40,000 people were killed by the guillotine in the time period of 1789 to 1799, this made the guillotine ineffective during the Reign of Terror. The reasons being were, it was a messy execution machine, people got bored of people being killed the same way, and it was a cruel way to die by being executed by the guillotine. Here are the reasons why.
The first reason that the guillotine was ineffective was because it was a messy device.
Even the man who made the machine was not proud of what the guillotine came to. “Joseph Guillotin became deeply distressed at how the device that he intended to be an example of the democratic nature and forward thinking of the French Revolution instead became a symbol of carnage and terror” (Klein) The guillotine was very messy and blood splattered everywhere, it also kept going until the head rain out of blood; that took at least twelve seconds. After they finished cutting the heads of the victims of this Treacherous machine, “workers shoveled sawdust on to the blood-soaked boards”(Klein) they would hang it up on large steaks around the perimeter of the stage. This would make the process of the guillotine messy because of the blood splattering everywhere, the workers had to put sawdust on it so it would soak up all of the blood off of the boards where the head was cut off, and the crowed would usually bring some type of cover so the blood did not get on them.
When people came to the guillotine to see people get their heads chopped off, it was just the same killing over and over again. People just got bored of it while some were horrified. “The young imperial Maiden of Fifteen has now become a worn discrowned Widow of Thirty-eight” (Carlyle) This shows how they never really care who it is, the execut...
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The Textbook
Beck, Roger B., et al., eds. World History: Patterns of Interaction. McDougal
Littell, 2009. Print.
Carlyle, Thomas. The French Revolution, Volume 3: The Guillotine. Vol. 3. London: James Fraser, ..., 2001. Print. French Revolution.
Mercer, Jeremy. When the Guillotine Fell: The Bloody Beginning and Horrifying End to France's River of Blood, 1791-1977. New York: St. Martin's, 2008. Print.
LYNN, MICHAEL R. "Executions, the Guillotine and the French Revolution." The Ultimate History Project. Purdue University, n.d. Web. 17 Apr. 2014.
Cobban, Alfred . "Historians and the Causes of the French Revolution." Aspects of the French Revolution. New York: George Braziller, 1968.
Throughout America’s history, capital punishment, or the death penalty, has been used to punish criminals for murder and other capital crimes. In the early 20th century, numerous people would gather for public executions. The media described these events gruesome and barbaric (“Infobase Learning”). People began to wonder if the capital punishment was really constitutional.
Furet, Francois ‘Napoleon Bonaparte’ in G, Kate (ed.). The French Revolution: Recent Debates and New Controversies. Clarendon Press, Oxford (1997). Gildea, Robert. Barricades and Borders: Europe 1800-1914, Oxford University Press, New York 2nd edn, 1996.
In the beginning of the novel, capital punishment serves as the "cure-all" for France’s social problems. After all, "death is nature’s remedy for all things, and why not legislation’s?" (62). It is this attitude that strikes fear into the lower class citizens, causing them to refrain from speaking out against their oppressors. Instead they are encouraged to "speak well of the law…and leave the law to take care of itself." (68). The fact is, that the blackened hearts of the aristocracy saw capital punishment as a convenience, rather than justice. The guillotine "cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each particular case, and left nothing else with it to be looked after" (62). This negative light that the ruthless use of capital punishment casts upon the rulers of France is exactly what Dickens had intended.
However different a guillotine and the Carmagnole dance/song may seem, they are quite related. A guillotine is an “instrument for inflicting capital punishment by decapitation, introduced into France in 1792” (Britannica). It is a rather old method of execution that consists of a head assembly, wheels (a pulley system), uprights, a blade assembly, a restraining assembly, a brace, a trigger assembly, a base, and a rope that is attached to the blade assembly. However, the most important parts were the blade and mouton which “weighed roughly 88 pounds” (The Interactive World of the Guillotine). Their job was to make a quick and painless beheading. To use this apparatus, a victim must lay down and put their head in the restraining assembly. Hence the name, this device would hold the head in place and keep it from moving at the time of the beheading. The executor would then lift the blade and mouton with a piece of rope that is attached onto a pulley.
