Summit Gist

The guillotine. That terrifying emblem of the French Revolution, which put paid to the French monarchy and many others thereafter, including Revolutionary leader Robespierre. But did you know it was still sending French prisoners to their deaths as recently as 1977? It all began with Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a member of the French National Assembly, who was, perhaps ironically, a physician, and keen on medical reform. On October 10, 1789, Guillotin proposed to the Assembly that to make citizens equal, all those sentenced to death should be executed by the same humane means – mechanical decapitation. A contradiction in terms perhaps, but an alternative to the gruesomely theatrical punishments to which commoners had hitherto been subjected. Initially Guillotin’s ideas were met with contempt. “Now with my machine, I strike off your head, in the twinkling of an eye and you never feel it,” he boasted. The Assembly thought it uproarious and the French press quickly ran with it. Guillotin’s p...