In its almost 200 years of use, the guillotine claimed the heads of tens of thousands of victims, ranging from common criminals to revolutionaries, aristocrats, and even kings and queens.
More than just a gruesomely effective killing machine, ‘Saint Guillotine’ served as a symbol of the French Revolution and cast an infamous shadow over much of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries.
Even King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were executed by means of the guillotine.
The first person to be executed by guillotine was a highwayman (someone who stole from travellers) by the name of Nicolas Jacques Pelletier on 25 April, 1792.
Below you will find four pretty cool facts you might not have known about the execution device once named the ‘National Razor’ of France.
1. It was originally developed as a more humane method of execution
In 1789, Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposed that the French government adopt a gentler method of execution. Although he was personally opposed to capital punishment, Guillotin argued that decapitation by a lightning-quick machine would be more humane and egalitarian than sword and axe beheadings, which were often botched.
2. It became a popular children’s toy
Children often attended guillotine executions, and some may have even played with their own miniature guillotines at home. During the 1790s, a two-foot-tall (60,9cm), replica blade-and-timbers was a popular toy in France. Children used the fully operational guillotines to decapitate dolls or even small rodents, and some towns eventually banned them out of fear that they were a vicious influence.
3. It was even used in Nazi Germany
The guillotine may be most famously associated with revolutionary France, but it may have claimed just as many lives in Germany during the Third Reich.
Adolf Hitler made the guillotine a state method of execution in the 1930s, and ordered that 20 of the machines be placed in cities across Germany. According to Nazi records, the guillotine was eventually used to execute some 16 500 people between 1933 and 1945, many of whom were resistance fighters and political dissidents.
4. It was used right up until the 1970s
The guillotine might have only been used as a public method of execution until 1939, but that didn’t stop the state from using them behind closed doors. The final three guillotine executions in France before its abolition were those of child-murderers Christian Ranucci on 28 July 1976 in Marseille; Jérôme Carrein on 23 June 1977 in Douai; and torturer-murderer Hamida Djandoubi on 10 September 1977 in Marseille.
Guillotine executions were halted for good when the death penalty was abolished in France in 1981.
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