People were looking for a a more humane way to execute people, so Joseph Ignance-Guillotin came up with the idea of a more humane way of death. People who were criminals at the time were being executed in cruel ways such as being slowly hanged, broken on a wheel, or burnt at the stake. The invention was to create a device that made most executions less painful and just immediate death. The guillotine “It had two large uprights joined by a beam at the top and erected on a platform reached by 24 steps. The whole contraption was painted a dull blood red and the weighted blade ran in grooves in the uprights which were greased with tallow.” It was designed for the blade to be dropped by gravity and not slowly causing a more painful way of
Kreis, Steven. "Lecture 12: The French Revolution - Moderate Stage, 1789-1792." The History Guide -- Main. 13 May 2004. Web. 03 Nov. 2011. .
Later on that day, a delegation was invited into the prison by the Governor of the Bastille, Bernard de Launay. DeLaunay then invited the delegation to lunch with him. When they did not return the mob became angry, fearing that they had been detained. A second delegation was sent forth. These soon came out again with the message that the Governor had adamantly refused to surrender. The delegates also had the information that the cannon were unloaded. This piece of news was all that the mob needed to urge them on. "...But the fury of the crowd continued to increase and their blind wrath did not spare de Launay's escort...Exhausted by his efforts to defend his prisoner...he had to seperate from M. de Launay...Hardly had he sat down when, looking after the procession, he saw the head of M. de Launay stuck on the point of a pike...The people, fearing that their victim might be snatched away from them, hastened to cut his throat on the steps of the Hotel de Ville..."
Liberty, equality, and freedom are all essential parts to avoiding anarchy and maintaining tranquility even through the most treacherous of times. The Reign of Terror is well known as the eighteen month long French Revolution (1793-1794). In this period of time, a chief executive, Maximilien Robespierre, and a new French government executed gigantic numbers of people they thought to be enemies of the revolution, inside and outside of the country. The question is: were these acts of the new French government justified? Not only are the acts that occurred in the Reign of Terror not justified, they were barbaric and inhumane.
Unfortunately, he died before experiencing Haiti’s separation from France in 1804. However, along the way of success of both revolutions, a toll occurred on the numerous lives lost. The Reign of Terror in France was created as a way to protect the republic from its internal enemies, but instead 16,000 people were guillotined. Many documents were shown to be describing the execution of the Reign of Terror to be gruesome and wrongful such that J.G. Milligen stated, “The process of execution was also a sad and heartrending spectacle”, in The Revolutionary Tribunal. Milligen continued to describe the vivid scene of the execution, but this was only one event and many others have died in the fall of the Bastille and the attack on the royal palace.
On July 14, 1789, several starving working people of Paris and sixty soldiers seized control of the Bastille, forever changing the course of French history. The seizing of the Bastille wasn’t caused by one event, but several underlying causes such as the Old
...st powerful symbols of the French Revolution and killed an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 people during the Reign of Terror. (Doc F) The guillotine was a sharp, angled blade that killed quickly the most deadly and feared method of invoking fear during the revolution. (Doc F) These methods; however, became too extreme and the deaths of the incident was not justified.
Since they guillotined so many people, the bucket became a necessity to have. Along with this, it helped to prevent the smell of death in the streets. The most important part of the guillotine is, of course, the blade. The first guillotine was built with a blade that was straight across. When someone had to be decapitated, force and exact precision were needed in order for it to be a success (Jonas L. Bulman).
I learned that we have to obey God and not turn away from Him by making idols when tempted to. Guillotines were used to kill people for any kinds of minor reasons, which Robespierre did not accept. As a result, a massive number of people died. In the end, Robespierre himself died. I learned that killing
Nardo, Don. A. The French Revolution. San Diego, California: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1999. Print.