A couple of weeks ago, your resident historiorantologist posited the idea that, in spite of where knee-jerk definitions might lead us, the three clowns who have occupied the Office of the Attorney General during the Bush "administration" are, in fact, products of Enlightened (or, at the very least, Enlightenment) thinking. At first blush, this seems impossible – these are, after all, neocon mouth-breathers who think habeus corpus translates to "have corpses" – but as I hopefully showed in Enlightened Justice, the tendency to conflate jurisprudence and violence in the 16th-18th centuries pretty clearly indicates that the Torture Trio would be quite at home in the post-Magna Carta, pre-Cesare Becarria world.
Those centuries are, of course, the very ones that saw the dawning Industrial Age enter daily life in a big way, and it was inevitable that crime and punishment would be one of the battlegrounds between philosophy and "progress." Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we'll have a look at Early Modern responses to calls for humane executions and (ultimately futile) attempts to hold back the trend toward mechanical dehumanization.
Historiorant: This is the continuation of a ?-part series, the first diary of which was posted on May 26, 2008. Two days later, Barack Obama made a truly regrettable choice of speech-delivering venues, which prompted me to write Obama's Education Policy: In Need of Change and Obama's Education Policy: In Need of Change, Pt. 2 before being able to return to the Cave's regularly-scheduled programming. Sorry for the delay.
Enlightened Revolution
The Enlightenment is one of those amorphously-defined eras in history – no great battle began or ended it, its fate wasn't tied to that of a single nation, etc. – generally held to have occurred between 1650 (or so) and (about) 1850. The Renaissance preceded it, while the decades that overlapped and followed the Enlightenment's petering out go by several names - the Imperialist Era, the Age of Nationalism, and the Industrial Revolution are a few examples. In their own ways, each of these takes on the 19th century can be seen to have their origins in the thoughts and philosophies of the Enlightenment, but tonight, I'd like to keep the focus on how the Enlightenment system of justice dealt with the coming of the Industrial Age, and leave the more deeply poli-sci stuff for another evening. So, while the French Revolution deserves a diary or two in its own right, I'll try not to get bogged down in the various Bastille-stormings, regal beheadings, and marches on Versailles, and instead will focus on the machine that has come to symbolize it.
That said, a word or two about the nature of the French Revolution is important, because at the time of the development of the guillotine, France was a pretty crazed place. The revolt that began in 1789 was occurring across all strata of society; at the governmental level, newly-empowered bourgeoisie philosophers were wrestling with difficult questions stemming from how to transform an absolute monarchy to a constitutional republic. As the National Assembly, they drafted and ratified the Declaration of the Rights of Man in August, 1789 – parts of which sound strikingly similar to a now dimly-remembered American document ratified that same year:
- Law is the expression of the general will. Every citizen has a right to participate personally, or through his representative, in its foundation. It must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in the eyes of the law, are equally eligible to all dignities and to all public positions and occupations, according to their abilities, and without distinction except that of their virtues and talents.
- No person shall be accused, arrested, or imprisoned except in the cases and according to the forms prescribed by law. Any one soliciting, transmitting, executing, or causing to be executed, any arbitrary order, shall be punished. But any citizen summoned or arrested in virtue of the law shall submit without delay, as resistance constitutes an offense.
- The law shall provide for such punishments only as are strictly and obviously necessary, and no one shall suffer punishment except it be legally inflicted in virtue of a law passed and promulgated before the commission of the offense.
- As all persons are held innocent until they shall have been declared guilty, if arrest shall be deemed indispensable, all harshness not essential to the securing of the prisoner's person shall be severely repressed by law.
The Declaration, like the US Constitution and Bill of Rights, is made up of the ideas of several different philosophes melded together, as opposed to being the masterwork/brainchild of a single individual. So it is that Montesquieu gives us the separation of powers, from Voltaire we get the First Amendment, and so on – but it falls to one of the lesser-known of the great 18th-century thinkers, Cesare Beccaria, to define what the law might look like under an Enlightened system of justice. Many of Becarria's ideas found their way into the founding documents of both the United States and France, with the concept of "innocent until proven guilty" probably the most visible of them, followed closely by the notion of the punishment fitting the crime.
