How the Guillotine Got Axed
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Since France abolished capital punishment, in 1981, it has been nearly impossible to see a guillotine. In Paris, the Museum of the Prefecture of Police possesses just a guillotine blade, while the closest thing on view at the Carnavalet Museum is a two-foot-tall model guillotine and a pair of dangly brass guillotine earrings. In the Eleventh Arrondissement, where the Rue de la Roquette meets the Rue de la Croix Faubin, you can just make out five rectangular indentations in the pavement—flagstones that supported a guillotine that stood outside the Roquette prison during the second half of the nineteenth century. (It was used to execute dozens of people, including the anarchist Auguste Vaillant, who lobbed a bomb onto the parliament floor, and Émile Henry, who blew up a café to avenge Vaillant’s execution.) The apparatus is a phantom now, but it was once a concrete, almost corporeal presence, known familiarly as the Widow, the National Razor, the Cigar Cutter, or, simply, the Machine.
Originally, the guillotine was called the louisette, after its inventor, the surgeon Antoine Louis. He conceived of the device in the late seventeen-eighties, likely drawing inspiration from the English gibbet, the Scottish maiden, and the Italian mannaia, and had it built by a harpsichord manufacturer named Tobias Schmidt. Louis and Schmidt were acting on the advice of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a physician who firmly opposed the death penalty but, as long as it was in effect, wanted to render it more humane and efficient.
Before the Revolution, methods of capital punishment varied according to class: nobles were beheaded by a brisk swing of the sword, while other criminals faced an array of punishments, from hanging to drowning, depending on the offense. Guillotin urged the Assemblée Nationale to democratize its approach, so that “offenses of the same kind will be punished by the same kind of penalty, regardless of the rank and status of the guilty.” To that end, he proposed the creation of a new apparatus. “The knife falls, the head is severed in the blink of an eye, the man is no more,” he famously explained. “He barely feels a quick breath of fresh air on the back of his neck.”
The first public execution by guillotine took place in 1792. Despite Guillotin’s ideals, executions were messy and sometimes shambolic affairs, swarmed by bloodthirsty crowds and heckling tricoteuses. One such affair claimed an extra life when the executioner’s son ascended the scaffold to brandish a head, lost his footing, and fell to his death. The machine came with its own macabre accessories: a splatter shield and a wicker basket, placed at the foot of the platform to catch the rolling head.
Executioning was a hereditary métier, monopolized in Paris by the Sanson clan for nearly two centuries. In 1847, Henri-Clément Sanson, who preferred gambling to guillotining, pawned off the family apparatus. The Deibler family eventually took over, launching a new trend: waggish criminals started tattooing the words “ma tête à Deibler” (“my head for Deibler”) on the backs of their necks. The guillotine was conspicuous, until it wasn’t. In 1939, hundreds of people mobbed the Place Louis Barthou to witness the execution of the serial killer Eugen Weidmann. Someone had stashed a film camera in an apartment high above the plaza, capturing a scene of rowdy onlookers feasting on sausage sandwiches and uncorking bottles of wine as—after a series of delays—the blade dropped on Weidmann’s nape. The spectacle was sufficiently embarrassing that the Prime Minister decreed within a week that executions would theretofore be hidden behind prison doors. Yet gruesome traces of the practice endure: Anatole Deibler chronicled his work in a series of gray linen notebooks, excerpts from which were published in 2000 as a book called “Guillotinés.” Readers will encounter mugshots of the condemned, Deibler’s hand-drawn notations (a red cross with a black circle represented a completed execution), and, without warning, a series of photographs of severed heads.
In the four and a half decades since France abolished the death penalty, the guillotine itself has rarely been seen. It was last used in Marseille, in 1977, to execute Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian man convicted of murder. Robert Badinter, the Minister of Justice who led the campaign against capital punishment, recognized that the device—killer not only of Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Danton, and Robespierre but also of hundreds of Algerian revolutionaries and of Marie-Louise Giraud, who was executed in 1943 for having provided twenty-seven abortions near Cherbourg—was too important a part of French history to be destroyed. At his urging, “so that the public, too, could confront this machine of death,” two guillotines entered the national collection of popular artifacts, insuring their preservation. However, Badinter insisted on a stipulation: owing to their intensely sensitive nature, they were not to be displayed for twenty years.
In 2010, one of the two guillotines went on display at the Musée d’Orsay as part of an exhibition dedicated to crime and punishment—but organizers considered the sight so potentially upsetting that they decided to obscure the machine with a black veil. Similar measures were deployed at viewings in 2013 and 2019. This fall, President Emmanuel Macron inducted Badinter, who died in 2024, into the Panthéon, France’s national mausoleum of heroes. The panthéonisation took place at a fractious political moment, three days after the resignation of Sébastien Lecornu, France’s fourth Prime Minister in thirteen months. Yet the homage to Badinter proved strikingly uncontroversial, with politicians from opposite ends of the political spectrum striving to claim him as one of their own. Newsstands stocked special issues dedicated to him, and the mint rolled out a commemorative coin. And, to honor the occasion, the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations (Mucem), in Marseille, decided to display a guillotine in full view.
