CHAPTERCLXXIV.CAPITAL PUNISHMENT—MERCIFUL AND MERCILESS MODES IN DIFFERENT AGES.In this chapter we propose giving a short review of the methods by which obnoxious criminals have been, at various times, among various peoples, invited to “shuffle off this mortal coil.”Capital punishment, like Cleopatra’s charms, has been of “infinite variety”—the variety, however, as a rule, being simply among the most horrible possible methods. No records remain to tell how the contemporaries of the Saurians and the Megatherium, the ingenious dwellers in caves, and warriors of the flint age, disposed of their malefactors, but the fullest accounts have been preserved of the proceedings of our more modern ancestors, since the days of Adam, in the way of executions.The Jews, who led the bead-roll of antique nations, appear to have usually stoned the criminals of their own race—a democratic sort of penalty, where every good citizen had a finger in the pie, and hurled his righteous rock, and even the little Hebrew boys could enjoy the fun of the stoner. To the stoned it must have been something of a lingering torture, requiring much patience to bear. For their enemies they reserved the sharper practice of hewing them in pieces, or they burned them alive, or turned them to agricultural account, and fertilised the sites of their smoking cities by harrowing them in with considerable vehemence.The Chinese, another ancient and highly cultured race, have been similarly merciless. It is singular how little difference there has been in this respect of ingenious cruelty between the most cultivated peoples and the wildest savages.Decapitation is the mildest of Chinese extreme penalties, and is usually performed with much skill and sang-froid by means of a sword, the criminal, male and female, taking the matter most philosophically, and making no indecorous remonstrances at their summary taking off.There is a tariff, too, for substitutes—a plan which might commend itself to our wealthier homicides. But our Celestial neighbours across the Pacific prefer killing the doomed by not allowing them to sleep, or starving them to death in cages or straightened limits, in which they are exhibited during the process of skeleton-formation, in peripatetic rambles on the shoulders of the local deputy sheriffs.And chopping them deliberately into fragments, at intervals of an hour or so, is much to their taste. There is a cage, part of the spolia opima of the first Chinese war, among the archives of the Royal Artillery, at Madras, India, in which they carried about Colonel Rowlandson, and the LondonTimeshad a liberal annual payment on its pension list for the family of Mr. Bowles, a special correspondent, similarly disposed of just before the last Chinese war.The torturing propensities of the pleasing red man, whom Cooper immortalised, and Custer has occasionally assisted to the happy hunting grounds, are too well known to require much notice.The use of fire is a prominent feature in their social circles, complicated with the facetious tomahawk and the insinuating scalping-knife. But we know the Modocs, the Sioux, and others like them, only too well.The Assyrians, Medes and Persians, ancient Egyptians, and other Orientals seemed to have employed similar agencies to their Israelitish neighbours for lopping off the rotten branches of their family trees.The processes are faithfully depicted and chiselled on the walls of Thebes, Persepolis, and Nineveh.The Greeks were somewhat tender-hearted in some cases; for instance, they allowed Socrates to poison himself comfortably among his friends.They objected to parricides, however, and for them reserved a punishment adopted from the Egyptians, like their alphabet, and naturalised at a later date by the Romans. They confined the too impetuous slayer of his father in a bag with a snake, a monkey, and a cat, to keep him company, and then gently dropped the congenial party into the sea.The Romans seem first to have hit on the idea of crucifixion, a singularly torturing refinement of internal, external, and mental pain.It was esteemed an ignoble death, and must have been anguish to a sensitive mind; the cruel nails rending the flesh, barely supporting the weight of the writhing body, must have been severe, while the dreadful thirst of the fevered victim must have been a culminating horror.The State criminals sometimes came floating over the Tarpeian rock, and smashed into pulp below.This has been emulated by Theodore of Abyssinia, at his mountain fastness of Magdala, and by Tippoo Sahib at the Droorg, one of the peaks of the Neilgherry mountains in Southern India, where is a convenient precipice over 1000 feet clear of sheer natural wall.The Roman taste for the joys of the circus stimulated their imagination to devise novel torment, and criminals or Christians, or simply prisoners of war, were exposed to combat wild beasts, or each other, to “grace a Roman holiday.”They sometimes, however, executed distinguished folks in polite fashion, merely sending a polite message for them to “stand not on the order of their going, but go” out of the world at their earliest convenience.A good deal of bleeding to death in warm baths and sudden insertion of the “bare bodkin” resulted.The chivalric Japanese custom of harikari is a similar concession to the conventionalities of society, and is also eminently useful as a duelling agent necessitating the absolute retirement of both disturbers of the peace and their friends’ serenity.It is hardly necessary to dilate on the ceremonious surroundings of these interesting occasions, when the accomplished gentleman who has offended the laws, or has been offended by a friend, calls his relatives and acquaintances together and, supported by a second, a veteran in the punctilio of the local code of honour, makes his little speech, drinks his farewell toast, and then proceeds to carve himself in the most approved style, proudly feeling as he dies that he has done his duty to his country, his family, and the world at large, and that the gentleman he had the difficulty with cannot survive him.The Druids, like the Huns, the Aztecs, and the Ashantees and Dahomeyans in the present day, were rather sanguinary.Funerals were fittingly honoured by the sacrifice of a proportionate number of slaves and criminals, to form a retinue for the worthy departed in the world of spirits. The Druids usually burned a few hundreds in a great wicker image of the human figure.It is recorded that many thousands of men, women, and children, with horses, jewels, arms, and domestic necessaries, were sacrificed when Attila, “the Scourge of God,” died, and were buried with him in the bed of a river, diverted temporarily from its course for the purpose, and similar formalities are observed in the African kingdoms mentioned, on any one event, but repeated annually as a “custom,” to keep the manes of the deceased in good humour by the polite remembrance implied by the observance.But Christian Europe, in the Dark Ages, could vie with any race or century in the ingenuity and refined cruelty of capital punishment.The preliminary tortures of the rack, the boots, the thumb-screws, the strappado, must have tended to make the recipient of these attentions desirous of death.The noble Barons who harried each other, and revolted at brief intervals throughout their tumultous lives, pressed air, earth, fire, and water into their service for the purpose of execution.Men were judicially pressed to death as late as the Titus Oates conspiracy, in the reign of Charles II. They were hanged in chains to starve; they were burned alive, half hanged, mutilated, and then burned; they were scorched with hot irons, their eyes seared out, their limbs plunged into molten lead or tar; they were spitted like cockchafers on stakes, they were drowned with unmerciful rapidity, or chained to stakes at low water to be more slowly suffocated by the rising tide; they were broken on the wheel, or torn apart by wild horses, while the axe for the noble kept up a perpetual refrain like the ticking of a clock.The Inquisition, in the garb and under the name of religion, invented and applied more exquisite barbarities. To drive a man mad first and into a grave afterwards by the incessant trickling of a single drop of water was a torment worthy of Satan himself.The thousands burned to death in Spain, France, England, China, India, Germany, attest the gusto with which the reverend brethren of the Holy Office snuffed in the flavour of roasting humanity, and were enraptured with the shrieks of the martyrs, as now-a-days we are when Capoul or Tamberlik rouses our enthusiasm with the ringing C in alt.In those good old days men were slain for sneezing in improper places, for constructive disrespect, or for stealing a loaf, and the severity remained till within comparatively recent times.Some of the middle-age methods still survive. In Naples, three years ago, of three women condemned for infanticide two were beheaded; the third, the principal culprit, was mazzolated, or knocked on the head with a trace, like an ox, her abdomen then slashed open, while the executioner executed a “pas de fascination” on the quivering trunk, spurting the blood out like a fountain.In Spain, Spanish colonies, and the sister Republics who once owed allegiance to that haughty country, malefactors are garrotted, or strangled in an armchair with a steel cravat, which is jammed to the choking point by the dexterous twisting of a screw behind.They also shoot considerably, evincing a peculiar fondness for shooting people in the back with a remarkably bad aim, and then finishing them with a shot in the ear at close quarters, or a dagger under the fifth rib.It was in this way they disposed of William Walker, “the grey-eyed man of destiny,” at Truxillo, in 1860. The French weakness for the guillotine, an aggravated