In a lot of ways, though, Becarria was a man before his time. In an age in which "crime prevention" meant "execute the probably-guilty so that he won't do it again," Becarria proposed that
Crimes are more effectually prevented by the certainty than the severity of punishment.
...and...
It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them. This is the fundamental principle of good legislation, which is the art of conducting men to the maximum of happiness, and to the minimum of misery, if we may apply this mathematical expression to the good and evil of life...
Essay on Crimes and Punishments
A justice system which adhered to these ideals would be hopelessly "quaint" in the mind of someone like Abu Gonzales, but that's not the only reason to think that George W. Bush – whose governorship of Texas saw more than 150 men and 2 women executed in a state-sanctioned bloodbath unrivalled by any modern governor in any state – has never heard of Cesare Becarria. Turns out the father of modern jurisprudence was strongly against the death penalty, and used a lot of the same arguments that might be heard at a candlelight vigil today:
The punishment of death is pernicious to society, from the example of barbarity it affords. If the passions, or the necessity of war, have taught men to shed the blood of their fellow creatures, the laws, which are intended to moderate the ferocity of mankind, should not increase it by examples of barbarity, the more horrible as this punishment is usually attended with formal pageantry. Is it not absurd, that the laws, which detest and punish homicide, should, in order to prevent murder, publicly commit murder themselves?
ibid. (emphasis mine – u.m.)
Then as now, however, the Ashcrofts outnumbered the Becarrias, and talk of eliminating executions entirely made little headway in either France or the U.S. Instead, compromise measures were sought, with an aim toward at least ensuring that people would no longer be slain by royal fiat, that the accused would not suffer cruel and unusual punishments, and, eventually, that the state would carry out its legally-sanctioned murdering away from the eyes of the chanting, fist-waving mobs prior to abolishing it altogether.
Death by Philosophy
A decapitation machine does not, at first blush, seem to be the ultimate solution to these concerns, but when placed in context, the French government's institution of the guillotine does make sense. They wanted an egalitarian means of killing people – in other words, the same method would be used whether one was a street-urchin-turned-felon or a garden variety aristocrat with less-than-legal proclivities – to replace the patchwork of methods then in use. They had a point: If a criminal happened to come from the wrong side of the tracks (assuming, of course, that there had been tracks at that point in history), he could expect anything from being stretched on a rack to being strangled while dangling from a noose (the British didn't start using the "sharp drop" until 1783) to having his limbs tied to four oxen or horses, which would then be driven in opposite directions. If the criminal happened to be a Republican member of the "better" classes, executions were carried out by the marginally-more-dignified (but much quicker) means of chopping the person's head off with a sword or axe.
The Great Unwashed thus viewed decapitation as an aristocratic death, and started demanding it as the sole punishment for their own capital offenses. In 1788, the year before the Revolution began, a mob attacked Charles-Henri Sanson, the High Executioner of France, while we was going about the business of breaking some guy on the wheel. After the mob had freed the condemned man and trashed the wheel itself, King Louis XVI banned its use, not realizing that he was opening the door for the yet-to-be-convened National Assembly (then the National Constituent Assembly, then the National Legislative Assembly, etc...) to come up with something to replace it. In October, 1789, the Assembly debated this matter, and a delegate by the name of Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin made what turned out to be a pretty compelling suggestion:
"the criminal shall be decapitated; this will be done solely by means of a simple mechanism," with the "mechanism" being defined as "a machine that beheads painlessly".
Leaving aside the matter of whether or not it's even possible to decapitate a person painlessly, people respected the good doctor's opinion – in 1784, he'd been appointed by the King to sit on a commission (which also included such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin) to investigate the "animal magnetism" claims of Franz Anton Mesmer - and in typical bureaucratic form, the Assembly established its own commission to find out more about head-chopping machines. Guillotin sat on this committee, as well, but it was actually headed up by another doctor, Antoine Louis - indeed, when the government finally standardized its execution method a couple of years later, the machine was first called louison or louisette.
