The unfailing machine

The sentimental revolution

The French Revolution is often seen as embodying the Enlightenment impulse towards rationalizations of all kinds – enlightened penal codes, tax laws, state administration, weapons manufacturing, weights and measures. ⁴ But the series of events that go under the title of the French Revolution also followed the Enlightenment’s lead in placing sentiment at their core. The late 18th century represented not only the Age of Reason, but the high point of ‘sensibility’ (Figlio, 1975) – a dual notion that, by the middle of the 18th century, denoted the capacity for both physical sensation and moral sensitivity, and therefore underwrote theories of perfectibility and pathology in individuals and the social organism alike (Denby, 1994: 139–40; Vila, 1998: 225–57). ⁵ Its principal elements were contained within sentimentalism, which held that all sentiments had their origin in physical sensations (sentiment was the emotional ‘movement’ that came as a first consequence of physical sensation); and that those same sentiments provided the foundation of the social order (Riskin, 2002: 3). In this way, not only ideas, but emotions and the moral sentiments had sensory origins and were as central to human nature as was reason (Vila, 2014: 7). As expressions of sensibility, they all fused sensation with sentiment and, within French natural philosophy after the 1750s, provided a basis for knowledge (Riskin, 2002: 3).

The bridge that sentimentalism erected between the physical and the moral was undergirded by a sensationist theory of mind that, over the second half of the 18th century, spread through physiology and a nascent psychological science that included the works of Charles Bonnet (who first used the term ‘psychology’ in French to refer to the science of mind or mental phenomena) (Bonnet, 1755; Vidal, 2011). The theory drew heavily on French interpretations of Locke, first by Condillac and later by Diderot, who seized on the sensationist epistemology contained in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, seeing the mind as a blank slate at birth and the senses as instruments inscribing the outside world upon it. Against the Cartesian tradition of treating the passions as the antithesis of the rational faculty, French sentimentalists in the tradition of Locke allied the emotional with the rational, locating their common sources in the nerves (Pinch, 1996: 18–19). The centrality of sensibility and sensation to the reasoned work of the mind (Riskin, 2002: 49–51) formed a refrain throughout the mid-18th century: Claude-Adrien Helvetius claimed that all operations of the mind could be reduced to physical sensibility; Rousseau and his sympathizers held that, through the senses, the mind could be shaped to reason correctly (and morally) about the world (Vila, 2014: 13); the Baron d’Holbach – whose salon counted Condillac, Condorcet, Diderot and d’Alembert as its patrons – wrote that ‘the mind is a product of…physical sensibility’, ‘from sensibility flow all the faculties that we call intellectual’ including morality (d’Holbach, 1776: 3). Condorcet would go on to define this union of the natural and the emerging moral sciences that studied ‘either the human mind itself, or the relations of men to one another’. In this way, as Jessica Riskin has observed, Condorcet and his followers joined ‘epistemology and psychology with questions of proper behavior and good government’ (Riskin, 2002: 5). Displaying sensibility publicly became a marker of sociability, linking the individual and the collective in support of universal principles (Vincent-Buffault, 1991: 9). Voltaire, for instance, saw himself as a ‘man of feeling’ and mounted his attacks against religious intolerance on that basis (Baasner, 1988: 135–6). Diderot reflected on the sentimental literature of the age and enjoined his contemporaries to ‘come, we will cry together over the unfortunate characters of these fictions’ (Diderot, 1773: 391). In this way, sensibility represented a profoundly public psychology – outside the exclusive purview of experts, spreading through salon culture and the vernacular of the literate classes, but also helping to explain, shape and cultivate a sentimental public. It explained not only the sensory origins of sentiment, but how that sentiment could spread to form a common feeling among strangers and a basis of the social bond.

