Guillotine

“Off with her head!” cried the Queen of Hearts when she saw Alice interrupting her game of croquet. Luckily for the curious girl, the monarch was hardly ever listened to by her subjects. With the introduction of the guillotine, however, the command “off with their heads,” acquired a new meaning.

It borders on irony that Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738-1814) is now remembered for the murderous machine. A literature professor and medicine doctor, Guillotin lobbied for the abolishment of capital punishment in his native France. But when his efforts proved futile, he began to work on a more humane method of killing people, which at that time varied from hanging to burning to decapitating by axe. Far from designing it, Guillotin only proposed to build “a machine that beheads painlessly.”

The machine claimed its first victim in 1791, two years after Guillotin's proposal. The original name, “louisette” was quickly substituted with a catchier “guillotine,” additionally popularized by a famous song. In 1793, the entire world shivered at the invention when King Louis XVI and his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, literally lost their heads in a public spectacle watched by hundreds of Parisians. Before the French Revolution slowed down, some 40,000 people followed their suit.

As soon as the heads of the royal family landed in a basket, the word “guillotine” entered the English language. It was probably brought to the British Isles by French refugees who crossed the Channel in thousands to keep their bodies in one piece. According to one dictionary, the first registered phrase with the eponym was written in 1973 and read: “At half past 12 the guillotine severed her head from the body.” One year later, the verb form of the eponym appeared.

The more heads were falling, the more fashionable the eponym became. With the guillotining of Maximilien Robespierre in July 1794 ended the terror and mass executions of political enemies. The machine, however, was reactivated by the Nazis who are thought to have decapitated some 17,000 people between 1933 and 1945. This number is impressive, especially that, as Time Magazine reported in 1933, Herman Goering preferred “the medieval chopping block and headsman's axe” to the humane guillotine.

As capital punishment has been now abolished by most countries, the eponym has been used more often in its figurative sense. A Weekly Standard journalist commented on the tight presidential race within the Democratic Party between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, saying: “All this Hillary hype now merely cranks the guillotine blade higher and higher into the air should she lose Iowa.” Still, the word carries bloody connotations as this example clearly illustrates: “White House aides insist that [President Bush's criticizing then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld] was intended neither to placate critics who wanted Rumsfeld's head nor to fuel demands for the guillotine.”

Fortunately for contemporary politicians, “off with their heads” does not mean their decapitation. It doesn't change the fact that they still lose their heads as often as during the darkest moments of the French Revolution.