The reason we call the thing a "guillotine" is likely due to a comic song that appeared in Actes des Apôtres, a Royalist rag, in late 1791, after the legislature had passed a law decreeing that the only means of execution for a capital offense was to be decapitation. The "e" was probably added in the early 1790s by an English poet, seeking a means of making the doctor's name rhyme a little better; by then, the name was in common usage throughout France, despite Guillotin's rather peripheral role in the machine's adoption.
Weird Historical Sidenote: There's a long-standing urban legend out there that says Guillotin was executed by the machine that bore his name, as punishment for inventing the infernal device that brought such misery unto France. It's not true – though he did spend some of the Revolution hiding from the purity revolutionaries, Guillotin died of natural causes in 1814, at the ripe old age of 75. Nor was the guillotine viewed as menacing monster, except during a couple of periods described below; it was, rather, seen as an object of advancement, and with some degree of national pride.
The committee wasn't inventing head-choppers out of thin air; there were several models in use around Europe upon which they based their ideas. In northern England and southern Scotland, decapitators like the Halifax Gibbet had been in use since at least 1286; in 1307, a similar device called the Irish (or Scottish) Maiden was first employed – one of these is on display at the Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh – and by the 1400s, cities in Switzerland and Italy were operating similar machines. An interesting note about the Halifax Gibbet was the way it allowed for what might be called "participatory justice": a rope attached to the blade's retaining pin was played out to the crowd, which collectively pulled at a signal from the executioner.
One of the prime uses of the Halifax Gibbet was the protection of private property – while modern society has reached the point at which a common thieves (so long as they're in charge of corporations) can rob people blind, secure in the knowledge that they'll never have to pay with their lives, in the Medieval world, pocketing a relatively small amount of one's neighbor's possessions could result in a rather permanent hedge against recidivism:
"If a felon be taken within the liberty of Halifax...either hand-habend (caught with the stolen goods in his hand or in the act of stealing), back-berand (caught carrying stolen goods on his back), or confess and (having confessed to the crime), to the value of thirteen pence half-penny, he shall after three markets...be taken to the Gibbet and there have his head cut off from his body."
Halifax Gibbet Law, via Wikipedia
Louis and his commission made some improvements over the Halifax Gibbet and similar designs – for one, they opted for a crescent-shaped blade (like the head of an axe) instead of the straight-edged, super-heavy neck-crushers that had come before. They also included a lunette, a hinged, two-section yoke that kept the victim's head in the right place. In October, 1791, beheading became the only legal means of execution, and in March, 1792, Louis submitted a report recommending the use of a machine much like the one described by Dr. Guillotin, but failing to mention the contributions of the good doctor himself.
Over the winter, a working model had been created in Strasbourg, through a partnership between an officer of the criminal court and one Tobias Schmidt, a German engineer and harpsichord maker. Schmidt is most often credited with the idea of a blade at a 45-degree angle to ensure a cleaner, less bone-mashing cut, though there is a legend out there which holds that Louis XVI submitted a design which called for a triangular blade. Regardless, on March 20, the guillotine became the sole method of execution in France (save for a few crimes against state security that brought on the firing squad). It would remain so until 1981, when France finally realized Dr. Guillotin's original ambition and abolished the death penalty once and for all.
The First Cut is the Deepest
By April 25, 1792, all was in readiness, the appropriate legislation had been debated and enacted, and France was ready to inaugurate a new era in egalitarianism – by ensuring that every commoner who died at the hands of the state did so in the same manner as an aristocrat. A highwayman named Nicolas Jacques Pelletier was the first person compelled to partake of the Great Equalizing Death Machine (actually, it became known as "Madame Guillotine" or the "National Razor"), and for about a year, it was seen as simply another aspect of a revolution that had already altered just about everything in French daily life, from the calendar to the flag to the system of weights and measures. For some, it was even an object of national pride, another means of showing the world how any man in France was, at least in terms of basic human rights, the equal of any other – Liberté, égalité, fraternité, and all that.
