In The kindest cutter of all, Munro Price reviews Guillotine: The Timbers of Justice by Robert Frederick Opie:
The guillotine is a paradoxical device. It was conceived with a humanitarian purpose: to spare criminals condemned to death in 18th-century France the horrors that had traditionally been their lot — primitive hanging, breaking on the wheel or, for those who had been foolhardy enough to try to kill the king, tearing apart by wild horses. Compared to these medieval barbarities, swift dispatch by a state-of-the-art beheading machine was infinitely preferable. Yet within two years of its inauguration, the guillotine had gained a notoriety unequalled by any of these earlier, and far nastier, methods.
Before the invention of the guillotine, beheading en masse was prohibitively expensive:
Under the old regime, the luxury of decapitation, usually by the sword, was strictly reserved for the nobility; one of the Assembly’s first decisions, prompted by the eponymous Dr Guillotin, was that this boon should be extended to all Frenchmen regardless of birth.This high ideal, however, concealed major practical difficulties. Beheading the occasional aristocrat was one thing; applying the same method en masse to common criminals, not all of whom could be relied upon to rise to the occasion, was enough to make the stoutest headsman tremble. As the state executioner Charles-Henri Sanson put it, in a masterpiece of professional understatement: “In order that an execution may be completed according to the requirements of the law…the executioner [must] be very skilful and the condemned very composed, otherwise it may be impossible to complete the execution by the sword without the risk of dangerous incidents occurring.
“After each execution the sword is unfit to perform another; it is essential that the sword which is liable to damage be sharpened and reset if there are several condemned persons to be executed at the same time. It is therefore necessary to have a number of swords available in a state of readiness…The Paris executioner has only two swords.”
Of course, most of us associate the guillotine with 1790′s France, during the revolution, but the guillotine had a 189-year career that went beyond France, “and by the mid-19th century [it] had become the standard means of execution in most of the Italian and German states, Greece and even Newfoundland.” Even the Nazis used the guillotine:
Its worst abuse occurred not in 1790s Paris, but in Nazi Germany. The guillotine claimed just under 3,000 French lives in Paris during the Terror, but 10,000 German ones in 1944 and 1945 alone.