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 5th,
1793 to July 27th,
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 137th
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 17th
1939. The final head was to fall on September 10th
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 2nd,
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.
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