Such sappy sentiments, stirring as they may be, do not get in the way of the reasoning of men like Dick Cheney Maximilien Robespierre and his buddies in the Jacobin Club. The history of the Jacobins, their conflicts with the centrist Girondin faction, and their eventual consolidation of power into the hands of the Committee of Public Safety (a name which out-Bushes even "Department of Homeland Security" in terms of Orwellianness) is a long and complicated one, involving everything from peasant counter-revolutions to foreign armies marching into France to restore the king to his throne. Suffice to say that by the summer of 1793, several governments had attempted – and failed – to set things right, and it seemed best to allow a George W. Bush-sort to take the reins and root out the enemies of the state.
Robespierre was initially opposed to the death penalty, but became convinced as the Revolution wore on that it might be needed under certain circumstances. In June, 1791, the king had been caught trying to flee the country (which the people more or less interpreted as a lack of desire on their monarch's part to comport himself to a constitutional role), and in 1792, the Prussian Duke of Brunswick issued the ham-handed Brunswick Manifesto, which made clear the position of at least two old-school monarchies (those of Prussia and Austria) vis-à-vis the French Republic:
"to put an end to the anarchy in the interior of France, to check the attacks upon the throne and the altar, to reestablish the legal power, to restore to the king the security and the liberty of which he is now deprived and to place him in a position to exercise once more the legitimate authority which belongs to him."
Massive armies needed to be quickly raised in order to meet the foreign threat (which started in earnest, incidentally, when the French government issued a "bring 'em on"-type declaration of war on April 20, 1792), but Robespierre reasoned that France faced as many, if not more, threats from counter-revolutionaries than she did from German-speaking conscripts. One of these, of course, was the still-breathing king, who was finally placed on trial in December, 1792. During the proceedings, Robespierre "clarified" his position on the permissibility of the death penalty to his fellow legislators:
"This is no trial; Louis is not a prisoner at the bar; you are not judges; you are — you cannot but be — statesmen, and the representatives of the nation. You have not to pass sentence for or against a single man, but you have to take a resolution on a question of the public safety, and to decide a question of national foresight. It is with regret that I pronounce, the fatal truth: Louis ought to perish rather than a hundred thousand virtuous citizens; Louis must die, so that the country may live."
The King met the guillotine in January, 1793; here's the eyewitness account of Henry Essex Edgeworth. Edgeworth recorded the last words of Louis XVI:
'I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I Pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France.'
...and went on to portray his rather ignoble end:
He (Louis XVI) was proceeding (with his speech), when a man on horseback, in the national uniform, and with a ferocious cry, ordered the drums to beat. Many voices were at the same time heard encouraging the executioners. They seemed reanimated themselves, in seizing with violence the most virtuous of Kings, they dragged him under the axe of the guillotine, which with one stroke severed his head from his body. All this passed in a moment. The youngest of the guards, who seemed about eighteen, immediately seized the head, and showed it to the people as he walked round the scaffold; he accompanied this monstrous ceremony with the most atrocious and indecent gestures. At first an awful silence prevailed; at length some cries of 'Vive la Republique!' were heard. By degrees the voices multiplied and in less than ten minutes this cry, a thousand times repeated became the universal shout of the multitude, and every hat was in the air."
Yeah. Good times.
Spin That Would Make Scott McClellan Blush
Louis' wife, Marie Antoinette, would follow in October that same year, but a lot happened in the interim. By early June, France had declared war on both Britain and Belgium, the Committee of Public Safety had been established, and the Girondists had been run out of power. In July, Jean-Paul Marat, the "friend of the people" and an associate of Robespierre, was murdered in his bathtub by a dead-ender Girondist named Charlotte Corday, which sparked some pretty strong cries for retribution:
It’s time for the permanent guillotine. A conspiracy to assassinate our best, our firmest supporters, our faithful representatives has revealed itself. Already, yesterday a sacrilegious hand dared stab the firmest supporter, the most zealous defender of the people: in a word, an inhabitant of the Mountain (the highest row of seats at the back of the multi-tiered National Convention, where the most powerful Jacobins, who called themselves Montagnards, sat – u.m.)
