French guillotine
Guillotine beheading is the only legal means of execution in France. When the guillotine is mentioned, it is often associated with the French Revolution. At the time, a physician named Joseph Inhas Guiyottan first proposed the use of it, which could quickly carry out the death penalty to alleviate suffering. At that time, the guillotine was not a cruelty, but a progress.
In 1792, a new guillotine, designed by Giyottan, was officially introduced and named after his last name. In April of the same year, the guillotine carried out its first execution, and the tortured person was a robber. It is extremely ironic that Louis XVI, the French king who personally intervened in the work of the guillotine, was later pushed to the guillotine on the charge of collaborating with the enemy and treason. In October of the same year, his queen Marie Antoinette was also executed on the guillotine. The famous leaders of the Jacobin faction during the French Revolution, such as Robespierre and Danton, were also put on the guillotine due to harsh political struggles.
According to statistics, the guillotine lasted about 200 years from its birth to its "glorious retirement", and was used about 4,600 times in total. In 1981, French President Mitterrand announced the abolition of the death penalty, and the guillotine came to an end, and these bloody guillotines withdrew from the stage of history.
The last prisoner to be publicly executed by the guillotine
From the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Executions of prisoners in France were usually carried out using guillotines. Because it happened to be at that bloody scene, it caused a kind of shock to the onlookers. Moreover, under the guillotine, there was no distinction between the commoners and nobles, and everyone was equal. However, the last time France used the guillotine for execution was in 1939, and the cessation of public executions was also inextricably linked to this time.
After the execution of Eugen Weidmann, a convict of six murders, on the guillotine in June 1939, the French government decided that the reaction from the masses was too strong and banned public executions instead in a Paris prison. Weidmann's execution was made into a documentary and is still circulating on the Internet.
Born in Frankfurt, Eugen Weidmann was born in Frankfurt and was arguably a natural antisocial personality. As a teenager, he was placed in juvenile detention for crimes. As an adult, he lived in Canada and Germany, and was both imprisoned for theft. In 1937, Eugen. Weidmann murdered two women and four men in Paris, including kidnapping an American tourist and killing him. Among the targets of his killings were governesses, drivers, advertising practitioners, real estate agents and a prisoner he met in a German prison.
Although his murders all looked like money and murder, the money taken from the victims was very small. Judging from the identity of the victim, he is irregular and completely random to see the mood, basically for the pursuit of excitement.
In the early morning of June 17, 1939, Eugen. Weidmann was taken to the guillotine in front of the Prison of Saint-Pierre, where he was killed by the cheers and shouts of a whistling crowd. He was the last criminal in France to be publicly executed on the guillotine. Subsequently, the Guillotine executions in France were carried out in private.
Why abolish the death penalty for the guillotine
The guillotine became public, prohibiting the crowd from watching. This is directly related to Weidmann's execution. Because at that time, the crowd of onlookers showed not anger, but excitement, as if they were not watching the execution, but waiting for the opening of the play. They shouted, whistled, joked and quarreled... and the people did not have any fear, but instead rushed up and took out the veils they had prepared long ago and dipped them in the blood on the ground.
The reason why the crowd is crazy is because there are rumors that the blood of beheaded prisoners is the best medicine that can cure diseases, especially for epilepsy. The French government is acutely aware that public beheading is no longer a deterrent, it is slowly turning into a noisy chaos and human hysteria. Subsequently the then President of France Albert. LeBron announced that public executions would henceforth be banned.
On 9 October 1981, President François Mitterrand enacted a law abolishing the death penalty in France. The guillotine is history completely.