Guillotine (pronounced gil-uh-teen)
(1) An apparatus designed for efficiently carrying out executions by beheading.
(2)
An instrument for surgically removing the tonsils.
(3) Any of various machines in which a
vertical blade between two parallel uprights descends to cut or trim metal,
stacks of paper, etc.
(4) To truncate or cut.
(5) A technical procedure permitted in some
parliaments which provides for an early termination of the time usually
allocated to debate a bill, forcing an immediate vote.
Circa 1791: The guillotine was named after Joseph
Guillotin (1738-1814), the French physician who urged adoption. The related forms are guillotined & guillotining,
the use as verb attested from 1794.
Dr Guillotin came to regret lending his name
to the famous machine but it wasn’t his invention and nor was the origin even
necessarily French. Although the date it
was first used is unknown it seems almost certainly a medieval creation, an
early English record indicating a mechanical beheading device was in use in Halifax
in West Yorkshire; then called the Halifax
Gibbet, the decapitation of a Mr John Dalton was recorded in 1286. A sixteenth century engraving named The Execution of Murcod Ballagh Near to
Merton in Ireland 1307 shows a similar machine suggesting use also in medieval
Ireland and Scotland, from the mid-sixteenth century until the abolition of use
circa 1710, employed the Maiden which
seems to have been functionally identical to the Halifax Gibbet; in Italy, was un-euphemistically
called the Mannaia (cleaver). Over the years, it attracted many nicknames,
some sardonically deployed as the equivalent of gallows humour including La Monte-à-regret (The Regretful Climb),
Le Rasoir National (The National
Razor), La Veuve (The Widow), Le Moulin à Silence (The Silence Mill), La Bécane (The Machine), Le Massicot (The Cutter), La Cravate à Capet (Capet's Necktie (Capet
being Louis XVI)) & La
Raccourcisseuse Patriotique (The Patriotic Shortener).
Marie Antoinette's execution on October 16, 1793 (Unknown artist).
The carts famously used to take victims to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror (the period in the mid-1790s after the declaration of the First Republic, marked by massacres, public executions, anti-clericalism and internecine political struggle) were called tumbrels although many illustrations depict the use of four-wheeled carts rather than tumbrels. Presumably both types were used but historians generally believe it was usually the tumbrel because the revolutionaries preferred the symbolism of something usually used for moving dung or rubbish and suggest artists simply preferred the four-wheelers for compositional reasons. The noun tumbrel (two-wheeled cart for hauling dung, stones etc) was from mid-fifteenth century French, a name, curiously perhaps, used in the early thirteenth century to describe what some eighteenth century dictionaries described as a mysterious “instrument of punishment of uncertain type” but which turned out to be (1) a name for the cucking stool used, inter alia, to conduct the dunking in water of women suspected of this and that and (2) was a type of medieval balancing scale used to weigh coins. It was from the Old French tomberel (dump cart) (which exists in Modern French as tombereau), from tomber ((let) fall or tumble), possibly from a Germanic source, perhaps the Old Norse tumba (to tumble), the Old High German tumon (to turn, reel).
Public guillotining of Eugen Weidmann, Versailles, 1939.
The records from the early days of the revolution are understandably sketchy but the first guillotine was likely that crafted by a German harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt which was first used on 25 April 1792, the term “guillotine” appearing first in print in a report by the journalist Louis René Quentin de Richebourg de Champcenetz (1759-1794) who, in another journalistic scoop, was later guillotined. Although synonymous with the French Revolution, during which some seventeen thousand were beheaded, the guillotine remained the official method of capital punishment until the death penalty was abolished in 1981. The highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier (circa 1756–1792) was the first victim while the last public guillotining was of Eugen Weidmann (1908-1939) who, convicted of six murders, was beheaded in Versailles on 17 June 1939. The final drop of the blade came when murderer Hamida Djandoubi’s (1949-1977) sentence was carried out in Marseille on 10 September 1977.
Paper trimming guillotine.
The device was used in many European
countries until well after the Second World War but, perhaps predictability,
none were as enthusiastic as the Nazis.
Having been used in various German states since the seventeenth century
and being the preferred method of execution in Napoleonic times, guillotine and
firing squad were the legal methods of execution during both the Second Reich
(1871–1918) and the Weimar Republic (1919–1933). For the Nazis however, it was just another
way to industrialize mass-murder and under the Third Reich (1933-1945), 16,500
were guillotined including 10,000 in 1944–1945 alone although, after the attempt
on his life in July 1944, Hitler wasn’t at all attracted to an efficient or
humanitarian dispatch of the surviving plotters and for them specified a more
gruesome method. The guillotine was used
for the last time in the FRG (West Germany) in 1949 though its use in the GDR
(East Germany) persisted until 1966, mostly by the Stasi (secret police) for
secret executions.
The German for guillotine
is fallbeil (axe-method). The Nazis increased
the number of capital offences in the criminal code and consequently, there was
a drastic increase in the number of executions in the Reich. To meet the demand, many prisons were
designated as execution sites, sixteen gazetted by 1942, all equipped with metal
(Mannhardt) fallbeils, the standardized procedure for execution as typically exact
and bureaucratic as anything in the German civil service. The first fallbeils were made from wood and built
by the inmates of the Tegel prison in Berlin, hence their name. The later Mannhardt design, fabricated from
steel was more sophisticated, including an external pulley frame and,
thoughtfully, a hinged sheet-metal to protect the executioner from blood
spray.
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