Delancey’s Place has an excerpt today about olden France and a certain deadly icon:
Guillotin’s motive was to introduce a more humanitarian form of capital punishment, and his success in that was evident from the very first use of the guillotine when “the crowds, accustomed to bloody bouts with the ax and sword, thundered in disappointment, ‘Bring back the block!’ ” Yet almost immediately, guillotine executions became Paris’s favorite form of entertainment, with families bringing picnic lunches and reveling in the carnival atmosphere that surrounded them.
The guillotine was used until the 1950s, and in a public execution in 1939 of a hated German criminal, the crowd acted as if they were at a coronation festival or maybe a rock concert. “[E]legant ladies, avid for souvenirs, rushed to dip their handkerchiefs in the blood” of the man whom they had just watched lose his head. This comes from Stanley Karnow’s Paris in the Fifties.
In high school I bought and assembled a little plastic model of a guillotine, complete with a plastic Jacobin with a removable head.
Some years later, I looked at it and said, “You know, this is really creepy. I don’t want to own this anymore.” And I threw it out.
One of the least noted aspects of maturity is a decrease in emotional morbidity.
I just cannot understand anyone wanting to witness that.
Although, I used to play ‘airplane crash’ with my dolls, ripping off their body parts and scattering them around the room. But I think that was just so I could tend to them. I hope so anyway.
For the record (there is a record?) I do not do that anymore.
I’m not so sure I even want to cite any of my own examples of juvenile morbidity.
It’s my understanding that a guillotining (the last one) took place in 1977.
I read an article in which an elderly French man explained what it was like to assist his father with the guillotining of many prisoners during the Algerian War. There was definitely no shortage of blood. The “bring back the block” crowd must have been as truly sick as, well, some juveniles addicted to some graphic video game.
But a well-sharpened guillotine certainly would be swifter and more reliable and humane than some of the botched lethal injections I’ve read about (no, I don’t spend much time reading about this stuff).