edition of the domestic bread or meat chopper, has disposed of many multitudes of kings, queens, nobles, ragamuffins, petroleuses, and others, with business-like rapidity and cleanliness.The baskets, sawdust, and brightly-polished cheese-knife employed are familiar, and almost inviting in comparison with the gallows adhered to by Anglo-Saxons.Hanging nowadays seems a “lost art.” The Americans have improved the machinery with patent drops and weights warranted to jerk up the hanged with satisfactory promptitude.But the education of the hangman has been sadly neglected. The knot is rarely tied with scientific accuracy, or the rope in as good condition as it might be.The consequence is, but a small proportion of the sufferers enjoy the sudden death they would prefer, if they must die in so hasty a manner, and instead of their necks being broken they are slowly strangled, if the rope does not break and necessitate a repetition of the performance.Physicians and anatomists say this slow strangulation must be exquisitely painful.Humanitarians have accordingly suggested “painless extinction.” Chloroform applied long enough would soothe the slumberer to wake no more here below, with absolutely no pain.An overdose of laudanum might be an improvement, as bestowing positive pleasure before he lapsed into unconsciousness.Both these and other plans are warmly recommended, and discussed with some heat by their respective advocates. Some gentlemen have even hinted at the possibility of doing good at the same time by dissecting the brain of the living but unconscious subject, during the calm retreat from the sins and follies of his life.Another method of painless extinction is by blowing the patient from a gun. This was invented by the Mahommedans of India, was employed by the British during the mutiny of 1857, and is still in favour with the Ameer of Afghanistan.It has one great advantage as a preventive of crime in its application to Hindoos, as they believe, when a man’s body is split into filaments, as it must be by such a process, that his chances of future existence are very slim.Their ideas of resurrection are peculiar and Pythagorean, but they object to this total obliteration, and accordingly dread the blowing-from-gun procedure above all other penalties. Physically, it cannot hurt, however.The conclusion and distribution of the fragments are so sudden and complete that pain must be entirely wanting as an element. Destroying a hanged Brahmin’s body with quicklime is also objectionable to Hindoos, on account of similar doubts as to his future rehabilitation.A Hindoo punishment, of gradually crushing a criminal under the foot of a trained elephant, is repulsive, and is discountenanced by the British Government. Any rajah who reverts to these ancestral amusements renders his tenure on the throne insecure. It has not been practised for some years.The guillotine, of which such horrible use was made in the past French Revolution, has been said to be the most merciful mode of putting malefactors to death, but this is by no means certain.Dr. Tuc and some German physicians and surgeons after him held that there does indubitably remain in the brain of a decapitated head some degree (un reste) of thought, and in the nerves something of sensibility, and the case of Mademoiselle Corday was alleged as proving that doctrine.We abstain from any details of the thousands of murders by the guillotine at this time. One fact will enable our readers to understand something of its horrors.It was proved on the trial of Fouquier Tinville that 160 persons of all ages and ranks, and of both sexes, were tried and executed on a charge of conspiracy, not merely false but absurd, visionary, and impossible—forty-five of these persons, who were utterly unknown to each other, were tried and condemned within twenty minutes, and executed on the same evening in almost as short a space. These executions were for many months the amusement—the spectacle of the people—we wish we could say the populace of Paris. Chairs were stationed round the instrument of death, where women, in a station of life to be able to pay for that amusement, used to have seats, and sit, and chat, and work, while waiting for the tragedy, which they had looked at as a farce. We find in theRevue Retrospectivea curious letter incidentally descriptive of this elegant scene of Parisian amusement.“The Procureur-Général Rœderer to Citizen Guidon.“13th May, 1793.“I enclose, Citizen, the copy of a letter from Citizen Chaumette, solicitor to the Commune of Paris, by which you will perceive that complaints are made that, after these public executions, the blood of the criminals remains in pools upon the place, and that dogs come to drink it, and that crowds of men feed their eyes with this spectacle, which naturally instigates their hearts to ferocity and blood.“I request you, therefore, to take the earliest and most convenient measures to remove from the eyes of men a sight so afflicting to humanity.”Our readers will observe the tender regret—not that all this blood was shed, but that it was not wiped up; and they will be startled when they recollect that at the date of this letter not above a dozen persons had been yet executed there, but that within one year the blood of a thousand victims had saturated the same small spot of ground.In one of the foolish modern-antique processions of the Convention, the whole cortège was delayed and thrown into confusion because the cattle that were drawing some of their theatrical machines could neither be induced nor forced to traverse this blood-tainted place.This Chaumette was one of the most impious and sanguinary of the whole tribe, and we could almost believe that he envied the dogs the blood they drank. He it was that bullied the wretched idiot Gobel, revolutionary Archbishop of Paris, to come to the bar of the Convention to abjure Christianity, and proclaim himself an impostor, at the head of a procession in which asses were insultingly decorated with the sacred emblems of religion.Chaumette himself it was who introduced to the Convention a prostitute in the character of the Goddess of Reason. Robespierre sent this whole clique to the guillotine, and on the 13th of April, 1794, Chaumette’s own blood flowed to increase the horrors of which he had complained.The guillotine remained in permanence in the Place de la Révolution till the 8th of June, 1794, when the inhabitants of the streets through which the batches (“fournées”), as they were called, of sufferers used to pass, became at last tired of the agreeable sight, and solicited its removal.Robespierre seems at this time to have adopted a new policy, to have formed some design of founding a dictatorial authority in his own person on the basis of religion and morals.On the 7th June he made his famous report acknowledging “l’Etre Suprême,” and appointed the 20th June for the greatfêtein the gardens of the Tuileries, which was to celebrate this recognition.Of this ceremony Robespierre was to be the “Pontifex Maximus,” and it can hardly be doubted that it was to remove the odious machines from the immediate scene of his glorification that it was—the day after the decree and ten days before the celebration—removed to the PlaceSt.Antoine, in front of the ruins of the Bastile; but that a day might not be lost, it was removed on a Decade, the republican Sabbath.No.100.In the forty-nine days in which it is said to have stood at theBarrière du Trôneit despatched 1270 persons of both sexes, and of all ages and ranks, and it became necessary to build a kind of sanguiduct, to carry off the streams of blood; and on the very last day, when the tyrant had already fallen, and that the smallest interruption would have sufficed to have stopped the fatal procession, forty-nine persons passed almost unguarded through the stupified streets to the place of execution.And here we have the last occasion to mention Sanson; and it is to his credit, as indeed all the personal details related of him seem to be. On the 9th Thermidor there was, about half-past three in the afternoon, just as this last batch of victims was about to leave the Conciergerie, a considerable commotion in the town, caused by the revolt against Robespierre.At that moment Fouquier, on his way to dine with a neighbour, passed through the court where the prisoners were ascending the fatal carts. Sanson, whose duty it was to conduct the prisoners to execution, ventured to stop the Public Accuser, to represent to him that there were some rumours of a commotion, and to suggest whether it would not be prudent to postpone the execution till at least the next morning.Fouquier roughly replied that the law must take its course. He went to dinner, and the forty-nine victims went to the scaffold, whither in due time he followed them.After the accession of Louis Philippe, for whom the guillotine must have been an object of the most painful contemplation, sentences of death were also very rare, and certainly never executed where there was any possible room for mercy.The executions, too, when forced upon him, took place at early hours, and in remote and uncertain places; and every humane art was used to cover the operations of the fatal instrument with a modest veil, not only from motives of general decency and humanity, but also, no doubt, from national pride and personal sensibility.What Frenchman would not wish that the name and memory of the guillotine could be blotted from the history of mankind?