By Gustave Lenotre*
“The scaffold had become a part of the people’s life, and a certain number of Parisians, were extremely entertained by the new plaything. Someone conceived the idea of beheading, in the porches of the old basilica of Notre-Dame, all the stone Saints that adorned the church-fronts. The whiteness of the broken stone contrasted strikingly with the bodies of the statues, blackened by time, and gave an impression of freshly-cut flesh, which was regarded as delightfully funny.”
No doubt you will think that ghoulish humor could not be carried farther: nevertheless there were even more horrible things than these. The wave of madness that spread over France had turned the nation’s head to such a degree that the guillotine had its lovers and its worshipers. There was a religion of the scaffold. Executioners volunteered, for love of the work, to purge the soil of the Republic from the royalists who defiled it. The Revolution had done their best to raise the scaffold to the dignity of an honored institution.
Gateau, Controller of Army Stores, wrote: “Saint Guillotine¹ is in a state of the most brilliant activity, and the beneficent Terror is producing here, in a miraculous way, a condition of affairs that there could be no hope of achieving by means of reason and philosophy in less than a century. The time has come for the justice that inspires fear, and every guilty head ought to pass under the national leveler. The aristocrats must be shown, by songs and dances, that their death is the people’s only happiness.” Gateau had a wax seal engraved with a guillotine. These men made blood their god.
The dead were devoid of clothing, the executioners sold it until the Revolution made it that the government acquired the money; anything left was given to the poor.
¹The words Sainte Guillotine, were in common use.
*A short excerpt from his book by the same title.
The Guillotine and Its Servants By Gustave Lenotre. Pg. 199: Ch. VIII, The Scaffold in Song; Pgs. 203-208: Ch. IX, Worship of the Guillotine
Short Stories on Honor, Chivalry, and the World of Nobility—no. 587