From “History of the Guillotine.”
THE GUILLOTINE remained in the Place de la Révolution till the eighth of June, 1794, when the inhabitants of the streets through which these batches (fournées), as they were called, of sufferers used to pass, became at last tired of that agreeable sight, and solicited its removal. This would probably have been not much regarded; but there was a more potent motive. Robespierre seems at this time to have adopted a new policy, and to have formed some design of founding a dictatorial authority in his own person on the basis of religion and morals. On the seventh of June he made his famous report acknowledging “l’Etre Supréme,” and appointing the twentieth of June for the great fête in the garden of the Tuileries, which was to celebrate this recognition. Of this fête Robespierre was to be the Pontifex Maximus, and it can hardly be doubted that it was to remove the odious machine from the immediate scene of his glorification that it was—the day after the decree and ten days before the fête—removed to the Place St. Antoine, in front of the ruins of the Bastile; but that a day might not be lost, it was removed on a Decadi, the republican Sabbath. It stood, however, but five days in the Place St. Antoine, for the shopkeepers even of that patriotic quarter did not like their new neighbor; and so, after having in these five days executed ninety-six persons, it was removed still further to the Barrière du Tróne, or, as it was called in the absurd nomenclature of the day, Barrière Renversée.
There it stood from the ninth of June to the fall of Robespierre, 9th Thermidor (July 27th, 1794). So say all the authorities; but an incident in the trial of Fouquier-Tinville seems to prove that, in the early part of July at least, the scaffold stood in the Place de la Révolution, and that the instrument was dismounted every evening. A lady, the Marquise de Feuquières, was to be tried on the first of July; the whole evidence against her was a document which had been placed under the seals of the law at her country house near Versailles, and Fouquier sent off the night before a special messenger to bring it up; the messenger was delayed by the local authorities, and could not get back to Paris till half-past four on the evening of the first, when, “on arriving at the Place de la Révolution, he found the executioner dismounting the engine, and was informed that the Marquise de Feuquières had been guillotined an hour before,”—having been tried and condemned without a tittle of any kind of evidence; and this fact, attested by his own messenger, Fouquier could not deny—though we cannot reconcile it with the other evidence as to the locality of the guillotine at that particular period. In all the lists des Condamnes Madame de Feuquières and twenty-three other persons are stated to have suffered on the first of July at the Barrière du Tróne.
In the forty-nine days in which it is said to have stood at the Barrière du Tróne it despatched one thousand two hundred and seventy 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 had sufficed to have stopped the fatal procession, forty-nine persons passed almost unguarded through the stupefied 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 the 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 neighbor, passed through the courts where the prisoners were ascending the fatal carts. Sanson, whose duty it was to conduct the prisoners to execution, ventured to stop the Accusateur Public to represent to him that there were some rumors 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 it course. He went to dinner, and the forty-nine victims went to the scaffold, whither in due time he followed them!
The next day the guillotine was removed back to the scene of its longest triumphs—the Place de la Révolution—where on the twenty-eighth of July it avenged humanity on Robespierre and twenty-one of his followers; on the next day sixty-nine, and on the day after thirteen more of his associates fell, amongst whom were most of the judges, juries, and officers of the Revolutionary Tribunal, and a majority of the Commune of Paris—greater monsters, if possible, than the members of the Tribunal. Here indeed the trite quotation,—
| “Neque enim lex æquior ulla | |
| Quam necis artifices arte perire sua,”— |
Of the operations of the guillotine in the departments during the Parisian Reign of Terror we have very scanty information. We only know that in most of the great towns it was in permanent activity, and that in some remarkable instances, as at Avignon, Nantes, and Lyons, its operations were found too slow for “the vengeance of the people,” and were assisted by the wholesale massacres of fusillades and noyades. At Nantes, and some other places, the Conventional Proconsuls carried M. de Clermont Tonnere’s principle to the extreme extent of ostentatiously inviting the Executioner to dinner.
For some months after the fall of Robespierre the Parisian guillotine was, though not permanently, yet actively, employed against his immediate followers; and, subsequently, against the tail (as it was called) of his faction, who attempted to revive the Reign of Terror; but we have no distinct details of these proceedings; the numbers, though great, were insignificant in comparison with the former massacres, and no one, we believe, suffered who did not amply deserve it—Fouquier-Tinville himself and the remainder of his colleagues, the judges and jury of the tribunal, included. His and their trial is the most extraordinary document that the whole revolution has produced, and develops a series of turpitudes and horrors such as no imagination could conceive. But that does not belong to our present subject, and we must hasten to conclude.
Under the Directory, the Consulate, and the Empire, we do not find that any immoderate use was made of the guillotine;—the very name had become intolerably odious, and the ruling powers were reluctant to use it even on legitimate occasions. During the Restoration it was rarely employed, and never, as far as we recollect, for any political crime. When occasion for its use occurred, it was brought forth and erected in the Place de Greve, and removed immediately after the execution; and we ourselves can bear witness—though we could not bring ourselves to see it—that one of these tragedies, which occurred while we happened to be in Paris, appeared to throw a kind of gloom and uneasiness over the whole city, that contrasted very strongly and very favorably with our recollection of the events of twenty years before.
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 word Guillotine,” says the author of “Les Fastes de l’Anarchie,” “should be effaced from the language.” But the revolutionary horrors which France is naturally so anxious to forget, it the more behooves 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.
