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The Guillotine Was Invented For Mercy, Not Mass Murder
Fun facts about revolutionary Europe’s favorite killing device
The guillotine is one of the most recognizable execution devices in the world. The iconic appearance of the fearsome curved blade ranks up there with the gallows and the cross as the more prominent images of human execution. The guillotine dominated a gruesome part of European history and continues to engage the imagination to this day.
But the guillotine was never supposed to become the killing machine that it did.
When the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin advocated for the use of the beheading device as a method of execution, he could not have known that it would be used to kill thousands of his countrymen.
The guillotine was initially invented as a mercy device. It was supposed to be a modernization of Medieval execution methods that had grown gory and inhumane. Enlightened people could not bear to kill people in such ways any longer. There had to be a better way. Those condemned to die should not also have to be tortured en-route to their final punishment.
Old execution methods
Before the invention of the guillotine, execution was brutal and somewhat arbitrary. A person’s death experience would be shaped by the strength of the arms of the man wielding the ax or the skill of the person tying a slip knot. Some beheadings would take more than one swing to accomplish. Others would slowly die at the end of a rope. In the Medieval world, this was simply a fact of life, but during the Age of Enlightenment, these arbitrary factors began to weigh on the minds of many.
The new wave of enlightenment sentiment led to a reexamination of the death penalty. Death didn’t have to be painful, messy, or arbitrary. It could be fast and efficient as the rest of the machines being invented at the time.
