The Guillotine (Part One: Origins)
For, lo, the great Guillotine, wonderous to behold, now stands here; the Doctor’s Idea has become Oak and Iron; the huge cyclopean axe ‘falls in its grooves like the ram of the Pile-engine,’ swiftly snuffing-out the light of men! “Mais vous, Gualches, what have you invented?”
“All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice”
Guillotines are back in vogue.
Is it any surprise? A generation coming of age during the Great Financial Crisis; a decade of slow recovery — if recovery at all — rising costs of essential needs like healthcare, housing and education; spiralling wealth inequality; a global pandemic that has shown the tragic inadequacy of current ruling bodies and economic structures; and looming in the background, gnawing at the ear like tinnitus, is the unceasing warming of the globe. Though the anxieties stretch across generations, it is undeniable that it is the young who are feeling the brunt of these looming crises, unaddressed and exacerbated by the established, the older, the richer, the propertied, the elected.
Who could not be angered when instead of addressing the demands of the young, we instead receive sharp, reactionary shocks: Brexit in the UK, climate change deniers elected in Australia, and of course, Trump’s election in the United States. The defeat of Labor in Australia, Corbyn in the UK, and Sanders in the United States — all overwhelmingly favoured by the young and progressive — disillusioned huge swathes from electoral politics altogether.
If they do not care for our healthcare, our housing, our future and prospects, if they set the police upon us (the police they militarised), if they ask us to fight the wars they started, and they ignore our calls and petitions for change, well then what recourse is left? Why should we care for their health, safety, security, property or longevity? The need for change inevitably ferments, and not incremental change, but a sharp rupture — revolution!
Modern inspiration for revolution, at least in the Western canon, is a little sparse. Occupy Wall Street? Petered out with little result, and is emblematic of the dysfunctional, flaccid response that people so want to avoid. Battle of Seattle? A battle, that although perhaps a propaganda success, was not a war, and resulted in no material gain. Coloured revolutions? Largely shaking off the despotic remnants of the Soviet Union, a project people are more-than-not trying to distance themselves from (which also rules out the 1917 Russian Revolution). May 68? Eh. What is needed is something big, something successful, and most importantly: something evocative. As Marx notes, “in such epochs of revolutionary crisis [people] anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes.” When it comes to something immediately known, something of world-historic proportions, something that encapsulates the burning need for change and the rage fuelling it, what is there but the French Revolution?
The result is, of course, the resurrection of the guillotine.
It is this resurrection that has spurred me to write this article. The guillotine is a powerful symbol of revolutionary class warfare, and yet it is also deeply ironic and, well, bad, as a symbol for revolution. I’ve never been too comfortable with calls to violence. The growth in guillotine memes and phraseology from ~2017 onwards unsettled me and I’ve long intended to write down why. In this series, I want to trace the history of the guillotine and its significance to revolution and movements towards social justice.
The Pre-Guillotine
The guillotine was famously invented by one Dr. Guillotin during the French Revolution, who just as famously died by his own contraption. Like many famous aspects of history, neither of these two “facts” are true.
The device we know now as the guillotine has existed, in some form, for a number of centuries prior to its deployment in the French Revolution.
Within England a guillotine device had been used, known as the Halifax Gibbet from at least the 1600s. Although confined to a small region of England, and not used for some 150 years prior to the French Revolution, reproductions and prints of the device were continually made. For example, one such print appeared in ‘London Magazine’ just forty years prior to the Revolution.
Other depictions of a ‘guillotine’ go further back through history. The 1577 woodcutting by Hollinshed depicts the execution of Irishman Murcod Ballagh by Sir David Caunton in 1307. Even earlier, Lucas Cranach’s woodcutting from 1539 depicts the execution of St Matthew the Evangelist, where he was beheaded “after the manner of the Romans” in the 1st century AD.
While it is unlikely that Hollinshed knew precisely the mode of execution that befell Murcod Ballagh 250 years earlier (let alone Cranach and St. Matthew), this does indicate that knowledge and depictions of the ‘guillotine’ existed through Europe before Dr. Guillotin was even born.
In fact, it was an appeal to the (supposed) English way of execution that was used in part to justify the French adoption of the guillotine. From a report prepared for the Legislative Assembly in 1792: “This is the mode adopted in England… two posts connected at top by a cross beam, whence a convex hatchet is made to fall suddenly on the patient by removal of a peg… it is easy to construct such an instrument.”
