1000 Years of Annoying the French

by Stephen Clarke

  The guillotine was introduced into France in the eighteenth century as a quick, humane method of execution. But decapitation machines were already in use hundreds of years earlier in Yorkshire – and were occasionally operated by animals.

  If you wanted to get messy, there were of course some spectacular ways of killing people. The French used to enjoy watching criminals broken on the wheel, for example. The victim would have their arms and legs smashed with a metal bar and their chest caved in, and then they would be tied to a wheel with their broken limbs folded under them and left hanging there until they died. This method was commonly used in France as a way of executing robbers right up to the Revolution.

  French traitors, meanwhile, would usually be torn limb from limb by horses pulling in four different directions. François Ravaillac, who stabbed King Henri IV to death in 1610, was executed like this, but only after having the hand that held the knife burned off with sulphur, and then having molten lead and boiling oil and resin poured over his flesh. (Henri IV was a popular monarch, and France was pretty angry at Ravaillac.)

  It seems surprisingly humane, then, that elsewhere people were experimenting with quicker, cleaner ways of taking off a head. And the earliest type of what we mistakenly call the guillotine was probably invented in Halifax, northern England, a town whose only other claim to innovation is that it was home to confectioner Violet Mackintosh, the woman who invented Rolos and Quality Street toffees.

  The Halifax Gibbet looked a lot like the French version, though it was a much sturdier, stockier beast. A large wooden block, about five feet long and one foot thick, held an axe blade like a single tooth. This block was raised approximately fifteen feet in the air between two wooden posts, before being allowed to drop on to the victim below. And from the look of the modern replica standing in Gibbet Street, Halifax, today, if that thing came down on your neck, your head would fly halfway across Yorkshire.

  The earliest reference to its use is the execution of a criminal called John Dalton in 1286, though town records of executions before Elizabeth I have been lost. We do know, however, that the gibbet claimed twenty-five heads during her reign, and that it was last used in anger on 30 April 1650.

  Not that Halifax was a hotbed of treachery and murder, or a centre of excellence for execution where other towns would send their most fiendish criminals to be beheaded. In The Every-Day Book by William Hone, an almanac for 1825–6 with a text for every day of the year, the anniversary of the execution of Louis XVI – 21 January – has a few paragraphs about the Halifax Gibbet. Hone says that it was used for crimes committed in the forest of Hardwick, which belonged at the time to the lord of the manor of Wakefield. If a thief was caught there with goods valued at more than ‘thirteen pence halfpenny’, then he or she was taken for trial to the lord’s bailiff in Halifax and if found guilty, beheaded on a market day (a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday).

  A much earlier text, written in 1577 by a man called William Harrison, gives a highly detailed description of the method, and suggests that the people of Halifax took a sort of collective responsibility for the executions (though the lord of the manor probably kept his hands clean).

  Harrison wrote that the Halifax Gibbet’s axe was held in place by a wooden pin:

  … unto the midst of which pin there is a long rope fastened that cometh down among the people, so that, when the offender hath made his confession and hath laid his neck over the nethermost block, every man there present doth either take hold of the rope (or putteth forth his arm so near to the same as he can get, in token that he is willing to see true justice executed), and, pulling out the pin in this manner, the head-block wherein the axe is fastened doth fall down with such a violence that, if the neck of the transgressor were as big as that of a bull, it should be cut in sunder at a stroke and roll from the body by a huge distance.

  This is gruesome enough, but he adds a final, frankly bizarre, detail:

  If it be so that the offender be apprehended for an ox, oxen, sheep, horse, or any such cattle, the self beast or other of the same kind shall have the end of the rope tied somewhere unto them, so that they, being driven, do draw out the pin, whereby the offender is executed.

  Cows executing cattle rustlers … market days must have been very lively in medieval Halifax. No risk of people driving out of town to do their shopping at the mall.

  There are also records of guillotine-type machines in use in Ireland in 1307 and in Scotland in 1564. Two centuries later, in 1747, a Scot, Lord Lovat, a convicted traitor who was due to be executed in London, begged the government to introduce the technology down south. ‘My neck is very short,’ he said, ‘and the executioner will be puzzled to find it out with his axe.’ Apparently he also hoped that the new London machine would be named after him. In the event, though, he got the axe, and was lucky – his head came off with one blow. If, of course, you can call that luck.

  The cutting edge of technology

  So where did Guillotin come in?

  As we will see in the next chapter, the French Revolution was marked by wholesale massacres, and in fact, Royalists were more likely to be hacked to death by a mob than have their necks neatly sliced. Docteur Guillotin was therefore doing a humanitarian good deed when he suggested that a swift decapitation, not preceded by torture, should be the standard form of capital punishment in France. He was also proposing a democratization of the death sentence, because until then only aristocrats had been decapitated – lower-class citizens had suffered the hideous punishments mentioned above.

  Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a physician from Saintes in the southwest of France, was a politician as well as a doctor. He was elected a député (Member of Parliament) for Paris in the first post-revolutionary parliament, the Assemblée nationale constituante, and it was at a session of the Assemblée on 10 October 1789 that he outlined his ideas for a new code of punishment. As well as suggesting that everyone should get the same punishment for the same crime, and that all executions should be by decapitation machine, he also proposed that the body of an execution victim should be returned to the family and given a decent burial. All in all, a thoughtful man.

