The Guillotine and the Terror

About this book

This is a study of the guillotine and its role in the French Revolution concentrating as much upon the social and psychological contexts - the "mythology" and theatre of the guillotine - as upon the history and transformations of the guillotines invention. The book offers a thesis which argues for example that the guillotine acts as an enlightenment machine as the begetter of a new physiology of the headless body politic as an aristocratic/democratic art of dying and as the source of a new kind of criminological portraiture.