Madame Guillotine and the head of Peter Kürten.

Recently, a good friend of mine posed an interesting question. To what extent has the guillotine symbolised France and French history? I had never considered the point before but it is certainly worth pondering. As a symbol and method of capital punishment, the story of the guillotine is a contender for one of the most macabre chapters in world history.

The relationship between France and the guillotine has been largely ambivalent. The device has undeniably come to represent the French Revolution, the era in which it was introduced. As a symbol the guillotine carries connotations of mindless terror and brutality that knows no bounds. This is particularly ironic as the man who proposed and designed it, Dr. Joseph Guillotin, was one of many Enlightenment thinkers who argued in favour of humane, classless methods of execution. Of these, Voltaire was perhaps the most eloquent when he wrote 'ingenious punishments, in which the human mind seems to have exhausted itself in order to make death terrible, seem rather the inventions of tyranny than of justice.' Classless the guillotine was, thousands felt the cold kiss of Madame Guillotine on the nape of their neck, from common peasantry to King Louis himself. The period from September 5^th, 1793 to July 27^th, 1794 became known to posterity as la Terreur (The Reign of Terror) and it was between these dates that the guillotine was to claim as many as forty-thousand lives. George Orwell, in his critique of Charles Dickens (1939), notes that 'to this day, to the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads.' Orwell argues that the description of the guillotine in Dickens' 1859 novel A Tale of Two Cities 'create in his mind a special, sinister vision which he has succeeded in passing on to generations of readers.' Doubtless authors such as Dickens played some role in fostering the guillotine's grim legend but its role in European history has not been limited to the upheavals of Revolutionary France.

The guillotine was subsequently adopted by many countries such as Belgium, Sweden, Greece and Germany. It continued to be used steadily but not until the hideous period of Nazi rule did the guillotine see as much action as it had done in the last years of the eighteenth century. Whilst the workings of the device itself had drawn little criticism in the light of the crueler actions it had replaced, the guillotine was still seen as the epitome of reactionary inhumanity by some. During the Paris Commune of 1871, a socialist uprising in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, a guillotine was destroyed by the people, no doubt in repudiation of the past and as declaration of the new order. Freidrich Engels wrote that 'the guillotine was brought out by the 137^th battalion of the National guard, and publicly burnt, amid great popular rejoicing.' No more evident was the symbolic link between French Republican identity and the guillotine than Paris in 1871. The Commune was eventually ruthlessly suppressed and the guillotine remained. 

The twilight years of the guillotine are often the facts of this bleak saga that surprise people the most. The last public execution in France was that of Eugen Weidmann on June 17^th 1939. The final head was to fall on September 10^th 1977 when Hamida Djandoubi was executed in Marseilles by Marcel Chevalier, France's last executioner. Chevalier's son Eric was present at the execution so that he may one day carry on the family tradition. France eventually did away with the death penalty in 1981 and with it beheading. The days of Madame Guillotine were finally over.

As a footnote to this story I would like to recount the strange tale of Peter Kürten's head. Peter Kürten was a German serial killer dubbed the 'The Vampire of Düsseldorf'. Charged with nine murders and seven attempted murders, he was found guilty and beheaded in Cologne on July 2^nd, 1931. Scientists, desperate to discover a manifest cause of his psychopathic behaviour, dissected Kürten's head but to no avail. It was mummified and placed in storage. Quite what happened to this preserved oddity in the following decades is immensely difficult to ascertain. Whether it was looted by some eccentric U.S. soldier at the end of World War Two, sold on the lucrative underground markets that deal in such commodities or both, the head ended up in the United States. There it may be seen today. It is located in 'Ripley's Believe It or Not! Museum', Wisconsin. Amongst a fake mermaid and mummified two-headed pig, Peter Kürten's head is suspended in a small fridge and slowly rotates to the amusement of the many visitors. A troubling end for a troubled man.