On 10 October 1789, he asked the Constituent Assembly that the same offences be punished with the same penalties, whatever the rank of the guilty, and that execution be instantaneous: the machine itself would be designed by the surgeon Antoine Louis. His family later asked, in vain, to change its name.
The story
Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was born at Saintes on 28 May 1738. A physician and professor of anatomy, in 1789 he was one of the ten Paris deputies elected to the Estates General, where he sat with the reformers.
On 10 October 1789 he laid six articles on capital punishment before the Constituent Assembly. The first is the one that matters: that offences of the same kind be punished by the same kind of penalty, whatever the rank and station of the guilty man. Under the old regime, nobles were beheaded and commoners hanged.
He asked too that the execution be instantaneous, by mechanical means, to do away with the suffering and with the executioner's misses. The principle was adopted; the machine was designed by the surgeon Antoine Louis and the harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt.
Usage gave him the object all the same. Guillotin, who never built a thing, spent the rest of his life denying it. Imprisoned under the Terror, he came out after Thermidor and went back to medicine; he was one of the men who brought smallpox vaccination to France.
He died in Paris on 26 March 1814 and was buried in Division 8. His family later asked the state for leave to change the name, and were told they had only to make it illustrious some other way.
His grave no longer exists. Vandalised in the years after his death, it disappeared altogether: no monument, no inscription marks the place, and the Friends of the cemetery count him among those whose remains went to the ossuary. The position shown on the map is therefore only approximate, to the scale of the Division.
On site, do not miss
Nothing, precisely: the grave of the man whose name became that of a machine was vandalised and then erased, and Division 8 keeps no trace of his passing.
Visitors' questions
Where is Guillotin's grave?
Nowhere: it has vanished. Guillotin was buried in Division 8, in the lower, older part of the cemetery — the division of Xavier Bichat and Georges Cuvier — but his grave was vandalised in the years after his death and nothing of it survives. The marker on the map shows the division, not a visible grave.
Xavier BichatDid Guillotin invent the guillotine?
No. In October 1789 he proposed that all condemned prisoners be executed in the same way, regardless of rank, and by an instantaneous method. The machine was designed by the surgeon Antoine Louis and the harpsichord maker Tobias Schmidt.
Antoine d'AndréWhy does the machine bear his name?
Through usage, which he was never able to correct: having brought the proposal before the Assembly, he remained tied to the object. He spent the rest of his life disowning it, and his family later asked in vain to change their name.
Paul BarrasWhat did he do after the Revolution?
Imprisoned under the Terror and freed after Thermidor, he returned to medicine and was one of the champions of smallpox vaccination in France — the fight of a man who spent his life trying to spare others suffering. He died in Paris on 26 March 1814.
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