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Law

Guillotine and guillotining

guillotine; guillotiner

The guillotine is the execution apparatus that beheads by a falling blade; the narrative gives it a concrete form as a steel triangle between wooden uprights.

From the book

The Gods Are Athirst

Anatole France · Diotimos Editions · 2026

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Meaning

Related words and phrases.

The guillotine is the execution apparatus that beheads by a falling blade; the narrative gives it a concrete form as a steel triangle between wooden uprights. Guillotiner is to execute by that instrument, while faire guillotiner means to have someone guillotined, not personally to operate it. The noun also stands for the execution awaiting a prisoner or the machinery of punitive government. Its meanings change with the speaker: Gamelin invokes a holy protector of the country and imagines equal access to execution as the abolition of privilege; women reacting to Marat’s murder find the same instrument too gentle and demand more elaborate torments. Neither attitude is a neutral account of humane punishment. Brotteaux sees the material scaffold amid cheerful spectators and street commerce. Later the state’s care for wounded Gamelin keeps him alive so that he cannot escape execution, reversing the reassuring sense of solicitude. The ordinary sash-window expression croisée à guillotine shares the mechanism’s vertical motion but denotes a window, not an execution machine. The English retains “guillotine” and uses “have … guillotined” for causative constructions; its “sash window” loses the everyday French verbal echo.

Places to read

  1. Chapter II, paragraph 3Frenchcroisées à guillotine: sash windows. A domestic window mechanism, explained separately under croisée à guillotine; the shared word does not turn the windows into execution instruments.
  2. Chapter III, paragraph 59Frenchtraînait lentement à la guillotine un homme: slowly dragged a man to the guillotine. The procession makes the apparatus a destination. The bystanders’ guess that the unnamed man is a starver of the people remains explicitly probable, not established.
  3. Chapter VII, paragraph 55Frenchtrouvant la guillotine trop douce: finding the guillotine too gentle. The angry women demand whipping, breaking on the wheel and quartering instead; douceur here is their rejected measure of punishment.
  4. Chapter XIII, paragraph 7Frenchune sorte de privilège inique: a kind of unjust privilege. Gamelin thinks reserving the guillotine for aristocrats would be unjust privilege. The conditional and attribution expose his perverse reasoning about equality.
  5. Chapter XIII, paragraph 21FrenchSainte guillotine, sauve la patrie: holy guillotine, save the country. Gamelin’s inward invocation gives an instrument of killing the role of a sacred saviour.
  6. Chapter XIV, paragraph 9Frenchun triangle d’acier entre deux montants de bois: a steel triangle between two wooden uprights. Brotteaux’s view supplies a concrete description, followed by cheerful spectators and the previous day’s blood.
  7. Chapter XXV, paragraph 37Frenchpeut-être ferai-je guillotiner sa mère: perhaps I shall have his mother guillotined. Gamelin imagines a possible future use of judicial power after kissing the child. Peut-être prevents treating it as an already-made decision.
  8. Chapter XXVII, paragraph 47Frenchelle ne voulait pas qu’aucun d’eux échappât à la guillotine: it wanted none of them to escape the guillotine. The Convention’s solicitude means preserving Robespierre’s wounded associates for execution, including Gamelin.