Essay On Guillotine

Guillotine; The Efficient Killing Machine

Throughout world history people have been brutally killed by beheadings, burned to death, and hangings. The guillotine has simplified the process of killing by developing the process into a more efficient advanced way of death. A guillotine is a machine responsible of quick less painful deaths. This machine is structured with a large wooden base having a hole for a person’s neck to sit. The blade, which sits at the top of the machine then beheads victim causing a simple quick less painful death. This machine was used frequently and adequately during the French Revolution. In the novel, “Tale of Two Cities” by Charles Dickens, this killing machine is compared to a female named La Guillotine. Dickens proclaims, “On the top of the gallows is fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its point in the air” (Beheading and The Guillotine).

The Guillotine was used as a more humane way of killing in the 1700’s and 1800’s and was mainly exercised on the upper class. Although, William the Conqueror brought the guillotine back to England where it used for the Nobles. The lower class citizens were executed with the guillotine only at times where they were beaten beforehand. Sometimes, the axe-men were horribly inaccurate, causing victims to pay for a clean cut in exchange for money.

On the release of the rope, the blade drops onto the neck of the victim while he is strapped to a board. The guillotine consists of seven parts: the crossbeam, the mouton, the grooves, the declic, the lunette, the bascule, and the shield. While the execution takes place a person called the assistant executioner is in place if the victim would try to lunge their heads forward, causing the execution to get messy. The shield is s...

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...307. The last person that was executed in public in France was Eugene Weidmann outside of St. Pierre prison in Versailles on June 17, 1939 after he murdered six people. The last time the guillotine was used was on Hamida Djandoui in France on September 10, 1977, in Marseille.

In conclusion, it can be seen that the guillotine became a huge part of the French Revolution and was responsible for many executions in the seventeen hundreds. “The historian _mile Compardon has calculated by going through tribunal documents in Paris from the year 1793 and till 17th of May 1795, 10,223 cases were handled - and of these 5,582 ended up by execution in the guillotine” (So Many Died During The French Revolution). While the guillotine might be harsh, wrong, and questionable one thing is for certain; the guillotine played a valuable role in the development of the French Revolution.