Today in Sasha's history.
Author: Sasha
This article was originally written by Sasha and is not allowed to be reproduced by any media
April 25, 1792: The guillotine was used for the first time in France to carry out the death penalty.
The death penalty in France is very interesting, and it is very different from that in China.
There were many types of death sentences in ancient France.
The most common type of execution in France was hanging, and most prisoners were hanged.
Unlike hangings in China, hangings in France are very humiliating.
Ancient Chinese hanging is a relatively benevolent criminal law, in the Chinese view, it is to leave no blood and a whole corpse.
Cao Cao's order to hang Lu Bu was an act of leniency, after all, Lu Bu had killed the big devil Dong Zhuo.
Tang Xuanzong asked Gao Lishi to hang Yang Guifei with a rope, which was also a relatively lenient execution.
France is the opposite.
Hangings in France are for all kinds of notorious crimes, such as robbers, thieves, hooligans, scoundrels, etc., in short, low-class civilians. Most people are not immediately put down after being hanged, but the bodies are displayed for a period of time to intimidate other civilians.
You must know that at normal temperatures, the bubbles in the flesh accumulate more and more 3 days after death, and a giant view will be formed, and the whole body of the corpse will be swollen and miserable.
In the novel "Treasure Island", the pirates are not afraid of heaven and earth, they are afraid of being hanged and showing the public to "dry up"!
In addition to hanging, the common death penalty in France was burning at the stake.
The targets of the executions at the stake were fixed, and they were basically carried out in various ways that were unacceptable to French society.
The common use of witchcraft or cults is an instant death in France.
It is an exaggeration that homosexuality and sexual intercourse with animals are also subject to burning. On July 6, 1750, Jean Dior and Bruno Renaud were sentenced to death for same-sex sexual acts, hanged and burned at the stake, the last execution in France convicted of same-sex sexual acts. Also in 1750, Jacques Ferren was hanged or burned at the stake for bestiality, the last bestial execution in France.
The rest are more horrific criminal laws, such as serious robberies and homicides, which can be punishable by sticking, similar to the Chinese cane death, beaten to death with a wooden stick.
The point is that the French stick strikes a person's limbs, not the head. When the limbs of the victim are broken, they are left in place and usually die for a long time. Even more terrifying, the victims were sometimes tied to high poles for birds to peck at. There are records of a 14th-century prisoner living for 3 days before dying. During the Black Death epidemic of 1348, the authorities claimed that an executed Jew (who was falsely accused of spreading the Black Death) had lived for four days and four nights.
As for treason, killing one's parents, killing the emperor, which are the most serious crimes in France, are punishable by car splitting, that is, tearing the body to pieces.
Compared with the above criminal laws, the most common death penalty in France is beheading.
In China, beheading is a form of public punishment and is more insulting.
When Cixi killed Su Shun and other ministers, only Su Shun was beheaded for public display, and the other two were given death, and finally one hanged and the other drank poisoned wine.
In France, beheading was a lenient penal code that was applied to people of status, especially nobles.
Why? French executioners are professional. They came to behead cleanly, and the man died instantly.
Executioners in France were special professions, well-paid but low-status, often hereditary.
The most famous French executioner in history was Charles-Henri Sanson, nicknamed "Monsieur de Paris". Charles executed more than 3,000 people in his lifetime, setting a world record.
The Charles have been executioners for three generations, starting with their great-grandfather.
By 1778, when his elderly father officially retired, Charles was promoted from assistant to official executioner.
To this end, Charles also spent 6,000 francs in bribing officials to become the only executioner in the city of Paris.
This is interesting, why do you have to pay bribes to be an executioner?
The main thing is that the executioner has a lot of oil and water. He is a civil servant and has a stable monthly salary provided by the state, and of course he can also take bribes from prisoners, which is allowed by law.
So, how Charles's father retired was due to an unsuccessful execution.
Normally, this kind of professional executioner only needs a single knife to cut off the head of the victim.
In order to die as painless as possible, the tortured person often chooses to give the executioner some benefits privately to ensure that the execution will not be a problem.
However, Charles's father is 64 years old and something really has a big problem.
The victim was the famous Mrs. Angerlik Tiguet. Madame Tigay was originally an upper-class figure and a social queen.
She was accused of cooperating with her lover and hired a murderer to attempt the murder of her husband, and was sentenced to beheading.
Shire's father was experienced, but as he got older, his strength and reflexes had decreased.
He slashed down first, but Mrs. Tigay writhed in fright, and this one slashed at the shoulder, which was not fatal at all.
Mrs. Tigay let out an earth-shattering scream, and a large amount of blood splattered out, and the scene was extremely terrifying.
Charles's father panicked and had his son, who was his assistant, struggle to hold down the lower half of Madame Tigay's body, and then slashed a second time.
At this time, Madame Tiguet's upper body was still writhing, and the knife was slashed at the back of the head, but it still did not cut off the neck. Madame Tigay was mortally wounded and still screaming in pain.
At this point, the 18-year-old Charles snatched the broadsword from his father's hand and slashed it with all his might, finally slashing Madame Tiguet's neck with the third knife.
At this point, Mrs. Tige, who had been stabbed three times, died.
The scene was so terrifying, especially the screams of Mrs. Tigay, that the crowd fled in terror, and many people died in the stampede.
At this point, Charles's father was forced to retire.
This kind of mistake by Charles's father is not uncommon in Europe. During the beheading, there are often several or even dozens of slashes in a row. For example, when the famous slut Queen Mary I of Scotland was executed, the executioner slashed three times in a row.