“The wordGuillotine,” says the author ofLes Festes de l’Anarchie, “should be effaced from the language.” But the revolutionary horrors which France is naturally so anxious to forget, it the more behoves us and the rest of Europe to remember and meditate.Such massacres as we have been describing will probably never be repeated: they will, no doubt, stand unparalleled in the future, as they do in the former annals of the world; but they should never be forgotten as an example of the incalculable excesses of popular insanity.The invention of this instrument of death (the guillotine) is thus described by a graphic writer:—Joseph Ignace Guillotin lived to deplore his own ingenuity in inventing or suggesting a machine which besides being effective for the immediate purpose intended, was the result of a really kind feeling. The stern irony of fate occasionally rewards inventors in this way.Born in 1738, Guillotin received a medical training; he became a physician of much repute, and was chosen professor in one of the French universities. In 1789, when France was beginning to feel the first throes of the Revolution, Guillotin was elected member of the National Assembly, and took his seat among the Liberals or Reformers.He proposed a resolution declaratory that capital punishment ought to bear no relation to the rank of the culprit; that when a criminal is condemned to death, for any crime whatever, the mode of execution should be the same whether he were peer or peasant.Until then, nobles and privileged persons, when condemned to death, had the honour of being decapitated, either by the axe or by the sword; whereas the common people were left to the tender mercies of a hempen rope. Dr. Guillotin at the same time proposed a second resolution.He wished to save the unhappy being from the additional punishment existing from the uncertainty, nervousness, or clumsiness of the executioner, whether axeman or swordsman.He cited historical incidents in which two, three, or even more cuts were given, by the axe or the sword, before the head of the miserable sufferer was finally severed from the body. He proposed to do away alike with the gibbet, the sword, and the axe, and to substitute a decapitating machine, in which a sharp, heavy knife should descend on the neck of the condemned.Feeling assured that bodily pain could not be felt during this brief operation, he was quite carried away by his subject, and said, enthusiastically, “I could cut off your head with my machine in the twinkling of an eye, without your suffering the smallest pain!”Poor Dr. Guillotin had to bear the shafts of ridicule, always a terrible weapon to a Frenchman. Many of the members of the Assembly smiled at his ardent words; and the Royalists out of doors made rare fun of him. One of their journals gave a song, “On the inimitable machine of Dr. Guillotin for chopping off heads called after his name the Guillotine.”Poor Dr. Guillotin had to bear the shafts of ridicule, always a terrible weapon to a Frenchman. Many of the members of the Assembly smiled at his ardent words; and the Royalists out of doors made rare fun of him. One of their journals gave a song, “On the inimitable machine of Dr. Guillotin for chopping off heads called after his name.”This name, started in this bantering way, has clung to the machine from that day till now. The doctor protested against the designation, but in vain. He did not even invent the machine; he merely pointed out that the chopping action could easily be produced by a sharp, heavy blade descending from an upright frame.The National Assembly, on receiving Dr. Guillotin’s two propositions, at once adopted the first of them, by decreeing equality of punishment for all ranks of society; but left the mode of execution for further consideration. It was not till nearly two years afterwards, that, on the motion of MM. Lepelletier and Saint Fargeon, a decree was issued, declaring that the mode of capital punishment should be by decapitation. Even then the merits and demerits of the axe, the sword, and the falling knife were left in abeyance. In March, 1792, the Assembly sought the advice of Dr. Antoine Louis, a celebrated surgeon, and secretary of the Paris College of Surgeons.He explained, scientifically, how far the various decapitating instruments acted like knives, and how far like scissors; and expressed himself decidedly in favour of a chopping machine.He showed that the idea of such a machine was by no means a new one. An Italian book by Achille Bocchi, dated 1555, gives an engraving of an Italian nobleman being beheaded; a heavy blade, suspended by cords from a crossbar at the top of a frame, is represented as falling on the neck of the victim.In 1632 some such apparatus was employed in Languedoc, for decapitating Duc Henry de Montmorenci. It was also ascertained that Scotland in the North, and Persia in the East, had employed machines bearing a resemblance to this.Among the strange scenes of the French revolutionary days, not the least strange was that of the National Assembly listening gravely to the details given on these matters.Dr. Louis conferred with Dr. Guillotin, and also with the famous executioner Sanson. Sanson specially urged that, if all executions henceforth were to be by beheading, a machine would be greatly needed, as he distrusted his own power of using the sword or the axe so frequently and so accurately as would be necessary.After hearing all the explanations and suggestions, the Assembly passed a decree for the use of a decapitating machine, in substitution of the halter, the axe, the sword, and the various instruments of torture such as the rack.One Schmidt, a German musical instrument maker, residing at Paris, was taken into council; and he, Guillotin, Louis, and Sanson, settled among them the details of the machine.Nay, there was even a fifth adviser. The king, always fond of lock-making and amateur engineering, requested to have the designs shown to him; and he suggested an improvement which was practically adopted.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.TheChronique 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.”Some of the shopkeepers went so far as to display earrings shaped like little guillotines. Two years before the fall of Robespierre, when violence had begun but had not yet assumed its more fearful aspect, aristocratic or royalist families kept a good deal within doors in their Parisian mansions, and sometimes amused themselves in a strangely morbid way.Dolls or puppets were provided with features resembling those of the chief popular leaders. After dinner, during dessert, a small mahogany guillotine was introduced, and wheeled along the table from guest to guest; one by one the puppets were placed under the knife and their heads chopped off.Inside the trunk or body of the puppet was a liquid, vinous and fragrant enough to be tasteful to the palate, but blood-red; this flowed out over the table, and the guests, including ladies, dipped their handkerchiefs into it, and applied it to their lips! In all probability this strange game was played but seldom, but opposition journalists magnified it into a regular habit of “les aristocrats.”They do these things differently in France, even as regards hanging and head chopping, to what we do in England, observes a writer while noticing the well-known work, entitled “The Memoirs of the Sansons.”There the office of public executioner is hereditary, and has been held by one of the same family from 1681 down to 1867.Here, when Mr. Calcraft resigned his post, Mr. Marwood, a person in no way connected or related with his predecessor, succeeded him.In this instance merit alone, and not hereditary right or title, we presume, assured to the present hangman his high office.M. Sanson, whose memoirs are here translated from the French, is the last of his line. As the translator informs us, “he was the lineal descendant of a race of headsmen through whose hands every State victim, as well as every common criminal, had passed during two centuries. They had hung, beheaded, guillotined, quartered, and tortured, from father to son, without interruption.”The grandfather of the author executed King Louis the Sixteenth and his queen, besides a host of nobles and others.He likewise had to carry into execution part of the sentence passed on Madame de la Motte, who had been found guilty of cheating two jewellers out of a valuable necklace on pretence that Queen Marie Antoinette had commissioned Cardinal de Rohan to purchase it for her.She was sentenced to be whipped, branded, and imprisoned for life. M. Sanson thus describes how his grandfather performed the duties imposed on him:—WOMAN-WHIPPING.Madame de la Motte shuddered; she clenched her hands, looked down, and then raising her head, “Very well,” she said. The two assistants, who had at first tried to secure her, came forward, but she motioned them away, and advanced before them.When the procession reached the hall, where a parliamentary committee were sitting, the clerk read out the judgment. At the very first which proclaimed her guilt, the strongest emotion appeared on Madame de la Motte’s face.Her eyes rolled in their sockets; she bit her lips, and the hitherto pretty face now seemed to be the mask of fury.Charles Henri foresaw a storm and approached her; and it was well that he did so, for as the clerk came to the penalties, the unhappy woman’s rage burst out with extraordinary violence.She fell backwards so suddenly that her head must have been fractured on the stones had not my grandfather caught her in his arms. Madame de la Motte’s strength increased as the consciousness of her fate flashed through her mind; and a protracted struggle ensued between her and the assistants who attempted to pinion her.She was at length carried down to the court. The scaffold was erected opposite the gate, which had been left open. But it was six o’clock in the morning, and only a limited number of persons were looking on.She was stretched on the platform, and received twelve stripes. She never ceased shrieking while the punishment was being inflicted. She invoked vengeance on the head of Cardinal de Rohan; and she added that it was her own fault that she had suffered