  His only fault seems to have been a tactless sense of humour. At the October session of the Assemblée, his ideas had not been listened to very attentively, so he brought them forward again in December, when he compared a swift decapitation machine to the long and cruel process of hanging: ‘With my machine,’ he boasted, ‘I can cut off your head in the wink of an eye and you won’t feel a thing.’ His pun got a laugh, but the other députés were so shocked by his levity that they called a halt to the debate.

  Guillotin’s quip was reported outside Parliament, and inspired a comic song that mocked ‘Hippocrates’ representative’ for wanting to massacre people as quickly as possible. And it was this song that first gave a name to the as yet non-existent killing machine – the ‘Guillotine’.

  Eventually, in 1791, all the doctor’s proposals were voted through, and the Ministry of Justice began looking into exactly what kind of machine they wanted. Antoine Louison, the secretary of the Academy of Surgeons, remembered Guillotin’s proposal and recommended this kind of machine. Guillotin was summoned by the Procureur général (State Prosecutor) to enlarge upon his suggestions, but it is not sure that the doctor attended the meeting, because by this time he had learned that, as a homage to his dedication (and possibly to the song he inspired), the new machine really was going to bear his name. He was apparently horrified.

  Various people began to tender for the job of making the decapitation machine. The man who usually did the ministry’s scaffold-building, a carpenter called Guidon, put in a prohibitively high bid because his workers didn’t want to be associated with the project. Even when the government offered to make all contracts totally anonymous, the workers still refused to have anything to do with the guillotine. In Strasbourg, though, an officer of the court called Laquiante agreed to design a machine, and got a Paris-based Prussian harpsichord-maker called T
obias Schmidt to make it.

  Completed in early 1792, Schmidt’s prototype included a platform twenty-four steps off the ground to give the public a good view of the killing, and a leather pouch to hold the severed head. At first, the blade was rounded or straight, but Schmidt soon exchanged it for the 45-degree-angled edge that we know so well. This was one harpsichord-maker who had missed his vocation.

  The prototype was set up in the rue Saint-André-des-Arts in the Latin Quarter, where Schmidt had his workshop, and tested out on sheep and calves. It was then moved to the Paris suburbs and tried out on corpses from a hospital, a prison and an old people’s home. The results were considered satisfactory and, on 25 April 1792, an armed robber called Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier gained the dubious honour of being the first man to be guillotined in the place de la Grève (the square in front of the modern Hôtel de Ville – Town Hall – where criminals were traditionally executed).

  The new machine worked so well that it actually became something of a fashion icon – children’s toys were all the rage, and guillotine earrings were a must-have accessory (or should that be the neck plus ultra?) for Parisian women. For a short while, anyway – the novelty palled after the execution of Louis XVI on 21 January 1793, when it suddenly became fashionable to accuse perfectly innocent people of counter-revolutionary activities and slice off their unfortunate head.

  It is not known exactly how many people died during the Terror of July 1793–July 1794, but it may have been as many as 17,000. Guillotin himself barely escaped with his neck intact – he was imprisoned on suspicion of Royalist sympathies after a condemned aristocrat asked him to care for his wife and children. On his release from prison, Guillotin withdrew from public life and was so discreet that he was thought to be dead. He actually survived until 1814, however, and no doubt spent his final years wishing that one of the other popular names for the decapitation machine would replace his own – by now, the machine had been nicknamed ‘le rasoir national’ (national razor), ‘la raccourcisseuse patriotique’ (patriotic shortener), and, more seriously, ‘le Louison’ after Antoine Louison, the secretary of the Academy of Surgeons who had commissioned it. But the name guillotine stuck and was even turned into a verb, guillotiner.

  In the end, though, Dr Guillotin had only himself to blame. If he hadn’t made his memorable joke in Parliament about ‘ma machine’, he might have been remembered for his democratic intentions rather than a gruesome method of execution. And the guillotine might even have been given a more historically accurate name – ‘le Halifax’, for example. Which would actually have been quite fun, because 200-odd years later, the Académie française would probably still be debating whether to allow the verb halifaxer.

  16

  The French Revolution: Let Them Eat

  Cake. Or Failing That, Each Other

  The chorus of the French national anthem says it all: ‘Marchons, marchons, qu’un sang impur abreuve nos sillons’, which could be loosely translated as ‘Let’s march, let’s march, and may our fields be irrigated with impure blood.’

  Not only is it a shade more violent than ‘God Save the Queen’* (which harks on about defeating Britain’s enemies but wishes for nothing more violent than that God will ‘frustrate their knavish tricks’), it is also a touch misleading. In fact, most of the blood shed in the cause of the French Revolution was not what the author of ‘La Marseillaise’ would have thought of as ‘impure’. It was French as opposed to foreign, and only a small proportion of it was aristocratic.

