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Terrible incident, which often occurred at executions during the Terror. Nowadays assassins and poisoners are decapitated more decently. Many improvements in the guillotine have been made. At the spot where the King's head fell, a long rivulet of blood streamed down the planks of the scaffold to the pavement.
The same cannot be said of executions.... It can also be seen from the "instruction" that personal safety is to a certain extent guaranteed only to members of the government, of the Central Council, and of the local Executive Committees.
'He is one of those who, at the outbreak of the Revolution, embraced it with the whole strength of his simple nature. He believed what the writers and the speakers told him, and he was convinced that, after a little disturbance and a few necessary executions, France was to become a heaven upon earth, the centre of peace and comfort and brotherly love.
A bold thought was in Cuchillo's mind, but the executions of this project was yet to lead him to a fearful punishment, which he well deserved. We cannot, however, speak of this at present. A man, as we have said, had arrived at the Indian camp with news.
I was arrested by the provisional government on the order of Lieutenant Colonel Niglitsch on a most flimsy charge of traveling with false passports. In those times arrests and executions were the order of the day.
Josephine anxiously ran her eye over the record of the executions, and found the name of her husband in the fatal list. She fell senseless to the floor in a long-continued swoon. When consciousness returned, she exclaimed at first, in the delirium of her anguish, "O God, let me die! let me die! There is no peace for me but in the grave."
They know I am going to be burned forever; they know I am going to hell, but that don't satisfy them. They want to give me a little foretaste here. Prosecutions and executions like these were common in every Christian country, and all of them based upon the belief that an intellectual conviction is a crime. No wonder the church hated and traduced the author of the "Age of Reason."
After the Restoration, the belief in witchcraft declined among educated people though some able writers maintained it and there were few executions. The last trial of a witch was in 1712, when some clergymen in Hertfordshire prosecuted Jane Wenham.
On the eighteenth of February, orders were sent both to the Lieutenant of the Tower and to the Sheriffs of London and Middlesex for the executions of the rebel lords. Great solicitations had, meantime, been made for them, and the petitions for mercy not only reached the Court, but came down to the two Houses of Parliament, and being seconded by some members, debates ensued.
In the year after the executions he had the satisfaction of studying another remarkable case of possession in Boston; but when it and the treatise which he wrote upon it failed to excite much attention, and it was plain that the tide had set the other way, he soon got his consent to let it run at its own pleasure, and turned his excursive activity to other objects....
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