the disgrace which had been inflicted on her, since, had she said but one word, she would have been hanged instead of having been flogged.The second part of the sentence had no doubt escaped her, for when she was seated on the platform she remained motionless, as if completely subdued and powerless. Charles Henri Sanson thought the moment was well chosen for the completion of the penalty.Her dress had been torn, and her shoulders were bare; and he took an iron from the grate and applied it to her skin. Madame de la Motte uttered a wild shriek, and, writhing in the grasp of one of the assistants who were holding her, she bit his hand with such fury that she took a piece of flesh off.She struggled again, and it was with the greatest difficulty that the iron could be applied to the other shoulder. Justice was now satisfied. Madame de la Motte was put into a fly, and taken to the Salpetriere. As she was alighting she tried to run under the wheels, and a few moments afterwards she thrust the sheet of her bed into her throat in a frenzied attempt to choke herself. Her imprisonment lasted for months.AN AMATEUR HEADSMAN.On August 20, 1792, the Tuileries were invaded, and the king incarcerated in the Temple. A revolutionary tribunal was instituted. This tribunal, although it numbered men like Fouquier-Tinville, used the guillotine with comparative moderation. It applied severe laws with severity; but it acted with justice, and respected the forms of law.It had chiefly to deal with common malefactors. From 1771 to 1792 the number of raids on persons and property considerably increased. Paper-money, which was of recent creation, excited the cupidity of forgers. During a period of seven months, fifteen forgers were executed on the Place de Greve. On August 19, 1792, one Collot was condemned to death for forgery, and the guillotine was erected on the usual spot selected for executions.The Place was, as usual, well attended. As the cart, in which were Charles Henri Sanson and the culprit, drove up, a tremendous clamour greeted their appearance, and my grandfather distinguished a cry of “To the Carrousel!” The horse continued to advance, but a man seized the bridle and asked the driver why he did not obey the popular order.Charles Henri Sanson interposed; but the man declared that the will of the Commune was that the guillotine should henceforth be erected opposite the palace of the late king, and that he must immediately transfer his tools there. My grandfather replied that his duty was to carry out the orders which were transmitted to him, and not to meet the wishes of the magistrates before they were expressed. But the clamour became more vociferous, and the horse’s head was turned in the direction of the Tuileries.Charles Henri Sanson’s position was very perplexing.He asked, and at length obtained, leave to drive up to the Hotel de Ville to ask for instructions. After some hesitation the Procureur of the Commune authorised my grandfather to act according to the wishes of the mob.The scaffold was taken down and transferred to the Place du Carrousel; and the cart repaired thither, escorted by the crowd. But a considerable time elapsed before the guillotine could be erected again; and the culprit, who had hitherto been calm, began to struggle violently.As the carpenters had gone away the people helped my grandfather to reconstruct the instrument of death. This reconstruction, however, progressed so slowly that night came on before it was finished, and my grandfather, apprehending desperate resistance on the part of the doomed man, requested some of those who worked around him to go to the Commune and ask for an adjournment of the execution.The request was received with jeers of anger and derision, and the public indignation became ominously threatening.A beardless young man, who wore the red cap, came forward, shrieking that my grandfather was a traitor, and that he should taste of the guillotine himself unless he “operated” without more ado. Charles Henri retorted with some warmth that he could not execute the culprit without special assistance.“Your assistants are drunk?” exclaimed the young man. “You can find as much help as you require here. The blood of aristocrats cement the happiness of the nation, and there is not one man in the crowd who is not ready to lend you a hand.”A general cry of assent followed these words; but the circle around the scaffold became wider, and it appeared obvious that few were prepared to stand by their word. My grandfather perceiving this, had hastened to prevent the first speaker from retreating, by accepting his offer.The culprit was led to the steps of the scaffold, which he refused to mount, and Charles Henri was obliged to take him in his arms and carry him up the platform. When the unfortunate man saw the dark outline of the machine, his resistance became most desperate, and he shrieked for mercy. The crowd was now silent. The improvised executioner did not budge, but he was very pale.At last, after a final struggle, the culprit was strapped to the plank, but his contortions were so violent that an assistant had to sit upon him.Charles Henri Sanson now told the young man that he could not furnish a better proof of his patriotism than by taking a leading part in the execution; and he put in his hand the rope which communicated with the knife.At his bidding the young man gave a tug; the knife fell, and the head rolled in the basket. This was not all; it was customary to show the head to the multitude after the decapitation, and loud cries reminded my grandfather of the custom. He explained to the young man what he was to do, at the same time proposing himself to do the horrible duty.But his substitute refused; he took the head by the hair, and advanced to the edge of the scaffold; but as he was raising his arm to show the bloody trophy, he staggered and fell back. Charles Henri Sanson came to his assistance, thinking that he was fainting, but he discovered that he was dead! Violent emotion had brought on an apoplectic fit, which killed him instantaneously.Notwithstanding all that had been said upon the efficacy of the guillotine, we much question its being a more merciful mode of death than Mr. Marwood’s “long drop,” as it is termed, as in many cases death has taken place instantaneously, and as a sequel to this chapter we subjoin a correct account of the leading phrenological characteristics of the present public executioner.Mr. Max Greger, our local phrenologist, whose description of the “casts” of the convicts Wardlaw and Docherty was contributed at the time of the executions, has just added the following analysis of the phrenological characteristics of the “dread finisher of the law”:—General size of head—very large.Temperament—fibrous-nervous.Posterior lobe of the brain—small.Anterior lobe of the brain—rather large.Portion of the brain above Cautiousness—moderate.Portion of the brain above Causality—moderate.Circumference at the base—23¾ inches.He is only 5ft.5in.in height; as to age, he will be on the shady side of fifty; of remarkable muscular power, which is lost sight of in the face, the narrowness of which, compared with the enormous width of head, is strikingly peculiar—the disproportionate size of the latter giving a drooping posture to the body, and seemingly indicating that Nature had not intended this personage to hold up his head in society.Though fully developed in the region of the reflective powers, those faculties which judge of the relative size, shape, and design of things, and which constitute the understanding proper, are conspicuous by their absence—accounted for in him by want of education and sedentary nature of previous calling (shoemaker). There is also a decided want of balancing power, which, taken in conjunction with his possession of large imaginative powers, and stimulated by his active temperament, constitute him an enthusiast, and consequently he is naturally prone to an erratic course of life, and to be in some respects impracticable and visionary.His large acquisitiveness denotes an inordinate desire to acquire wealth, while his enormous caution will assist in holding fast the same. His large reflective faculties will confer considerable penetration and perception of character and events. His sense of the ludicrous, with humour and mimicry, is large.He, however, must be considered a somewhat grim joker, and he is not at all likely to desire to be made the subject of his own fun. He is ambitious of being thought knowing and deep. He has an inordinate amount of vanity and self-conceit—must be foremost in his business: “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”Being highly sensitive to praise or the admiration of his fellow-men (which, however, he seldom gets), he is likely to consider the execution of Wainwright—a criminal of the first degree—as bringing both himself and his office still more prominently before the public; but this weakness, which is manifested in the manner in which he gloats over themodus operandiof his profession, may in time bring his office more and more into contempt, and thus defeat the very object he is anxious to attain.From the development we find he is not wanting in energy, with considerable shrewdness and tact, and his mechanical and constructive talents would have enabled him to succeed in life either as a manufacturer, a machinist, or an agriculturist.MARWOOD’S CARD.The following is a copy of Mr. Marwood’s professional card, in the last line of which there will be found a touch of grim—and, doubtless, unconscious—humour:—WILLIAM MARWOOD,EXECUTIONER,CHURCH LANE,HORNCASTLE,Lincolnshire, England.ALL ORDERS PROMPTLY EXECUTED.
In this chapter we propose giving a short review of the methods by which obnoxious criminals have been, at various times, among various peoples, invited to “shuffle off this mortal coil.”
