In Revolutionary France, the guillotine was a privilege reserved for the nobility, though the nobles themselves would surely have preferred a different sort of privilege. Before the Revolution, commoners were simply hanged. But when equality was extended to criminal law, decapitation became the fate of everyone, neatly encapsulating the peculiar humanitarian sensibility of the revolutionaries in their determined pursuit of equality. But beheading people is an expensive business, especially when you are unleashing the Terror and planning to remove the heads of more than a thousand citizens every week. Consider that executioners were paid around $700, and that the axes of the time, as has been documented, lost their edge far too quickly. Whether this was due to the executioners’ incompetence or the stubborn resilience of their victims’ necks, I cannot say. The revolutionaries therefore turned to the famous invention of Joseph-Ignace Guillotin: the guillotine, which P. G. Wodehouse described as the only remedy for grey hair.
🇫🇷 Looters and rioters are presented as heroes by far-left media and politicians https://t.co/5aqXxPnrVR
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 21, 2026
