The Rest Is History - 505. The French Revolution: The Shadow of the Guillotine (Part 3)

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

During the "Ancien Regime", royal executioners held an unholy status, and would strike up fear in the crowds as they walked the streets of Paris. But with the Revolution, the role of executioners in society was reformed, and whilst they lost some of their privileges, they were ushered into to a new, universalist France. And as the Revolution brought forward more and more enemies of the state, executioners were faced with more victims than the axe could handle. This, combined with an ever growing debate around the humanity and dignity of executions, would lead to the invention of a killing machine still used by the French state more than 150 years later… Join Tom and Dominic in the third part of our second season of the French Revolution, as they look at gruesome methods of execution under the French monarchy, the changing role of executioners, how the Guillotine came to loom so large over the fate of so many… _______ Looking for all of our episodes on the French Revolution? Check out The Rest Is History’s French Revolution playlist https://open.spotify.com/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX6W9e1zgsgaG _______ LIVE SHOWS *The Rest Is History LIVE in the U.S.A.* If you live in the States, we've got some great news: Tom and Dominic will be performing throughout America in November, with shows in San Francisco, L.A., Chicago, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., Boston and New York. *The Rest Is History LIVE at the Royal Albert Hall* Tom and Dominic, accompanied by a live orchestra, take a deep dive into the lives and times of two of history’s greatest composers: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. Tickets on sale now at TheRestIsHistory.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis + Becki Hills Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is the restishistory.com. Hello everybody. Now Theo, our producer, has asked me to point out to you that this episode is very, very gory. So if you're listening in the car with small children, consider yourselves warned. Enjoy. It was the popular theme for jests, it was the best cure for headache. It infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey. It imparted a peculiar delicacy to the complexion. It was the national razor which shaved close. Who kissed La guillotine looked through the little window and sneezed into

the sack. It was the sign of the regeneration of the human race. It superseded the cross. Models of it were worn on breasts from which the cross was discarded and it was bowed down to and believed in where the cross was denied. It sheared off heads so many that it and the ground it most polluted were a rotten red. It was taken to pieces like a toy puzzle for a young devil and was put together again when the occasion wanted it. It hushed the eloquent, struck down the powerful, abolished the beautiful and good. Twenty friends of high public mark, 21 living and one dead. It had lopped the heads off in one morning in as many minutes. The name of the strongman of old scripture had descended to the chief functionary who

worked it. But so armed he was stronger than his namesake and blinder and tore away the gates of God's own temple every day. So that was Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities and he is writing of course about the guillotine. And Tom when people think about the French Revolution in the English speaking world in particular, the guillotine is at the absolute centre of our mental picture isn't it. There's the guillotine, the blade stained with blood, there's the basket with the heads of the aristocrats. There are kind of cackling, orc-faced old women with knitting needles, knitting at their foot and the sort of the grim, pale sort of mermodons of the revolution who are ordering more carts to

rattle through the streets. Tumbrils. revolution who are ordering more carts to rattle through the streets with guests of Madame Guillotine. So we thought now we'd talk about the guillotine as the supreme symbol of the revolution. Because of course it's at this point in the story that the guillotine starts to feature. So I think you're absolutely right that for us in the English speaking world, the guillotine is perhaps the supreme symbol of the revolution and particularly of the terror. And often in the English speaking world, the two are conflated. So the guillotine, I think, for Dickens and for Carlisle before

him and for English people who lived through the revolutionary period, it was an object of dread because it facilitated slaughter on an almost industrial scale. Enormous quantities of people are being killed in kind of mass execution sessions. But also because the guillotine ends up in the very centre of Paris. And so it enshrines a spectacle of death physically at the heart of the capital of the country that is going through the revolution. And you see it, it's kind of menace endures in Master and Commander, where Russell Crowe, when he's rallying his men to face the French, he has the line, do you want to see a guillotine

in Piccadilly? Do you want your children to sing their master eyes? No, terrible prospects, obviously. So the shadow of the guillotine, I think, hangs heavy over the English imagination. But I think in France, obviously it has slightly different connotations. In France, the guillotine continues to be used long after the revolution because it is seen as being the most humane and progressive method of execution. And amazingly, the last public guillotining takes place as late as June 1939. That's bonkers.

And a serial killer is executed outside the prison he's been kept in and the place where he's executed is Versailles. It's amazing irony. Do we know how many people went to watch it? I mean, that's mad, isn't it? A fair few, I think. Unbelievable. And actually, Dominic, the last person in France to be guillotined, he's executed in September 1977, which is five months after the release of Star Wars. That's crazy. The fact that you could, I mean, at least it wasn't public because otherwise you could have gone to see both in a single year. I mean, that's crazy. And I think, you know, it's not just the French who share this assumption that the guillotine

is progressive and humane. And you can see this because it gets adopted in lots of countries that are inspired by the French revolution. So in Belgium, in Switzerland, in Sweden, in Greece, actually in Germany, I mean, we did the white rose, didn't we? The activists who opposed the Nazis and who ended up being guillotined. But we also talked about how von Papen, the afeet bouffant haired aristocrat who precedes Hitler. And he viewed the guillotine as too humane, too Afite. And he wanted it abolished and replaced with the axe, which he saw as much more traditionally Germanic. I think both sides of that argument are pretty debranged. Yeah. But I think the English and the French attitude to the guillotine is what makes it

the perfect symbol of the revolution, because it's seen as being simultaneously a symbol of horror, a symbol of humane enlightenment, an emblem of terror, an emblem of compassion almost. It's spattered in blood, but it is a clean method of execution. And those paradoxes are beautifully exemplify broader paradoxes about the revolution. And so because of that, because the guillotine has this totemic status, listeners may be wondering, we haven't mentioned it really until now. We kind of alluded to it at the end of the last episode. And the reason for that is that it isn't introduced until 1792. But having said that, it's not as though the revolution hasn't already displayed a taste for public displays of punishment and of retribution. So Dominic, in the episode you did on the Bastille,

you drew attention to the fact that alongside the role the Bastille plays as a narrative of despotism being overthrown, of the banner of liberty being planted on the stones of toppled despotism. There are also salutary displays of punishment. Yeah. And on that day, so notoriously, there's Fuon, isn't there? The guy who said, let them eat straw and his son-in-law and they're both decapitated and their heads are put on pikes and their mouths are stuffed with straw and they're paraded

round and they kind of bring the two heads together and they shout out kiss papa to the head of the son-in-law. And then the one that we did last time, the upskirters at the Chande-de-Mars, when they get caught, they get beheaded and their heads get paraded round. And in all these cases, the way that they are killed is by being hung from a lamppost, a lantern. And so the great revolutionary cry of vengeance and punishment is always a la lantern. And Camille Desmoulins, who we've talked about a lot, his journalism in September 1789, so just a few months after the storming of the Bastille, he kind of ventriloquizes a lantern, giving a talk in this remarkable piece of journalism called The Lantern Speaks

to the Parisians. And he imagines the lantern saying, thank you for making me so famous, for making me so admired, then complains, there are so many criminals, there are so many villains who've escaped me, I want more. And I guess it casts a slightly sinister perspective on Desmoulins journalism. You also mentioned this other article he wrote, the Declaration of the Rights of the Accuser in the last episode we did, the one we did on Tuesday. So I mean, his journalism is quite intimidating, isn't it? Well, also Tom, that, Lansing speaks to the Parisians, what's that? September 1789. So so early on in the story of the revolution. So that thirst for vengeance and that blood

thirstiness isn't a later, you know, it's not that Dickens and Carlisle have tainted the revolution by pretending that it was always there. It was always there. Well, it's an instinct, isn't it? Demulai is articulating a kind of particularly radical and aggressive take on the revolution. And actually most of the enthusiasts for the revolution, most of the delegates to the National Assembly are twitchy about the idea of revolutionary justice. So in the two years that follow the fall of the Bastille, you know, there are regular lynchings. So between May 1790 and

February 1792, 13 lynchings are known to have taken place in Parisian neighborhoods. And to delegates at the national assembly, to people who see themselves as the embodiment of the revolution, this is terrifying. I mean, this is an expression of the incipient anarchy that lots and lots of them are worried about. But there is this kind of sense on the streets among the radical journalists like Desmoulins and Marat that these lynchings aren't just legitimate but that they are a kind of patriotic expression of revolutionary values. And this is very potently expressed in the first great anthem of the French revolution, Saira. So it's all going to be fine. And the initial lyrics of that are actually quite dull.

It's full of kind of stuff like when Boileau spoke about the clergy. It sounds great. Boileau spoke about the clergy. It's not great stuff. They mentioned the prudent Lafayette, the careful Lafayette. So lots of enthusiasm for him as well. But the lyrics get more and more radical and it ends up the most vengeful version kind of explicitly promises, les aristocrates à la lanterne, the aristocrats will be hanged from the lamp post. And this becomes so totemic that in the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Paris this summer, this is what Marie Antoinette, the beheaded Marie Antoinette is singing. And the reason that it becomes totemic is that it is summoning up the idea of executions,

mass executions as a kind of purging of France, as a public display of violence that is assumed to be not just necessary on a kind of purely criminal level, but a catharsis, a freeing of France from the taint and evil of what has gone before. And again that's not just Anglo-Saxon projection because if you look at the rhetoric of your Marat, Robespierre, Saint-Juice later on in the revolution, they absolutely say that a republic of virtue can only be born through blood. But here's the thing, Dominic, this idea that executions should instill a powerful and dramatic moral lesson, which the French Revolution absolutely buys into, is not original to the French Revolution.

It is an assumption that derives from the Ancien Régime. So it comes naturally to people in France, because they have been raised to take it for granted. And so often in the series, obviously, we recognise how complete the rupture is that the Revolution embodies, but also traced the way in which there are continuities. And in the context of executions, in the process by which the guillotine comes to be invented and enshrined at the heart of the revolution, there is one really totemic figure who exemplifies this. And it's a man who was mentioned by Dickens, the strong man of old scripture, which of course is Samson. And the name of probably the most famous executioner in French history and maybe all history, he is Saint-Saëns, Charles-Henri Saint-Saëns. And he claimed over the course of his life to have executed something like 3000 people. Many of these are some of the most famous names in the history

of the French revolution. But before the revolution, he had served as the royal executioner of France. And he is one of an entire dynasty of executioners. It's a family business. Well, as we'll see, it's something more than a business. But his great grandfather, who was also called Charles Saint-Saens, had been appointed the Parisian executioner back in 1688. And before the Saint-Saens become the executioning dynasty, there had been a previous dynasty of executioners called the Guillaume who'd been in office since 1594. So as you say, a family business, but also something much more because under

the monarchy, the executioner, he's not a kind of an agent of rational justice. He's not a bureaucrat. He's not a functionary employed by the state. He's something much weirder, much more menacing than that. And there is a brilliant book on this by Paul Friedland called Seeing Justice Done, the Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France. And when I was doing the research for this, I wanted something that would take me deeper than most of the books on the French Revolution that I've got do. And I went to the London library, they got stacks of books and I went through all the things, you know, the various shelves. And this was the book I found and it's superb.

It tells you, you know, all the deep history of it, which we'll be going into in this episode. So essentially what you're going to hear in this episode, it comes from Friedland's book. And in fact, Dominic, I mentioned to you that the last public execution in France took place in outside Versailles in 1939. And Friedland has actually done a video on that as well, a lecture. So if guillotining is your thing, Paul Friedland is your man. Anyway, he explains exactly what it is that's weird and menacing about the figure of the executioner by comparing them to other groups of people. So he says that they're like Jews in pre-revolutionary France in that they're outcasts and Jews in

Christian societies for a long, long time have performed the role of usury, which obviously makes them hated and feared. And the executioner similarly is seen to be doing something that's very important, that's very essential to the functioning of the state, and yet puts him beyond the pale, marks him as a kind of figure of sin and menace. And again, like Jews, but also like prostitutes and like lepers, they are restricted to certain quarters of town. There's a sense that their very presence kind of spreads a form of moral pestilence. They can't be allowed to come into contact with decent citizens. So as late as 1781, a riot breaks out when an executioner goes to the local

theatre to see a play and the entire audience kind of erupts and hurls him out. So it's a bit like being an MP in Britain today. Yeah, a bit like being an MP in Britain today. A bit. A bit. A necessary but unpleasant part of the national life. But what MPs don't have to do, which the executioner did, is wear distinctive clothing. So executioners would have official costumes and it would be prescribed by the different towns.

So in Paris, the royal executioner always has to wear a blood red coat. Like a hunting coat. Yes. Yeah, but of course, you know, stained with the mark of his trade. Yeah. Wow. So very menacing, but Friedland also points out that they are actually possessed of an almost royal charisma. So this is why they have hereditary dynasties. You know, this is something that kings do. They are reputed to cure diseases with their touch, which again is something that Kings

traditionally do, kind of scrofula, whatever. And they have these rights to walk through marketplaces and take whatever they want for their daily use. What? Like sort of supermarket sweep kind of thing? Yes, exactly. That's, that's crazy. But what makes it even more like a game show is that they're not actually allowed to pick anything up with their fingers or hands because their touch

is tainted. They have in Paris, they have a tin plated spoon. So what if you want to buy like clothing? How does your spoon help you then? No, it doesn't. It's if you're getting coffee or sugar or whatever. Right. It's helping yourself with this. I think it's like a big spoon. Oh, it is a massive spoon. Yeah, massive. Yes. It's a yourself with this. I think it's like a big spoon. Oh, it is a massive spoon. Yeah, massive spoon. Yes, it's a huge tin-plated spoon. The spoon with which Alan Partridge would go to the market. Like a huge spoon. Well, trying to raise Alan Partridge from your mind, I'll give you a brilliant description

from Friedland's book. It is not difficult, Friedland writes, to imagine the shudder that went through the crowd at the approach of this figure dressed in his required ceremonial robes, bearing perhaps the insignia of the gallows, accompanied by his wife and by his aides, often drawn from the ranks of younger siblings or cousins. And all these people, individuals whom one usually caught sight of only when they were rooting around in sewers, skinning dead animals, harassing lepers and prostitutes, and of course, rending the flesh of live human beings on the scaffold would fan out across the marketplace and begin to demand their allotted egg, their measure of butter and their herring, et cetera, et cetera. Spoon or no spoon, they made everyone

cringe. Mason- Theo would make it. I mean, Theo could have done that stuff. It's like being a producer at GoHang. I have to say, it's a great passage and Friedland's book is, I mean, it's a wonderful work of scholarship. It's also brilliantly well written as well. So all very weird, but I think it adds to the sense of horror that a condemned person feels to be handed over to such a man. Because I think there's a sense that his very touch is a form of the punishment. And to go from being someone who has not been convicted of a crime to being convicted of a crime is symbolized by the fact that this guy with his spoon and his

red coat and everything lurches forward and physically takes possession of you, physically takes command of you. And it's a marker of the fact that you've kind of passed beyond the limits of the decent citizen into a dimension of punishment. And the execution is responsive. He's not just doing the actual capital punishment. So he would also be doing brandings or locking people up in the pillory or shackling them to be taken to the galleys. So we talked about Joan de la Motte, the fraudster in the case of the affair of the diamond necklace and how she's branded and shaved and everything. That is the role of the executioner. He's doing that. If you think about that, the process by which Joan de la Motte, for instance, is given the kind of coarse robe and sentenced to what had been a hospital for penitence, there is a sense in which all of this display, all

of this kind of weirdness is about repentance as well as punishment. It's clearly steeped in kind of very deeply Catholic notions of penance and absolution. And when you read about accounts of executions, it's as though the route to the scaffold is almost conjuring up echoes of a passion play. There's the sense in which the journey from the prison to the scaffold is about turning a criminal back into a Christian ready to be received by his or her creator. So there's a French scholar, Michel Bay, who's brilliant on this. So he writes, the criminal who has violated the prohibition of murder has by his act entered into the world of the sacred. He has endowed himself with an energy that renders his presence harmful and contagious. He introduces disorder

into society and in the relations between society with the divine. The only reconciliation possible between the murderer and the society rests therefore in the sacrifice which frees him from his stain. So Tom, does that mean, well, we started with Dickens when you think of a kind of Dickensian London or 18th century London execution, there are people kind of hooting with laughter, eating pies. It's a tremendous carnival. Does that suggest that in France there is a perhaps more somber atmosphere and that it feels more like a religious ceremony than they are to the fair?

As we will see, public executions are hugely popular. As in England, they have the quality of a grand sports occasion. People look forward to them hugely. But I think there is a, dare I say, sacral quality to them that in Protestant England you don't get. You just don't have the Catholic echoes of penance and absolution that you get in an execution in France. And this is why, I mean, we talked before about Jean Callin, who was the Protestant who gets falsely accused of killing his son, gets broken on the wheel. His case gets taken up by Voltaire who campaigns against it. And he's a crazy, the fam is the monstrousness of the religious system that required him to be broken like that. But Voltaire's campaign

works because there are Catholic instincts as well that would say that torturing to death an innocent person on an instrument of torture is also against Christian traditions for very obvious reasons. So the Cala case is kind of pointing to the way in which even before the revolution, people are starting to have reservations about what is happening, that there is something, well, you know, this is an age when everyone basically is still very devoutly Christian. There is something unchristian about it. And this is exemplified by the most notorious of all public executions that takes place in the Ancien Régime. And this happens in 1757 in the reign of Louis XV, so the grandfather of Louis XVI.

And it is a punishment that is inflicted on a domestic servant called Robert François d'Amin, who had attempted to kill Louis XV, to stab him with a dagger, as Louis XV was entering Versailles in a carriage. And Damien gets seized and imprisoned, and the executioners prepare for him a fate that is designed to be the most terrifying, the most salutary spectacle that the French justice system can possibly devise. And everybody knows about this. And if you think of it as being like a great sports occasion, you know, this is the world cup final where your team has qualified. Yeah. You know, this is the biggest match that you've ever seen. So you

get two months before the actual execution, you get a newspaper called the Gazette d'Amsterdam writing, never has a spectacle had as many spectators as the punishment of Damien will have. People are whipping themselves up into a frenzy of excitement about it. And of course it's a massive occasion for the young lad, Charles Henri Sanson, who's only 18, kind of pretty much making his debut as a superstar executioner. So he doesn't want to mess up and he will be assisting his uncle, Nicolas Sanson on the big day. So a huge occasion for him, huge occasion for Damien. Yeah.

How's it going to go down? Is it going to measure up to expectations? So the day of the execution arrives, the crowds are indeed massive. The authorities have to set up barriers to keep them back. The wealthy have kind of hired rooms so that they can look out over it. It's noted that lots of the people there are women. So we have a diarist, Monsieur Babier, and he wrote in his diary, people noticed that there were many women and even some of distinction and they never left the windows and that they were better able to stand the horror of the

punishment than the men. Something that did not do them honor. Women are made of stronger stuff though, aren't they Tom? That's the lesson of history. Well, the horror is indeed immense. So on the morning of his execution, which is the 28th of March, 1757, so he's had kind of a month and a half to ponder what's going to happen to him. The jailers come and he's alleged to have said, la journée s'arrude. This is going to be a terrible day. That's such a kind of sportsman thing to say, like, you know, it's going to be a tough game, Tom, but I'll, uh, I'll take each moment as it comes.

Yeah. Dig deep. Yeah. So it is indeed a terrible day for Balad Damian. So he gets put into a tumbrel. Uh, he gets given a torch of burning wax to carry and he's taken to the square where executions conventionally happen, which is the Place de Grève by the Hotel de Ville. The hand with which he had plunged the dagger into Louis

the 15th is burned using sulphur, so connotations of hell. The executioners then take red hot pincers and remove little gobbets of flesh from his body. And the office of the watch, who was supervising later recorded that what the executioner took away formed at each part, a wound about the size of a six pound crown piece. We know that executioners love spoons. They have another spoon at this point. Yeah. I hope it's a different spoon. It is a different, because, because what he's dipping it into is a mixture of molten lead boiling oil, burning resin, wax and sulfur melted together. And he then kind of pours this into the various wounds that have been created.

As the flesh is being pulled off, as this liquid is being poured into the wounds, poor Damien is crying out as the damned in hell are supposed to cry out, pardon my God, pardon Lord. So he's still alive. He's then publicly emasculated. So his testicles and penis are chopped off, held up to the gawping crowd. And then comes the pièce de la résistance. Four horses are led into the square. Each of his four limbs are attached to a horse. The horses are whipped to make them move off. But unfortunately, this hasn't been done for about a hundred years. So the executions are up to speed with what you need to do. Nothing happens. He's not torn to pieces. So they stop the horses.

They then cut his tendons and the horses are then whipped forwards. And at this point, the limbs go, and all you have left is his trunk. His limbs are burnt in front of him. He's still alive at this point. And then surely not conscious. What remains of him is burnt at the stake. I mean, this is probably the worst thing we've ever heard about on the rest of this history. This is unbelievable. So basically the lads have done good. They've set up the spectacle that people were hoping for.

That's what the public wanted. That's what the public wanted. However, it's actually so horrific that it backfires. Executions do continue to be as popular as they've ever been after this particular spectacular. But I think that it leaves a sense among opinion formers, which has already been developing even before it, that it is actually unfashionable to gawp at them. And this in part, no doubt reflects the kind of the growing impact of the enlightenment Voltaire, you know, as we've said, was a vehement campaigner against these forms of punishment.

But remember it is the king himself. So Louis the 15th, who had been the object of Damien's assassination attempt, who actually gives the posthumous pardon to Cala. So it's not as though there's a complete kind of divergence between enlightenment thinkers and upholders of the Ancien Regime. Rousseau with his cult of sensibility is also, I think, a big influence in changing attitudes to these kind of public executions. But again, remember Marie Antoinette, great enthusiast for it. And I think also there is a kind of slightly misogynistic tinge to it because we mentioned how people focus on the women who are watching these executions. And there's one notorious woman who watches

it, Madame Preonde, and she's described by a disapproving intellectual as one of the prettiest and one of the most stupid creatures that God created. And she had been watching the horses pull poor Damien to pieces and cried out, oh Jesus, the poor horses, how I pity them. Oh, the poor horses. Oh my word. It becomes kind of representative of the frivolity and cruelty and unthinking lack of...

The heedless sadism almost. And on Let Them Eat Cake, so Marion Twinnett herself, she never went to an execution. So she didn't enjoy the spectacle. No. Interesting. No. I mean, the point of that is that I don't think there's anything inherently revolutionary about kind of revulsion against the penal system. So potential for its reform is incubating within the Ancien Regime. Within those enlightenment monarchies of 18th century Europe, so Joseph the Second or Leopold the Second in Austria, for example,

they had been reformers. They had been trying to clean up what they saw as these antiquated relics of a barbaric dark age. Yeah, but having said that, it is striking how the memory of executions like Damien's execution and of people broken on the wheel and all that, it does play a huge part in the image of the Ancien Régime that comes to be enshrined by the revolution. And actually, which endures to this day, it is seen as representative of everything that the revolution is fighting against. And it is striking how many of the future leaders of the revolution are in the decades before the revolution breaks out kind of swept up on a kind of wave of opposition to the death penalty. So Robespierre in 1785, he had written an article in which he proposed that the death penalty, if it

absolutely has to be imposed, should be swift, should be merciful. And he, you know, there's a class element to this. So he wrote, whereas the gallows stigmatize the relatives of a commoner forever, the iron which fells the head of a great man imprints no stain on his posterity. His actual preference, ironically, is for the death penalty to be abolished altogether. Yeah, I love that irony. I mean, he's very keen on that. As is Briceau, who we talked about in our previous episode. And we talked about how he was kind of an activist, a humanitarian activist. And in

1780, he won a prize for an essay in which he compared the death penalty in France to the atrocity of cannibals. And he argued that criminals, instead of being executed, should be put into penal servitude and that this would kill two birds with one stone because on the one hand it would be humane, there'd be no shedding of blood by the state. And on the other hand, it would enable the black slaves in the Caribbean colonies to be set free and to be replaced by criminals. So he wrote, replace those unhappy Negroes who are guilty only of having a languid look and of absorbing the rays of light in the epidermis. Replace those Negroes in your plantations, your sugar factories and your mills with the condemned whom you judge deserving of being

deprived of a liberty, which is dangerous to the human race. And so for all these reasons, it's unsurprising I think that when the revolution breaks out, the reform of the death penalty, whether to abolish it completely or whether to introduce new strictures, new articles that would govern how it's applied comes to be very high on the agenda. Enter Madame Guillotine. All right, Tom, let's take a break. And when we return, we will have our appointment with a formidable madame. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.

That's the rest is entertainment.com. Painting a portrait, which was as picturesque as it was sensitive, of the terrifying punishments which have endured even in the century of humanity – gibbets, wheels, scaffolds, burnings at the stake, barbarous punishments invented by barbarous feudalism – he concluded by proposing the following article. In all cases in which the law pronounced the death penalty against the accused, the punishment will be the same, no matter the nature of the crime for which he has been found guilty. Decapitation and the execution will take place by the effect of a simple mechanism.

Monsieur Guillotin gave a description of the mechanism. The mechanism falls like thunder. The head flies off. The blood spurts. The man is no more. So that was a report in the Journal des Étaires Généraux, the newspaper of the Estates General, on a speech that was given by Dr. Joseph Ignace Guillotin to the National Assembly in November 1789. So the revolution

is less than six months old. And there's Dr. Guillotin explaining how this humane, progressive, merciful, egalitarian form of capital punishment will lead France into a brave new dawn. So Tom, take it away. So just to say the sources for all this are really amazing. I mean, you can trace the way that the argument on all of this evolves over the course of the early months and years of the revolution. And I mean, anyone interested, Paul Friedland's translated them in his book. So this is where I've got the translations from. They're really, really interesting to follow. So anyway, back to Dr. Guertin. We've actually already met him in this series because listeners may remember

that when the members of the third estate had found themselves locked out of their meeting hall in June 1789, and they didn't have anywhere to go, Dr. Guillotin stands up and proposes that they meet in the tennis court, which they then proceed to do. So he's exactly the kind of man who gets elected to the third estate in the elections to that crucial and decisive assembly of the estates general. He's actually a gérant d'un, he's born north of Bordeaux in 1738. And according to family tradition, which I really like to believe actually happened, he was born prematurely because his mother had been startled by the screams of a man being broken on the wheel. That undoubtedly happened. Yeah, I like to think so. So he was a very clever boy.

He was brought up by the Jesuits, actually trained as a Jesuit, then left the order when he was 25, became a doctor and he was a very passionate social reformer. So he was a great man for being co-opted onto Quangos, that kind of thing, doing investigations into social injustices. So he wrote a whole report for the government on the draining of swamps. Fascinating. He was also rather sinisterly, but I'm sure he did it from the most humanitarian principles. He was against doing rabies experiments on animals and thought that it should be done on criminals.

But he justified this by saying it was very progressive. So he wrote, a biting sensation, the painful symptoms of illness are these to be compared with the appalling torments undergone by a man whose bones are being broken, who is forced to expire in the anguish of despair? Do you rather be Britain by a rabid rat or would you rather be broken on the wheel? I think I would rather be bitten by a rabid rat. Yeah, I would too, I think. I'd take that over the wheel, definitely. Yeah, I think I would. So I think, I think Giertan is, I mean, I think he's got the ball there. Yeah, hats off to him.

Sensible policies for a happier France. And so you can imagine this being the kind of man he is, he loves the early days of the revolution. Because there are committees being set up left, right and centre. Brilliant. I can write loads of reports, spend all my time on committees and have people bitten by rabid rats. Love it. He's obviously a genuinely very compassionate man who really works hard to try and improve the condition of those who are suffering, those who are poor, those who are disadvantaged. So he's elected a member of the poverty committee. And then Marky Desaard, remember, was co-opted onto a committee investigating orphanages. And maybe not entirely the best person to

be enrolled in that responsibility. But Giertan, I think, who also has a focus on foundlings and orphans, he's much better qualified for this kind of work. And he also writes a massive report on sickness provision for the poor. So he's very much in the cause of good, but the cause for which he becomes, well, not famous, notorious really, is penal reform. And personally, like Robespierre, he wants to abolish the death penalty, but he also knows that probably this is too much to hope for. It's too big an ask. And so his secondary ambition is to make it more humane, to make it more enlightened. And the thing is, as we intimated in the first half, he is kind

of pushing it an open door with this. It's not as though there is an institutional opposition to this on the part, say, of the monarchy. So Louis XVI has been introducing laws here, laws there, to kind of make it less likely that people will be sentenced to death. So 1775, for instance, he'd abolished death penalty for desertion, unless there was an actual war being fought at the time. 1788, so the year before the revolution breaks out, he had increased the number of judges that were required to deliver a death sentence. So in other words, to make it harder. So he's working with that, but he's also working with the

natural instinct of the revolutionaries to get rid of anything that smacks of feudalism and smacks of superstition. And obviously having an executioner in a blood red robe, kind of pulling bits of flesh out with red hot pincers. This is exactly the kind of thing that a revolutionary instinctively is going to be opposed to. Yeah, of course. And so this is why he feels when he stands up in the National Assembly on the 8th of October 1789, he feels that, you know, he's going to get a good audience. The problem is that this is immediately after the removal of the King and Queen from Versailles by the women who've come out from Paris. And the delegates are still in Versailles, but they're understandably a little

bit shell shocked, a little bit kind of unsettled. And so Girtan's proposals don't really get the attention that they may be deserved. But there are, you know, there are a few people who turn up to listen to him and his proposals, the first of which is in his words, crimes of the same kind shall be punished by the same kinds of punishment, whatever the rank or estate of the criminal. So in other words, rather than having people broken on the wheel or being pulled apart by horses or whatever, you just have the one system of execution for everybody, no matter their rank, no matter their status, no matter their gender. He proposes

furthermore that the form of execution should be beheading because it is the most humane way of death. And he proposes that the decapitation be done by, and I quote, a simple mechanism. And these proposals are seen as being controversial. The delegates pass the first article, so the one that there should be only a single form of execution. They feel it's going too far to pass the other provisions, the other articles. And so a month and a half later, Guertin goes back to the attack. And this is a speech that was being reported in the newspaper, the newspaper that you quoted. Finally, on the 21st of January, 1790, all of his proposals are accepted except for the sixth and last one. And that's the one where Guiartin proposes the introduction of a simple mechanism for beheading the condemned.

And this is reported widely and it makes guillotine an object of public ridicule. People just find this, the whole idea of this hilarious. The idea of a machine they find inherently ridiculous. I mean, the thing is, it's not a novelty. These machines have been developed and invented. So there was actually, there was one in England, but it's seen as being ludicrous, a bit like the, the scientists in Gulliver's Travels who, you know, are trying to extract some beans from cucumbers. Yeah. Yeah. It's seen as being ludicrous, a bit like the scientist in Gulliver's Travels who, you know, are trying to extract some beans from cucumbers.

Yeah. It's kind of, it's seen as... And Boffin's mad scheme. Yes. And Guillotin particularly comes to seem the kind of the archetype of a do-gooding utopianist whose schemes simply outrun what is sensible. And so a song is written about him in which his machine is called the guillotine, the guillotine. Right.