The emotional collectivism of the period illustrated this spread, as sentimentalism moved from the literary salons to the public sphere and as crowds wept together in the streets over the revolution’s central events. As Vincent-Buffault notes, from the Estates General to the taking of the Bastille, to the arrival of the king in Paris, hardly a major event took place that did not end in collective tears and embraces (Vincent-Buffault, 1991: 78). Along with the emphasis on the power of human reason, contemporaries emphasized that natural sentiments, available to everyone and acquired through the senses, could serve as the basis for morality and political reform. The Jacobins, for instance, who would make greatest use of the guillotine, appealed again and again to inner emotion in their rhetoric. Robespierre, ironically arguing against the death penalty that he would use so ruthlessly a few years later, was lauded for his sensibilité during the debates. By the time of the Terror, that same sensibility would become an enemy of the revolution, feigned by the tyrant Louis XVI, misshapen into pity for the victims of the Committee of Public Safety, a weakness that betrayed the enemies of the Republic (Higonnet, 1998). In the decades that followed, observers would blame the excesses and turmoil of the period on the public that sentimentalism helped create. But early on, its dual psychological and moral dimensions formed a key political resource and a crucial solution to the revolution’s pressing problem of realizing individual potential while ensuring social order as the traditional structures of the Old Regime fell.

The most important of those structures had been the corporations. The political, economic and even the social life of the Old Regime revolved around these self-governing bodies with their special rights and privileges – craft and merchant organizations, the Church, universities, academies and law courts. The corporations provided not only a means of mutual protection and labour regulation; contemporaries also regarded them as the necessary underpinning of persons, giving them legal, social and moral standing, delineating the individuals’ rights and obligations to one another, and securing their proper behavior and thought (Goldstein, 2005: 40). The proposals to lessen the power of the guilds, and ultimately to dissolve them, called that proper behavior into question. Jan Goldstein has examined in depth how sensationist psychology combined with the dissolution of the corporate order to produce fears about individual mental functioning, isolation and particularly the dangers of a rampant imagination (ibid.: 21–59). The remonstrance of the Parliament of Paris against the 1776 Turgot edicts abolishing the guilds hinted at dark consequences: ‘Each artisan will regard himself as a solitary being, dependent on himself alone, and free to indulge all the flights of an often disordered imagination’ (‘Lit de justice’, 1776: 346). Although expressed as a concern about mental activity, the remonstrance articulated a widespread fear about the breaking of the social bond and captured the general worry about how persons were, or ought to be, bound and connected to each other – as citizens, as members of humanity. Guild after guild echoed the sentiment. The Paris glove makers asserted: ‘each person has an existence only through the corporate body [corps] to which he is attached’ (‘Observations des maîtres-gantiers’, n.d.). The ribbon and fringe makers warned: ‘by breaking the ties that bind [us] together, this new system [of limitless freedom] will turn each artisan [fabricant] into an isolated being’ (Réflexions sur l’edit, 1776: 8). Indeed almost all the protests against the Turgot edicts are couched in these terms of communal definition. The dangers of the imagination and of the psyche were therefore part of these more general concerns about the dissolution of the social order in which mental faculties, empowered through sensationist psychology, became a focus of concern. The powers of the mind became dangerous precisely because of the way they were (ironically) imagined to operate in a world where the foundational social structures of late-18th-century France lay in ruins.

Alongside its role in limning the dangers of isolation and solitude, sentimentalism informed ideas about what happened when people gathered in large numbers, and particularly in the burgeoning public spaces of the late Old Regime and the early revolution. Despite an understanding that the various senses, properly channeled, could aid human reason (Vidal, 2011: 2), observers feared that, especially among the masses, sentiment could prove pathological and overwhelm the rational faculty. In a remarkable passage, the 1784 report of the royal commission investigating Mesmerism (which included Benjamin Franklin, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin and future victims of the guillotine like Lavoisier and Jean Sylvain Bailly) linked effects across the great communal spaces of the late 18th century – the theatre, the battlefield and the public spaces of future uprisings:

Little by little the impressions spread and reinforce one another, as one notices in theatrical presentations, where impressions are greater when there are many spectators, and above all in places where one is free to applaud. This sign of individual emotions establishes a general emotion that each person shares to the degree that they are susceptible. It is what one observes moreover in armies on the day of battle, where the enthusiasm of courage and panic alike spread with such speed. The sound of the drum and the military music, the noise of cannon, the musketry, the cries, the confusion shakes the organs, imparts on minds the same agitation, and raises the imaginations to the same degree. In this unity of intoxication, a manifested feeling [impression] becomes universal; it encourages [one] to charge, or it incites [détermine] one to flee. The same cause gives birth to rebellions: imagination governs the multitude: men gathered in large numbers are more susceptible to their sentiments [sens], reason has less sway over them. (Rapport des commissaires chargés par le Roi, 1784: 53–4)