(snip)
You brave and intrepid Jacobins, redouble your efforts and your courage. With the Paris municipality, immediately go and ask the National Convention which tribunal will judge those who bore a sacrilegious hand to strike the breast of one of your friends, one of your members.
Demand of it that the paralytic side, once known as the Marais and the Vendée be immediately replaced; that most, and even all be arrested because they are guilty, have no doubt about it.
Sans Culottes (the working people and small businessmen of Paris, named for their stocking-less pantaloons – u.m.), my friends, let us avenge, avenge the death of one of our friends, a Montagnard. Let the head of the patricidal woman fall under the sword of the law. Let the guillotine be permanent and let those who did us so much harm, who desire the destruction of the republic and to give us a king, be punished.
If you follow this advice, hastily given, the lives of our faithful representatives will no longer be in danger.
LEBOIS, friend of the Sans Culottes.
Details of the Assassination
Cordray's beheading four days later, on July 17, 1793, raises an interesting question about the guillotine, and about just how long a head survives without a body. The story goes that the executioner, not satisfied with merely decapitating an enemy of the state, slapped her cheek as he was presenting the head to the mob – and was shocked when the face contorted into a look audience members described as "unequivocal indignation." As late as 1956, experiments were being conducted on the recently-beheaded, but it's not like they could, um, tell the doc what was happening to them; reports and careful (but ultimately anecdotal) observations is about the best info available. Regardless of whether or not post-decapitation brains can register images or direct muscle movements, however, it's not likely that the head would retain consciousness for more than a few seconds, given the massive, sudden loss of blood pressure.
The first political prisoners had met their fate at the National Razor in 1792, but the pace accelerated as Robespierre assumed more and more dictatorial power. He was doing it to protect the Revolution, he claimed (I've gone ahead and bolded the stuff that might have influenced the neocon worldview) in early 1794:
"If virtue be the spring of a popular government in times of peace, the spring of that government during a revolution is virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the country. ... The government in a revolution is the despotism of liberty against tyranny"
Robespierre was no dummy, though – he knew he needed something like a USA PATRIOT Act to provide legal cover for the bloodbath he was instigating. Obligingly, the Law of Suspects was handed down on September 17, 1793, giving true-tricolor revolutionaries the means to rid themselves of freedom-haters once and for all:
- Immediately after the publication of this decree, all suspects found on the territory of the Republic and who are still at liberty will be arrested.
- Suspects are (i) Those who, either by their conduct or their relationships, by their remarks or by their writing, are shown to be partisans of tyranny and federalism and enemies of liberty; (ii) Those who cannot justify, tinder the provisions of the law of 21 March last, their means of existence and the performance of their civic duties; (iii) Those have been refused certificates of civic responsibility (certificats de civisme); (iv) Public officials suspended or deprived of their functions by the National Convention or its agents, and not since reinstated, especially those who have been, or ought to be, dismissed by the law of 14 August last...
- The comités de surveillance established under the law of 21 March last, or those substituting for them, are empowered by the decrees of the representatives of the people to go to the armies and the departments, according to the particular decrees of the National Convention, and are charged with drawing up, in each local district, a list of suspects, of issuing warrants for their arrest and of affixing seals to their private papers. The commanders of the public force, to whom these arrest warrants will be conveyed, must carry them out immediately on pain of dismissal.
Could it be that by allowing the FBI to sign its own warrants, John Ashcroft was, in fact, communicating to history that he fully grokked the Enlightenment? Hmmm...
Heads Are Gonna Roll
In some respects, Robespierre's heart was in the right place – he had the rationale behind the social safety net down pat:
Society is under obligation to provide for the support of all its members either by procuring work for them or by assuring the means of existence to those who are not in condition to work.
