Some people build model ships...

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

But this man.... http://boisdejustice.com/Home/Home.html
Hmm...!
If you can lightly skip over his take on the Revolution (he knows a lot about guillotines, but evidently not much about the 1790's!) the history page has a pre-1925 fire photo of the Paris guillotine blade and lunette. There was a fire in 1925 that destroyed Madame Tussauds in London, including, sadly, most of the Revolution and Napoleon artefacts, but the blade survived, though damaged - I don't know what became of the lunette (I last went when I was 5 or 6!). I suppose you have to take their word for it that it's the one: it's now billed as 'the blade that killed Marie-Antoinette' (and I bet they were tempted to add 'like in the movie'?), but if that's the case parts, if not all of it, must also have been used to kill - well, pretty well everyone that everyone here is interested in...which is a weird and horrible thought...
http://boisdejustice.com/History/History.html
(btw in case you didn't know, Tussaud also allegedly took Robespierre's 'death mask' -the Parisian place that makes copies believes it was actually taken in life, which is plausible - Washington had his cast in life, as did many politicians, poets etc. - but billing it as taken at the foot of the guillotine sounds more dramatic! http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/dec/01/france.art )
Gosh, I'm morbid today!

Comments

Re: 1790's and guillotine

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

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.

Yes, I am morbid...!

Re: 1790's and guillotine

[boisdejustice.livejournal.com]

To answer your question on how I got into this hobby... 1972, a 15-year old kid living in the suburbs of Paris innocently came across an article in the newspaper talking about the execution of two criminals, Buffet and Bontemps, in the Sante prison in Southwestern Paris, a place he was quite familiar with. Further reading revealed that these fellows had been DECAPITATED with a mysterious machine called a "guillotine" although there were no pictures. A frantic search of many other sources yielded an article in L'Express and a large front page drawing of the awesome apparatus. Not only did this kid not know, before that day, that his country was still executing people, but the idea that they were cutting their heads off in a machine was just overwhelming to him. The next year, to the horror of his parents, the kid built his first guillotine model, a crude rendition of the magical apparatus (for extra credits in his history class). After successfully repressing the urge for 30 years, I was overcome be the need to see if I could do it again, this time with proper documentation, better tools and more refined carpentry skills... and it turns out that the machine has quite a following and there is a small, largely un-met, demand for such models. So until my enthusiasm runs out I will continue building them. The macabre aspect of it has worn off over time and I only see it as a tool designed for a specific purpose. I still admire the design and feel great pleasure in achieving a better and better semblance of the real thing.

I too collect books on the guillotine, most of them in French. I also collect photographs, news articles and historical information. When I read about reactions to my website I am often surprised to find how the subject appears to others... I guess I have grown calloused to those pictures and the information surrounding them. Spending three days this summer going over every inch of a real Berger guillotine that had actually been used, felt to me like I was visiting an "old friend". Every part of it seemed so familiar although it was the first one I had ever seen in person. I am very squimish when in comes to other gory photos/information. For example I wouldn't go on a site like oggrish-dot-com because I know it would make me sick. On the other hand, guillotines seem no more gory to me than a kitchen slicer...

Not to worry I also have more "normal" hobbies like collecting handguns, re-enacting Civil War battles and restoring WW-2 armored vehicles - Just kidding - but I do have a keen interest in Civil War and WW-2 history.

You are correct that my depiction of the French Revolution's descent into madness is grossly oversimplified for the purpose of explaining how the guillotine developed and where the multitude of 1792 machines came from. There is however a sense of loss of direction and ideals when the leaders, after advocating Liberty, Equality and Brotherhood, writing a Bill of Human Rights, emancipating slaves, promoting women, casting down privileges and capricious laws, promoting freedom of speech and religion start repressing ideas, start killing off people in a mass-paranoia for exercising their newly gained liberties... going on to repress religion, start killing eachother for political gain... They use mock trials to sentence anyone to death if they deem they "might" not agree with them.

The ease of the death by guillotine may have been a contributing factor to the bloodshed of "The Terror" but one must not forget the tens of thousands that were sommarily shot, drowned or executed by cannon in the ruthless repression in the provinces. Those victims by far exceed the number of those that were beheaded. I see Robespierre as a man with noble ideas (he first proposed that the death penalty be abolished) that got caught up in the cause and completely lost sight of the purpose, bending all principles in the pursuit of power. I cannot forgive him for having Danton and his followers executed for personal political gain. I have always regarded Danton as the greater mind and the more humanitarian side of the Revolution that might have tempered it.

Re: 1790's and guillotine

[victoriavandal.livejournal.com]

I once baked a 17th century cake rather than write a school essay, but I never did anything like that! The death penalty was abolished here (Britain) in the late 60's: it was only a few years before I was born, but it seems like something that belongs in the distant past. I find it very shocking when I get an ebay item from the USA with newspaper packaging discussing executions!

Which Civil War? We had a village Fete here a few years ago, with a Civil War theme - but when the re-enactors turned up, they were in Covered Wagons and dressed as Union and Confederate: the village organisers had booked the wrong Civil War! I suppose we'll get some Napoleonic re-enactments in 2012 and 2015, which I'm looking forward to because I love the uniforms...

Strangely, in the popular image of the Revolution (outside France), the deaths at Nantes and Lyon are ignored - it's always Paris and the guillotine that is emphasised, and with wildly exaggerated death tolls. I presume it is because of the incongruity of the idea that the 'Age of Reason' should produce something as paradoxical as a 'humane' machine for killing human beings! Meanwhile, we seem blasé about deaths by bullet or cannon fire...that's somehow regarded as 'natural'!

I think it's unfair to blame Robespierre for Danton's death: on 9th Thermidor Robespierre was accused of both killing Danton AND of defending him (!!) - he had earlier defended him at the Cordeliers, and tried to defend Desmoulins at the Jacobins, and was reportedly defending Danton against demands for his arrest within the Comité de Salut Public until the last minute - then helped to draft their accusation (!). Danton and co. must have thought he was still inclined towards them, as they called for him twice as a witness at their trial, to no avail. I don't think it was about personal gain - of all the existing members of the CSP at that time, had Danton attempted to defend Fabre and brought the government down (his motives still seem unclear), Robespierre would probably have survived such a coup. I think it was a matter of maintaining government stability, striking Left and then Right, regardless of the human cost to people who were once personal friends. It is very much in the Roman / Spartan civic spirit believed to be 'noble' at the time - like David's painting of Brutus with the bodies of his sons - but from a human point of view, chilling.

I think it's tragic that the Indulgents didn't wait until the spring to launch their campaign: their timing was bad: even friends like Freron were warning Desmoulins that, living in Paris, he failed to appreciate the difficulties on the front line. I know what you mean about Danton and Desmoulins (who I particularly like) being more warmly 'human', but it was perhaps easier to be humane in the semi-retirement, with families, they were both living in at the time, far harder when living the incredibly stressful 24/7 atmosphere of government, when nerves must have been stretched to breaking point - I always wonder how they managed to function at all under so many stresses, national and personal.