Who invented the guillotine
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Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s legacy to the French language may not be as useful an addition to your everyday vocabulary as that provided by Eugène Poubelle, but it’s perhaps more distinctively French. As well as the name for the execution device itself (la guillotine), Guillotin has also supplied us with a verb, (guillotiner, to guillotine), two further nouns (le guillotineur/la guillotineuse, who does the guillotining, and the rather less fortunate le guillotiné/la guillotinée at the business end of the device), plus, the excellent term, lafenêtre à guillotine, which sounds very much more architecturally exciting than the English sash window. Note that, like la Bastille (and unlike, say, la ville), the double-l of Guillotin and guillotine has a y-sound rather than an l-sound in French (and apparently also commonly in American English – it’s only the British that always get it wrong).
Here are three things that many people can tell you about Joseph-Ignace Guillotin:
1. He was keen on executing people.
2. He invented the guilloti Apparatus designed for carrying out executions by beheading This article is about the device used to carry out executions by beheading. For the paper slicing tool, see Paper cutter. For other uses, see Guillotine (disambiguation). A guillotine (GHIL-ə-teenGHIL-ə-TEENGHEE-yə-teen)[1] is an apparatus designed for efficiently carrying out executions by beheading. The device consists of a tall, upright frame with a weighted and angled blade suspended at the top. The condemned person is secured with a pillory at the bottom of the frame, holding the position of the neck directly below the blade. The blade is then released, swiftly and forcefully decapitating the victim with a single, clean pass; the head falls into a basket or other receptacle below. The guillotine is best known for its use in France, particularly during the French Revolution, where the revolution's supporters celebrated it as the people's avenger and the revolution's opponents vilified it as the pre-eminent symbol of the violence of the Reign of Terror.[2] While the name The man who gave his name to Madame la Guillotine or The Widow (La Veuve) was born at Saintes in southern France in 1738 and became a doctor after graduating from university in Paris. From 1789 he was one of the Paris deputies to the Constituent Assembly, in which he took a prominent role. Guillotin was opposed to the death penalty on principle but, failing that, he wanted criminals executed as painlessly as possible and proposed the use of ‘a simple mechanism’ to replace burning alive, hanging, quartering, drowning and other slow and agonising methods. He also wanted an end to the system that gave aristocrats the privilege of execution by axe or sword. The machine that would swiftly behead all comers is generally said to have been invented by the surgeon Antoine Louis, though there had been prototypes of it in other European countries. It was mainly Guillotin’s advocacy that led to the introduction of the guillotine in 1791 as France’s sole method of execution. The first machine was erected in Paris the following year and the first person
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Guillotine
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Death of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin
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