Although the imagination was a recurrent threat in these considerations, the realities of horror, suffering and inhumanity also worked against the redeemed social order the sentimentalists proposed. Rousseau would express the resulting ambivalence about the pedagogy of public display in Emile, where the dangers of real events outstripped the peril of imagined ones. In a statement that would presage so many of the guillotine’s multiple dimensions, he explained: ‘What one too often sees, one no longer imagines, and it is only through imagination that we feel another’s sorrows. By dint of seeing death and suffering [on a routine basis], priests and physicians become pitiless’ (Rousseau, 1999: 517).

By the late 18th century, the public executions of the Old Regime represented exactly this kind of anti-sentimental spectacle and theatre. A succession of brutal public executions had horrified the Parisian public, beginning with the would-be regicide Damiens in 1757, whose four-hour torture and execution would be cited by legal reformers like Beccaria and Thomas Paine, and later used as a dramatic set-piece by Foucault (Beccaria, 2012; Foucault, 1995[1977]; Paine, 1998). More recently, there had been the botched execution of Lally, the disgraced governor-general of French India, captured by the British and falsely accused of treason in France. He would later be publicly and posthumously exonerated by Louis XVI, but not before Voltaire and Thomas Carlyle had denounced his execution as a judicial murder. Precisely because these executions were increasingly seen as abhorrent and symbolic of the Old Order, they occupied the intersection between Suard’s agoraphobia and Mirabeau’s opportunism. There was danger in the brutality, cruelty and suffering of the public executions of the Old Regime. But sentimentalism also argued for reformed, ‘humane’ executions as a kind of public education in the virtues of the new French Republic. The spectacle of the execution, like that of the festivals, with open spaces and uninterrupted vistas that turned the scaffold into a stage, was ready-made for the principles of late-18th-century French sentimentalism. ⁷ An execution consistent with its moral imperatives would encourage dignity and patriotism; one that reproduced the horrors of the Old Regime would dull empathy and dissolve the common bonds that linked citizens and humanity.

The unfailing machine

The guillotine was conceived out of these combined developments – the collapse of the Old Regime with its unequal privilege, its brutality and (for some) its suffocating stability; and the dominance of sentimentalist psychology, limning the threats to individual minds, the dangers of public gatherings and strong sensations, and the possibilities of a new social order. The machine was designed to solve two problems of executions in the age of both reason and sentiment – the problem of how to make punishment uniform, rational and humane; and the related problem of the effect of non-uniformity, variability and inhumanity on a sentimental, spectating public.

The theoretical machine was proposed by Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a well-respected physician and Freemason, a friend of Robespierre and a fellow Jacobin. When he rose in the chamber of deputies, with Mirabeau’s support, as a representative of the Third Estate on 10 October 1789 during a debate on capital punishment, he was already a prominent figure, having been central to the events that helped launch the revolution. ⁸ The text of Guillotin’s speech is lost to history, if it was ever recorded. But when he took up again the postponed question of penal reform on 1 December, the Journal des États Généraux reported the details, describing how: ‘Monsieur Guillotin dwelt at length on the tortures in which man shows himself more ferocious than wild beasts. The torment of red hot pincers and such like, these things I pass over in silence’ (Journal des États Généraux, 1789: 236–7). But the most shocking element for many observers was his proposal of a decapitation machine. Often treated in isolation even by contemporaries, the machine was in fact proposed in the last of six articles presented to the National Assembly, a set of interlocking legal reforms that embedded the device within a tableau of contemporary judicial concerns surrounding the treatment of criminality writ large. The first five articles protected the individual rights of the criminal, establishing equality of punishment across rank and station, protecting the property of the condemned, and preserving the dignity of the condemned’s family (a common theme) by legally and morally shielding it from dishonour. Only the sixth article treated capital punishment specifically, doing away with the different regimes of execution and specifying that all death sentences would share a single method – decapitation – carried out by a ‘simple mechanism’ (‘Proposition, par M. Guillotin’, 1789).