Badinter’s campaign against capital punishment had its origins in his own brutal family history. Born in Paris in 1928, he was the son of Simon Badinter and Charlotte Rosenberg, both Jewish immigrants from Bessarabia. His parents prospered, opening a fur shop called Paris-New York and moving to the tony Sixteenth Arrondissement. By the time he was eleven, Robert knew how to attach a collar to a coat of astrakhan or skunk. When the now notorious exhibition “The Jew and France” opened at the Palais Berlitz, in 1941, Robert and his brother went to see it, laughing defiantly at plaster casts of hooked noses intended to help the public “recognize Jews.” The next year, their uncle was arrested in the Vel d’Hiv roundup, and months later French police took their ailing paternal grandmother, Sheindléa Badinter. She died in a cattle car on her way to Auschwitz. By February, 1943, the Badinters were living quietly in Lyon. One day, Simon left the apartment and was arrested in a raid organized by the Nazi officer Klaus Barbie—the Butcher of Lyon. When Simon failed to come home, Robert went looking for him and came within a hair’s breadth of being caught himself.
A historian later wrote that Simon, who died in Sobibor, “bequeathed to his son a crazy love for the Republic, daughter of the Revolution, which had given Jews equal rights.” Robert became a corporate lawyer, marrying the philosopher and Publicis advertising heiress Élisabeth Bleustein-Blanchet, but later shifted his focus to criminal defense. One of his law partners later speculated that, in agreeing to represent the condemned, he was seeking to make “ ‘moral compensation’ for the major financial cases that so enriched the firm.” Badinter’s wife put it more bluntly: “He remained all his life that young man—permit me the expression—cut in half, torn apart” between the horrors he had survived and a desire to make the most of his life. A formative case came in 1972, when Badinter failed to save the life of a man he was representing who had been sentenced to death. He and a fellow-inmate planned to escape prison, and the other inmate killed a nurse and a guard during the attempt. As the man’s lawyer, Badinter witnessed his execution. On the train the next morning, he decided to dedicate his life to abolishing the death penalty: “From then on, I was an intransigent adversary of capital punishment. I had gone from intellectual conviction to militant passion.”
In 1976, Badinter joined the defense team of Patrick Henry, a sales representative who abducted a seven-year-old boy from school and smothered him to death. Henry had led the victim’s parents and the public on for weeks, demanding a million francs in ransom when the child was already dead. It looked as though the United States, where the Supreme Court had for several years maintained an effective moratorium on executions, might soon do away with capital punishment. But the French nation was up in arms—“France is afraid,” a television news presenter famously intoned, as, within twenty-four hours, three ministers called for Henry to be executed.
Badinter knew that debate-club arguments about deterrence and human-rights law and the possibility of judicial error would be ineffective. Nor would it suffice to try to evoke empathy for the defendant. He decided that his only chance was to impress upon the judges their direct, personal responsibility for the taking of a life by, as he called it, the “bloody lottery” of capital punishment. He later wrote, “It was about leading them, with all possible intensity, in front of the guillotine, showing them this young man in front of them and telling them: it’s up to you, now, to decide whether he should be cut in two in the courtyard of a prison.” His closing argument presented abolition as a fait accompli:
Against all expectations, the judges spared Henry, and Badinter’s arguments gained traction with the French public. Still, in 1981, when François Mitterrand appointed him Minister of Justice, sixty-three per cent of the French public approved of capital punishment. Badinter forged on, delivering a now famous speech exhorting the members of the Assemblée to prevent “furtive executions at dawn, under the black canopy.” The measure passed, 363–117, killing the death penalty in France. (Badinter also played an instrumental role in decriminalizing homosexuality.) Two years later, Klaus Barbie was arrested in Bolivia and extradited to France to stand trial for his wartime crimes. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison, avoiding the guillotine owing to the efforts of the son of a man he’d helped annihilate. Badinter considered Barbie’s fate “a true victory of civilization.”
Only fifteen of the world’s nearly two hundred countries carried out executions in 2024—the lowest number ever recorded. The United States, it requires no reminding, is one of them, joining China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq on a rogue’s list of nations that persist in maintaining what Amnesty International has characterized as “the ultimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.”
In MAGA circles, support for capital punishment is trending, alongside looksmaxxing and ice baths. In at least seven death-penalty states—Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas—lawmakers have introduced legislation that would allow women who choose abortion to be tried for homicide. “The only way to address that on this side of heaven is that you forfeit your right to live,” the pastor Jeff Durbin declared at a Turning Point USA event. Elon Musk recently opined that “Murderers, where there is unequivocal evidence of guilt, should be hanged, as has been the case throughout history.” (He was piggybacking on a post lauding executions as a way to “weed out” criminal genes.) Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir, the software company that made nearly two billion dollars last year enabling the federal government to perform tasks such as surveilling immigrants, followed suit, arguing that offenders should be hanged “quickly” after three violent crimes, and that it was “time to bring back masculine leadership.” Ma tête à la manosphere.
