The reason we only hear the horror stories about the guillotine, and not the details that the old regime boiled people alive is that this time it was nobles getting the chop. That's literally the only logical reason to demonize that method in particular.
"Literally the only logical reason to demonize that method in particular." U wot, I'm choking to death here m8
The reason we hear the horror stories about the guillotine was because it was well-documented and it involved "audience participation," in which thousands of lucky participants were executed every month for being political enemies by the most efficient guillotine. It's bizarre to treat everyone who died criticizing the excesses of these times to suggest that everyone who criticized the guillotine was an agent of the ancien regime whose humanity was tied solely to their loyalty to aristocracy; be that it is, for that was the kinda justification used to eradicate entire French populations for being enemies of the state, people who were clearly not fucking aristocrats
. During the Revolution Controversy, defendants against the consolidating power of France's future tyrants used this argumentation to defend their mass executions. When critics lambasted the farce of the humane execution of the guillotine; the same tyrants would bring up the same bullshit about perspective. Their contemporaries found it disgraceful, yet it seems too much of today's states are willing to ignore it because they trace their roots to this liberal revolution ;P
It's well proper sneaky to pretend "humane by comparison to boiling alive" is the same as "humane." The liberal leaders of France's revolution and her critics abroad were both united in the ludicrous farce of fighting for freedom only to see terror and tyranny reign. Don't pretend this never happened, or it was all for nothing. The true horror lurking in the claims that the guillotine was the humane method is blood well apparent to everyone who lived under its yoke, its ease of use and who imagined they could be - and often would be, next. Seeing it hanging high, without even considering the actual horror stories they made, of accounts of those whose heads retained some semblance of cognizance upon severance. And then there's the scale... Where before the crowd could witness the spectacle of seeing one noble go through ceremony and pomp before having the swordsman lop his head off, in order to retain the same spectacle with a much more unceremonious execution, more people had to be executed to grant the crowd the same spectacle. Entire lines now, one after the other, people gone in rows.
Also, look up the English list of death-penalty offenses nicknamed the "bloody code" which is contemporary with the Napoleonic Code. It's pretty interesting stuff, and an example of how the victors write the history:
Yeah, so English jurors had to rig the system so that paupers weren't mandatorily executed for stealing a few pence. These are the guys cited as the good guys against the murderous French revolutionaries. But of course the English are in the clear here, because the people being executed were the poor, not nobles. Remember, at the very time the guillotines were running, the UK was loading the Irish into plague-ridden ships and sending them as slave labour to Australia.
It's not my fault if American history is inundated with the mentality of good guys vs bad guys, I didn't write this stuff
.
But I can write for the UK's perspective here, with what limited knowledge I have. Here it is not seen as good guys vs bad guys, but the conflict between revolutionary and
not setting your country on fire maintaining your continuity.
The controversy was over the French Revolutionaries' willingness to overturn the entirety of their inherited institutions in order to enforce their liberty; the English argued that the destruction of all their institutions had eradicated the privileges and liberties they had inherited, whilst removing every institution which safeguarded their liberty, placing it in the hands of
politicians. With all the institutions to which people owed their liberty to deleted, no one would need to owe any loyalty to the state for any reason, thus the only reason left to be loyal to the state would be violence. History has vindicated this view, as every time French citizens did point out they had no reason to be loyal to the new state,
the French state eradicated them. The vast majority of indentured servants and convicts sent to Australia were sourced from Britain, not Ireland, for what it's worth (as it seems British convicts are not as worthy as others in American textbooks :|), while in regard to ship conditions, "plague-ridden" is anachronistic, and the UK was the first nation in the world to regulate sanitation aboard transportation vessels so that they
weren't typhus-ridden immigrant traps. The USA followed suit 16 years after the UK.
Lastly, ignoring that English jurors were deliberately allowing paupers to ignore the laws the jurors were supposed to follow is a rather nice parallel for the Revolution controversy itself. The British with their unwritten constitution had absolute flexibility in exercising the law for the benefit of its people and its freedom; contrast the French Revolutionaries with their written constitution, a supposed guarantee of liberty.
In both cases, the French did as you do now, pointing to how the Revolutionaries had a nicer piece of paper detailing how humane and wonderful they were. The English pieces of paper by contrast, were not nearly as nice sounding (besides the Magna Carta, which is pretty peng), yet they treated them as that - mere pieces of paper. I believe a similar conundrum can be viewed in how the French juror could not disobey his own constitutional law in the manner the English juror could, or in how Americans today in
[ insert subtle political commentary here ] struggle to make reforms in favour of modernizing American law vs breaking the American constitution.
Yet revisionist historians tell you the English juror is the villain for not having the nicer piece of paper, despite not being the one executing his country to death! ;P
In that same concept, I've always found the slaughters of Timur fascinating. For the first decade of Timur's rule, his wars seemed almost pointless, rarely gaining any ground. In reality, they served a much different purpose- they tested loyalties
-snip-
It does make you wonder how one could be so lenient to their own people, yet so ruthless to others.
Spicy history. Reminds me of the Rashidun Caliphate, which had much of the same problem. Many of its inner-conflicts were solved by keeping the warlike and quarreling tribes expanding ever-outwards with more conquests, many of which didn't serve to really benefit the Caliphate besides some abstract notion of expansion. But they were effective at keeping the quarreling tribes busy, and when the conquests stopped happening, the quarrels turned into civil war.
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