Capital punishment, like Cleopatra’s charms, has been of “infinite variety”—the variety, however, as a rule, being simply among the most horrible possible methods. No records remain to tell how the contemporaries of the Saurians and the Megatherium, the ingenious dwellers in caves, and warriors of the flint age, disposed of their malefactors, but the fullest accounts have been preserved of the proceedings of our more modern ancestors, since the days of Adam, in the way of executions.
The Jews, who led the bead-roll of antique nations, appear to have usually stoned the criminals of their own race—a democratic sort of penalty, where every good citizen had a finger in the pie, and hurled his righteous rock, and even the little Hebrew boys could enjoy the fun of the stoner. To the stoned it must have been something of a lingering torture, requiring much patience to bear. For their enemies they reserved the sharper practice of hewing them in pieces, or they burned them alive, or turned them to agricultural account, and fertilised the sites of their smoking cities by harrowing them in with considerable vehemence.
The Chinese, another ancient and highly cultured race, have been similarly merciless. It is singular how little difference there has been in this respect of ingenious cruelty between the most cultivated peoples and the wildest savages.
Decapitation is the mildest of Chinese extreme penalties, and is usually performed with much skill and sang-froid by means of a sword, the criminal, male and female, taking the matter most philosophically, and making no indecorous remonstrances at their summary taking off.
There is a tariff, too, for substitutes—a plan which might commend itself to our wealthier homicides. But our Celestial neighbours across the Pacific prefer killing the doomed by not allowing them to sleep, or starving them to death in cages or straightened limits, in which they are exhibited during the process of skeleton-formation, in peripatetic rambles on the shoulders of the local deputy sheriffs.
And chopping them deliberately into fragments, at intervals of an hour or so, is much to their taste. There is a cage, part of the spolia opima of the first Chinese war, among the archives of the Royal Artillery, at Madras, India, in which they carried about Colonel Rowlandson, and the LondonTimeshad a liberal annual payment on its pension list for the family of Mr. Bowles, a special correspondent, similarly disposed of just before the last Chinese war.
The torturing propensities of the pleasing red man, whom Cooper immortalised, and Custer has occasionally assisted to the happy hunting grounds, are too well known to require much notice.
The use of fire is a prominent feature in their social circles, complicated with the facetious tomahawk and the insinuating scalping-knife. But we know the Modocs, the Sioux, and others like them, only too well.
The Assyrians, Medes and Persians, ancient Egyptians, and other Orientals seemed to have employed similar agencies to their Israelitish neighbours for lopping off the rotten branches of their family trees.
The processes are faithfully depicted and chiselled on the walls of Thebes, Persepolis, and Nineveh.
The Greeks were somewhat tender-hearted in some cases; for instance, they allowed Socrates to poison himself comfortably among his friends.
They objected to parricides, however, and for them reserved a punishment adopted from the Egyptians, like their alphabet, and naturalised at a later date by the Romans. They confined the too impetuous slayer of his father in a bag with a snake, a monkey, and a cat, to keep him company, and then gently dropped the congenial party into the sea.
The Romans seem first to have hit on the idea of crucifixion, a singularly torturing refinement of internal, external, and mental pain.
It was esteemed an ignoble death, and must have been anguish to a sensitive mind; the cruel nails rending the flesh, barely supporting the weight of the writhing body, must have been severe, while the dreadful thirst of the fevered victim must have been a culminating horror.
The State criminals sometimes came floating over the Tarpeian rock, and smashed into pulp below.
This has been emulated by Theodore of Abyssinia, at his mountain fastness of Magdala, and by Tippoo Sahib at the Droorg, one of the peaks of the Neilgherry mountains in Southern India, where is a convenient precipice over 1000 feet clear of sheer natural wall.
The Roman taste for the joys of the circus stimulated their imagination to devise novel torment, and criminals or Christians, or simply prisoners of war, were exposed to combat wild beasts, or each other, to “grace a Roman holiday.”
They sometimes, however, executed distinguished folks in polite fashion, merely sending a polite message for them to “stand not on the order of their going, but go” out of the world at their earliest convenience.
A good deal of bleeding to death in warm baths and sudden insertion of the “bare bodkin” resulted.
The chivalric Japanese custom of harikari is a similar concession to the conventionalities of society, and is also eminently useful as a duelling agent necessitating the absolute retirement of both disturbers of the peace and their friends’ serenity.
It is hardly necessary to dilate on the ceremonious surroundings of these interesting occasions, when the accomplished gentleman who has offended the laws, or has been offended by a friend, calls his relatives and acquaintances together and, supported by a second, a veteran in the punctilio of the local code of honour, makes his little speech, drinks his farewell toast, and then proceeds to carve himself in the most approved style, proudly feeling as he dies that he has done his duty to his country, his family, and the world at large, and that the gentleman he had the difficulty with cannot survive him.
The Druids, like the Huns, the Aztecs, and the Ashantees and Dahomeyans in the present day, were rather sanguinary.
Funerals were fittingly honoured by the sacrifice of a proportionate number of slaves and criminals, to form a retinue for the worthy departed in the world of spirits. The Druids usually burned a few hundreds in a great wicker image of the human figure.
It is recorded that many thousands of men, women, and children, with horses, jewels, arms, and domestic necessaries, were sacrificed when Attila, “the Scourge of God,” died, and were buried with him in the bed of a river, diverted temporarily from its course for the purpose, and similar formalities are observed in the African kingdoms mentioned, on any one event, but repeated annually as a “custom,” to keep the manes of the deceased in good humour by the polite remembrance implied by the observance.
But Christian Europe, in the Dark Ages, could vie with any race or century in the ingenuity and refined cruelty of capital punishment.
The preliminary tortures of the rack, the boots, the thumb-screws, the strappado, must have tended to make the recipient of these attentions desirous of death.
The noble Barons who harried each other, and revolted at brief intervals throughout their tumultous lives, pressed air, earth, fire, and water into their service for the purpose of execution.
Men were judicially pressed to death as late as the Titus Oates conspiracy, in the reign of Charles II. They were hanged in chains to starve; they were burned alive, half hanged, mutilated, and then burned; they were scorched with hot irons, their eyes seared out, their limbs plunged into molten lead or tar; they were spitted like cockchafers on stakes, they were drowned with unmerciful rapidity, or chained to stakes at low water to be more slowly suffocated by the rising tide; they were broken on the wheel, or torn apart by wild horses, while the axe for the noble kept up a perpetual refrain like the ticking of a clock.
The Inquisition, in the garb and under the name of religion, invented and applied more exquisite barbarities. To drive a man mad first and into a grave afterwards by the incessant trickling of a single drop of water was a torment worthy of Satan himself.
The thousands burned to death in Spain, France, England, China, India, Germany, attest the gusto with which the reverend brethren of the Holy Office snuffed in the flavour of roasting humanity, and were enraptured with the shrieks of the martyrs, as now-a-days we are when Capoul or Tamberlik rouses our enthusiasm with the ringing C in alt.
In those good old days men were slain for sneezing in improper places, for constructive disrespect, or for stealing a loaf, and the severity remained till within comparatively recent times.
Some of the middle-age methods still survive. In Naples, three years ago, of three women condemned for infanticide two were beheaded; the third, the principal culprit, was mazzolated, or knocked on the head with a trace, like an ox, her abdomen then slashed open, while the executioner executed a “pas de fascination” on the quivering trunk, spurting the blood out like a fountain.
In Spain, Spanish colonies, and the sister Republics who once owed allegiance to that haughty country, malefactors are garrotted, or strangled in an armchair with a steel cravat, which is jammed to the choking point by the dexterous twisting of a screw behind.
They also shoot considerably, evincing a peculiar fondness for shooting people in the back with a remarkably bad aim, and then finishing them with a shot in the ear at close quarters, or a dagger under the fifth rib.
It was in this way they disposed of William Walker, “the grey-eyed man of destiny,” at Truxillo, in 1860. The French weakness for the guillotine, an aggravated edition of the domestic bread or meat chopper, has disposed of many multitudes of kings, queens, nobles, ragamuffins, petroleuses, and others, with business-like rapidity and cleanliness.
