The Guillotines Full Movie

[Enrique Fats]

Theguillotine is best known for its use in France, particularly during the French Revolution, where the revolution's supporters celebrated it as the people's avenger and the revolution's opponents vilified it as the pre-eminent symbol of the violence of the Reign of Terror.[1] While the name "guillotine" dates from this period, similar devices had been in use elsewhere in Europe over several centuries. Use of an oblique blade and the pillory-like restraint device set this type of guillotine apart from others. Display of severed heads had long been one of the most common ways European sovereigns exhibited their power to their subjects.[2]

The design of the guillotine was intended to make capital punishment more reliable and less painful in accordance with new Enlightenment ideas of human rights. Prior to use of the guillotine, France had inflicted manual beheading and a variety of methods of execution, many of which were more gruesome and required a high level of precision and skill to carry out successfully.

After its adoption, the device remained France's standard method of judicial execution until the abolition of capital punishment in 1981.[3] The last person to be executed by a government via guillotine was Hamida Djandoubi on 10 September 1977 in France.[4]

The use of beheading machines in Europe long predates such use during the French Revolution in 1792. An early example of the principle is found in the Old French High History of the Holy Grail, dated to about 1210. Although the device is imaginary, its function is clear.[5] The text says:

Within these three openings are the hallows set for them. And behold what I would do to them if their three heads were therein ... She setteth her hand toward the openings and draweth forth a pin that was fastened into the wall, and a cutting blade of steel droppeth down, of steel sharper than any razor, and closeth up the three openings. "Even thus will I cut off their heads when they shall set them into those three openings thinking to adore the hallows that are beyond."[5]

The Halifax Gibbet in England was a wooden structure consisting of two wooden uprights, capped by a horizontal beam, of a total height of 4.5 metres (15 ft). The blade was an axe head weighing 3.5 kg (7.7 lb), attached to the bottom of a massive wooden block that slid up and down in grooves in the uprights. This device was mounted on a large square platform 1.25 metres (4 ft) high. It is not known when the Halifax Gibbet was first used; the first recorded execution in Halifax dates from 1280, but that execution may have been by sword, axe, or gibbet. The machine remained in use until Oliver Cromwell forbade capital punishment for petty theft.

Holinshed's Chronicles of 1577 included a picture of "The execution of Murcod Ballagh near Merton in Ireland in 1307" showing a similar execution machine, suggesting its early use in Ireland.[7]

The Maiden was constructed in 1564 for the Provost and Magistrates of Edinburgh, Scotland and was in use from April 1565 to 1710. One of those executed was James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, in 1581, and a 1644 publication began circulating the legend that Morton himself commissioned the Maiden after he had seen the Halifax Gibbet.[8] The Maiden was readily dismantled for storage and transport, and it is now on display in the National Museum of Scotland.[9]

For a period of time after its invention, the guillotine was called a louisette. However, it was later named after French physician and Freemason Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who proposed on 10 October 1789 the use of a special device to carry out executions in France in a more humane manner. A death penalty opponent, he was displeased with the breaking wheel and other common, more grisly methods of execution and sought to persuade Louis XVI of France to implement a less painful alternative. While not the device's inventor, Guillotin's name ultimately became an eponym for it. Contrary to popular myth, Guillotin did not die by guillotine but rather by natural causes.[10]

French surgeon and physiologist Antoine Louis and German engineer Tobias Schmidt built a prototype for the guillotine. According to the memoir of the French executioner Charles-Henri Sanson, Louis XVI suggested the use of a straight, angled blade instead of a curved one.[11]

Sensing the growing discontent, Louis XVI banned the use of the breaking wheel.[13] In 1791, as the French Revolution progressed, the National Assembly researched a new method to be used on all condemned people regardless of class, consistent with the idea that the purpose of capital punishment was simply to end life rather than to inflict unnecessary pain.[13]

A committee formed under Antoine Louis, physician to the King and Secretary to the Academy of Surgery.[13] Guillotin was also on the committee. The group was influenced by beheading devices used elsewhere in Europe, such as the Italian Mannaia (or Mannaja, which had been used since Roman times[citation needed]), the Scottish Maiden, and the Halifax Gibbet (3.5 kg).[14] While many of these prior instruments crushed the neck or used blunt force to take off a head, a number of them also used a crescent blade to behead and a hinged two-part yoke to immobilize the victim's neck.[13]