...but in the end, the allure of unitary exectutiveness was too much to resist, and he started killing people for failing to uphold the same principles as he. Fortunately for the Revolution, and less so for the people of France,
like all people who live by principle alone, he was ruthless and heartless in his pursuit of morality and principle. He, like other extremists, was passionately attached to the ideas of Rousseau and the creation of a society free from inequality. He had little to do with building the machinery of the terror—that was largely due to the perverse genius of Georges Danton—he nevertheless was responsible for the amplification of this machinery across the face of France. It was Robespierre who gave the Terror its character, for he believed that virtue was ineffective without terror and he openly advocated terror as a political virtue. To this end, he expanded the powers of the tribunals and led them against other leaders in his government. On June 10, he managed to legislate the Law of 22 Prairial (see the discussion of the French calendar below), which allowed tribunals to convict accused enemies without hearing any evidence whatsoever.
(emphasis the author's – u.m.)
The Radical Revolution
It's difficult to say how many people died by the guillotine during the year or so of the Jacobin Reign of Terror, but it was a lot – estimates range from 15,000 to 40,000. Contrary to popular belief, most were peasants or poor folk (many of France's aristocratic families having fled to other countries) who found themselves accused of thought crimes against the Revolution. It started with the execution of Marie Antoinette in October, 1793, but it didn't take long before Girondists, then sans-coulottes, then insufficiently-radical Jacobins, and finally anyone that Robespierre didn't like met a gruesome end.
Weird Historical Sidenote: She might have been called "Madame Deficit" during her reign, and she might've been swiftboated with a cake-related expression she might never have said, but it can't be argued that Marie Antoinette met her fate without dignity. After she accidentally stepped on the foot of her executioner, she uttered her last words: "Monsieur, I ask your pardon. I did not do it on purpose."
Robespierre's ever-broadening criteria for guillotine-eligibility should serve as a cautionary tale to anyone willing to trade freedom for security, for as noted in the Wikipedia article on the Montagnard radical,
Robespierre expanded the traditional list of the Revolutions' enemies to include moderates and "false revolutionaries". In Robespierres' understanding, these moderates and "false revolutionaries" were not only ignorant of the dangers facing the republic, but also in many cases disguised themselves as active contributors to the Revolution, who simply repeated the work of others, or even impeded the progress of the patriots. Anyone not in step with the decrees of Robespierres' committee is said to have been eventually purged from the Convention, and thoroughly hunted in the general population. While it is debated whether Robespierre targeted moderates to accelerate his own agenda, or out of legitimate concern for France, it is known that his definition of traitor led to the execution of many of the Revolutions' original and staunchest advocates.
And all we get to deal with concern trolls is a "hide" button. Sheesh.
The Terror Ends, But the Guillotine Chops On
Like many, if not most, dictators, Robespierre eventually let paranoia get the best of him and overplayed his hand. For one, there was the whole "get rid of everything Christian (including priests)" thing - which included rededicating Notre Dame as the "Temple of Reason" and hosting propaganda shows inside – that didn't go over well in the more-conservative countryside. For another, there was the The Law of 22 Prairial, a totalitarian bit of legislation that only a Michael Mukasey could love:
- The Revolutionary Tribunal is instituted to punish the enemies of the people.
5. The enemies of the people are those who seek to destroy public liberty, either by force or by cunning.
6. The following are deemed enemies of the people: those who have instigated the re-establishment of monarchy, or have sought to disparage or dissolve the National Convention and the revolutionary and republican government of which it is the center;...Those who have sought to impede the provisioning of Paris, or to create scarcity within the Republic;...Those who have sought to inspire discouragement, in order to favor the enterprises of the tyrants leagued against the Republic; Those who have disseminated false news in order to divide or disturb the people; Those who have sought to mislead opinion and to prevent the instruction of the people, to deprave morals and to corrupt the public conscience, to impair the energy and the purity of revolutionary and republican principles, or to impede the progress thereof, either by counter-revolutionary or insidious writings, or by any other machination;...Those who, charged with public office, take advantage of it in order to serve the enemies of the Revolution, to harass patriots, or to oppress the people;
Finally, all who are designated in previous laws relative to the punishment of conspirators and counter-revolutionaries, and who, by whatever means or by whatever appearances they assume, have made an attempt against the liberty, unity, and security of the Republic, or labored to prevent the strengthening thereof.
