The Guillotine: Prior To The Reign Of Terror

695 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Political effects of the French Revolution

The guillotine itself was used prior to the reign of terror and is documented being used after the reign of terror as well (Symbol of Revolution). In light of this it was not the invention of the guillotine that proves Mead’s theory but rather the idea the guillotine championed that proves her ideas. The guillotine was a representation of an idea to show more compassion and humanity in the treatment of all humans. Even those who had been convicted of a serious crime. The French did this by enacting legislation, forcing all executions to be beheadings by guillotine in 1792 (Symbol of Revolution). Guillotines much like gunpowder were initially invented with a noble purpose of relieving the suffering of death. Although one was meant to stop it from happening and the other intended to bring death quicker. The …show more content…

The immediate effect was the weakening of the French revolutionary government allowing Napoleon to take control of the government by military takeover. This event changed the landscape and direction of European politics for nearly two hundred years following the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo. However, that is a paper in itself and not as important as the long term social change this machine of death encouraged. It came to symbolize a changing of regime, the road from oppression to freedom. The people of France cheered the executions because they believed it paved a path to democracy. When in contrast it only created more turmoil. It twisted the idea of justice into one of where the right thing is what the most people want (Brown). The Reign of Terror which was made possible by the guillotine also left another example that change could only come from conflict and blood. Whether you agree with this assumption or not it is crudely obvious this belief still holds true in the modern day. Every uprising against government since the French revolution has involved conflict and

Show More
Related

  • History of The Guillotine

    539 Words  | 2 Pages

    The guillotine was first introduced during the French Revolution by a man named Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin. He is a physician who first was involved with the issues of medicine. On December 1, 1789 he became interested in the idea of capital punishment. He invented the guillotine. It was a contraption used for causing immediate and painless death. It included a falling blade, running between two upright boards of wood and later a basket. Therefore, one may believe that the design of the guillotine helped with executions.

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast The Haitian Revolution And French Revolution

    1077 Words  | 3 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Reign Of Terror Dbq Essay

    782 Words  | 2 Pages

    A guillotine is a decapitation device that quickly chops off it’s victims head in the blink of an eye. According to document F, About 16,000 people were believed to have died at the hands of it. No matter how small or petty a crime was, people would have been executed for it. Even Marie Antoinette and King Louis XVI, the leaders of France before the Revolution, were decapitated by one, as was the leader of the Reign of Terror, Maximilien Robespierre. Another method to weed out the counter revolutionaries was a network of spies that watched out for anyone who spoke out against the government, “A careless word of criticism spoken against the government could put one in prison or worse” (Document E). The punishment for a crime as small as ththis was more often than not

    Read More

  • The Reign of Terror: Was it Justified?

    667 Words  | 2 Pages

    (Doc E) The guillotine became one of the most 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 quickly killed the most deadly and feared method of invoking fear during the revolution. (Doc F)

    Read More

  • Guillotine Beheading

    799 Words  | 2 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

    Read More

  • Execution of King Charles I

    660 Words  | 2 Pages

    King Charles I left us with some of the most intriguing questions of his period. In January 1649 Charles I was put on trial and found guilty of being a tyrant, a traitor, a murderer and a public enemy of England. He was sentenced to death and was executed on the 9th of February 1649. It has subsequently been debated whether or not this harsh sentence was justifiable. This sentence was most likely an unfair decision as there was no rule that could be found in all of English history that dealt with the trial of a monarch. Only those loyal to Olivier Cromwell (The leader opposing Charles I) were allowed to participate in the trial of the king, and even then only 26 of the 46 men voted in favour of the execution. Charles was schooled from birth, in divine right of kings, believing he was chosen by God to be king, and handing power to the parliament would be betraying God. Debatably the most unjust part of his trial was the fact that he was never found guilty of any particular crimes, instead he was found guilty of the damage cause by the two civil wars.