The baskets, sawdust, and brightly-polished cheese-knife employed are familiar, and almost inviting in comparison with the gallows adhered to by Anglo-Saxons.
Hanging nowadays seems a “lost art.” The Americans have improved the machinery with patent drops and weights warranted to jerk up the hanged with satisfactory promptitude.
But the education of the hangman has been sadly neglected. The knot is rarely tied with scientific accuracy, or the rope in as good condition as it might be.
The consequence is, but a small proportion of the sufferers enjoy the sudden death they would prefer, if they must die in so hasty a manner, and instead of their necks being broken they are slowly strangled, if the rope does not break and necessitate a repetition of the performance.
Physicians and anatomists say this slow strangulation must be exquisitely painful.
Humanitarians have accordingly suggested “painless extinction.” Chloroform applied long enough would soothe the slumberer to wake no more here below, with absolutely no pain.
An overdose of laudanum might be an improvement, as bestowing positive pleasure before he lapsed into unconsciousness.
Both these and other plans are warmly recommended, and discussed with some heat by their respective advocates. Some gentlemen have even hinted at the possibility of doing good at the same time by dissecting the brain of the living but unconscious subject, during the calm retreat from the sins and follies of his life.
Another method of painless extinction is by blowing the patient from a gun. This was invented by the Mahommedans of India, was employed by the British during the mutiny of 1857, and is still in favour with the Ameer of Afghanistan.
It has one great advantage as a preventive of crime in its application to Hindoos, as they believe, when a man’s body is split into filaments, as it must be by such a process, that his chances of future existence are very slim.
Their ideas of resurrection are peculiar and Pythagorean, but they object to this total obliteration, and accordingly dread the blowing-from-gun procedure above all other penalties. Physically, it cannot hurt, however.
The conclusion and distribution of the fragments are so sudden and complete that pain must be entirely wanting as an element. Destroying a hanged Brahmin’s body with quicklime is also objectionable to Hindoos, on account of similar doubts as to his future rehabilitation.
A Hindoo punishment, of gradually crushing a criminal under the foot of a trained elephant, is repulsive, and is discountenanced by the British Government. Any rajah who reverts to these ancestral amusements renders his tenure on the throne insecure. It has not been practised for some years.
The guillotine, of which such horrible use was made in the past French Revolution, has been said to be the most merciful mode of putting malefactors to death, but this is by no means certain.
Dr. Tuc and some German physicians and surgeons after him held that there does indubitably remain in the brain of a decapitated head some degree (un reste) of thought, and in the nerves something of sensibility, and the case of Mademoiselle Corday was alleged as proving that doctrine.
We abstain from any details of the thousands of murders by the guillotine at this time. One fact will enable our readers to understand something of its horrors.
It was proved on the trial of Fouquier Tinville that 160 persons of all ages and ranks, and of both sexes, were tried and executed on a charge of conspiracy, not merely false but absurd, visionary, and impossible—forty-five of these persons, who were utterly unknown to each other, were tried and condemned within twenty minutes, and executed on the same evening in almost as short a space. These executions were for many months the amusement—the spectacle of the people—we wish we could say the populace of Paris. Chairs were stationed round the instrument of death, where women, in a station of life to be able to pay for that amusement, used to have seats, and sit, and chat, and work, while waiting for the tragedy, which they had looked at as a farce. We find in theRevue Retrospectivea curious letter incidentally descriptive of this elegant scene of Parisian amusement.
“The Procureur-Général Rœderer to Citizen Guidon.
“13th May, 1793.
“I enclose, Citizen, the copy of a letter from Citizen Chaumette, solicitor to the Commune of Paris, by which you will perceive that complaints are made that, after these public executions, the blood of the criminals remains in pools upon the place, and that dogs come to drink it, and that crowds of men feed their eyes with this spectacle, which naturally instigates their hearts to ferocity and blood.
“I request you, therefore, to take the earliest and most convenient measures to remove from the eyes of men a sight so afflicting to humanity.”
Our readers will observe the tender regret—not that all this blood was shed, but that it was not wiped up; and they will be startled when they recollect that at the date of this letter not above a dozen persons had been yet executed there, but that within one year the blood of a thousand victims had saturated the same small spot of ground.
In one of the foolish modern-antique processions of the Convention, the whole cortège was delayed and thrown into confusion because the cattle that were drawing some of their theatrical machines could neither be induced nor forced to traverse this blood-tainted place.
This Chaumette was one of the most impious and sanguinary of the whole tribe, and we could almost believe that he envied the dogs the blood they drank. He it was that bullied the wretched idiot Gobel, revolutionary Archbishop of Paris, to come to the bar of the Convention to abjure Christianity, and proclaim himself an impostor, at the head of a procession in which asses were insultingly decorated with the sacred emblems of religion.
Chaumette himself it was who introduced to the Convention a prostitute in the character of the Goddess of Reason. Robespierre sent this whole clique to the guillotine, and on the 13th of April, 1794, Chaumette’s own blood flowed to increase the horrors of which he had complained.
The guillotine remained in permanence in the Place de la Révolution till the 8th of June, 1794, when the inhabitants of the streets through which the batches (“fournées”), as they were called, of sufferers used to pass, became at last tired of the agreeable sight, and solicited its removal.
Robespierre seems at this time to have adopted a new policy, to have formed some design of founding a dictatorial authority in his own person on the basis of religion and morals.
On the 7th June he made his famous report acknowledging “l’Etre Suprême,” and appointed the 20th June for the greatfêtein the gardens of the Tuileries, which was to celebrate this recognition.
Of this ceremony Robespierre was to be the “Pontifex Maximus,” and it can hardly be doubted that it was to remove the odious machines from the immediate scene of his glorification that it was—the day after the decree and ten days before the celebration—removed to the PlaceSt.Antoine, in front of the ruins of the Bastile; but that a day might not be lost, it was removed on a Decade, the republican Sabbath.
No.100.
In the forty-nine days in which it is said to have stood at theBarrière du Trôneit despatched 1270 persons of both sexes, and of all ages and ranks, and it became necessary to build a kind of sanguiduct, to carry off the streams of blood; and on the very last day, when the tyrant had already fallen, and that the smallest interruption would have sufficed to have stopped the fatal procession, forty-nine persons passed almost unguarded through the stupified streets to the place of execution.
And here we have the last occasion to mention Sanson; and it is to his credit, as indeed all the personal details related of him seem to be. On the 9th Thermidor there was, about half-past three in the afternoon, just as this last batch of victims was about to leave the Conciergerie, a considerable commotion in the town, caused by the revolt against Robespierre.
At that moment Fouquier, on his way to dine with a neighbour, passed through the court where the prisoners were ascending the fatal carts. Sanson, whose duty it was to conduct the prisoners to execution, ventured to stop the Public Accuser, to represent to him that there were some rumours of a commotion, and to suggest whether it would not be prudent to postpone the execution till at least the next morning.
Fouquier roughly replied that the law must take its course. He went to dinner, and the forty-nine victims went to the scaffold, whither in due time he followed them.
After the accession of Louis Philippe, for whom the guillotine must have been an object of the most painful contemplation, sentences of death were also very rare, and certainly never executed where there was any possible room for mercy.
The executions, too, when forced upon him, took place at early hours, and in remote and uncertain places; and every humane art was used to cover the operations of the fatal instrument with a modest veil, not only from motives of general decency and humanity, but also, no doubt, from national pride and personal sensibility.
What Frenchman would not wish that the name and memory of the guillotine could be blotted from the history of mankind?
“The wordGuillotine,” says the author ofLes Festes de l’Anarchie, “should be effaced from the language.” But the revolutionary horrors which France is naturally so anxious to forget, it the more behoves us and the rest of Europe to remember and meditate.
Such massacres as we have been describing will probably never be repeated: they will, no doubt, stand unparalleled in the future, as they do in the former annals of the world; but they should never be forgotten as an example of the incalculable excesses of popular insanity.
