I was wondering if you'd ever come across this page! Ok, I am not one to criticise strange hobbies - right now I'm sitting in a room full of Victorian stuffed birds, animal skulls, an Emu (oh, yes, full size), and the cat's asleep on top of a pile of 1790's Moniteurs, next to a repro English Civil War Roundhead hat...and my first choice of Lj name was Lunette- sadly, taken. And, yes, I'll admit I have books on guillotines....I'm still curious to know how you got into it, though! Guns, tanks and battle reenactments are more usual!
I know you're trying to pack a lot of history into a couple of paragraphs, but unfortunately it comes across to me (I'm a hairy old lefty) as a 19thc / Simon Schama 'take' - Robespierre as 'master of the Terror', etc., killing left right and centre in a sort of delerium - the irony of his downfall is that amongst the plotters of the coup are extreme terrorists whose fear of being called to account for atrocities in the provinces leads them to kill before they are killed - then write themselves up as whiter-than-white heroes afterwards. Nor do I think the early ideals are 'replaced' - if anything, the idealism increases, in the sense of a vision of perfect society when the promised land is reached: what goes horribly wrong is the day to day stuff on the ground, and the reasons for that are as I'm sure you know extraordinarily complex and different in each individual case, often fraught with ironies and paradoxes and all manner of external pressures, overt and covert (that's why I've been obsessed with this period in particular for decades - you can never exhaust it!).
I wonder to what extent you can 'blame' the guillotine itself for the death toll? It made killing easy. If each execution had taken 30 mins like those at Tyburn, or worse, been like the horrific ones of the Ancien Regime, I'd imagine John-Tuturro-in-Millers-Crossing-like scenes on the scaffold would have made the executions less tolerable to audience, victim, executioner and regime alike. Then again, I've just finished 'War and Peace' (at last!) - 80,000 dead in one day, and all concerned are regarded as national heroes...! (a thought - a book I've got called something like 'a dictionary of modern history' has as its cover image that Thermidor cartoon of Robespierre executing the executioner on one side, the atom bomb on the other...so it defines the modern era as bookended by clean modern weapons of death!)
On the 'death mask' - a lot of the 'different' heads look to me like the same head differently made up. Tussaud's uncle's waxwork show in the Palais Royal/Egalite had a model of Robespierre made in his lifetime (she claims he donated some clothes for it, but like everything she says it's impossible to know the truth!), and it seems likely that it was this one that was swiftly altered after Thermidor (quick, chop its head off and stick some paint on it!) - but it was the practice of sculptors, even ones who worked with a sitter, to take a cast for reference, so the 'death mask' may well be a 'life mask': it's the straight-off-the-guillotine story that seems doubtful. The heads of Hebert and Fouquier-Tinville have part-open eyes, but I've only seen the waxworks of those, not the unadorned plaster casts themselves, so I've no idea if that's a grisly detail added on afterwards for extra yuk in the Chamber of Horrors.
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timeasmymeasure
Re: 1790's and guillotine
Date: 2008-10-22 01:10 am (UTC)I know you're trying to pack a lot of history into a couple of paragraphs, but unfortunately it comes across to me (I'm a hairy old lefty) as a 19thc / Simon Schama 'take' - Robespierre as 'master of the Terror', etc., killing left right and centre in a sort of delerium - the irony of his downfall is that amongst the plotters of the coup are extreme terrorists whose fear of being called to account for atrocities in the provinces leads them to kill before they are killed - then write themselves up as whiter-than-white heroes afterwards. Nor do I think the early ideals are 'replaced' - if anything, the idealism increases, in the sense of a vision of perfect society when the promised land is reached: what goes horribly wrong is the day to day stuff on the ground, and the reasons for that are as I'm sure you know extraordinarily complex and different in each individual case, often fraught with ironies and paradoxes and all manner of external pressures, overt and covert (that's why I've been obsessed with this period in particular for decades - you can never exhaust it!).
I wonder to what extent you can 'blame' the guillotine itself for the death toll? It made killing easy. If each execution had taken 30 mins like those at Tyburn, or worse, been like the horrific ones of the Ancien Regime, I'd imagine John-Tuturro-in-Millers-Crossing-like scenes on the scaffold would have made the executions less tolerable to audience, victim, executioner and regime alike. Then again, I've just finished 'War and Peace' (at last!) - 80,000 dead in one day, and all concerned are regarded as national heroes...! (a thought - a book I've got called something like 'a dictionary of modern history' has as its cover image that Thermidor cartoon of Robespierre executing the executioner on one side, the atom bomb on the other...so it defines the modern era as bookended by clean modern weapons of death!)
On the 'death mask' - a lot of the 'different' heads look to me like the same head differently made up. Tussaud's uncle's waxwork show in the Palais Royal/Egalite had a model of Robespierre made in his lifetime (she claims he donated some clothes for it, but like everything she says it's impossible to know the truth!), and it seems likely that it was this one that was swiftly altered after Thermidor (quick, chop its head off and stick some paint on it!) - but it was the practice of sculptors, even ones who worked with a sitter, to take a cast for reference, so the 'death mask' may well be a 'life mask': it's the straight-off-the-guillotine story that seems doubtful. The heads of Hebert and Fouquier-Tinville have part-open eyes, but I've only seen the waxworks of those, not the unadorned plaster casts themselves, so I've no idea if that's a grisly detail added on afterwards for extra yuk in the Chamber of Horrors.
Yes, I am morbid...!