I read an article yesterday that said that Amnesty International had released its annual review of the death penalty. According to the report, recorded executions in 2022 reached the highest figure in five years as the Middle East and North Africa’s most notorious executioners carried out killing sprees.
Among other things in the report (that I chose not to read in its entirety) included: highest number of judicial executions recorded globally since 2017; 81 people executed in a single day in Saudi Arabia; 20 countries known to have carried out executions; and six countries abolished the death penalty partially or fully.
Well, that got me to thinking about a story I read recently about Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. He was a French physician, politician, and freemason who proposed the use of a device to carry out death penalties in France with a less painful method of execution than those that were currently being used. Even though he didn’t invent the guillotine, and he opposed the death penalty, his name became associated with the machine as though he had invented it. The actual inventor of the original prototype was a man named Tobias Schmidt.
Dr. Guillotin was actually a nice, kindly man that took this one issue as his life’s work — that people convicted of a capital offense should have the right to a quick and painless form of execution. Up to that point, French commoners were executed by hanging. The nobility, of course, died a nobler death —by the sword.
The kinder, gentler beheading machine that Guillotin had in mind was already being used in Italy, England and Germany, so the French government said, okay, let’s try it. The government asked a German piano maker, Tobias Schmidt, to build the prototype — he did, and it was successfully tested on dead bodies supplied by local French hospitals. Turns out that the guillotine became generally accepted just in time to become the symbol of the French Revolution.
Nearly 3,000 men and women were guillotined in Paris during the fall and winter of 1703. Another 14,000 executions were carried out in the provinces. Most of the victims were designated “enemies of the people” because their politics didn’t agree with whichever revolutionary party held the balance of power at the time. But in many cases, innocent people were hauled off to the guillotine for the flimsiest of excuses, such as complaints of jealous or vindictive neighbors. In some cases, people were guillotined because of clerical or administrative errors.
The guillotine stuck around for a long time — Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant convicted of murder, was guillotined at Baumetes Prison in Marseilles, France on September 10, 1977.
After Dr. Guilliotin’s death, his children tried to get the guillotine’s name legally changed. They weren’t successful, so they changed their own name instead.
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