    Read More

  • The Functionalist Theory Of Capital Punishment In Colonial America

    869 Words  | 2 Pages

    Capital punishment, or better known as the death penalty, began around the eighteenth century B.C. when The Code of King Hammaurabi of Babylon implemented the death penalty for 25 different crimes. In the 16th century, Henry VIII created edicts that caused about 72,000 people to be put to death by acts such as hanging and drawing and quartering. New Colonial America did not have prisons to hold criminals so the main source of punishment was the death penalty. Captain George Kendall was the first person on record, in the new colonies, to be sentenced to death. In 1632, in Jamestown, Virginia, a woman by the name of Jane Champion became the first woman to receive the death penalty in the colonies. On June 29, 1972, in the case of Furman V. Georgia, the supreme court ruled that capital punishment violated the

    Read More

  • Personal Peace In Charles Dickens A Tale Of Two Cities

    781 Words  | 2 Pages

    Madame Defarge plots with her husband and fellow revolutionaries her plan of revenge. “Madame Defarge held darkly ominous council…the Evremonde people are to be exterminated, and the wife and child must follow the husband and father” (414,415). Many people throughout the countryside did not even know what they were still fighting and killing for, some did it for fun, some did it blindly, some did not know why they were doing it and others were so full hate that they did it out of revenge. Madame Defarge was one of the ones who killed out of sheer revenge and hate, a result of a lacking government. Additionally, Lady Guillotine was considered the secret to forcing justice and peace into a land full of terror and fear. “Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation…The horrible massacre, days and nights long…was to set a great mark of blood upon the blessed garnering time of harvest” (260,293). Resulting in quit the opposite, the massacres and the daily feeding of human lives to the mouth of the guillotine did not bring the peace and freedom the French citizens were striving for. It brought tears and tantrum, fear and untrustworthiness to almost every Frenchmen. The Tale of Two cities accurately depict the bloodiness of the Reign of

    Read More

  • Historical Methods of Torture and Execution

    899 Words  | 2 Pages

    Europe is the place to visit if this is what you're into. Many cities and towns have medieval torture museums. We liked one that we visited at Mont St. Michel in France. For those of you who can't afford to travel, check out the movie version of Edgar Allen Poe's The Pit and the Pendulum starring Lance Henrickson. Don't know how historically accurate it is, but it's great atmospherically.

    Read More

  • The Punishments of the Medieval era

    1232 Words  | 3 Pages

    When Shakespeare was born in 1564, Queen Elizabeth had taken power a mere 6 years prior, and her justice system was very different from ours. In this paper, I hope to explore some of the ways punishments were different, such as how many crimes had individual punishments, often times depending on how severe the crime was. I will also go in-depth to one of the most infamous cases of the medieval period.

    Read More

  • History of the Death Penalty and Why It Is Not Wrong

    3309 Words  | 7 Pages

    “I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that the death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty.”

    Read More

  • Medieval Torture

    653 Words  | 2 Pages

    Torture is defined as in law, infliction of severe bodily pain either as punishment, or to force a person to confess to a crime, or to give evidence in a judicial proceeding. In the middle of ancient people torture has been used as a means of suffering and to punish captured enemies. It involves using instruments to force evidence from unwilling witnesses.

    Read More

  • French Revolution Violence And Decapitations

    1336 Words  | 3 Pages

    There was a diverse act of assaults prior to the Reign of Terror such as The Champ de Mars, The Massacres in 1792 and The March to Versailles. Many important characters were sinking in horrible assassinations and were being executed. The common tool used to do this cruel acts was the guillotine which was passed down from 1789 to 1793. Many people argue that violence started at the beginning of the French Revolution, but that is not quite accurate. Way before the French Revolution started, many acts of violence were occurring across Europe, even though they were not major problems it still caused issues. Many times, the criminal or peasant was surrounded by thousands of people to be taken back to the scene of the crime so they could confess. It depended on the type of violence or crime they had committed, they would get their hands cut off, but usually the one they used to commit the crime. Then the criminal would have had to hang their hand around their neck till they got to the court. Many times, they would stop for authorities to reveal what was the crime committed, the penalty and what happened. Cutting hands off was not the only punishment for peasants or criminals, they were tortured in many ways such as whipped or stripped. One of the worse punishments was the one of a priest condemned of treason, he was tied by his legs and left hanging from a day before his execution. To torture him and make him suffer even more, the authorities were throwing rocks and stones at him while he was upside down hanging from a tree. Unlike peasants, nobles were treated differently. They had a less painful death. Nobles typically evaded public embarrassments or cruel punishments like the one of the priest. Their deaths did not include torture, it was straight to the point. They often used the guillotines for their decapitations because it was

    Read More

  • Essay On Guillotine

    891 Words  | 2 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • History Of The Death Penalty

    1903 Words  | 4 Pages

    “I believe that more people would be alive today if there were a death penalty.”-Nancy Reagan (Reagan)

    Read More

More about The Guillotine: Prior To The Reign Of Terror

Open Document