The guillotine is often described by historians as the most humane form of execution. At the time of its heyday, the eighteenth century, it certainly was. For those condemned to death had previously been sent to heaven by much harsher means. For example, charioting or quartering.

Even if the guilty person's head was chopped off with an axe or a sword, the agony of the victim could last for five minutes if the executioner was insufficiently qualified. And the executor himself had to strike several blows in a row.

The prototypes of the guillotine in Europe were widely known at least since the XIV century. For example, this is how the English executed the Irish rebel Mercod Ballagh in 1307.

The creator of the guillotine in its modern form is Dr Joseph Guillotin. This cunning doctor proposed his invention to the Constituent Assembly of France already in 1789. As the most humane and extremely simple means of mass execution. Plus it perfectly equalized all criminals before the law, from nobleman to commoner.

The guillotine was finally perfected by another doctor, Antoine Louis. After his name, the guillotine in France is also often affectionately called la Louisette .... Another author of the guillotine mechanism is called German master Tobias Schmidt, who tearfully asked not to associate his surname with the killing mechanism in any way. But how can you hide something from the mistress of history?

The principle of the guillotine is simple as a whistle. The head of the condemned is lowered into special pads (la fenetre - the window), on which then under the action of a special spring and counterweight with great speed falls from the crossbar (chapeau) hundred kilogram sharp steel blade.

The guillotine, which was first tested on corpses and then improved, was widely used in France in the spring of 1792. On 25 April of that year, a famous thief named Nicolas Pelletier was the first to have the honor of experiencing the action of its blades.

There is a myth that Guillotin himself was sent to the guillotine during the French Revolution. But this, I tell you, is not true at all - Dr Guillotin died peacefully at home on the 26th of March 1814.

The guillotine became the true symbol of La Grande Révolution française - the Great French Revolution. For never before or since had such a large number of people been sent to its disposal.

All in all, in the 1790s, about 12 thousand people tasted the guillotine's action. On the Place de la Concorde in Paris alone, 1,120 souls. Including the French King Louis XVI and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette.

The guillotine waited for the main leader of the French Revolution - the brutal dictator Maximilian Robespierre and his right-hand man Nicolas Saint-Just. And the rest of the revolutionaries were sent to the dust with her help simply without counting....

The guillotine attracted so much attention at the time that craftsmen even started to make quite working children's ‘louisotchkas’. I don't mean for executing children. But just toy guillotines on which a child could jokingly decapitate, for example, a doll or a bird. Later in the 20th century, the French began to make guillotines without blades for their children's games.

Curiously enough, the Parisian plebs were initially terribly dissatisfied with Madame Guillotine. For centuries they had got used to much more spectacular types of public executions, and even with preliminary caresses and torture. However, the lack of spectacle for the crowd was quickly compensated by the mass, as well as the high status of many of the executed.

It is interesting that public guillotine executions in France were practiced until 1939. On the days of ‘events’ huge crowds of people gathered, famous artists sang and danced nearby ... The authorities were forced to ban public executions because they did not want to start a crowd - people agitated by the sight of imminent death then rushed to smash shops, hooliganism and fights.

In addition to France, the guillotine for execution has been used for the last two hundred years in England, Sweden, Belgium, and Italy.

The second birth of the guillotine was suddenly in Nazi Germany. The Nazis called it something else - Fallschwert (falling sword). And they loved to send to the scaffold in something guilty citizens of the Third Reich. For example, rebellious students Sophie and Hans Scholles, who scattered anti-war leaflets in Munich. In total, the Germans executed about 40,000 of their compatriots in this way.

The guillotine has always attracted the awe-inspiring attention of the medical profession. They were all eager to find out how much life is preserved in a severed human head. One criminal before the X hour doctors asked to move his eyes after the execution procedure. He, according to urban legend, blinked for another two minutes....

The last person to be executed by guillotine was a Frenchman of Tunisian origin, Hamida Jandoubi, sent there for the brutal murder of his girlfriend Elisabeth Bousquet. The execution itself took place on 10 October 1977. It is in principle the last death penalty of a convict in Western Europe so far.