GUILLOTINE, the instrument for inflicting capital punish ment by 'decapitation, introduced into France at the period of the Revolution. It consists of two upright posts surmounted by a cross beam, and grooved so as to guide an oblique-edged knife, the back of which is heavily weighted to make it fall swiftly and with force when the cord by which it is held aloft is let go. Previous to the period when it obtained notoriety under its pres ent name it had been in use in Scotland, England and various parts of the Continent. There is still preserved in the antiquarian museum of Edinburgh the rude guillotine called the "maiden" by which the regent Morton was decapitated in 1581. The last persons decapitated by the Scottish "maiden" were the marquis of Argyll in 1661 and his son the earl of Argyll in 1685. It would appear that no similar machine was ever in general use in Eng land; but until 1650 there existed in the forest of Hardwick, which was coextensive with the parish of Halifax, West Riding, Yorkshire, a mode of trial and execution called the gibbet law, by which a felon convicted of theft within the liberty was sentenced to be decapitated by a machine called the Halifax gibbet. A print of it is contained in a small book called Halifax and its Gibbet Law (1708), and in Gibson's edition of Camden's Britannia (1722). In Germany the machine was in general use during the middle ages, under the name of the Diele, the Hobel or the Dolabra. Two old German engravings, the one by George Penez, who died in 1550, and the other by Heinrich Aldegrever, with the date represent the death of a son of Titus Manlius by a similar instrument, and its employment for the execution of a Spartan is the subject of the engraving of the 18th symbol in the volume entitled Symbolicae quaestiones de universo genere, by Achilles Bocchi (I555). From the 13th century it was used in Italy under the name of Mannaia for the execution of criminals of noble birth. The Clironique de Jean d'Anton, first published in 1835, gives minute details of an execution in which it was em ployed at Genoa in 1507; and it is elaborately described by Pere Jean Baptiste Labat in his Voyage en Espagne et en Italie en 173o. It is mentioned by Jacques, viscomte de Puysegur, in his Mem oires as in use in the south of France, and he describes the exe cution by it of Marshal Montmorency at Toulouse in 1632. For about a century it had, however, fallen into general disuse on the continent ; and Dr. Guillotin, who first suggested its use in modern times, is said to have obtained his information regarding it from the description of an execution that took place at Milan in 1702, contained in an anonymous work entitled Voyage his torique et politique de Suisse, d'Italie, et d'Allemagne.
Guillotin, who was born at Saintes, May 28, 1738, and elected to the Constituent Assembly in 1789, brought forward on Dec. i of that year two propositions regarding capital punishment, the second of which was that "in all cases of capital punishment it shall be of the same kind—that is, decapitation—and it shall be executed by means of a machine." The reasons urged in support of this proposition were that in cases of capital punishment the privilege of execution by decapitation should no longer be con fined to the nobles, and that it was desirable to render the process of execution as swift and painless as possible. After satisfactory experiments had been made with the machine on several dead bodies in the hospital of Bicetre, it was erected on the Place de Greve for the execution of the highwayman Pelletier on April 25, 1792. While the experiments regarding the machine were being carried on, it received the name Louisette or La Petite Louison, but the mind of the nation seems soon to have reverted to Guillo tin, who first suggested its use ; and in the Journal des revolutions de Paris for April 28, 1792, it is mentioned as la guillotine, a name which it thenceforth bore both popularly and officially. BIBLIOGRAPHY.-J. Sedillot, Reflexions historiques et physiologiques sur le supplice de la guillotine ; J. J. Sue, Opinion sur le supplice de la guillotine (1796) ; J. H. Reville-Parise, Etude bio graphique sur Guillotin (1851) ; Notice historique et physiologique sur le supplice de la guillotine (183o) ; Louis Dubois, Recherches historiques et physiologiques sur la guillotine et details sur Sanson (1843) ; and a paper by J. W. Croker Quarterly Review Dec. H. Herschmann, La guillotine en 1793, d'apres des documents inedits des archives rationales (1908) .