Guillotin’s critics would seize on (and mock) the doctor’s emphasis on the speed, certainty and painlessness of the execution – ‘a slight coolness on the back of the neck’, in Guillotin’s famous words. But a quick and painless death was only one of the machine’s humane effects, and arguably not its most important. An early illustration captured these multiple dimensions (see Figure 1). Its caption explained how executions would be performed outside the city in a place specially set out for the purpose. They would be rare, private and even intimate affairs. To keep crowds at a distance, the machine would be surrounded by barriers and guarded by soldiers with lowered weapons. The confessor would give the signal for death at the instant of absolution. Even the executioner, yielding to natural sentiment, would look away at the final moment. Jerome Pétion, former mayor of Paris, fleeing the revolutionary authorities in June 1794 and already committed to suicide, captured the common sentimentalist view of the machine when he explained that the ‘principal goal of this invention was to avoid in these punishments the horrible experiences that outrage nature and dishonour humanity’. Shortening the suffering of the condemned was a secondary benefit (Charavay, 1876: 58).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

‘Machine proposed to the National Assembly for the execution of criminals by Mr Guillotin’ (1791). Note how the executioner turns away at the moment the rope is cut. Note also the use of the sword, the traditional method of decapitation.

This sentimentalist attention to the effects of executions on the sentimental spectator drove the broader Enlightenment reforms that framed Guillotin’s proposals. Against our first intuitions, the efforts of judicial reformers like Beccaria and revolutionaries like Lacretelle focused more on the sensibilities of the observer than on the criminal, and more on sentiments of horror or terror than of sympathy. Beccaria: ‘Who does not shudder with horror when reading in history of so many terrible and useless torments, invented and coldly applied by monsters who took upon themselves the name of sage?’ (Beccaria, 1856: 60). He invoked sentimentalist principles when he argued that the increasingly refined sensibility of civilized societies demanded less severe punishments ‘if one is to conserve the same relation between object and sensation’ (ibid.: 87). Pierre Louis de Lacretelle, a royalist historian and journalist from Metz who beat Robespierre in the Académie de Metz’s 1783 essay contest and who had drawn up the cahiers de doléances with Guillotin, spoke instead in the present tense: ‘Thank God for those gentle, sensitive souls on whom those horrible executions exert a kind of torture’ (Lacretelle, 1784: 131). Observers arguing for more humane punishment routinely expressed the effects and the horrors of Old Regime punishments in the first person and as a discourse rooted in sentiment (Foucault, 1995[1977]: 91). French sentimentalists like Diderot vividly illustrated this secondary concern with the suffering of the condemned by proposing the vivisection of criminals. ⁹ In his entry under ‘Anatomy’ in the Encyclopédie, Diderot proposed and defended criminal vivisection as humane, on the grounds that it punished the inhumanity of the criminal and employed the full capacities of the surgeon for the benefit of humanity. In his litany of proposed procedures – injecting different liquids into live criminals, allowing their thighs to be amputated at the joint, joining their mammary and epigastric arteries, sawing out ribs, or having a portion of their brain extracted – the suffering of the criminal was not only an afterthought, but one squarely compatible with sentimentalist principles. In 1775–6, in a memorandum on the treatment of rabies, Guillotin himself would take up Diderot’s idea, proposing that convicts should undergo ‘all such experiments as have been…attempted with animals’ as a way of reintegrating them into society. The procedure may seem ‘unjust, cruel, terrifying or unnatural’, Guillotin explained, ‘but it is merely alarming’ (Arasse, 1989: 3–4). Not only was this an age accustomed to worse horrors on the scaffold, as Daniel Arasse points out (ibid.), but one concerned with the profitability of executions within a larger economy of humane punishment. As much as Guillotin sought to make executions painless for the condemned, he valued even more the larger social and emotional tableaux that surrounded them.