The invention of this instrument of death (the guillotine) is thus described by a graphic writer:—Joseph Ignace Guillotin lived to deplore his own ingenuity in inventing or suggesting a machine which besides being effective for the immediate purpose intended, was the result of a really kind feeling. The stern irony of fate occasionally rewards inventors in this way.
Born in 1738, Guillotin received a medical training; he became a physician of much repute, and was chosen professor in one of the French universities. In 1789, when France was beginning to feel the first throes of the Revolution, Guillotin was elected member of the National Assembly, and took his seat among the Liberals or Reformers.
He proposed a resolution declaratory that capital punishment ought to bear no relation to the rank of the culprit; that when a criminal is condemned to death, for any crime whatever, the mode of execution should be the same whether he were peer or peasant.
Until then, nobles and privileged persons, when condemned to death, had the honour of being decapitated, either by the axe or by the sword; whereas the common people were left to the tender mercies of a hempen rope. Dr. Guillotin at the same time proposed a second resolution.
He wished to save the unhappy being from the additional punishment existing from the uncertainty, nervousness, or clumsiness of the executioner, whether axeman or swordsman.
He cited historical incidents in which two, three, or even more cuts were given, by the axe or the sword, before the head of the miserable sufferer was finally severed from the body. He proposed to do away alike with the gibbet, the sword, and the axe, and to substitute a decapitating machine, in which a sharp, heavy knife should descend on the neck of the condemned.
Feeling assured that bodily pain could not be felt during this brief operation, he was quite carried away by his subject, and said, enthusiastically, “I could cut off your head with my machine in the twinkling of an eye, without your suffering the smallest pain!”
Poor Dr. Guillotin had to bear the shafts of ridicule, always a terrible weapon to a Frenchman. Many of the members of the Assembly smiled at his ardent words; and the Royalists out of doors made rare fun of him. One of their journals gave a song, “On the inimitable machine of Dr. Guillotin for chopping off heads called after his name the Guillotine.”
Poor Dr. Guillotin had to bear the shafts of ridicule, always a terrible weapon to a Frenchman. Many of the members of the Assembly smiled at his ardent words; and the Royalists out of doors made rare fun of him. One of their journals gave a song, “On the inimitable machine of Dr. Guillotin for chopping off heads called after his name.”
This name, started in this bantering way, has clung to the machine from that day till now. The doctor protested against the designation, but in vain. He did not even invent the machine; he merely pointed out that the chopping action could easily be produced by a sharp, heavy blade descending from an upright frame.
The National Assembly, on receiving Dr. Guillotin’s two propositions, at once adopted the first of them, by decreeing equality of punishment for all ranks of society; but left the mode of execution for further consideration. It was not till nearly two years afterwards, that, on the motion of MM. Lepelletier and Saint Fargeon, a decree was issued, declaring that the mode of capital punishment should be by decapitation. Even then the merits and demerits of the axe, the sword, and the falling knife were left in abeyance. In March, 1792, the Assembly sought the advice of Dr. Antoine Louis, a celebrated surgeon, and secretary of the Paris College of Surgeons.
He explained, scientifically, how far the various decapitating instruments acted like knives, and how far like scissors; and expressed himself decidedly in favour of a chopping machine.
He showed that the idea of such a machine was by no means a new one. An Italian book by Achille Bocchi, dated 1555, gives an engraving of an Italian nobleman being beheaded; a heavy blade, suspended by cords from a crossbar at the top of a frame, is represented as falling on the neck of the victim.
In 1632 some such apparatus was employed in Languedoc, for decapitating Duc Henry de Montmorenci. It was also ascertained that Scotland in the North, and Persia in the East, had employed machines bearing a resemblance to this.
Among the strange scenes of the French revolutionary days, not the least strange was that of the National Assembly listening gravely to the details given on these matters.
Dr. Louis conferred with Dr. Guillotin, and also with the famous executioner Sanson. Sanson specially urged that, if all executions henceforth were to be by beheading, a machine would be greatly needed, as he distrusted his own power of using the sword or the axe so frequently and so accurately as would be necessary.
After hearing all the explanations and suggestions, the Assembly passed a decree for the use of a decapitating machine, in substitution of the halter, the axe, the sword, and the various instruments of torture such as the rack.
One Schmidt, a German musical instrument maker, residing at Paris, was taken into council; and he, Guillotin, Louis, and Sanson, settled among them the details of the machine.
Nay, there was even a fifth adviser. The king, always fond of lock-making and amateur engineering, requested to have the designs shown to him; and he suggested an improvement which was practically adopted.
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.
TheChronique 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.”
Some of the shopkeepers went so far as to display earrings shaped like little guillotines. Two years before the fall of Robespierre, when violence had begun but had not yet assumed its more fearful aspect, aristocratic or royalist families kept a good deal within doors in their Parisian mansions, and sometimes amused themselves in a strangely morbid way.
Dolls or puppets were provided with features resembling those of the chief popular leaders. After dinner, during dessert, a small mahogany guillotine was introduced, and wheeled along the table from guest to guest; one by one the puppets were placed under the knife and their heads chopped off.
Inside the trunk or body of the puppet was a liquid, vinous and fragrant enough to be tasteful to the palate, but blood-red; this flowed out over the table, and the guests, including ladies, dipped their handkerchiefs into it, and applied it to their lips! In all probability this strange game was played but seldom, but opposition journalists magnified it into a regular habit of “les aristocrats.”
They do these things differently in France, even as regards hanging and head chopping, to what we do in England, observes a writer while noticing the well-known work, entitled “The Memoirs of the Sansons.”
There the office of public executioner is hereditary, and has been held by one of the same family from 1681 down to 1867.
Here, when Mr. Calcraft resigned his post, Mr. Marwood, a person in no way connected or related with his predecessor, succeeded him.
In this instance merit alone, and not hereditary right or title, we presume, assured to the present hangman his high office.
M. Sanson, whose memoirs are here translated from the French, is the last of his line. As the translator informs us, “he was the lineal descendant of a race of headsmen through whose hands every State victim, as well as every common criminal, had passed during two centuries. They had hung, beheaded, guillotined, quartered, and tortured, from father to son, without interruption.”
The grandfather of the author executed King Louis the Sixteenth and his queen, besides a host of nobles and others.
He likewise had to carry into execution part of the sentence passed on Madame de la Motte, who had been found guilty of cheating two jewellers out of a valuable necklace on pretence that Queen Marie Antoinette had commissioned Cardinal de Rohan to purchase it for her.
She was sentenced to be whipped, branded, and imprisoned for life. M. Sanson thus describes how his grandfather performed the duties imposed on him:—
WOMAN-WHIPPING.
Madame de la Motte shuddered; she clenched her hands, looked down, and then raising her head, “Very well,” she said. The two assistants, who had at first tried to secure her, came forward, but she motioned them away, and advanced before them.
When the procession reached the hall, where a parliamentary committee were sitting, the clerk read out the judgment. At the very first which proclaimed her guilt, the strongest emotion appeared on Madame de la Motte’s face.
Her eyes rolled in their sockets; she bit her lips, and the hitherto pretty face now seemed to be the mask of fury.
Charles Henri foresaw a storm and approached her; and it was well that he did so, for as the clerk came to the penalties, the unhappy woman’s rage burst out with extraordinary violence.
She fell backwards so suddenly that her head must have been fractured on the stones had not my grandfather caught her in his arms. Madame de la Motte’s strength increased as the consciousness of her fate flashed through her mind; and a protracted struggle ensued between her and the assistants who attempted to pinion her.
She was at length carried down to the court. The scaffold was erected opposite the gate, which had been left open. But it was six o’clock in the morning, and only a limited number of persons were looking on.
She was stretched on the platform, and received twelve stripes. She never ceased shrieking while the punishment was being inflicted. She invoked vengeance on the head of Cardinal de Rohan; and she added that it was her own fault that she had suffered the disgrace which had been inflicted on her, since, had she said but one word, she would have been hanged instead of having been flogged.