  The words and music to ‘La Marseillaise’ were written in 1792 by a soldier called Claude-Joseph Rouget de Lisle. He composed his stirring song for French troops marching into battle against the Germans, and it was adopted as the national anthem after some volunteers from Marseille sang it in the streets of Paris. Ironically, however, Rouget himself (his name means ‘red mullet’, by the way) was later imprisoned as a traitor for protesting against the internment of the royal family, and narrowly avoided shedding his own blood. He spent the rest of his life in poverty, earning a crust translating English texts into French, while desperately trying to emulate his first hit. ‘La Marseillaise’ didn’t fare much better than its composer – it was banned by Napoleon, and only restored as the national anthem in 1879.

  All in all, the circumstances surrounding the song are a perfect illustration of the bloody chaos that reigned during the Revolution.

  Today, most French people think that events went something like this:

  Day 1, fair-minded but hungry liberators storm Bastille and release political prisoners.

  Day 2, a people’s tribunal votes to cut off heads of evil King and his wife who made a tactless remark about cakes.

  Day 3, the same tribunal votes to cut off heads of everyone else who is posh and against liberty, equality and fraternity.

  Day 4, freely elected Republican idealists introduce glorious era of democracy that still reigns in France today.

  But the annual Bastille Day celebrations hint at what really went on. If you go to Paris on 14 July, who will you see, parading down the Champs-Élysées? Is it the people who make France the successful nation it is today: the pâtissiers, winemakers, fashion designers, mineral-water salesmen and nuclear engineers?

  No. Tanks rattle along the avenue; camouflaged helicopters roar overhead; students from the country’s top engineering school, the École polytechnique, march past in military uniform, their swords chinking. The streets of the City of Lights are ablaze with weaponry, just as they were 200-odd years ago. The only difference is there aren’t quite as many heads being paraded about on pikes or people getting hacked to death by the mob. Which is lucky, because it might scare away the tourists.

  And the Brits, as usual, were to blame for all the mess. Or so said a Frenchman who was there at the time – Maximilien Robespierre, the so-called ‘bloodthirsty dictator’ who sent so many real or imaginary traitors to the guillotine before ending up there himself. In 1793 he made a speech saying that the Revolution was started by London ‘to lead France, exhausted and dismembered, to a change of dynasty, and put the Duke of York [Prince Frederick, George III’s son] on the throne of Louis XVI. The execution of this plan would have given England the three objects of its ambitions and jealousy – Toulon, Dunkirk and our colonies.’

  Robespierre was on the paranoid side, and he was trying to rewrite history in order to stir up hatred for a new anti-British war, but he might have had a point. Some historians say that without the Brits the French would never have had the will to revolt. The Seven Years War of 1756–63 and participation in the American War of Independence had effectively bankrupted France, and the arguments about how to get out of the financial quagmire had caused the first real cracks to appear in its political establishment. Commoners demanded that Louis XVI and his landowning courtiers take radical action to ease the hardship, and the King was too out of touch, ill advised and weak to deal with the situation. The calls for reform turned to outright revolt, and today the country is a republic.

  So actually, the French should be grateful to the Brits – except those French people who had their heads cut off during the Revolution, or who were torn limb from limb, drowned, shot or roasted alive, of course. They probably wished that things had stayed a little more peaceful in 1789.

  Pourquoi la Bastille?

  The storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 was by no means the first event of the Revolution, or its most meaningful.

  In the same area of eastern Paris, on 28 April, there was, for example, a dramatic attack on a paper factory. It belonged to Jean-Baptiste Réveillon, the man who made the decorated paper skin of the first Montgolfier balloon. Réveillon was no aristocrat – he was a commoner who had built up a business manufacturing and selling wallpaper, and had made his mark on French history by hosting the first ever balloon flight in the grounds of his factory. So why attack him? Well, a rumour sprang up that Réveillon was planning to cut wages at his factory in line with the recently lowered price of
bread, and the news provoked a riot. A mob of several thousand people attacked the building where he lived and worked, burning his merchandise and designs, smashing or stealing his furniture, and looking for the boss himself with a view to using his blood to paint a wallpaper motif. Troops fired on the rioters, killing thirty of them and provoking the rest into terrorizing the whole neighbourhood.

  In fact, though, the rioters had got it all wrong. Réveillon had made a speech saying that the price of bread ought to be cut so that badly paid workers could afford it. But he didn’t hang around to point out that he’d been misquoted – he and his family climbed over a wall, only just escaping with their lives.

  Even so, one could argue that the mob had had revolutionary intentions, and that the riot had provided thirty martyrs, so this outbreak of public violence might justifiably have replaced the Bastille in the national calendar. There was, however, a major linguistic problem: Réveillon Day wouldn’t have worked, because ‘le réveillon’ is Christmas Eve, and it would have created confusion to have two Christmas Eves, one of which was at the end of April. So the hunt for a national holiday was still on.

  On 13 July, a mob attacked the convent at Saint-Lazare, where it was rumoured that a vast supply of wheat was being hoarded. This time, the story was accurate, and the attackers came away with fifty-odd wagonloads of grain. The problem was, however, that the convent was a charitable institution, and the wheat might well have been intended for distribution to the poor. And anyway, Convent Pillaging Day wouldn’t have sounded good. Something more politically correct was needed.