What do Star Wars and the Guillotine have in common?

Ah, the guillotine! From the get-go and to this day, it is the must-have accessory for any French protest or revolution. But how did that come to be? And could the #Guillotine ever be related to #StarWars? Well, let's find out!

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The guillotine is much more ancient than the French revolution. For example, the “Halifax Gibbet” was used in England as early as the 13th century up until the mid-17th century. The guillotine was even employed in 1632 for the execution of the Duke of Montmorency in Toulouse.

Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was born prematurely on the 28th of May 1738 in Bordeaux, France. Family tradition claims his mother gave birth to him after being startled by the screams of a man being broken on the wheel, a story which shaped his future pursuit of a more humane method of execution.

Having moved to Paris to study medicine and become a physician, he wrote in 1788 a pamphlet arguing for more non-nobility representation in the Estates General, which got him elected as a representative of the Third-Estate. And following the tennis court oath, he became a deputy of the National Constituent Assembly.

There, he mostly directed his attention towards medical reform until the 10th of October 1789, where, during a debate on capital punishment, he proposed a bill that advocated beheading as the method of execution whatever the crime. He saw in this a less brutal and more egalitarian method of execution.

At first, his proposition gained little traction until he delivered an eloquent speech on the 1st of December, which he ended by saying, “Now, with my machine, I cut off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it!" His words became a common joke.

The following day, the royalist journal, “Les Actes des Apôtres”, derided his comment into a song.

“And then offhand
His genius planned;
That machine that ‘simply’ kills—that’s all—;
Which after him we call;
"Guillotine".”

This song was the first time anyone had used the name Guillotine. Dr. Guillotin opposed the death penalty and hoped the use of a more humane method of execution would be a first step towards its abolition. Two years later, on the 3rd of June 1791, when the Assembly voted in favor of carrying all death sentences by decapitation.

The design of the machine was tasked to the secretary of the Academy of Surgery, Dr. Antoine Louis, who submitted a detailed report on the subject the following year in March. By April, the machine had been built and tested on animals, and then, the corpses of children and women. From these tests, Dr. Louis would come to recommend the emblematic angled blade instead of the crescent shape that had been used until then.

The memoirs of the chief-executioner claim it was the King, an amateur locksmith, who recommended the design.

And on the 25th of April 1792, a highwayman named Nicolas Jacques Pelletier became the first man guillotined. While the execution was deemed a success, the public’s reception was underwhelming at first with the crowd demanding the wooden scaffold back. But eventually, they came to love it to the point of nicknaming it “La Sainte Guillotine”.

A month later, Dr. Louis died. It’s commonly believed that he was guillotined, but that is unlikely. It is also commonly believed that Dr. Guillotin was guillotined, but that's not true. He got imprisoned but was saved by the downfall of Robespierre, and died at the age of 75 in 1814, deeply regretting that his name was attached to an instrument of terror.

Victor Hugo would later say, “They are miserable men. Christopher Columbus cannot attach his name to his discovery; Guillotin cannot detach his from his invention.”

And that is how the guillotine became France’s primary method of execution up until its last use in 1977. On the same year Star Wars: A New Hope came out; a man has been guillotined in France.

The last person to be guillotined was Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant who had kidnapped, tortured and murdered his girlfriend, Élisabeth Bousquet. In February 1977, he was sentenced to death and on September, he was guillotined, thus making him the last person executed in Western Europe and the last person beheaded in the Western World.

The death penalty was finally abolished in France in 1981.

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