The Guillotine and Its Servants
“The scaffold had become a part of the people’s life, and a certain
number of Parisians, were extremely entertained by the new plaything.
Someone conceived the idea of beheading, in the porches of the old
basilica of Notre-Dame, all the stone Saints that adorned the
church-fronts. The whiteness of the broken stone contrasted strikingly
with the bodies of the statues, blackened by time, and gave an
impression of freshly-cut flesh, which was regarded as delightfully
funny.”
Plunder of a church during the French Revolution. Painting by Victor-Henri Juglar.
No doubt you will think that ghoulish humor could not be carried
farther: nevertheless there were even more horrible things than these.
The wave of madness that spread over France had turned the nation’s head
to such a degree that the guillotine had its lovers and its worshipers.
There was a religion of the scaffold. Executioners volunteered, for
love of the work, to purge the soil of the Republic from the royalists
who defiled it. The Revolution had done their best to raise the scaffold
to the dignity of an honored institution.
A ceremony of the new Republican Religion of Reason inside the Notre Dame Cathedral, Paris, 1793.
Gateau, Controller of Army Stores, wrote: “Saint Guillotine¹ is in a
state of the most brilliant activity, and the beneficent Terror is
producing here, in a miraculous way, a condition of affairs that there
could be no hope of achieving by means of reason and philosophy in less
than a century. The time has come for the justice that inspires fear,
and every guilty head ought to pass under the national leveler. The
aristocrats must be shown, by songs and dances, that their death is the
people’s only happiness.” Gateau had a wax seal engraved with a
guillotine. These men made blood their god.
The dead were devoid of clothing, the executioners sold it until the
Revolution made it that the government acquired the money; anything left
was given to the poor.
Marie
Grosholtz (Madame Tussaud) 1761-1850. A scene from the Chamber of
Horrors in London of Madame Tussaud searching for the guillotined head
of Marie Antoinette at Madeleine Cemetery, October 16, 1795. In Paris of
1770, Madame Tussaud learned to model wax likenesses under the tutelage
of her mentor, Dr. Philippe Curtius. At the age of 17, she became an
art tutor to King Louis XVI’s sister at the Palace Of Versailles. During
the French Revolution, Marie was commanded to visit the mass graves to
collect the severed heads of notable Royalist and Revolutionary victims
of the guillotine so as to make new death masks. She even did
Robespierre own death mask after he was a victim of the guillotine. The
rebels used their death masks as trophies and paraded them through the
city. She survived the Revolution and brought her exhibition to England
in 1802. Photo by mariosp & bruciestokes.