Before the French Revolution, King Louis XVI of France, who had a cowardly and tolerant personality, was determined to reform the beheading.
At the suggestion of Joseph Iñas Guillotan (a member of the Constituent Assembly), a physician who supported the abolition of the death penalty, Louis XVI personally participated in the design, culminating in the invention of the mechanized guillotine in 1791.
After experiments with animal and human corpses, the guillotine worked well, and it only took a second to cut off the head, with a success rate of nearly 100 percent, to the satisfaction of Louis XVI himself.
You know, Louis XVI was a locksmith king, and he was originally interested in machinery, and he participated in the improvement.
The earliest chopping knife of the guillotine was a rectangular shape with a blade parallel to the ground. When testing with corpses, it was found that it was difficult to decapitate the head in one go, even if the knife was very heavy. At the suggestion of Louis XVI, the chopping knife was finally changed to a trapezoidal shape, which increased its power a lot.
Before the execution, the victim's hair needs to be cut as short as possible to prevent the tough hair from blocking the knife edge.
The victim was then taken to the guillotine with his hands tied, and his head was fixed with a special wooden strip to prevent him from moving.
The guillotine's chopping knife weighs 40 kilograms, and at this time it hangs at a height of more than 2 meters, and the knife edge is extremely sharp. Once the executioner pushes the lever, the knife will fall quickly, cutting off the victim's head in no more than 3 seconds, with an extremely high success rate.
The guillotine minimizes the possibility of executioner error and is considered a more humane execution.
In April 1792, Charles was in charge of the first guillotine execution as executioner.
The robber-murderer, Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, was guillotined and executed. Before his death, the robber Nikolai even praised the king so that he could die without pain.
What Louis 160,000 did not expect was that he designed the guillotine to reduce the suffering of the tortured and carry out the death sentence more humanely, but it turned out to be the opposite.
It's like Dr. Gatling invented the machine gun to reduce the number of charging soldiers on the battlefield, hoping to reduce casualties.
However, after the advent of machine guns, the casualties were greatly increased, and even tens of thousands of casualties were killed and wounded in a day, which could not be done in the era of muskets.
The same is true of the guillotine, which has led to a much greater efficiency of the death penalty and more deaths.
As an executioner, Charles was supposed to execute a maximum of two or three people a day, but after the guillotine appeared, the number of executions increased by more than ten times.
Charles wrote in his diary: "Today is a terrible day, a total of 23 women of various ages and statuses are being put in prison vans awaiting execution, all of them in despair, fear and grief. Every day, the prison vans parade through the streets are accompanied by weeping, panicked shouts and prayers. Pale and frightened, they prayed to God for help, begged passers-by for help, and felt pity for even the strongest. On three or four occasions I saw passers-by fleeing, the streets deserted, and my assistants becoming uncharacteristically melancholy and timid, one of whom said, "They forced us to put the guillotine in disgrace." "Today, I'm not alone.
In just three years, by 1794 at least 60,000 people were killed on guillotines everywhere.
Ironically, Louis XVI died on the guillotine of his own design.
It didn't make much sense to behead Louis XVI, and his younger brother Louis XVIII fled to Belgium and could succeed him at any time.
Legend has it that the vote to execute the king was 361 votes to 360, with only one more vote in favor of the death penalty. And this crucial vote turned out to come from Louis XVI's cousin, the Duke of Orleans, who joined the revolutionary camp. The Duke of Orleans, nicknamed Louis the Equal, took the initiative to give up his nobility!
Interestingly, the Duke of Orleans was guillotined for his son Louis Philippe defecting to the Austrian army.
The person responsible for the execution of Louis XVI was naturally Charles, who still put on the executioner's uniform, a blood-red coat, and carried out this execution.
Before his death, the cowardly Louis XVI behaved very well, with a few hard bones. Until the last moment of the guillotine, he did not lose his temper, and his last words were: I am innocent, but I forgive you, and I hope God will forgive me. I hope that my blood will bless France.
Even if Charles is a professional executioner, he is a big living man after all. After the execution of the king, he was not in a good mood, which is also a unique event in the history of France.
Not long after, in October 1793, Queen Marie Antoinette was also sentenced to death.
It took 2 days from being sentenced to death to being guillotined, and Queen Mary, who was only 37 years old, turned gray with her black hair because of great fear and sorrow.
Charles was reluctant to execute Queen Mary and had his son Henry executed while he worked as an assistant. When it came time to guillotine Queen Mary, the queen was quite calm. She accidentally stepped on Charles's foot, then turned to him and said, "I'm sorry, you know, I didn't mean to".
These were her last words before she died.
Charles worked for 38 years before retiring in 1795, passing the position to his son Henry.
Many say that Charles killed more than 3,000 people in his lifetime, and that he believes that only 2,918 people were executed, and that the rest was mostly done by six aides, including his son.
It was not until 1977 that the guillotine was officially abolished by the French government.
The guillotine murderer Charles finally died in Paris at the age of 67. Interestingly, the French Emperor Napoleon once visited the executioner who killed Louis XVI, the scientist Lavoisier, Robespierre and countless others.
Napoleon once sarcastically asked him: Can you sleep peacefully at night when you have killed so many people with your own hands?
Charles retorted: "The king and the dictator kill a hundred times as many people as me, and they can sleep so soundly, let alone me, a little executioner."
Napoleon was speechless!
Statement:
This article refers to
The picture is from the Baidu picture of the Internet, if there is any infringement, please notify to delete.