1944: Col. Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, for the plot to kill Hitler 1794: Three generations of Noailles women, but not the Marquise de Lafayette

Themed Set: Thermidor

July 22nd, 2008 Headsman

Paris, 1794

It is Thermidor — Month of Heat — by that queer artifact of the times, the Revolutionary calendar, and in the blistering summer the guillotine rots its own scaffold.

It is the climax of that emblematic moment of the French Revolution, often wrongly standing to casual observation as synonymous with the entire revolution. Jarring indeed how brief the span of those pregnant, dangerous days, that upon the storming of the Bastille the guillotine had not yet been erected and from that traditional birthdate of the Revolution were eclipsed successively the Bourbon monarchy, the Constitutionalist Assembly, the Girondin liberals, Marat, Danton … culminating in the bloody hegemony of Robespierre and the fatal test between the Jacobins and their enemies.

By the spring and summer of 1794, Paris is delivered fully to Robespierre. “Terror,” he says, “is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible; it is then an emanation of virtue; it is less a distinct principle than a natural consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing wants of the country.” A blip on the screen chronologically, this period seems endless to those who survive it, and it reverberates endlessly to those who succeed it.

In this Revolution-era cartoon, legendary Parisian headsman Sanson (or Samson), having run out of victims, guillotines himself.

For the next week, join Executed Today in 1794’s Month of Heat as day by day the Terror rages at its apex, inscrutably suffering citizens to live or die — until of a sudden it succumbs to its own rot.

Entry Filed under: Themed Sets

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7 Comments Add your own

  • 1. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip  |  July 23rd, 2008 at 1:09 am

    [...] Part of the Themed Set: Thermidor. [...]

  • 2. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip  |  July 24th, 2008 at 2:37 am

    [...] Part of the Themed Set: Thermidor. [...]

  • 3. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip  |  July 25th, 2008 at 2:05 am

    [...] Part of the Themed Set: Thermidor. [...]

  • 4. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip  |  October 3rd, 2008 at 2:40 pm

    [...] Part of the Themed Set: Thermidor. [...]

  • 5. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip  |  October 3rd, 2008 at 2:42 pm

    [...] the Place de la Nation. Whether the result of another of the many bureaucratic snafus we’ve witnessed this week or a well-placed bribe from his friend and/or mistress Marie-Constance Quesnet, the guards were in [...]

  • 6. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip  |  October 3rd, 2008 at 2:47 pm

    [...] Terror” is usually dated from September 1793 through July 1794, but only during its bloodiest last two months would so many as 52 have been guillotined together; at the time of Carton’s execution, half [...]

  • 7. ExecutedToday.com »&hellip  |  October 3rd, 2008 at 2:54 pm

    [...] famous and infamous blade dropped for the last time at Les Baumettes prison in Marseilles on Hamida Djandoubi, a [...]

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