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...
... middle of paper ...
... The Guillotine." History of the Guillotine. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Mar.
2014.
Klein, Christopher. "The Guillotines First Cut." History. History, 25 Apr. 2012. Web.
Feb.-Mar. 2014.
"The Guillotine Headquarters - Construction 1792 and 1870." The Guillotine
Headquarters - Construction 1792 and 1870. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Mar. 2014.
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.
The guillotine was first introduced during the French Revolution by a man named Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin. He is a physician who first became involved with the issues of medicine. On December 1, 1789 he became interested in the idea of capital punishment. He invented the guillotine. It is a contraption used to cause immediate and painless death.
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.
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
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.
The guillotine was one of the fastest and most painless ways to kill people. Before that though there were a lot more painful and torturous ways to execute people. For example, they used to hang people but they would also torture them, to make their death even more painful. During the Enlightment, people favored human rights and their well being, so they didn’t torture people as bad as before. During the Enlightment, people got more rights so they couldn’t be tortured as much like former executions. The guillotine made execution a lot better. The guillotine was an enlightened way to execute people.
Cobban, Alfred . "Historians and the Causes of the French Revolution." Aspects of the French Revolution. New York: George Braziller, 1968.
...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.
Nardo, Don. A. The French Revolution. San Diego, California: Greenhaven Press, Inc., 1999. Print.
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.
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..."
The guillotine was used during the French Revolution as a device to behead victims of felony. The guillotine was used on several people such as Marie Antoinette, queen of France. Marie Antoinette was executed by the guillotine on October 16, 1793. Another individual of Monarch power that was executed by the guillotine was King Louis XVI. Though King Louis XVI claimed he was innocent, the people of France said otherwise and that the King brought France to a fall and he was executed for treason on
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.
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
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