The significance of the above is that the guillotine was not a new invention brought forth by the French Revolution. The guillotine was not born through scientific discovery or engineering advancement. So why was it that the guillotine came to such prominence only following the French Revolution, and say, not during the English Glorious Revolution, or as a standard means of execution prior? The guillotine wasn’t brought to prominence due to scientific developments, but due to legalistic and ideological changes. In many ways the guillotine is the perfect symbol of these developments, in all their glory and in all their folly and farce.
“A New Age of Penal Justice”
Michel Foucault opens his investigation of the birth of the prison with the execution of Robert-François Damiens, who had non-fatally stabbed King Louis XV — more of a nick than anything else. Damiens was taken on a cart, wearing nothing but a shirt, holding a torch of burning wax, to a scaffold so his torture could be publicly displayed. The flesh was torn from his breasts, arms, thighs and calves with red hot pincers. His right hand, holding the pen knife he used to stab the king, was burnt with sulphur. Where his flesh had been torn away was poured molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulphur mixed together. His body was then drawn and quartered — a prolonged process which required the cutting of Damiens’ thighs, severing his sinews and hacking off the joints. Six horses had to be used (after just four were unable to dismember him), and they had to change directions of their pulling, contorting Damiens’ broken body. Once rendered into four, his remains were burnt to ash, his house demolished, and family exiled.
Foucault focuses on the rapid transition from the above “gloomy festival of violence” to that of the orderly, timetabled, prison experience of less than a century later. The guillotine, promising swift and painless death, stands in equal contrast to Damiens’ torture. As Foucault notes, the late 18th and early 19th century were “a new age of penal justice”, a time when “the entire economy of punishment was redistributed”. New theories of law and crime were created, as were new moral and philosophical justifications for punishment.
Cesare Bonesana di Beccaria would publish his famous On Crimes and Punishment just a few years following Damiens’ execution, calling for the abolition of the death penalty in all but the most extreme circumstances. “Who does not remember the execution of Damiens?” Thomas Paine would ask in his The Rights of Man, decrying French despotism. US Founding Father Benjamin Rush would write a treatise on abolishing the death penalty and opened one of the first penitentiaries in 1790.
Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a somewhat un-notable member of the French National Assembly following the 1789 revolution, looked to make his mark in this age of enlightenment in the space of criminal justice reform. In October 1789, he proposed six articles to the National Assembly for consideration:
- Crimes of the same kind shall be punished by the same kind of punishment, whatever the rank of the criminal.
- In all cases (whatever be the crime) of capital punishment, it shall be the of the same kind — that is, beheading — and it shall be executed by means of a machine.
- Crime being personal, the crime being whatever it may be, of a criminal shall inflict no disgrace upon his family.
- No one shall be allowed to reproach any citizen with the punishment of one of his relations. He that shall dare to do so shall be reprimanded by the Judge, and this reprimand shall be posted up at the door of the delinquent; and moreover shall be posted against the pillory for three months.
- The property of a convict shall never nor in any case be confiscated.
- The bodies of the executed criminals shall be delivered to their families if they demand it. In all cases the body shall be buried in the usual manner, and the registry shall contain no mention of the nature of the death.
The first proposition faced little objection — after all, égalité was the movement of the time. It is during debates on the second proposition that Dr. Guillotin would assign his name to the eventual machine (there is no indication the doctor had a specific design in mind at this stage). With a rhetorical flourish, Guillotin declared “Now, with my machine I strike off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.” This statement was met with laughter from the assembly, but would get immortalised in a children’s rhyme and attach Guillotin’s name forever to the final contraption.
It was, in fact, proposition 3, 5 and 6 that made an immediate stir, and it is worth going on a slight tangent to delve into these. In Part Two we will look at the example of the Agasse Brothers, condemned to death during the French Revolution, who provide an example of just how ideas of justice and retribution were evolving at this time. The Agasse Brothers demonstrate to us the emergence of the idea of the “citizen” and the legal sanctification of the “individual” which are key socio-political ideas intriniscally tied to the guillotine. We will see how, rather than a tool of social revolution, the guillotine was part and parcel of the liberal state.
