10 Things France Is Famous for

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In the earliest centuries and medieval times, executioners carried out their tasks by decapitating their victims with a device- a guillotine. This infamous device was first invented in France. It was the popular way of executing those sentenced to death. The guillotine was the machine used to apply capital punishment by decapitation in several European countries such as France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Sweden, Italy and Germany. Although it is associated with the French Revolution of 1789, when it began to be used, it already existed in other countries since the thirteenth century. On October 10, 1789, a 50-year-old doctor named Joseph Ignace Guillotin submitted a proposal to the French Legislative Assembly. He proposed to equalize the penalties and at the same time humanize their application, extending the decapitation method – until then the privilege of the aristocracy – to the inmates of all social classes. In order to avoid the inconveniences and mistakes that the executioners often made with the use of the ax or the sword, he proposed to use an apparatus whose mechanism cut the head in a blink. Guillotine was not the inventor of what we know as guillotine, he is only a reference of its use during the French Revolution. Click the next ARROW to see the next photo!