When the National Assembly finally took up Guillotin’s proposal in December 1790, it undid two key elements of his original vision. It put aside the original commitment to a decapitation machine, and it insisted on the social value to be extracted from public executions (Carol, 2012: 41). Decapitation was adopted by the assembly on 3 June 1791 (article 3), insisting on its educational value. (Article 4 specified it should be done in public). The decision, however, put off the question of the precise method of execution which, as late as March 1792, was still assumed to be the sword. Asked for his opinion, the hereditary royal executioner of France and later high executioner of the French Republic, Charles-Henri Sanson, stressed that swords would quickly dull under multiple executions, requiring a store of spares. ¹⁰ He especially warned about the dangers that strong emotion – particularly terror – could produce in the condemned. Anticipating the steady flow of executions in the years to come, with subjects overcome by fear and unable to compose themselves, he cautioned that the event could become a struggle and a massacre, with possibly disastrous effects for executioner, victim and, above all, the public (Arasse, 1989: 20). ‘Can you be the master of a man who is unwilling or incapable of controlling himself?’ (Lenotre, 1920: 221). In particular, there was no guarantee the commoner would be able to show the public stoicism that bourgeois men in particular strove to embody as an individual ethos and as part of the theater of contemporary political culture (Outram, 1989: 78–80). Even the executioner might be moved and, in such a delicate operation, emotions were dangerous. The house of Sanson was filled with accounts of pity, clemency, reluctance and discretion; of the executioner even weeping while performing his duties. (See again Figure 1.) It was also tainted by a recent history of incompetence, as Charles-Henri had proved himself inept at both hanging and decapitation, a fact that Voltaire used to polemical advantage in the case of Lally-Tollendal.

The assembly refused to decide on the question of method, considering it too disturbing. Pierre Louis Roederer, Attorney General of the département of Paris, was charged with resolving doubts and he turned to Guillotin, who now shied away from the task.

It fell to Antoine Louis, secrétaire perpetual of the Academy of Surgery and one of the nation’s foremost experts on death, to determine the exact method. Born in Metz, educated by Jesuits, and a surgeon at the Salpêtrière hospital, Louis was considered supremely qualified for the task. As a surgeon he was familiar with cutting implements and their effects on the body. He had authored the Encyclopédie’s entry on ‘Death’, explaining that it was not ‘so fearful a thing as we imagine’; what generally frightened us most were ‘the convulsions of the disintegrating machine’, that is, the body (Arasse, 1989: 21). In 1752, he had become involved in a debate over the certainty of signs of death, sparked by a series of sensational cases of revived drowning victims, briefly presumed dead. His treatise, Lettres sur la certitude des signes de la mort, aimed to reassure the public against the attendant fears of being buried alive (Carol, 2012: 12). He would later use investigations on the cadavers of hanged criminals to question the official findings of the Calas affaire, suggesting that Calas’s son had indeed hanged himself (rather than being murdered by his father), and arguing for a ‘legal medicine’ that would both dissuade the wicked through fear of certain apprehension and correct judicial errors that determined the life and death of citizens (Louis, 1763: 3–4).

Louis’ concerns focused on ensuring the certainty of death and avoiding the horrors produced by variability. For this, the method had to be infallible. In early March, the Directory government had expressed its fear that ‘by the imperfection of the means or a lack of experience and clumsiness, the ordeal would become horrible for the patient [sic] and for the spectators’, inspiring the public to take revenge on the executioner ‘out of humanity’ (Lenotre, 1920: 224). Louis’ report to the National Assembly was published, rather than read to legislators, in order to spare its members ‘the painful details for which sentiments of justice cannot console humanity’ (Journal de Paris, 1792). The document surveyed the material and physiological impediments to reliable decapitation, particularly the resistance offered by interlocking vertebrae and dense tissue. But it also paused on the double threat that sensation posed to the certainty of death. Unlike Guillotin, who had made his proposals in the midst of the abolition of aristocratic privilege and clergy rights, Louis’ concerns were not so much about the variation of executions across social class, but about the all-too-human sources of variability across individual instances. As a surgeon, he knew first-hand the difficulties caused by varying human abilities and, in an age before anesthetic, by the struggles of the patient, which echoed Sanson’s fears of massacre on the scaffold (Carol, 2012: 48). He concluded that a ‘humane’ execution was impossible to achieve ‘by confiding it to an agent who is susceptible to variations in ability [adresse], due to moral or physical causes; it is absolutely necessary, for the certitude of the procedure, that it depend on invariable mechanical means whose force and effect can be determined’ (Saint-Edme, 1828: 160–1; emphases added).