The second part of the sentence had no doubt escaped her, for when she was seated on the platform she remained motionless, as if completely subdued and powerless. Charles Henri Sanson thought the moment was well chosen for the completion of the penalty.
Her dress had been torn, and her shoulders were bare; and he took an iron from the grate and applied it to her skin. Madame de la Motte uttered a wild shriek, and, writhing in the grasp of one of the assistants who were holding her, she bit his hand with such fury that she took a piece of flesh off.
She struggled again, and it was with the greatest difficulty that the iron could be applied to the other shoulder. Justice was now satisfied. Madame de la Motte was put into a fly, and taken to the Salpetriere. As she was alighting she tried to run under the wheels, and a few moments afterwards she thrust the sheet of her bed into her throat in a frenzied attempt to choke herself. Her imprisonment lasted for months.
AN AMATEUR HEADSMAN.
On August 20, 1792, the Tuileries were invaded, and the king incarcerated in the Temple. A revolutionary tribunal was instituted. This tribunal, although it numbered men like Fouquier-Tinville, used the guillotine with comparative moderation. It applied severe laws with severity; but it acted with justice, and respected the forms of law.
It had chiefly to deal with common malefactors. From 1771 to 1792 the number of raids on persons and property considerably increased. Paper-money, which was of recent creation, excited the cupidity of forgers. During a period of seven months, fifteen forgers were executed on the Place de Greve. On August 19, 1792, one Collot was condemned to death for forgery, and the guillotine was erected on the usual spot selected for executions.
The Place was, as usual, well attended. As the cart, in which were Charles Henri Sanson and the culprit, drove up, a tremendous clamour greeted their appearance, and my grandfather distinguished a cry of “To the Carrousel!” The horse continued to advance, but a man seized the bridle and asked the driver why he did not obey the popular order.
Charles Henri Sanson interposed; but the man declared that the will of the Commune was that the guillotine should henceforth be erected opposite the palace of the late king, and that he must immediately transfer his tools there. My grandfather replied that his duty was to carry out the orders which were transmitted to him, and not to meet the wishes of the magistrates before they were expressed. But the clamour became more vociferous, and the horse’s head was turned in the direction of the Tuileries.
Charles Henri Sanson’s position was very perplexing.
He asked, and at length obtained, leave to drive up to the Hotel de Ville to ask for instructions. After some hesitation the Procureur of the Commune authorised my grandfather to act according to the wishes of the mob.
The scaffold was taken down and transferred to the Place du Carrousel; and the cart repaired thither, escorted by the crowd. But a considerable time elapsed before the guillotine could be erected again; and the culprit, who had hitherto been calm, began to struggle violently.
As the carpenters had gone away the people helped my grandfather to reconstruct the instrument of death. This reconstruction, however, progressed so slowly that night came on before it was finished, and my grandfather, apprehending desperate resistance on the part of the doomed man, requested some of those who worked around him to go to the Commune and ask for an adjournment of the execution.
The request was received with jeers of anger and derision, and the public indignation became ominously threatening.
A beardless young man, who wore the red cap, came forward, shrieking that my grandfather was a traitor, and that he should taste of the guillotine himself unless he “operated” without more ado. Charles Henri retorted with some warmth that he could not execute the culprit without special assistance.
“Your assistants are drunk?” exclaimed the young man. “You can find as much help as you require here. The blood of aristocrats cement the happiness of the nation, and there is not one man in the crowd who is not ready to lend you a hand.”
A general cry of assent followed these words; but the circle around the scaffold became wider, and it appeared obvious that few were prepared to stand by their word. My grandfather perceiving this, had hastened to prevent the first speaker from retreating, by accepting his offer.
The culprit was led to the steps of the scaffold, which he refused to mount, and Charles Henri was obliged to take him in his arms and carry him up the platform. When the unfortunate man saw the dark outline of the machine, his resistance became most desperate, and he shrieked for mercy. The crowd was now silent. The improvised executioner did not budge, but he was very pale.
At last, after a final struggle, the culprit was strapped to the plank, but his contortions were so violent that an assistant had to sit upon him.
Charles Henri Sanson now told the young man that he could not furnish a better proof of his patriotism than by taking a leading part in the execution; and he put in his hand the rope which communicated with the knife.
At his bidding the young man gave a tug; the knife fell, and the head rolled in the basket. This was not all; it was customary to show the head to the multitude after the decapitation, and loud cries reminded my grandfather of the custom. He explained to the young man what he was to do, at the same time proposing himself to do the horrible duty.
But his substitute refused; he took the head by the hair, and advanced to the edge of the scaffold; but as he was raising his arm to show the bloody trophy, he staggered and fell back. Charles Henri Sanson came to his assistance, thinking that he was fainting, but he discovered that he was dead! Violent emotion had brought on an apoplectic fit, which killed him instantaneously.
Notwithstanding all that had been said upon the efficacy of the guillotine, we much question its being a more merciful mode of death than Mr. Marwood’s “long drop,” as it is termed, as in many cases death has taken place instantaneously, and as a sequel to this chapter we subjoin a correct account of the leading phrenological characteristics of the present public executioner.
Mr. Max Greger, our local phrenologist, whose description of the “casts” of the convicts Wardlaw and Docherty was contributed at the time of the executions, has just added the following analysis of the phrenological characteristics of the “dread finisher of the law”:—
General size of head—very large.Temperament—fibrous-nervous.Posterior lobe of the brain—small.Anterior lobe of the brain—rather large.Portion of the brain above Cautiousness—moderate.Portion of the brain above Causality—moderate.Circumference at the base—23¾ inches.
He is only 5ft.5in.in height; as to age, he will be on the shady side of fifty; of remarkable muscular power, which is lost sight of in the face, the narrowness of which, compared with the enormous width of head, is strikingly peculiar—the disproportionate size of the latter giving a drooping posture to the body, and seemingly indicating that Nature had not intended this personage to hold up his head in society.
Though fully developed in the region of the reflective powers, those faculties which judge of the relative size, shape, and design of things, and which constitute the understanding proper, are conspicuous by their absence—accounted for in him by want of education and sedentary nature of previous calling (shoemaker). There is also a decided want of balancing power, which, taken in conjunction with his possession of large imaginative powers, and stimulated by his active temperament, constitute him an enthusiast, and consequently he is naturally prone to an erratic course of life, and to be in some respects impracticable and visionary.
His large acquisitiveness denotes an inordinate desire to acquire wealth, while his enormous caution will assist in holding fast the same. His large reflective faculties will confer considerable penetration and perception of character and events. His sense of the ludicrous, with humour and mimicry, is large.
He, however, must be considered a somewhat grim joker, and he is not at all likely to desire to be made the subject of his own fun. He is ambitious of being thought knowing and deep. He has an inordinate amount of vanity and self-conceit—must be foremost in his business: “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
Being highly sensitive to praise or the admiration of his fellow-men (which, however, he seldom gets), he is likely to consider the execution of Wainwright—a criminal of the first degree—as bringing both himself and his office still more prominently before the public; but this weakness, which is manifested in the manner in which he gloats over themodus operandiof his profession, may in time bring his office more and more into contempt, and thus defeat the very object he is anxious to attain.
From the development we find he is not wanting in energy, with considerable shrewdness and tact, and his mechanical and constructive talents would have enabled him to succeed in life either as a manufacturer, a machinist, or an agriculturist.
MARWOOD’S CARD.
The following is a copy of Mr. Marwood’s professional card, in the last line of which there will be found a touch of grim—and, doubtless, unconscious—humour:—
WILLIAM MARWOOD,EXECUTIONER,CHURCH LANE,HORNCASTLE,Lincolnshire, England.ALL ORDERS PROMPTLY EXECUTED.
WILLIAM MARWOOD,
EXECUTIONER,
CHURCH LANE,
HORNCASTLE,
Lincolnshire, England.
ALL ORDERS PROMPTLY EXECUTED.