Francais II Unite 9&10

Pre-Guillotine Capital Punishment

• Deaths were inhumane and cruel.
• One example of the cruel and inhumane deaths were attaching four different ropes to four different horses. then attaching them all to a person in the center and making the horses run in four different directions, thus ripping apart the individual.
• These acts served as warnings to others of what was to come if they disobeyed laws, and ways to punish criminals
• Opposition to these types of punishments grew due to the philosophies of enlightenment thinkers. (Voltaire & Locke)

Dr. Guillotin Arrives

• Took place during the French Revolution in 1789 when a national assembly took place convulsing the country, reshaping its social and political views
• On the second day of the debate of France's penal code, Dr. Guillotin proposed six articles to the New Legislative Assembly
• Offered the NLA a sketch of the device, said the death given should be dignified and private
• His proposal was rejected by the NLA

Guillotin's Second attempt

• On December 1st, 1789 Dr. Guillotin proposed his articles before the NLA again. The five articles of reform on capital punishment he proposed were accepted, but again they denied his proposal of an execution machine for quicker, painless deaths
• In 1971 the NLA decided to retain the death penalty, then discussed a more human means of execution
• People began to favor the idea of decapitation after the NLA accepted a new, albeit repetitive, proposal by the Marquis Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau, decreeing that "Every person condemned to the death penalty shall have his head severed".

The Guillotine Comes to Be

• The Assembly - working through Pierre-Louis Roederer, the Procureur général - sought advice from Doctor Antoine Louis, the Secretary of the Academy of Surgery in France, and his design for a quick, painless, decapitation machine was given to Tobias Schmidt, a German Engineer.
• Tobias Schmidt was the first person to build the device, it was first tested on animals, and then human corpses
• Operated on a classic rope and pulley system

Improved and usable

• The first person to be executed with the new machine wasa highwayman called Nicholas-Jacques Pelletier
• Further improvements were made, and an independent report to Roederer recommended a number of changes, including metal trays to collect blood; at some stage the famous angled blade was introduced and the high platform abandoned, replaced by a basic scaffold.

The Guillotine in Its Prime

• It came to be nicknamed the Guillotin after Dr. Guillotin although it hadn't come to light until after he had given up on it.
• Throughout all of France the Guillotine became the means of any and all killing that was to be done
• 53 people were executed by the Halifax Gibbet between 1541 and 1650, but some guillotines exceeded that total in a single day.

Post-Revolution Use

• Public executions continued in France until 1939, when Eugene Weidmann became the last 'open-air' victim.
• Although the machine's use had gradually fallen after the revolution, executions in Hitler's Europe rose to a level that neared, if not exceeded, that of The Terror.
• The last State use of the guillotine in France occurred on September 10th ​1977, when Hamida Djandoubi was executed

End of Presentation