Guillotine Beheading

799 Words2 Pages

A guillotin is an apparatus designed for efficiently carrying out executions by beheading. The device consists of a tall, upright frame in which a weighted and angled blade is raised to the top and suspended. Guilliotin was a faster way of death than a axe, the axe took to many try's to behead someone. So the guilliotin was built to make the beheading someone faster. Over some 200 years of use, the guillotine claimed the heads of tens of thousands of victims. The guilliotin had a name killing machine, “Saint Guillotine” served as a symbol of the French Revolution. The name “guillotine” dates to the 1790s and the French Revolution, but similar execution machines had already been in existence for centuries. A beheading device called the “planke” was used in Germany and Flanders during the Middle Ages, and the English had a sliding axe known as the Halifax Gibbet, which may have been lopping off heads all the way back to antiquity. The French guillotine was likely inspired by two earlier machines: the Renaissance-era “mannaia” from Italy, and the notorious “Scottish Maiden,” which claimed the lives of some 120 people between the 16th and 18th centuries.During the Reign of Terror of the mid-1790s, thousands …show more content…

The yarn is then woven and twisted rope. The rope is tied securely to the top of the mouton, through the hole in the upper crossbar, through the rings, and wrapped around the déclic. In the early days of the guillotine, the executioner cut the rope with a sword to drop the blade, but it became too time-consuming to readjust the rope so they changed the design to incorporate the déclic.The guillotine has been relegated to history and lore and is no longer used for executions. In isolated cases, craftsmen make guillotines for entertainment (films and television), but these are built with sophisticated safety systems and often as models. There are books and kits available to make models of the

Open Document