✨During the 1700s, executions in France were public events where entire towns gathered to watch. A common execution method for a poor criminal was quartering, where the prisoner's limbs were tied to four oxen, then the animals were driven in four different directions ripping the person apart. Upper-class criminals could buy their way into a less painful death by hanging or beheading.The guillotine is an instrument for inflicting capital punishment by decapitation that came into common use in France after 1792 (during the French Revolution). In 1789, a French physician first suggested that all criminals should be executed by a “machine that beheads painlessly."✨
Guillotine, instrument for inflicting capital punishment by decapitation, introduced into France in 1792. During the French Revolution, the guillotine became the primary symbol of the Reign of Terror and was used to execute thousands of people, including King Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette
