Bastille Day and the guillotine

Bastille Day, July 14

In France, Le quatorze juillet (14 July) is a public holiday, formally known as the Fête de la Fédération (Federation Holiday). It is usually called "Bastille Day" in English.

The Storming of the Bastille in Paris occurred on July 14, 1789. The medieval fortress and prison in Paris known as the Bastille represented royal authority in the center of Paris and it became the symbol of the French Revolution; as well as, an icon of the French Republic.

Associated with the French revolution is the guillotine which was used to dispose of so many people.

The invention of the guillotine was necessitated by the French Revolution, a period during which the frequency and the number of executions called for a new method of operation.

Up to that time, there were two methods of capital punishment. For the common criminal of the riffraff variety, there was hanging while for errant nobility, there was the privilege of decapitation, usually with a broadax.

Actually, decapitation too often took place as a messy affair because nervous hands and sloppy techniques too often required more than one blow, thereby extending the procedure and the agony of the victim.

Joseph Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814), a French physician and deputy to the Constituent Assembly in 1789, proposed that decapitation could be performed more efficiently and humanely with a machine instead of by human hands.

The machine was not invented by Guillotin himself, but by a German mechanic named Tobias Schmidt under the direction of French surgeon Dr. Antoine Louis.

After several satisfactory experiments with corpses at a hospital, the new technology premiered with success on April 25, 1792, for the quick dispatch of a notorious highwayman named Pelletier.

The egalitarian attitude of the people brought on by the French Revolution demanded an end to the old two-tier system of execution, and so the guillotine became a right to be applied to everyone regardless of social status; that is, to peasants and to the highest ranking members of royalty.

The machine was initially connected to Dr. Louis and so it was called a Louison or Louisette, but it quickly became associated with its republican advocate, Joseph Ignace Guillotin.

The term guillotine, is believed to probably come from la guillotine or Madame Guillotine, make its way into English by 1793; which was, by coincidence, the year in which Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette lost their heads.

In addition, contrary to legend, Dr. Guillotin never became a victim of the guillotine, but he died a natural death and his head was still attached.

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