The 18th-century doctor Joseph Ignace Guillotin hoped a more humane method of execution would eventually lead to the end of capital punishment.
One day in May 1738, legend has it, a woman approaching the end of her pregnancy was walking down a street in Saintes, France, when she heard the cries of a man being executed on the town’s breaking wheel.
(The condemned would be tied to a large wheel, limbs stretched into a starfish, and then beaten with a club to break the bones.)
So traumatic were the man’s screams, the story goes, that the woman went into labor right then and there.
The circumstances, if true, were fitting for the person that came into the world that day.
As the French historian Daniel Arasse wrote, “the conditions of his birth determined his later renown”—the baby, Joseph Ignace Guillotin, would grow up to invent one of the deadliest instruments of execution of his time.
But before he invented the guillotine, he would devote a career to lobbying against the death penalty in France.
Guillotin’s early career was accomplished, if otherwise unremarkable: He worked briefly as a literature professor at the University of Bordeaux, then left for Paris, where he studied medicine and then settled as a practicing physician.
In 1788, he wrote a pamphlet titled “Petition of the Living Citizens of Paris,” arguing for more representation for non-nobility in the legislative body called the Estates General. The following year, largely as a result of the attention he received for “Petition,” he became a representative to the Estate, launching his political career.
As a politician, Guillotin focused mostly on medical reform. He was also an opponent of the death penalty, and, perhaps recognizing that outright abolition was unlikely, focused his energy on making capital punishment more humane—and more egalitarian. At the time, only the nobility in France had the dubious privilege of beheading by sword; most criminals sentenced to death were hung on the gallows (or, in some gruesome cases, sent to the breaking wheel).
On October 10, 1789, Guillotin submitted a proposal to the French government arguing for a decapitating machine to become the standard manner of carrying out the death penalty. Initially, the proposal gained little traction—but that December, Guillotin delivered a speech to the National Assembly that would ultimately elevate both the man and the idea to international fame.
In a moment of enthusiasm, he told his audience, “Now with my machine I take off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.”
The following day, the Les Actes des Apôtres, a popular French journal, mocked Guillton’s comment into song (this translation comes from Chambers Edinburgh Journal, a 19th-century British magazine):
Politician,
And physician,
Bethought himself, ’tis plain,
That hanging’s not humane
Nor patriotic;
And straightaway showed
A clever mode
To kill – without a pang – men;
Which, void of rope or stakes,
Suppression makes
Of hangmen. …And then offhand,
His genius planned
That machine that ‘simply’ kills—that’s all—
Which after him we call
“Guillotine”
Read the Remainder at The Atlantic