Pelletier’s head dropped into a wicker basket as workers shoveled sawdust onto the blood-soaked boards. Sanson pinned the condemned man’s neck into the guillotine and released the weighted blade. Although Pelletier may not have agreed, Judge Moreau had implored the French minister of justice “in the name of humanity” to speed up the guillotine’s construction for the sake of the “unfortunate man condemned to death, who realizes his fate and for whom each moment that prolongs his life must be a death for him.” ![]() The execution was stayed, however, as the means of Pelletier’s death was being developed. Judge Jacob-Augustin Moreau had sentenced Pelletier to die for robbery and murder in December 1791. VIDEO: The Guillotine See why this device was a preferred form of legal execution. As a special unit of soldiers under American Revolution hero General Lafayette stood guard, the man whose blood would christen the new killing machine, Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier, was paraded onto the platform. A throng of curious Parisians filled the plaza outside Hôtel de Ville and watched for two hours as the guillotine, appropriately painted blood red, was assembled on a scaffold. (An apocryphal story popularized by an Alexandre Dumas novel has King Louis XVI suggesting the changes to the machine that would ultimately lop off his head nine months later.)Īfter Sanson proclaimed himself satisfied with the redesign, it was time for the rollout. The height from which the knife dropped was increased, and the convex blade was changed to a sloping, triangular shape. The cuts on male corpses were not as clean, however, and prompted a redesign. After Sanson cleanly severed the heads of live sheep and calves, he successfully tested the guillotine on the corpses of women and children. As with many modern-day products, the testing began with animals. Antoine Louis designed the prototype, which was originally nicknamed the “Louison” or “Louisette.” Decapitation machines dated back to ancient times, but the contraption unveiled at the Bicêtre Hospital in Paris in April 1792 was cutting-edge in more ways than one. “The mechanism falls like lightning the head flies off the blood spurts the man no longer exists,” Guillotin told his colleagues. The solution was found in another of Guillotin’s ideas: a beheading machine that ensured a rapid and merciful death. ![]() ![]() Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, who proposed the idea for the beheading machine that became known as the guillotine. “Swords have very often broken in the performance of such executions, and the Paris executioner possesses only two,” he wrote. A fourth-generation executioner for whom capital punishment was the family business, Sanson warned the National Assembly that beheading by sword was an inexact science that would require dozens of skilled executioners, scores of fresh swords and a means of securing felons to guarantee quick cuts. In 1791 the National Assembly made decapitation the only legal form of capital punishment in France, but the state executioner, Charles-Henri Sanson, knew this presented practical problems. Guillotin beseeched his fellow lawmakers to follow their egalitarian principles and adopt a more humanitarian and equitable system of capital punishment whereby all criminals, irrespective of class, would be beheaded. The Parisian deputy and anatomy professor argued that it was unfair for common criminals in France to be executed by tortuous methods such as hanging, burning at the stake and breaking on the wheel while aristocratic felons had the privilege of quick decapitations, particularly if they tipped their executioners to ensure swift sword chops. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin rose before the National Assembly in 1789 to lobby for equality in a most unlikely area: capital punishment. As the spirit of liberté, égalité and fraternité swirled through Paris in the early days of the French Revolution, Dr.
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