A Drop of History 108

The creation of the guillotine
The revolution seeks its own method of execution

In October 1789, in the Assemblée Constituante of revolutionary France, a debate started, concerning the new penal code that would be applied by the new regime. An assembly member and medicine professor in the university of Paris, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, submitted six articles relevant to his specialty. In the last of those, he recommended decapitation as the best, most effective and least painful method of execution of convicts and enemies of the revolution.

It is true that, at the time when the French Revolution prevailed, there were so many people sentenced to death that it was very hard to enforce the sentence. Nobles, feudalists, royalists, anti-revolutionaries of all kinds, criminals who had taken advantage of the revolutionary chaos, all were awaiting their turn to be put to death. Joseph Guillotin argued in parliament in favour of the advantages of decapitation. “The blade falls with lightning speed, blood spurts out, and the man has ceased to live,” he claimed. The assembly, after a short debate, approved the suggestion. On 3 June 1791, a law was passed that “every person condemned to death should be beheaded”. On 25 September, the decision was included in the new penal code.

But the decision was not enough; an apparatus needed to be built in order to make it a reality, since nobody could even imagine the convicts beheaded by a cowled executioner’s sword or axe. The goal was a swift decapitation. In March 1792, the assembly commissioned a famous Paris surgeon, Antoine Louis, to study the problem. Louis researched various beheading contraptions that had been used over time in England, Denmark and Italy, and finally submitted a memo “on the methods of decapitation” to the assembly. In that, he suggested a composition of all the methods used before, including two vertical beams, a heavy blade moving along them, and a board, on which the condemned would lie, with their heads sticking out. And a basket where the severed head would drop, of course.

The apparatus’ blueprint was approved, and all that was left was its construction. That was assigned to a carpenter specialised in the construction of torture devices, but he demanded 5,600 francs as payment. The sum was considered exorbitant, so the commission was offered to a German, Tobias Schmidt, who agreed to a much lower price. He built the machine for 960 francs, including a leather sack for the storing and transportation of the severed head. The first execution by the new machine took place in October 1792, in the Place de Grève, and the multitude considered its performance satisfactory, after it beheaded highwayman Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier in seconds.

After that, every town square in France got one of those machines, which beheaded thousands fo people, especially during the infamous period of the revolution that was called “The Terror”, precisely for that reason. Even some of the revolutionary leaders, those who approved its construction, proved its efficiency themselves. In Louis’ design, the blade was curved like a scimitar, but in time it became straight and slanted. Several years later, as well, the cord that the executioner pulled to release the blade disappeared. The convict was tied upright on the board, then it was pushed forward, and the drop itself released the sharp steel. The convict would barely feel the jolt of the fall before their head rolled.

The apparatus was originally named “louisette” after doctor Louis, who had designed it, until the press remembered the first assembly member who had campaigned passionately for the establishment of decapitation. Thus Ignace Guillotin’s name went down in history, as the lethal machine was finally named “guillotine”.

Decapitations by guillotine were considered a very interesting popular spectacle. The poor were very amused at the sight of the heads of nobles or early revolutionary leaders rolling into the basket in a shower of blood. History, on the other hand, amuses herself quite differently. She creates myths for the popular imagination. When a man’s head is severed, he ejaculates. According to legend, where the beheaded man’s semen falls, a very rare plant, the mandrake, springs up. The French sought it eagerly beneath the guillotines, since they considered it a superlative love elixir. Can a ghastly death possibly lead to a memorable erotic encounter?

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2008, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 80

Charles de Gaulle (3)
If only there were a Charles de Gaulle today

The whole world has at least heard about General Charles de Gaulle, leader of France for many years. Everyone as well knows about the famous May 1968, the student rising that marked indelibly the consciousness of at least two generations. In some strange way, though, popular consciousness has separated de Gaulle from May ’68, regarding them as two different things. And yet, the May rising was aimed (on the political level) against de Gaulle, and de Gaulle was the one who put down the rising. No matter. History will not have two glories clashing and so she arbitrarily separates them in people’s memory.

Charles de Gaulle entered liberated Paris triumphant in 1944 and retired from politics on June 30, 1946, leaving France in the hands of politicians he disdained deeply. He returned twelve years later, after what was essentially a coup. The crisis in Algeria, at the time a French colony in revolt, made the country’s political life collapse. On 13 May 1958, the French generals in Algeria rose against the government and demanded the return of the great war victor. Virtually with a gun at his head, president Coty called de Gaulle to the Élysée Palace and asked him to form a government. De Gaulle stayed in power for eleven years, without anyone really threatening his authority. He resigned, not because he lost the elections, but because the French said “no” for the first time in a referendum of secondary importance.

De Gaulle ruled through referenda, which had grown into formidable weapons in his hands. The opposition accused him of using that manner of direct democracy in order to rule like a king. De Gaulle would stand at his bench in Parliament, and answer, furious: “Start a career as a dictator, me? Now? At the age of seventy?” He addressed the French voters in the same way; with dramatic gestures and direct speech: “People of France, you know it. You need to answer to me, without intermediaries.” The intermediaries were the Parliament, the parties, the institutions. De Gaulle had essentially abolished them all. The French would say, “De Gaulle said so”, and vote for whatever he asked them to.

De Gaulle won all the referenda he held: on the new constitution (80% of votes in 1958), on the self-government of Nice (75% in 1961), on the independence of Algeria (91% in 1962), on the election of the head of state through universal suffrage (62% in 1962). As soon as he lost his first referendum, on the reformation of the Senate (53% against, in 1969), he resigned and retired. He shut himself up in his country house in Colombey, saying, before he closed the door behind him: “Whatever happens, I will not speak again.” He kept his word to his death.

