Obscure History: The Death Penalty Abolitionist Who Invented the Guillotine

The 18th-century doctor Joseph Ignace Guillotin hoped a more humane method of execution would eventually lead to the end of capital punishment.

One day in May 1738, legend has it, a woman approaching the end of her pregnancy was walking down a street in Saintes, France, when she heard the cries of a man being executed on the town’s breaking wheel.

(The condemned would be tied to a large wheel, limbs stretched into a starfish, and then beaten with a club to break the bones.)

So traumatic were the man’s screams, the story goes, that the woman went into labor right then and there.

The circumstances, if true, were fitting for the person that came into the world that day.

As the French historian Daniel Arasse wrote, “the conditions of his birth determined his later renown”—the baby, Joseph Ignace Guillotin, would grow up to invent one of the deadliest instruments of execution of his time.

But before he invented the guillotine, he would devote a career to lobbying against the death penalty in France.

Guillotin’s early career was accomplished, if otherwise unremarkable: He worked briefly as a literature professor at the University of Bordeaux, then left for Paris, where he studied medicine and then settled as a practicing physician.

In 1788, he wrote a pamphlet titled “Petition of the Living Citizens of Paris,” arguing for more representation for non-nobility in the legislative body called the Estates General. The following year, largely as a result of the attention he received for “Petition,” he became a representative to the Estate, launching his political career.

As a politician, Guillotin focused mostly on medical reform. He was also an opponent of the death penalty, and, perhaps recognizing that outright abolition was unlikely, focused his energy on making capital punishment more humane—and more egalitarian. At the time, only the nobility in France had the dubious privilege of beheading by sword; most criminals sentenced to death were hung on the gallows (or, in some gruesome cases, sent to the breaking wheel).

On October 10, 1789, Guillotin submitted a proposal to the French government arguing for a decapitating machine to become the standard manner of carrying out the death penalty. Initially, the proposal gained little traction—but that December, Guillotin delivered a speech to the National Assembly that would ultimately elevate both the man and the idea to international fame.

In a moment of enthusiasm, he told his audience, “Now with my machine I take off your head in the twinkling of an eye, and you never feel it.”

The following day, the Les Actes des Apôtres, a popular French journal, mocked Guillton’s comment into song (this translation comes from Chambers Edinburgh Journal, a 19th-century British magazine):

Politician,
And physician,
Bethought himself, ’tis plain,
That hanging’s not humane
Nor patriotic;
And straightaway showed
A clever mode
To kill – without a pang – men;
Which, void of rope or stakes,
Suppression makes
Of hangmen. …

And then offhand,
His genius planned
That machine that ‘simply’ kills—that’s all—
Which after him we call
“Guillotine”

Read the Remainder at The Atlantic

History of Domestic Terrorism: America’s Original ‘Lone-Wolf’ Terrorist

No one noticed as the tall, thin man carried a package into the Capitol and left it in the Senate reception room. It was nearly July 4, 1915, and Congress hadn’t been in session since March, but many of the legislative buildings were open and thinly guarded. Frank Holt, 44, sneaked back out and made his way to Union Station. At 11.40 p.m., the package exploded, wrecking the ornately decorated room but hurting no one.

Around that time, a Washington newspaper received a note signed by “R. Pearce” that claimed responsibility, noting that the blast aimed “to make enough noise to be heard above the voices that clamor for war” and serve as an “exclamation point” for an appeal for peace. But that appeal was far from over: Upon hearing the explosion, Holt boarded a northbound train and headed to his next target.

In the space of a few days, he passed from deranged nut to lone-wolf terrorist and possible conspirator in the public’s mind.

The next morning, Holt reached the Long Island estate of J.P. Morgan Jr. The son of the iconic J.P. Morgan was following in his father’s footsteps and proving a strong supporter of the British, serving openly as Britain’s purchasing agent for munitions. Holt stormed into the house, and the two men fought until a butler knocked Holt out with a lump of coal to the head. Only after Holt was restrained did Morgan realize he’d been shot in the groin, albeit not seriously. At the police station, Holt calmly confessed to the D.C. bombing but said he’d only wanted to talk to Morgan and persuade him to stop financing and shipping munitions. He even claimed the shooting was accidental.

Holt was peddling a combination of lies and half-truths. He said he was a native-born American and pacifist who worked as a German professor at Cornell and had taught at other universities. But with his picture fronting newspapers nationwide, the lies soon caught up with him. He was really German-born Erich Muenter, wanted in Massachusetts for the murder of his wife 10 years earlier. His talent for languages had indeed landed him a job teaching German at Harvard. But 10 days after the birth of his second daughter, Muenter’s wife, Leona, died suspiciously; it was later determined that she had succumbed to arsenic poisoning. By the time Cambridge police issued an arrest warrant, Muenter had disappeared; a nationwide search and $1,000 reward failed to find any trace of him.

It turned out that Muenter had been hiding in plain sight. Under his new name he continued teaching German at colleges around the country and remarried. At the time of the attacks, his second wife was waiting for him in Dallas, where he had been hired to teach at Southern Methodist University. But after leaving Cornell, Muenter rented a house in New Jersey and began stockpiling dynamite. His former Cornell colleagues said Muenter had made strongly inflammatory pro-German comments. He’d also written to Kaiser Wilhelm, supposedly as part of his one-man campaign to keep America out of the war.

Police in New Jersey compared the purchase records of the dynamite with the small amount used in Washington and the sticks found in Muenter’s car and coat. Worryingly, some of the stockpile was missing. While Muenter sat in his cell, the headquarters of the New York City police were bombed on July 4, 1915. Three days later, a bomb exploded on the ship Minnehaha on the same day Muenter had written in a note that there would be attacks on two other ships carrying arms to England.

 Other than that coincidence, there was no evidence that Muenter was part of a pro-German plot to bomb American targets. In the space of a few days, he passed from deranged nut to lone-wolf terrorist and possible conspirator in the public’s mind. Muenter reflected “many of the traits of the lone-wolf terrorists we are seeing today,” says Jeffrey D. Simon, visiting lecturer at UCLA and author of Lone Wolf Terrorism: Understanding the Growing Threat. “He was smart, dangerous, had access to explosives … and combined personal and emotional problems with the desire to commit violence in the name of some cause.”

The British and French governments leaped on the story as further evidence of German hostility, an accusation made easy to swallow by the recent sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat that May. “Muenter’s bombing undoubtedly lent credence to fears about German traitors and spies on American soil during World War I,” says University of Kansas professor Lorie Vanchena.

But Muenter never answered the conspiracy accusations. On July 6, the day before the ship bombing, Muenter climbed to the top of his cell block and threw himself down head first, breaking open his skull. A prominent New York psychiatrist asked for Muenter’s brain in order to examine it for criminal abnormalities. A jailer obligingly shoveled it into a bucket and sent it to the doctor.

Read the Original Article at OZY