And it becomes very, very popular. You know, like songs are spreading across the streets of Paris. This song about the guillotine, you know, people love it. So the guillotine, the word, it begins as a joke of the guillotine and guillotine's expense. It does. It's part of a comic song. But the truth is that guillotine is, you know, he's ahead of the curve because as events will show, his proposal for a beheading machine

that will be swift and humane is brilliant for enabling the two seemingly opposed trends that we've been discussing in this episode to meet and to fuse. So on the one hand, this relish for kind of, you know, a spectacular and salutary display of justice that will be thrilling to people. The people can feel it simultaneously moral and exciting. And secondly, the notion that executions should be humane and should repudiate feudalism, should repudiate superstition. So it's both improving, well, it's improving in every sense. It's improving as it works as a spectacular deterrent to crime,

but it's improving in that it also, it's more humane, it's clean, it's progressive, it's modern. So what's not to like? Right, and so an obvious way in which you can make the penal system modern is to get rid of all the shenanigans around executions, having their tin-plated spoons and their blood red robes and all this kind of thing. And to do that requires the delegates in the National Assembly essentially to rule that the executioner is just a state functionary.

He's nothing special. So he's part of a group of people that include Jews and include actors who had suffered kind of civic disabilities under the Ancien Regime and now they're to be enrolled simply as everyday citizens. Right. But even in the final legislation that passes this, they still can't bring themselves to specify executioners. There's still a kind of superstitious sense in which even to mention the name is cursed. But the legislation gets passed and so the civic status of Saint-Saëns and other executioners

is normalized. And this is significant because it transforms the figure of the executioner into a servant of the revolution, into someone who is simply doing a civic duty. Nothing wrong with that. Perfectly rational, perfectly enlightened, perfectly progressive. But having said all that, there are still limits on how far the National Assembly are prepared to go in being progressive. Right.

So they're not going to scrap it completely. I mean, that's the pale, right? So at the end of May 1791, there is a debate on precisely this, and there is a vote on whether the death penalty should be completely abolished. Robespierre argues that it should, votes in favour of its abolition. But the majority of delegates disagree. And so the death penalty is maintained. There is an even more radical proposal than simply abolishing the death penalty. I mean, this kind of strikes at the heart of so many assumptions that people are utterly shocked by it, which is that executions, if they are to be maintained and it's decided

that they will be, should be done privately. In other words, the salutary quality of it, the way in which executions serve to educate our people, that should be removed. The removal of a criminal should be like kind of the excision of a cancerous tumor or something. It should just be done neatly, cleanly and privately. People can't get their heads around this idea at all. It's kind of howled down. And so it's agreed that public executions will be maintained and they will be public. But then there is the problem of how, how should these executions take

place? It's been agreed that there will be only the one method. So that one method needs to be decided upon. And essentially there are two alternatives. There's hanging, which is traditionally the way for the poor, as in Britain, or to be beheaded, which traditionally has been the way for the aristocracy. And because nothing is too good for the people, it's taken for granted that actually hanging is unacceptable, that everyone should now enjoy the rights that traditionally had been the rights of the aristocracy, partly because of that,

but also because it is seen as being quicker, it's more humane. But the person who raises objections to this, because if everyone is going to be beheaded, that would potentially require large numbers of people to be dispatched by losing their heads in one go. The person who objects to this is Saint-Saens, who is no longer the royal executioner, but he's still the chief executioner now the revolution. He presents various arguments against doing

it. One is that it requires great skill, which of course Saint-Saens would argue that, but I mean, he's not wrong. Right. Cause we've covered executions on this podcast. I think about the Duke of Monmouth and Jack Ketch, who had to take eight strokes of the ax or whatever before he managed to get his head off. That's a standard, isn't it? There's always these disastrous scenes on the block where they make a mess of it and it's really bloody and horrible.

Yeah. And Sanson was saying that the only way that you could possibly do this is to train up other people, but they, you know, it takes a long time to do it also, there's the risk that if you're using the same acts, the blade will become dull, but above all, he says, you know, it is very, very bloody. So if you remember how guillotine presented his arguments in favor of it, he's very in suciant about it. He's saying, you know, the blood spurts, the man is no more brilliant. Yeah. But that's what I'm saying. Actually, you know, this is going to be horrific. Blood just

going everywhere. We can't do that. We need a much more efficient way of sorting this out. So I'll quote you this memorandum that he writes to the National Assembly. When there shall be several condemned criminals who will be executed at the same time, the terror created by this form of execution because of the immensity of blood, which it produces and which it spreads out will give rise to fright and weakness in even the most intrepid of those who remain to be executed. So in other words, you've got people lining up and there's blood everywhere. So the people at the back of the queue will completely lose it and will not be executed in a decorous way because they'll be shouting and gibbering

and behaving badly. Yeah. And this won't be teaching an elevated lesson to the people. It'll be a shambles, Tom. It'll be rubbish. Yeah. So the delegates take all this on board and they think actually, you know, Dr. Geertas proposal, it's not completely mad. So they go to a surgeon, Dr. Antoine Louis, who is the permanent secretary to the Academy of Surgery, and they say, could you kind of work out what the best kind of machine would be? So Louis goes away and he analyzes what angle the blade should be at, what would be

the most efficient angle for the blade to come down. He kind of inspects the vertebrae, works out what's the best way to cut through them. And he draws up his report and he hands it back to the National Assembly. And Louis's conclusion is, for the certainty of the procedure and to ensure that decapitation will take place in an instant in accord with the spirit and the will of the new law, there is no option but to rely on invariable mechanical methods. So in other words, remove human error, get a machine. And so the delegates of the National Assembly go to Dr. Guillotin and say, you know, do you want to take control of this?

