Place de la Concorde & The Guillotine

It was on the eleventh of August, 1792 (the day after the capture of the Tuileries) that the Legislative Assembly advised the removal of the statue of the king, which was melted down and coined into two-sous pieces. In this year the fatal guillotine was established here. " Louis XVI was executed in the Place on January 21, 1793.

He was aged Thirty-eight years, four months and twenty-eight days.

On the seventeenth of July, Charlotte Corday was beheaded ; on October 2 Brissot, chief of the Gironde, with twenty-one of his adherents; on October 16, the ill-fated queen, Marie Antoinette ; on November 14, Philippe Égalité, Duke of Orléans, father of King Louis-Philippe ; on May 12, 1794, Madame Elizabeth, sister of Louis XVI.

On the fourteenth of March, through the influence of Danton and Robespierre, Hébert, the most determined opponent of all social rule, together with his partisans, also terminated his career on the scaffold. The next victims were the adherents of Marat and the Orléanists ; then on April 8, Danton himself and his party, among whom was Camille Desmoulins ; and on April 16, the atheists Chaumette and Anacharsis Cloots, and the wives of Camille Des-moulins, Hébert, and others. On July 28, 1794, Robespierre and his associates, his brother, Dumas, Saint Just, and other members of the comité du salut public ' met a retributive end here.

A few days later the same fate overtook eighty-two members of the Commune, whom Robespierre had employed as his tools. La-source, one of the Girondists, said to his judges :`Je meurs dans un moment où. le peuple a perdu sa raison; vous, vous mourrez le jour où il la retrouvera.' Between January 21, 1793, and May 31, 1795, upwards of twenty-eight hundred persons perished here by the guillotine.

The Place de la Concorde is one of the most magnificent squares of the entire world. It is accented by the obelisk which Mohammed Ali, Viceroy of Egypt, presented to Louis-Philippe. Surrounding it are colossal fountains with figures of Nereids and Tritons and on the pavilions that mark the Place with their imposing edifices are eight gigantic stone figures, representing the principal towns of France : Lyons, Marseilles, Rouen, Brest, Bordeaux and Nantes, with Lille and Strasburg, the two latter fantastically hung with crape and mourning emblems in remembrance of Alsace and Lorraine.

No one can cross the Place de la Concorde in all this stately beauty of to-day, without finding himself haunted by the tragic scenes that invested it more than a hundred years ago.

Doctor Guillotine

Doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotine was one of the most misunderstood men in all of French history, who invented the guillotine machine for execution.

The machine claimed 1119 lives during the two year span of the Revolutionary Terror (from May 1793-95).

However, Doctor Guillotin was actually a humanist, intent on sparing those condemned to death unnecessary pain and humiliation.

Prior to guillotine, execution styles varied according to a person's social status, and beheading, considered quicker and relatively painless, was reserved only for the noble upper classes. Other less fortunate criminals were condemned to burning at the stake, hanging, quartering, or other brutal forms of torture.

Last guillotine execution was on June 17, 1939. Eugen Weidman was executed before a large crowd in Versailles, France. The last nonpublic use of the guillotine in France, at Baumetes Prison, in Marsailles, was the execution of convicted murderer Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant, on September 10, 1977. France abolished death penalty on September 9, 1981.

The job of executioner was a hereditary one in France. It was passed down from father to son The most famous family who held this job was that of the Sansons, who operated the guillotine during the Revolution. From the period of 1688 to the mid 1800s, 18 members of the Sanson family acted as High Executioner.