Try asking anyone which country was the first to use the guillotine as an effective ‘tool’ of social control. The answer will almost certainly be France. There are those who would claim this is wrong. The Guillotine first appeared in Ireland, long before the terror that followed the French Revolution of 1789.

The earliest ‘guillotine’

This notorious beheading device was used as early as the fourteenth century, and possibly much earlier. It wasn’t called a guillotine, of course.

A woodcut illustration, reproduced in Holinshed’s Chronicles of 1577, shows one of the earliest examples of a guillotine, and its caption indicates it was a portrayal of the execution of Murcod Ballagh, near Merton, in County Galway, and dates the scene 1307.

This event has been disputed and the date is therefore uncertain but the woodcut certainly proves the guillotine existed at least 200 years before the French lost their heads over (or under) it. It doesn’t really prove it was used in Ireland, either – just that Holinshed, who was a British chronicler, was aware of it in the mid sixteenth century.

Other sources claim that forms of the device had been used in England and Ireland even earlier.

The guillotine in France

There’s no doubt that it was used, later, in France. In 1789, during the ‘Terror’ when there were mass executions following the French Revolution, it was promoted as a tool of execution by Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. He was opposed to the death penalty but believed that the least he could do was suggest a more humane method. It was adopted and named after him: La Guillotine. He wasn’t very pleased with this ‘honour’ and tried to have the name changed.

The last use of the guillotine in France was in 1977, in Marseille. Hamida Djandoubi, aged 28, lost his head after being convicted of torture and murder.

You can read more about the guillotine at the History Channel

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