Rather than opposing mechanism to sentiment, Louis placed mechanical philosophy in the service of sentimentalism and the economy of the senses, returning to Guillotin’s original idea for a decapitation machine. ¹¹ And rather than ignoring its effect on public sentiment (Arasse, 1989: 21), he conceived of the guillotine as a way of producing an absence of pathological sentiment, echoing the regime of sensations that figures like Rousseau held out as a prescription for virtue and health (Vila, 2014: 14). Recalling the botched execution of Lally, Louis cringed: ‘One watched this butchery with horror’ (Saint-Edme, 1828: 160). He explained that it was in light of the terrible spectacle of previous methods that ‘the present machine had been imagined’ (ibid.: 59). If there was an oversight on Louis’ part, it was to misjudge just how successfully his invention would deny the revolutionary public the sensations its members both anticipated and desired.

Louis’ account is fascinating for the way it mixes human and machine reliability, combining Enlightenment concerns over punishment and the legal subject with anxieties over the obduracy and sensitivity of human bodies and faith in the capacities of mechanisms. The idea of an unerring, public execution machine embodied both a belief in the redemptive power of sentiment and an anxiety about the perils of unsettling human emotion. For the machine to carry out its ambitious purpose, its very operation had to disappear: ‘The executioner triggers the release, and the man is no more’ (Saint-Edme, 1828: 165). In perhaps the most remarkable statement of an already remarkable report, Louis asserted that it was ‘an easy enough matter to build such an unfailing machine’ (ibid.: 163).

In April 1792, Louis’ device was still an imagined mechanism. To ensure its unfailing quality and to protect public sentiment, Louis would depend heavily on the contemporary mechanical arts, and specifically on the building trades of late 18th-century Paris. The city’s social geography bound those professions to the guillotine, whose first public demonstration would be staged in the Place de Grèves (now the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville), where day-laborers, often recent immigrants to Paris, would gather early in the morning to seek construction jobs and where leaflets listing pay scales were circulated. The occasional labor-stoppages that first mobilized there and spread throughout Paris in those years would eventually draw their name from the site – grève, or strike. But the connections to the building arts were also material and direct. The machine’s central mechanism – the mouton – was already an old technology (Rochon, 1792). Based around a falling weight guided by two uprights, it was a key component of the flourishing construction industry of 18th-century Paris, where it featured in the pile-drivers used to set the pilotis for bridges spanning the Seine and to lay building foundations during the construction boom of the 1780s. Mid-century treatises located the mechanism within a select pantheon of construction devices, including cranes and scaffolds, that formed a public theater of mechanisms and a reference point for Louis as he sought analogs for his device:

It is absolutely necessary, for the certainty of the process, that it [decapitation] depend upon invariable mechanical means whose force and effect can equally be determined. This is the approach they have taken in England: the criminal’s body is fixed between two posts, lying down on his stomach. From the height of a cross-beam that joins the two posts one drops, by the means of a release [declique]…the convex axe whose back should be strong and heavy enough to act effectively, like the mouton used to embed piles…(Charavay, 1876: 48)

After studying the question and making his report to the legislative committee on 7 March 1792, Louis began an active correspondence with the Attorney General, Roederer. In order to estimate cost, Louis called on the master carpenter Guidon in the last week of March at his home on Faubourg du Temple. Guidon, who was generally in charge of building the bois de justice (the execution scaffolds) visited Louis on the morning of 30 March, accompanied by one of his carpenters. They discussed the invention and came to what Louis called a ‘perfect understanding’ of the device, and Louis passed on detailed instructions. He explained that the machine should be made of several pieces: (1) uprights, composed of beams 10 feet high, 6 inches thick, with reinforcing struts on the sides and behind and copper pulleys on each support; (2) the blade ‘of good temper, and of the solidity of the best cleavers; its back will have the thickness of an axe, and will be mounted with a weight of thirty pounds, subject to modification by experiments’; (3) a rope of sufficient length and strength and a solid wooden billet; (4) the stockade for holding the accused; (5) the metal shackle for the neck. ‘If there are any errors’, Louis continued, ‘they will be easily verified by the least intelligent builder’ (Charavay, 1876: 50–1).

