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Antiquity -

The guillotine, in one form or another, has been lopping off heads since antiquity. Titus Manlius, the Roman politician and general, famously had his own son beheaded for disobedience. He was dispatched by the executioner using a blade drawn down through a slit made in a wooden scaffold.

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Halifax Gibbet -

The Middle Ages saw the development of the guillotine into its familiar tall, upright frame with a weighted and angled blade suspended at the top. An early example was the Halifax Gibbet (pictured), a contraption that employed a sliding ax head and was used in the town of Halifax in West Yorkshire, England during the 16th century.

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James Douglas and the 'Maiden' -

In 1546, the Scottish introduced the 'Maiden,' a crude but effective guillotine that was used extensively during the reign of Mary Queen of Scots. It was last employed in 1716. One of the people executed by the Maiden was James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton. In a perhaps ironic twist of fate, legend says that Morton himself commissioned the Maiden after he had seen the Halifax Gibbet. While there is no support for this claim, later writers repeated the myth. By the way, the original 1546 Maiden is on permanent display at the National Museum of Scotland.

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Holinshed's Chronicles -

'Holinshed's Chronicles,' a large, comprehensive description of British history published in three volumes in 1577, includes a picture of "The execution of Murcod Ballagh near Merton in Ireland in 1307," showing a similar execution machine to the Halifax Gibbet, suggesting its early use in Ireland. Incidentally, the 'Chronicles' were Shakespeare's inspiration for 'The Tempest,' 'King Lear,' and 'Henry V.'

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Medieval guillotine -

A beheading device called the "planke" was used in Germany and Flanders during the Middle Ages. The Italians called their primitive Renaissance-era device a "mannaia."

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Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738–1814) -

While similar execution machines had been around for centuries, the origins of what we know as the French guillotine date back to late 1789. Although he did not invent the guillotine, French physician and politician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin's name became an eponym for it.

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Development of the guillotine -

Guillotin was opposed to the death penalty on principle, but conceded that decapitation by a lightning-quick machine would be more humane and egalitarian than sword and ax beheadings. To that effect, he helped oversee the development of the first prototype.

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Antoine Louis (1723–1792) -

The man credited with designing a prototype of the guillotine is French surgeon and physiologist Antoine Louis (pictured). It was built by a German harpsichord maker named Tobias Schmidt.

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The guillotine unveiled -

Pictured: Joseph-Ignace Guillotin and Antoine Louis demonstrate the function of the guillotine using a scale model. Guillotin was later horrified to learn that the new machine was to be called a guillotine, and distanced himself from his association with the deadly apparatus.

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Use of guillotine -

Using the guillotine as a method of lawful execution was still sanctioned throughout Europe into the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the Western Hemisphere, however, the guillotine saw only limited use.

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The guillotine's first victim -

The first person to be executed by guillotine was French highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, who was beheaded on April 25, 1792 in front of the Hôtel de Ville, in Place de Grève in Paris. Pelletier's death established the guillotine as the only civil legal execution method in France until the abolition of the death penalty in 1981.

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Louis Collenot d'Angremont (1748–1792) -

Louis Collenot d'Angremont, the head of the Military Bureau of the Brigades of the National Guards of Paris and a staunch royalist, was famed for having been the first guillotined for his political ideas, on August 21, 1792.

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The French Revolution -

The French Revolution (1789–1799) sparked the so-called "Reign of Terror" of the mid-1790s, when thousands of perceived "enemies of the French revolution" met their end by the guillotine's blade. Pictured is the storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789.

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Reign of Terror -

The Reign of Terror was characterized by a series of massacres and numerous public executions that took place in response to revolutionary fervor, anticlerical sentiment, and accusations of treason. The guillotine was rarely clean of spilled blood. Pictured is the execution of nine young immigrants sentenced to death by a revolutionary court in 1792.

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King Louis XVI -

Famous victims of the guillotine during this period include King Louis XVI of France, who was beheaded on January 21, 1793 in Paris after being convicted by the Revolutionary Tribunal of high treason.

