On this day, 6 April 1871, rebel national guard troops of the 137th Battalion in the Paris commune seized the local guillotine, smashed it to pieces and burned it outside the town hall of the 11th district to the applause of a huge crowd of onlookers.
The government had recently created a new type of guillotine which was quicker and easier to transport. The district commune committee had voted to seize these “servile instruments of monarchist domination” and destroy them “once and forever… for the purification of the district and the consecration of our new freedom”.
While some on the left glorify the guillotine, in fact it has mostly been used as a weapon against radicals and the powerless. For example while use of the guillotine is most famously remembered in terms of the execution of aristocrats during the French revolution, the new “revolutionary” government soon began using it against those on their left.
The German Nazi government was also a big proponent of the guillotine, executing over 16,000 people with the device, including many resistance activists like Sophie and Hans Scholl.
More recently it was used in places like French colonies in the Caribbean, in state socialist East Germany and in France itself, where its last use was against a Tunisian agricultural worker who was convicted of murder and beheaded in 1977.
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Pictured: illustration of the destruction of the guillotine https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1393690857482727/?type=3