Antedating of "Guillotine"

[Chris Waigl]

On Tue, 27 Dec 2005 19:00:07 EST, Bapopik at AOL.COM typed:

> 1790? And the first person executed by guillotine was 1792??

According to the French Wikipedia pages (I haven't consulted any
other documents), the guillotine was proposed as a device to carry
out death penalties in two speeches Joseph Ignace Guillotin gave to
National Constituent Assembly in October and December 1789. The
method of "cutting the head" was adopted in 1791, but at this point
no functioning machine had been built yet. In March 1792, there was
still debate about the final design. TLFi has 1790 for its first
cite.

Just some background,

Chris Waigl