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Execution of Marie Antoinette -

King Louis XVI's wife, Marie Antoinette, met a similar fate, losing her head on the scaffold on October 16, 1793.

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Execution of Robespierre -

Maximilien Robespierre, the radical Jacobin leader and one of the principal figures in the French Revolution, was guillotined along with several of his accomplices on July 27, 1794.

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Revolution's end -

With enough blood spilled and thousands of heads having rolled, the French public's fascination with the guillotine waned at the end of the 18th century. However, public beheadings continued in France until 1939.

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Last public execution in France -

The last public execution in France took place on June 17, 1939 when convicted German criminal and serial killer Eugen Weidmann was guillotined outside the prison Saint-Pierre in Versailles. Interestingly, among those who witnessed the grisly spectacle was future actor Christopher Lee, then just 17 years old.

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Final cut -

France's last surviving guillotine displayed at the Museum of Justice and Punishment in Fontaine de Vacluse, near Avignon.

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The guillotine and the Nazis -

Hitler's Third Reich favored the guillotine as a quick and efficient way of dispatching enemies of the regime. In fact, the guillotine became a state method of execution in the 1930s. Some 16,500 people between 1933 and 1945 fell victim to this method of execution. Pictured is the guillotine memorial in the former Brandenburg-Görden Prison. The sign reads: 1798 anti-fascists were murdered at this site between 1940 and 1945.

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Execution of Hans and Sophie Scholl -

Hans and Sophie Scholl, who were members of the White Rose, a non-violent resistance movement in Nazi Germany, were both guillotined by the Nazis in Munich on February 22, 1943. Today, there are many streets and schools in Germany named for the Scholl siblings. There is also a literary prize in their honor, the Geschwister-Scholl-Preis.

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Execution of Elisabeth Gloeden -

German lawyer Elisabeth Gloeden stands before the judges during her trial for treason at the People's Court (Volksgerichtshof) in Berlin in November 1944. Gloeden, her husband, and her mother took in Jewish people fleeing persecution by the Nazis. In the aftermath of the failed 20th July plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler, they sheltered General Fritz Lindemann, one of the plotters. The Gloedens were betrayed, arrested, and executed by guillotine at Plötzensee Prison on November 30, 1944. Their fate was publicized as a warning by the Nazi regime.

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Execution of Horst Fischer -

German doctor and SS member Horst Fischer was guillotined on July 8, 1966 in Leipzig after being convicted by the Supreme Court of the German Democratic Republic for crimes committed at Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp during the Second World War.

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Killing machine -

A guillotine is seen at Dachau concentration camp near Munich, photographed on April 18, 1945 upon the liberation of the facility by Allied troops.

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Execution of Hans Vollenweider -

On October 18, 1940, Swiss criminal Hans Vollenweider was executed by guillotine, the last time Switzerland used such a method to carry out a death sentence. In fact, the death penalty in Switzerland was already scheduled to be abolished in January 1942.

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Execution of Hamida Djandoubi -

Tunisian national Hamida Djandoubi was the last person to be lawfully guillotined anywhere in the Western world. The convicted murderer was executed on September 10, 1977 at Baumettes Prison in Marseille, France.

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The guillotine in Vietnam -

In the early 1960s, the Diem regime in Vietnam established mobile special military courts that were dispatched to the countryside in order to intimidate the rural population. Guillotines, which had belonged to the former French colonial power, were used frequently to carry out on-the-spot executions. Pictured is the guillotine used in the infamous French and Vietnamese Hoa Lo Prison, also called the "Hanoi Hilton."

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Devil's Island -

Pictured: the former site of the French guillotine near the penitentiary known in France as the Bagne de Cayenne, but better known as Devil's Island, the largest of the Islands of Salvation in the Caribbean Sea off French Guiana.

Sources: (History) (The British Library) (History Today) (Euronews)

See also: Incredible island prisons around the world

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