You know, he's so offended by this. He doesn't have anything to do with it. Really? He turns them down. Because he's been made fun of in the song and stuff. Yeah. So he's very disgruntled by this. He's in a huge sulk.

He's in a strop. Yeah. So Dr. Louie, he keeps control of the project and he turns to this guy called Tobias Schmidt who is a German as his name implies. He's a piano maker. He's also an alcoholic which you might think is slightly worrying for a man who's going to invent a decapitation machine but actually he does a tremendous job. It's already one month later. And Louis then does tests. So first of all, he does it on a sheep, then he does it on a calf. And then finally he gets three human corpses and the head's sliced off. And Louis is absolutely delighted. So to quote him, one is astonished by the force and celerity of its action. And it is now April 1792. And so the time is ready to try out

the execution machine on the first victim. And the first victim is a highwayman called Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier, who had committed armed robbery in October 1791. Had been sentenced to death in December. Has been in prison awaiting his execution. And he is the person who on the 25th of April, 1792, is led out to the Place de la Greve, the traditional place of execution, where there is standing a peculiar looking machine. And the news has got out.

So there's a large crowd to witness it. Paletier is led up to the scaffold by Saint-Saëns. Saint-Saëns cuts off his hair, ties Paletier's hands behind his back, straps him down onto a board, pushes him out so that his neck is exposed to the blade, pulls on a rope, the blade slices down, the head vanishes into a sack and that's it. It's all over. And the crowd are completely bewildered. Yeah, gutting for the crowd who've been queuing there probably for hours and it's done and

dusted in seconds. Yeah. So a witness, very disgruntled eyewitness wrote, from the first point of contact to the last, there is no distance. It is an indivisible point. The blade falls and the patient no longer exists. The patient. Isn't that so interesting? The kind of medical metaphor. Yes. Because it is like a surgical operation. Yes. And when Giertan first proposed this machine, he commissioned illustrations,

which show a priest ministering to the person who's about to have his head cut off, as though, you know, tending a deathbed or something like that. And this idea that it is, it's like having an operation. It's smooth, it's clear, it's kind of dignitas. And I think that the ambivalence is suggested by the name which the machine comes to be given, which of course is guillotine. So it's initially called a Louisette, but the association of Guillotin's name with this kind of contraption is too strong and so it ends up being named after him. And it's reflective of the way I think in which it comes to have its own mythology very, very rapidly. It's quick, it's efficient, it's humane, certainly relative to what had

gone before, but it is also very, very bloody. And as Sanson had pointed out, the more criminals who are executed in one go, the more bloody the spectacle will become. And so, as we said, this fusion between the traditional spectacle and the new way of doing things, the guillotine kind of exemplifies it. But Tom, isn't it also that it's the fact that you can do so many people in one go. Yeah. And the uniformity of it is what is chilling. So the previous way of execution as unbelievably horrific as that was, there

was something about it that kind of respected you as an individual, you are Calas or Damien or whatever his name is, and you are brought out and this whole day is about you, you're at the center of it and it's specific to you. I mean, I'm not sure that's a great consolation. No, of course not. It's not a great consolation, but with this, isn't it that the, the ominous thing about it, especially looking back from the 21st century is that you can polish off dozens, hundreds of people in a day or two, and they're just numbers, people in a queue.

Yeah, they're anonymous. They're anonymous. It's the anonymity of it that they think is the frightening thing, isn't it? Isn't that what? Yes. But it also, of course, forms its own spectacle. The spectacle of a large line of people being beheaded. Yeah.

You know, it's extraordinary. No one's ever seen anything like it before. And so even though the theatrical quality of the executions, as you said, has been banned, there is a new theatricality about this and you get larger and larger crowds for it. And so the guillotine is moved from the Place de la Grève to ever larger venues. And it will end up being put in what today is the Place de la Concorde, but comes to be named the Place de la Révolution after the abolition of the monarchy. And there it comes to stand as the kind of the defining emblem of the revolution and people want to

watch it. So it has become a spectacle kind of despite itself. And that's why it's so appropriate that Sasson, who had been the royal executioner, is now the executioner operating for the execution of the enemies of the revolution. And it's, it's why even though you no longer have, you know, female aristocrats gathering at private windows to go, you do have women in particular who become notorious for the delight they take in the spectacle of death. And these of course are the trickle tours, the women who knit. These are the women from the market who had gone and seize the king and queen from Versailles

in 1789 and who have particular privileges as a result. They get the front row. So the sense of rupture is obviously very, very profound, but so too beneath the seeming show there are continuities as well. And that I guess is one of the reasons why the guillotine is the kind of perfect symbol of the revolution really. Absolutely. Tom, that was absolutely fascinating. So the guillotine has been set up, the blade has been sharpened, the tumbles are rattling

through the streets and there is going to be a steady stream of customers for Madame Guillotine because as we discussed last time, Tom, France is going to war. If you thought this episode was bloody, there is a lot more blood to come tomorrow. So you can listen to that episode right now if you're a member of the Restless History Club. If not, if you prefer the old fashioned ways of the wheel and the axe, then you'll just have to wait. Bye bye. Happy on too.