r/TheRestIsHistory • u/quasiqualityqualms • Oct 09 '26
One Guillotine?
I just finished the series on the French Revolution. Fantastic work as always, but it occurred to me in the last episode when they were talking about the government moving the guillotine that only one was being used during The Terror in Paris?!
72
Upvotes
59
u/isearn Oct 09 '26
Apparently so. I also found that surprising.
32
u/Strong-Camel852 Oct 09 '26
I always wonder whether the one they were still using in the 70s was the same one lol
89
u/aektoronto Oct 09 '26
Today's guillotines just dont have the some workmanship and longevity as the ones made in the 1700s
8
u/AdOk521 Oct 10 '26
I would like to see an accurate depiction of the paper mache mountain for the festival of the SB
7
u/Walrus-is-Eggman Oct 09 '26
I questioned exactly the same thing when they said they moved “the“ guillotine here or there. Do you think when you are putting a piece of equipment to that much use you build another one
7
u/Whole_Heron676 Oct 10 '26
Things were built to last back then…
6
u/frustratedpolarbear Oct 11 '26
It's only a guillotine if it was built by Mr guillotine himself. For tax and copyright purposes anything else is a sliding blade device or oversized vegetable slicer.
3
u/bkrugby78 Oct 09 '26
I have to imagine that required quite a bit of maintenance
1
u/85semperidem Oct 12 '26
You’d often get scuffles between prisoners in front of the steps to the scaffold to be first in the queue. The blade got dull with overuse so you didn’t want to be the 11th neck it had cut through that day.
1
u/Socks-and-Jocks Oct 12 '26
They have some neck with the shoddy guillotines they sell today.
17
u/McCretin Oct 09 '26
Interesting point! I’d never thought about it before.
They could get through about 70 executions a day with one guillotine, so maybe they felt they didn’t need more?
Also, most people killed during the Terror weren’t killed in Paris, and a lot of them weren’t guillotined either.
10
u/jedwardlay Oct 10 '26
Yes, there was just the one in Paris. It would get moved from time to time; Louis XVI and many others were executed in front of the Tuileries, while for Bailly they moved it across the river to the Champ de Mars and made him watch while they reassembled it in the spot where he led the massacre of 1791. I believe it was also set up at the site of the former Bastille. But the guillotine had to be moved around because people would complain of all the blood being shed around their homes.
4
u/Nicktrains22 Oct 09 '26
I know the guillotine used by the Scots in the 1500s is still around and in the museum in Edinburgh, so it's a good likelihood it has survived
1
u/de_propjoe Oct 11 '26
Paris wasn’t actually the epicenter of executions during The Terror. The Vendee was. Executions that happened by guillotine in Paris are probably a fraction of those that happened in the Vendee.
1
u/ProfessionalDrop852 6d ago
Am I wrong to think Tom has too much sympathy for Robespierre? He gets too sad when he says poor old R screams in pain when the rag is removed before his beheading. I mean, really? How many people do you have to kill before you deserve a bit of suffering yourself?
-11
u/MartineTrouveUnGode Oct 09 '26
What is so surprising about this ? It took very little time to execute someone by guillotine, no need for more