Fun fact: the doctor in question was opposed to the death penalty, and proposed the guillotine thinking he could at least make it more humane. He deeply regretted this action and spent the rest of his life campaigning against it. His family was so ashamed that they changed their surname.
While I’m still raining on your parade:
Good article. Long, but good. As it was published in 2019, it references the then current events.
crimethinc is the goat
I’ve thought of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process as example of what is encouraged by Crimethinc here and up until now as a wonderful role model.
But today we have the white supremacists who escaped the South African revolution recreating apartheid in the US and can’t help but think it would have been better if one of them had survived.
The overwhelming majority of the people guillotined during the French revolution were innocent commoners.
The point of The Terror was to burn the Révolution into the skulls of generations to come by making it so horrible the ownership class would be terrified into treating the working class nicely (this was before class consciousness, so it was the Petit Bourgeoisie that actually formed the Assemblée nationale representing the third estate. They, too, are ownership class, once Marx sorted it all out.)
This is why heads had to be piled high. We were supposed to be scared into civility. But as the early 20th century demonstrated to us, it didn’t work, and we still have people voting for far-right parties in order to vote against neoliberalism (which is happening a lot in Europe right now, and is a sound explanation of why Trump still got so many votes.)
Every ethical society requires a healthy and robust guillotine maintenance and repair workforce.
here’s a “fun” (read “insane”) fact: France abolished the death penalty in 1981; the last execution by guillotine took place in 1977
And Christopher Lee was in attendance
I want to celebrate July 14th in the states
Not a shitpost!
This is the only American I know of who is crazy enough to have the right idea.