7. The penalty provided for all offences under the jurisdiction of the Revolutionary Tribunal is death.
To save their own necks (literally), the former allies of Robespierre now turned on him; he was arrested in late July (took a bullet to the jaw in the process, most likely in a foiled attempt to kill himself); poetic justice was inflicted upon him on the 28th. By then, the novelty had worn off, and the crowds – which had once numbered in the thousands, buying programs and fighting for good seats – had shrunk considerably. With daily executions numbering the in hundreds, the mob had gotten bored with watching what was essentially an assembly line of death. Chop, chant, repeat.
Though its heyday was past, and it underwent a design overhaul in the 1870s, the guillotine continued to serve in France until the late 20th century. The last public use was in June, 1939, but the entire affair was so sloppily conducted – the head executioner may have been drunk, the machine wasn't properly assembled, and it was secretly filmed – that for the remainder of its run, the guillotine operated inside prison courtyards. The last execution by guillotine was that of Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant convicted of the torture, kidnapping, and murder of an ex-girlfriend, in September, 1977.
Belgium, Sweden, and Germany all used the guillotine, as well, but only in the latter did it remain in use after the First World War. The Fallbeil ("falling axe") was one of the legal methods of execution under the Weimer Republic, and when Hitler saw a guillotine demonstrated in 1933, he ordered up 20 more. The Nazis used it to deal with convicted criminals (political enemies were usually either hanged or shot) – 16,500 people were guillotined in Germany between 1933 and 1945, but it wasn't until 1943 that Hitler and the Gestapo started using the device on political malcontents. The first of these were the six members of the Weiße Rose, who had dared to publish leaflets urging Germans to get off their asses and start opposing Hitler:
people slumber on in their dull, stupid sleep and encourage these fascist criminals ... Each man wants to be exonerated of a guilt of this kind, each one continues on his way with the most placid, the calmest conscience.
About 100 more conscientious objectors found that the guillotine was the penalty for failing to fight for the Fatherland, and after the war, both East and West Germany continued to use it for capital criminal cases. West Germany's last guillotining was in May, 1949, before the adoption of a constitution which banned the death penalty; East German criminals continue to risk beheading until 1987.
In the United States, consideration was given to the adoption of the guillotine, but a PR stunt by Thomas Edison had the end result of turning Americans on to the electric chair. As the 20th century progressed, it occurred to the Hon. Doug Teper (D-GA61) that high-voltage chairs, gas chambers, firing squads, nooses, and lethal injections simply didn't provide enough options for the condemned to donate organ tissue, so in 1996, he proposed through HB 1274 that the State of Georgia adopt the guillotine. The measure failed – though one wonders what sort of national press the move might have generated, had it been undertaken five years later.
Historiorant:
Wow...this one got long. Sorry about that – and sorry it wasn't up on Sunday, like it should've been. There's been much afoot (and underfoot) in the Cave of late...
...including, of course, preparations for the Origins Game Fair, where Crusade of Kings will be released for use with the WILDSIDE Gaming System - and for the reading pleasure of any Kossack (or really, anyone who wants to learn some pretty cool stuff about the first three Crusades) who remembers the days when the stories first appeared as HfK diaries on Daily Kos. If you're in the vicinity of Columbus, Ohio, from June 25-29, make sure to drop by the Wildside tables at the Origins Game Fair – check out the Wildside Gaming Events link for our Kossack meet & greet. Hope to see you there!
Historically hip entrances to the Cave of the Moonbat can be found at Daily Kos, Never In Our Names, Bits of News, Progressive Historians, and DocuDharma.