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Updated: June 17, 2025
The invention created some little conversation among scientific men at the time, though I remember a machine in Edinburgh of a very similar construction, two hundred well, many, many years ago and at a breakfast which Guillotin gave he showed us the instrument, and much talk arose among us as to whether people suffered under it.
"La Guillotine" that fiendish beheading instrument that a deputy named Doctor Guillotin had devised was become Robespierre's private engine to tyrannize France. It stood in a great suburban place, on a scaffolding led up to by a flight of steps: a tall massive upright with high cross piece uglier than the gallows.
And the sun poured down its untempered rays on the condemned. But more pitiless than carts or streets or sun were the coarse Jacobins who ran alongside. With what fine wit they shouted "Long live the razor of the Republic!" A newsvendor began to sing, and was joined in chorus "Doctor Guillotin, That great médécin Love of human kind Preoccupies his mind."
Guillotin did not invent this instrument of death, even as it is a baseless legend that he died by it. Some improvements in it he made, and it thus happened that it was called after him. Nor less shall we find history, at all events literary history, in the noting of the popular characters in books, who have supplied words that have passed into common speech.
In prison he had suffered his beard to grow; his head fell on his shoulder, his legs bent beneath him, and his movements were apparently automatic and unconscious. * Dr. Guillotin got the idea of his famous machine from witnessing an execution in Italy. "I thought," said Franz to the count, "that you told me there would be but one execution." "I told you true," replied he coldly.
Guillotin did not really invent it, nor was he himself guillotined, as has often been said. The guillotine is supposed to have been invented long ago in Persia, and was used in the Middle Ages both in Italy and Germany.
Etienne, a slender young eloquent and vehement Barnave, will help to regenerate France, "And then there is worthy Doctor Guillotin, Bailly likewise, time-honored historian of astronomy, and the Abbé Sieyès, cold, but elastic, wiry, instinct with the pride of logic, passionless, or with but one passion, that of self-conceit.
It was imagined by a Mons. Guillotin, a physician of Paris, and member of the Constituent Assembly. The original design seems not so much to spare pain to the criminal, as obloquy to the executioner. I, however, perceive little difference between a man's directing a Guillotine, or tying a rope; and I believe the people are of the same opinion.
Guillotin whose philanthropic engine of painless death was before very long to find a deal of work came from the Assembly, of which he was a member, to assure the electors of Paris that all was well, appearances notwithstanding, since Necker was more firmly in the saddle than ever.
"You saw how slight that instrument was? It was one of the first which Guillotin made, and which he showed to private friends in a HANGAR in the Rue Picpus, where he lived.
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