The specifications mirrored those put forward a decade before by the architect Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières, who mixed references to Galileo, Huygens and Newton with notes about the selection and strength of woods to guarantee the construction of buildings (Le Camus de Mézières, 1782). Louis wrote Roederer again on 1 April, explaining that he had seen Guidon that morning, and that the carpenter had given him an estimate of the cost – 5,660 livres – an exorbitant sum. ¹³ Guidon had explained that the stigma attached to this type of work made workers scarce and that horses and carriages were needed to raise the scaffolding, inflating the price. He also suggested that the grooves in the machine’s uprights should be lined with copper to prevent binding. Constructed in this way, the master carpenter speculated the machine would last 50 years. As Louis explained, ‘He grasped the plan well and understood the advantages of the most careful construction’ (Charavay, 1876: 52).

Roederer passed the estimate to the Minister of Public Contributions, the Swiss-born Jacobin Clavière, who rejected it. Louis instead proposed the details of the machine to Matthias Schmidt, an immigrant German piano-maker, whose workshop was located on Cour de Commerce Saint-André, behind the Café Procope, where Rousseau had retired to sulk over his staging of Narcisse, where the revolution’s Phrygian cap first appeared, and where Robespierre, Danton, Marat and the Encyclopédistes held court. Schmidt had come to Louis’ attention through the executioner Sanson, who improbably played musical duets with the piano-maker and informed him about the proposal for a decapitation machine. The piano-maker claimed he could construct the device for 824 livres and won the commission. While the Jacobin physician and journalist Jean-Paul Marat worked to publish L’Ami du Peuple across the street, Schmidt turned to Louis’ specifications.

Trials conducted at the Bicêtre hospital in mid-April suggested the blade should be modified. On 19 April, Louis reported on new trials with three cadavers that the machine ‘decapitated so cleanly [nettement] that we were stunned by the force and the speed of its action. The functions of the executioner will be limited to pushing a rocker [bascule] that allows the fall of the mouton carrying the blade…The sureness of its operation will depend on the good temper of the cutting instrument’ (Charavay, 1876: 53). Because of this, Louis specified that Schmidt should construct the blade for all the départements of France; it would, he assured Roederer, be easy to find carpenters for the rest, following the instructions Schmidt laid out.

Roederer himself was less confident about the certainty of the machine’s action. In May, he would ask Pierre Giraud, the chief architect of the département of Paris, to give his expert opinion. Invoking public concern, Giraud explained: ‘Although the implement is well-conceived, it has not been perfected to the fullest possible extent to ensure the public’s peace of mind’ (Giraud quoted in Carol, 2012: 56; emphases added). Recapitulating his colleagues’ criticism of corner-cutting (if not fraud) levelled mostly against foreign artisans recently arrived in Paris, he concluded that the machine had been hastily built and was not secure enough. He identified a number of defects: the mouton itself was merely nailed, rather than screwed, and could detach itself from the blade; the grooves in which it slid could swell under certain conditions, slowing its fall; replacement moutons would be needed in case of failure; the grooves of the uprights should be lined with copper; and a foot-rest should be added to the plank. As Anne Carol notes, ‘all these recommendations attested to the persistent fear that the mechanism, reputed to be more reliable than a human, would fail and repeat the cruelty of Old Regime punishments’ (ibid.: 56). ¹⁴ Giraud’s recommendations, implemented in the following months, would help create the guillotine of the Terror and the medico-philosophical debates over the instantaneity of death.

But by the time of Giraud’s report, the machine had already entered into public use. On 25 April, it had worked for the first time in the Place de Grève to execute a highwayman, Pelletier, found guilty of stealing 800 livres in assignats. That same day, Roederer predicted that the execution would attract a crowd of the curious and asked the Marquis de Lafayette – hero of the American Revolution, commander of the national guard and himself only four months from prison – to order the gendarmes to protect the machine from the crowd: ‘the new mode of execution – punishment by beheading – is sure to draw a large crowd to the [Place de] Grève, and you would be well advised to take measures so that no damage is done to the machine’ (Charavay, 1876: 54). Antoine Louis had already made his own ambiguous prediction. ‘This device’, he had asserted in his report the month before, ‘if it seems necessary, will cause no sensation, and will barely be noticed’ (Saint-Edme, 1828: 163). He was talking about the physical sensations of the condemned; but he might just as well have been talking about the sentiments of the revolutionary public.