Tech thugs’ burgeoning mania for capital punishment owes much, of course, to Donald Trump. The President has delectated in the idea since at least 1989, when he paid a reported eighty-five thousand dollars to take out a full-page newspaper ad calling for the return of the death penalty, two weeks after the attack that would be pinned on the Central Park Five. (“Muggers and murders,” he wrote, “should be forced to suffer.”) The fact that the Central Park Five were, in fact, innocent has done little to temper Trump’s lust for the chamber and the chair. As central punisher-in-chief, he has stayed the executions of more turkeys than humans, granted clemency to money launderers and insurrectionists but spared not a single person on death row. One of his first acts upon entering his second term was to issue an executive order titled “Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety.” (The Robespierrean echoes were probably not intentional.) In November, when Democratic lawmakers urged members of the military not to follow illegal orders, Trump responded with capital letters and capital threat: “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!” This week in Israel, meanwhile, lawmakers—some wearing lapel pins in the shape of a noose—passed a measure that would make hanging the default punishment for Palestinians convicted of deadly militant acts; experts say that it would likely spare Jewish Israelis convicted of similar offenses.
American public support for the death penalty is at fifty-two per cent, the lowest it has been in nearly sixty years, yet executions soared in 2025, nearly doubling from twenty-five to forty-seven. Quizzed by Gallup in 2014 on what execution method they considered to be the most humane, respondents chose lethal injection (sixty-five per cent), firing squad (nine per cent), hanging (five per cent), electric chair (four per cent), and gas chamber (four per cent). In 2022, the state of Arizona gave Frank Atwood the option to be executed using Zyklon B, the hydrogen-cyanide gas that the Nazis used to murder more than a million people during the Holocaust. A Jewish group sued to stop the plan, so Arizona resorted to a lethal injection. Prison employees had enough trouble inserting an I.V. in Atwood’s vein that he ended up offering advice to his executioners: “Could you try the hand?” Amid evidence of torturous administration methods, racial bias, and wrongful convictions—more than two hundred death-row inmates have been exonerated since 1973—twenty-one states have implemented so-called secrecy laws or other provisions reducing transparency around executions.
One argument for displaying the guillotine publicly is that it will help French people remember the horrors of capital punishment. Victor Hugo, a committed abolitionist, wrote that “One can remain somewhat indifferent to the death penalty, not take a position, say yes or no, until one has seen a guillotine with one’s own eyes.” Badinter himself was awed by the machine, observing that, “with its two tall, thin arms raised high, it so perfectly expressed death that it seemed to be death itself.”
Not long ago, I took a train to Marseille to see the guillotine at Mucem. The museum’s director, Pierre-Olivier Costa, met me in the entry hall and led me through the galleries housing Mucem’s permanent exhibition of items from its collection of folk arts and popular traditions. We passed by circus posters, weathervanes, and ex-votos before entering the space where more than a hundred thousand museumgoers would eventually encounter the machine. The one on display, he explained, had been used from 1872 to 1977. Costa explained that the archives hadn’t yielded much information about its victims, other than to suggest that it had been “much used during the Second World War, notably to kill resistants.” Museum workers had assembled it from forty pieces with no instruction manual. As Costa put it, the museum wanted to show the machine “lightly bound, like a monster that has been tied up and can no longer reach its objective.” Still, he added, several visitors had already become faint just looking at it.
The machine stood in its own room, looking stark and alone. It was shockingly tall—fifteen feet of wood and steel, hulking over our heads. It had been mounted on a small platform, which bore a little icon of a pair of feet inside a backslash circle, as though stepping into a guillotine were every museumgoer’s wish. Costa’s characterization of the device as a monster befitted its physical dominance, but I felt a chill from a different source of recognition: the guillotine, so colossally impassive, so indifferent to the range of passions that humans project upon it, was a technology, not a beast. I might have been looking at a drone or a driverless car. As the lawyer and author Constance Debré notes in “Protocoles,” her recent book on the American death penalty, the first electric chair was developed in Thomas Edison’s workshop. Debré writes, “Finding the best manner of killing is a quest.”
Inspecting the guillotine more closely, I noticed that Costa and his colleagues had nixed the wicker basket that caught heads, not wanting to enter “dans le gore.” Costa stepped back and beheld the guillotine. He homed in on the heavy, glinting blade. “Were we right to show it? It’s so incredibly violent,” he said, then added, “But it’s important to show that the battle is over and has been won.” This is true, at least, in more than eighty-five countries around the world. But in the United States the spectacle has yet to decisively sicken its proponents, and the “bloody lottery” carries on. ♦