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French history myths: The inventor of guillotine was guillotined

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French history myths: The inventor of guillotine was guillotined
The guillotine was France's method of judicial execution for almost 200 years. AFP PHOTO / DAMIEN MEYER (Photo by DAMIEN MEYER / AFP)

The guillotine is synonymous with the terror that followed the French Revolution, but did the machine's inventor really fall victim to his own creation?

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Myth: Joseph Guillotin, inventor of the guillotine, was beheaded by the very device he had introduced during the Terror, the period of political instability that followed the French Revolution.

Doctor and humanitarian Joseph-Ignace Guillotin did not in fact invent the guillotine, and never claimed that he did, similar machines to behead people had existed in various forms since the Roman period.

He was, however, the man who ensured that the guillotine became the sole legal method of execution in France. Not because he was in fan - in fact he was against the death penalty - but because he regarded it as more humane than previous execution methods in France, which had included such horrors as burning, breaking on the wheel and being torn apart by horses. 

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Following Guillotin's proposal, the mechanised beheading device was adopted as the only method for judicial execution in France in March 1792, ending the pre-Revolutionary practice of reserving more humane execution methods for aristocrats.

Guillotin's ideas were actually very wide ranging, in addition to the machine that came to bear his name, he also introduced a new code around judicial executions;

  • All punishments for the same class of crime shall be the same, regardless of the criminal;
  • When the death sentence is applied, it will be by decapitation, carried out by machine;
  • The family of the guilty party will not suffer any legal discrimination;
  • It will be illegal to anyone to reproach the guilty party’s family about his/her punishment;
  • And property belonging to the convicted shall not be confiscated;
  • The bodies of those executed shall be returned to the family if so requested.

Guillotin - whose family were so embarrassed by the association that they unsuccessfully petitioned the government to change the name of the killing machine - died at home, of natural causes, at the age of 75 in 1814. He’s buried at Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris – alongside Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Frederic Chopin and Marcel Proust.

During the Terror a doctor with a similar name was guillotined in Lyon, giving rise to the belief that Joseph-Ignace suffered this ironic death.

The guillotine remained the official method for judicial executions until France abolished the death penalty in 1981.

This article is part of our August series looking at famous misconceptions around French history.

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