THE GUILLOTINE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 8 June 1938, Page 9

THE GUILLOTINE

NAMED AFTER INVENTOR. Joseph Ignace Guillotin is generally credited with being the inventor of the guillotine, the machine used in France for beheading criminals. "With my machine, messieurs, I whisk off your head in a twinkling, and you have no pain.” Such was Dr Guillotin’s contribution to the French Revolution. “For two and 20 years, he, unguillotined, shall hear nothing but guillotine, see nothing but guillotine,” wrote Carlyle in his "French Revolution.”

Some authorities deny to Dr Guillotin the dubious honour of inventing this ghastly machine. The use of machines of this kind is ascribed to the Persians. In Italy, from the thirteenth century, it was the privilege of the nobles to be put to death by a machine resembling the guillotine. It was used in the middle ages in Germany, and during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a machine called the maiden, which differed but slightly from the guillotine, was employed in Scotland for the purposes of decapitation. Among its victims were one of Rizzio’s murderers (1566). the Regent Morton (1581), and the Marquess (1661) and Earl of Argyll (1685).

Incidentally, one often hears it said that Dr Guillotin perished under the blade of the machine he himself introduced into France. That is not so. He died peacefully in his bed in 1814.