Laquiante, an officer of the Strasbourg criminal court,[15] designed a beheading machine and employed Tobias Schmidt, a German engineer and harpsichord maker, to construct a prototype.[16] Antoine Louis is also credited with the design of the prototype. France's official executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, claimed in his memoirs that King Louis XVI, an amateur locksmith, recommended that the device employ an oblique blade rather than a crescent one, lest the blade not be able to cut through all necks; the neck of the king, who himself died by guillotine years later, was offered up discreetly as an example.[17] The first execution by guillotine was performed on a highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier[18] on 25 April 1792[19][20][21] in front of what is now Place de l'Htel de Ville, the city hall of Paris. All citizens condemned to die were from then on executed there, until the scaffold was moved on 21 August to the Place du Carrousel.

The machine was judged successful because it was considered a humane form of execution in contrast with more cruel methods used in the pre-revolutionary Ancien Rgime. In France, before the invention of the guillotine, members of the nobility were beheaded with a sword or an axe, which often took two or more blows to kill the condemned. The condemned or their families would sometimes pay the executioner to ensure that the blade was sharp in order to achieve a quick and relatively painless death. Commoners were usually hanged, which could take many minutes.

Having only one method of civil execution for all regardless of class was also seen as an expression of equality among citizens. The guillotine was then the only civil legal execution method in France until abolition of the death penalty in 1981,[22] apart from certain crimes against the security of the state, or for the death sentences passed by military courts,[23] which entailed execution by firing squad.[24]

Louis Collenot d'Angremont was a royalist famed for having been the first guillotined for his political ideas, on 21 August 1792. During the Reign of Terror between June 1793 and July 1794 about 17,000 people were guillotined, including former King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette who were executed at the guillotine in 1793. Towards the end of the Terror in 1794, revolutionary leaders such as Georges Danton, Saint-Just and Maximilien Robespierre were sent to the guillotine. Most of the time, executions in Paris were carried out in the Place de la Revolution (former Place Louis XV and current Place de la Concorde); the guillotine stood in the corner near the Htel Crillon where the City of Brest Statue can be found today. The machine was moved several times, to the Place de la Nation and the Place de la Bastille, but returned, particularly for the execution of the King and for Robespierre.

For a time, executions by guillotine were a popular form of entertainment that attracted great crowds of spectators, with vendors selling programs listing the names of the condemned. But more than being popular entertainment alone during the Terror, the guillotine symbolized revolutionary ideals: equality in death equivalent to equality before the law; open and demonstrable revolutionary justice; and the destruction of privilege under the Ancien Rgime, which used separate forms of execution for nobility and commoners.[25] The Parisian sans-culottes, then the popular public face of lower-class patriotic radicalism, thus considered the guillotine a positive force for revolutionary progress.[26]

After the French Revolution, executions resumed in the city centre. On 4 February 1832, the guillotine was moved behind the Church of Saint-Jacques-de-la-Boucherie, before being moved again, to the Grande Roquette prison, on 29 November 1851.

In the late 1840s, the Tussaud brothers Joseph and Francis, gathering relics for Madame Tussauds wax museum, visited the aged Henry-Clment Sanson, grandson of the executioner Charles-Henri Sanson, from whom they obtained parts, the knife and lunette, of one of the original guillotines used during the Reign of Terror. The executioner had "pawned his guillotine, and got into woeful trouble for alleged trafficking in municipal property".[27]

The last public guillotining in France was of Eugen Weidmann, who was convicted of six murders. He was beheaded on 17 June 1939 outside the prison Saint-Pierre, rue Andre Mignot 5 at Versailles, which is now the Tribunal Judiciaire de Versailles. Numerous issues with the proceedings arose: inappropriate behaviour by spectators, incorrect assembly of the apparatus, and secret cameras filming and photographing the execution from several storeys above. In response, the French government ordered that future executions be conducted in the prison courtyard in private.[28]

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