Guillotin gives his name to the guillotine
Le Docteur Guillotin / Image choisie par monsieurdefrance.com : Par https://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/obf_images/https://wellcomeimages.via wikicommone
Guillotin did not invent the guillotine and yet...
Victor Hugo once said "There are unfortunate men. Christopher Columbus cannot attach his name to his discovery; Guillotin cannot detach his from his invention." Joseph Ignace Guillotin, born in Saintes in 1738, is one of those men marked in spite of themselves. In fact, it is said thatthe cries of a condemned man triggered his mother's labor. Ironically, much later, an unrelated Monsieur Guillotin was executed by the instrument bearing that name. Guillotin became a doctor at the hospital in Arras, where he practiced for many years. He became a deputy at the very start of the French Revolution in 1789. In particular, he worked on the death penalty, which was applied differently according to social status or crime. He wanted, in fact, the same death for all;
Guillotin's signaturen / Photo selected by monsieurdefrance.com: wiki commons
However, Guillotin never invented the machine that made him famous. The idea came from Dr. Louis, a doctor from Metz: in fact, the device was initially called "Louison". Mind you, there was no shortage of nicknames for the guillotine! It has also been nicknamed "the silence mill", "the widow", or "the national razor". If the guillotine bears this name today, it's because Joseph Ignace Guillotin fought for its adoption. Not out of cruelty, but out of humanism.
The idea: a single, painless death for all
Before the Revolution, execution methods varied according to social rank and crime: hanging, quartering, decapitation... sometimes with dramatic clumsiness. We recall one count enduring 29 axe strokes before being beheaded. Guillotin wanted to change that: "With my machine, I blow your head off in the blink of an eye, and you don't suffer", he said. His goal? A quick and identical death for all, without distinction. He was such an advocate of this new invention of his time, which sliced off the head in the same way for everyone, that it ended up being given the name guillotine. he even disowned it all his life. Until his death in 1814, Guillotin described this association between his name and the machine as"an involuntary stain on my life". History sometimes imprisons a man in an image far removed from what he set out to embody.
The guillotine in operation on the Place de la Révolution (now the Place de la Concorde in Paris) / Photo chosen by monsieurdefrance.com : By Pierre-Antoine_Demachy (1807) - site Gallica, Domaine public, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15569614
