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Showing posts with the label French Revolution

The Guillotine: A Humane Way to Kill?

Since the early thirteenth century, engineers have worked to streamline the process of beheading.  The earliest known beheading machine was the Halifax Gibbet, found in the town of Halifax, Yorkshire, England.  The first record of its existence dates from the year 1210, though the first public record of the Gibbet executing anyone comes from 1280.  It was a simple device: two long upright poles fitted with grooves would allow a heavy wooden block to be raised on a rope and dropped by the operator.  Attached to the block was an axe which would chop off the head of the criminal below.  The Gibbet was used for the execution of petty criminals, which was defined as anyone who stole (or who confessed to having stolen) money or goods worth 13½ pence or more.  The Gibbet was used to kill over 150 thieves between 1280 and 1650, when Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell abolished capital punishment for theft.  Certainly others were executed throughout England for theft, but there was only one Gib

The Nose of the Sphinx

In 1798, Napoleon Buonaparte proposed a French invasion of Egypt and Syria.  Since he wasn’t emperor yet, he had to ask permission from the Directoire, which was a panel of five people who were running France in the late days of the French Revolution.  Napoleon’s pitch was that an invasion of Egypt would protect French interests and damage English trade, and also put France in a good position to start cutting deals with the princes of India, who were mostly under direct or indirect control of the English.  France and England were at war at this time, so it sounded good to the Directoire.  They gave him the troops and their blessing, however improbable Napoleon’s scheme was. The campaign in Egypt didn’t go as well as Napoleon had hoped.  His troops wound up fighting both the English and the Ottoman Empire.  Though they saw a lot of victories, Egypt was just too much to control, and those two empires were just too much to fight.  The invasion resulted in the deaths of 40,000 Fren