Conclusion

The day of Pelletier’s execution, the Chronique de Paris reported that the machine had a number of advantages over previous methods. The very first was that the form of execution was ‘less appalling’ and it went on to note that no man would have to stain his hands with the murder of his fellow citizens. It added as a final benefit that the condemned would not experience any other torment than the knowledge of his impending death (Lenotre, 1920: 234). A report the following day replaced hope with deception. As Roederer had worried, the novelty of the spectacle had indeed drawn much larger crowds than usual. But its effect on the public was less impressive: ‘The people, in any case, were not at all satisfied: they saw nothing; the thing was too quick’; to console themselves they dispersed singing ‘bring back my wooden gallows’ (Chronique de Paris, 1792). As one 20th-century commentator would later observe, the success of the guillotine lay precisely in the absence of apparatus, its simplicity, its lack of noise: the instrument seemed not to execute people, but to eliminate them (Lenotre, 1920: 236–7).

By August 1792, the Commune of Paris had decided to mount the machine permanently in Place de la Carrousel, with only the blade removed after the daily string of executions. There were reports of its fallibility, particularly under heavy use (Carol, 2012: 56–7). But overall, and especially in Paris, people ignored these failures to focus instead on the machine’s startling and dispiriting efficacy. The doctor Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, intimate friend of Mirabeau and the true author of his sensationist papers on public education, argued that ‘the death of a man ordered in the public interest is probably the greatest act of social power: the instrument [of death] itself should make the punishment rarer and more trying…it should not accustom the people to the sight of blood’. For Cabanis, who had been present at the original Bicetre trials, not only did the guillotine lack dramatic dignity, but ‘spectators see nothing; there is no tragedy for them; they haven’t time to be moved’ (Cabanis, 1954: 502–3; emphases added). ¹⁵ Himself a chief proponent of sentimentalist psychology, Cabanis signaled how the culture of sensibility would ultimately be turned against the guillotine itself as it dispatched larger and larger numbers of ‘conspirators’, a group that would expand dramatically during the Terror. Over the course of that brutal year, the machine would make a great circle of Paris – traveling from Place de la Carrousel to Place de la Révolution, Place Saint-Antoine and Place du Trône Renversé, before finally returning to the entrance of the Tuileries, where Robespierre and his fellow conspirators met their fate. ¹⁶

Even if Cabanis saw the guillotine as working against the sentimentalist principles that had inspired it, later commentators would associate the two intimately. Psychologists in the 19th century would see the rupture of the French Revolution and the excesses of the Terror as a product of the public that sentimentalism had helped create. In doing so, the sentimental machine would play a significant role in the emergence and explicit discussion of the self in French public psychologies that followed (Goldstein, 2005: 11). But those associations would not have to wait for the turn of the century. They were already taking form within the revolution itself. Towards the end of May 1794, Jerome Pétion wrote a satirical article intended for the Encyclopédie. Pétion, who had supported the revolution and the fall of the monarchy, was one of a number of deputies purged with the Girondins when they opposed what they saw as the excesses of the revolution. Within a few days, he would submit to that other form of Stoic death – suicide (Outram, 1989: 68–9). Looking beyond the execution as event to the machine itself, Pétion pointed to the troubling public pedagogy of the instrument: ‘There is not a single major town in France where they have not placed a guillotine in the public squares to convert the enemies of Maratism and the Sainte Montagne.’ He went on to lay out its ironic effects:

The effects that this machine produces on the mind are surprising. It stupefies and petrifies them instead of making them indignant, rousing them. The commissaires of the National Convention are in the habit of dragging several of them in their wake to exhibit them where they pass. If the momentary appearance does not have the effect they expect, they place them (in their words) in permanence. (Charavay, 1876: 59)

In the meantime, while they awaited Pétion’s capture, the sentimental public guillotined him in effigy.