De Gaulle was the expression of nationalist, intransigent, traditionally proud France. That France, of course, could not quite understand that the world around her had begun to change fast. De Gaulle made France a nuclear power, but he was not very good with everyday reality. The old general was the belfry of France, the national trademark, the landmark that made the country visible from afar. The belfry may stand proud at the centre of the village, but it does not concern itself with the petty events that take place around its base. His financial policy was harmful. De Gaulle did suppress the May ’68 rising, but he never understood why the students revolted and raised barricades all over Paris. The general could understand why right-wing extremists attempted to assassinate him after the independence of Algeria, but it was impossible for him to realise why workers occupied their factories. He could not understand the new times.

During the electoral campaign of 1965, when he had François Mitterrand as his main opponent, his advisors told him that he should present himself to the voters no longer as a prophet but as a candidate… and he was furious: “And what am I supposed to tell the French then? That my name is Charles de Gaulle and I’m seventy-five years old?” The old general was tired. At that moment he probably remembered what he had said, as an impetuous young officer, to field marshal Pétain, who, despite having been a hero of the first World War, was not particularly willing to engage in the second: “What a tragedy old age is!”

When he retired, the French said “at last”, just like someone seeing their old father retiring from a business that he had established, but which by now has different needs and has to be left in the hands of the younger generation. The conservative French press, in the long articles on his death, wrote that “from now on, the French will say many times, if only there were a de Gaulle now!” Journalistic nonsense. History never gives second chances, either to nations or to people. For her, everything is a single roll of the dice.

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2007, All Rights Reserved

A Drop of History 76

Antoine Lavoisier

Every time that a pupil, in any classroom of any school anywhere in the world, stands before the chemistry teacher and recites the famous law of conservation of mass, “in nature nothing is created out of nothing, nothing is destroyed, everything is transformed”, must spare a thought for one of the most illustrious scientists that ever lived, Antoine-Laurent de Lavoisier. He is known as the father of modern chemistry for his outstanding discoveries, which set the groundwork for modern research, but very few remember his ghastly death, which was totally undeserving to such a great mind.

Lavoisier was guillotined on 8 May 1794, the fifth year of the French Revolution, and his head rolled into the basket that received the heads of all who represented the old guard – royalists and supporters of feudalism. It was one of the most unfortunate moments of world history, since Lavoisier found himself sucked into the vortex of the most brutal period of the revolution, when common sense did not function and fanaticism, vindictiveness, and baseness ruled in its stead. The man was blessed with an exceptional scientific mind, but cursed with being on the side of the defeated.

Lavoisier had received an excellent education, as his father was a state tax collector, a position that the son also came to hold. The particular vocation was very profitable under the royalist regime, but quite detrimental to one’s health after the monarchy fell to the revolution. Tax collectors were the most hated class among the French poor, and their chief even more so. What matters if Lavoisier had hardly anything to do with tax collection, instead spending endless hours in his laboratory, where he made stunning discoveries? He studied the nature of gases and he was the first to give an answer to the question, unanswered until then, of what exactly is combustion. He explained that combustion is the result of hydrogen reacting with other elements. He stated the first version of the law of conservation of mass, studied the composition of water, explained what exactly respiration is and how it works in the human body, studied the phenomenon of fermentation. At the age of twenty-five, he became a member of the French Academy of Sciences. But he had already made a mistake that was to cost him very dearly.

Before the revolution, a young lawyer named Jean-Paul Marat had published a manual with the ponderous title Natural Research on Fire. Lavoisier expressed his opinion on Marat’s work openly: he said it was pure nonsense. When the French Revolution broke out, in 1789, Marat rose to be one of its main leaders. That, combined with his position as tax collector for the royalist regime, made the great scientist an easy target. “We will not let these leeches rest, safe in the shade, without taking back all the blood they sucked out of the body of the people!” shouted citizen Marat in the parliament.

Marat remembered Lavoisier’s criticism of his manual, years before, and started to write fiery articles against him in the gazettes. “I denounce that impostor Lavoisier, apprentice chemist, general tax collector, supposed father of all discoveries.” The revolutionaries promptly shut down his laboratory and soon afterwards arrested him. None of the other scientists dared confront the new power. People had regressed into savagery at the time, and the guillotines worked non-stop in the town squares all over France, dispatching the so-called enemies of the new regime. Alone, Lavoisier listed before the court the long line of his scientific achievements, only to receive the following reply by the illiterate and fanatical judge: “The Republic needs neither scientists nor chemists. To death.”

Lavoisier, together with twenty-seven other convicts, was immediately led to the guillotine and his head rolled. Eighteen months later, after Robespierre’s and Marat’s deaths, when the more moderate Directory took over power, his wife, Marie-Anne, was permitted to take her husband’s equipment and notes. The authorities accompanied the permit with an official note full of historical irony: “To the widow of Lavoisier, who was unjustly convicted.” He was convicted as simply as that; the mistake was corrected as simply as that.

One of the greatest scientists of humankind had his life unjustly cut short, at the age of fifty-one and during his most productive period, because several years earlier he had justly criticised a truly poor work. A few years later, the French government also granted him a formal state funeral, because – they said – he had glorified his country within the international scientific community.

The fatherland was grateful to its hero, whom it had turned into mincemeat, in order to digest him more easily…

© Dimitris Kambourakis 2003, All Rights Reserved
Translation from the Greek © M.A.K. 2007, All Rights Reserved