A sum of five thousand five hundred francs was paid for the machine, constructed for the National Assembly by Guidon, the carpenter. An attempt was made to give the name of Louisette, or Louison, to it, in honour of the learned doctor; but the name Guillotine had been current in the public mind for two or three years, and nothing could supplant it, although Dr. Guillotine certainly never sought to have his memory thus perpetuated.
The apparatus was first tried in decapitating the dead bodies of three men, and some live animals, at the prison of the Bicêtre. Dr. Louis, after seeing the efficacy of the invention tested in this way, died just before the terrible days of the revolution came on; and was therefore denied the pleasure, or spared the pain (whichever it might be), of seeing the guillotine employed as the most dreaded of political instruments.
The first victim was an ordinary criminal, an highwayman named Nicholas Jacques Pelletier, who was guillotined on the 25th of April, 1792.
The Chronique de Paris, in its next day’s issue, stated that “The novelty in this mode of execution caused a considerable augmentation in the number of persons who usually witness such scenes.
“The machine is with good reason, preferred to other modes of putting to death. One human being is not directly employed in decapitating another; and the promptness with which the operation takes place is more consistent with the spirit of the law, which is often severe, but should never be cruel.”
The first political guillotining took place four months later, when Louis David Collinot d’Augremont was executed by torchlight for the crime of having been among “the enemies of the people” on the 10th of August, the day on which “the people” broke into the Tuileries, expelled the royal family, and filled the palace and its surroundings with blood.
The National Assembly was succeeded by the National Convention, and by this Convention was founded the Revolutionary Tribunal, in April, 1793. Then, indeed, commenced the fearful period, always since recorded in history as the Reign of Terror, which lasted until July, 1794. How many unhappy persons were guillotined during these fifteen months is not accurately known; but in the final six weeks preceding the fall of Robespierre more than eleven hundred heads rolled in the dust of Paris alone.
Whether M. Guillotin had the heart to join in these discussions we do not know—he continued his practice as a physician, and was much respected. A popular notion prevails that he himself fell a victim to the machine which he had suggested—nay, that he was its first victim. Such was not the case; he was in prison as a “suspect” during the later days of the Terror; but the fall of Robespierre occurred just in the nick of time, and M. Guillotin survived to the days of the Consulate and the Empire.
He wrote a portion of autobiography, marked by the omission of all notice of his much-regretted suggestion of a beheading machine. The indifference to death, induced by an almost daily familiarity with descriptions and spectacles relating to it, showed itself in ways which we in our quiet country and quiet times can hardly regard as credible.
During the Terror the guillotining of several persons every day—sometimes many scores a day—became so much a matter of course as to be treated by the Parisians as an ordinary element in city business. In the prison, to “play at guillotine” was a favourite amusement among the prisoners, and many jokes were manufactured about the “national razor.”