A common rumor holds that Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, the Frenchman who invented the guillotine, was also eventually executed with the device. But as the Dictionary of Eponyms notes, "Dr. Joseph ...

One day in May 1738, legend has it, a woman approaching the end of her pregnancy was walking down a street in Saintes, France, when she heard the cries of a man being executed on the town’s breaking ...

Chanting; red, white, and blue banners waving; crowds infuriated; a guillotine carried through their midst: A scene reminiscent of eighteenth-century Paris played out in Puerto Rico on a Tuesday night ...

Concerns about the drugs used for executions are being raised again after the federal government announced it will once again execute inmates convicted of capital crimes almost 16 years after the last ...

You’ve probably seen the guillotine in historical epics and Dickens adaptations. But were you aware that it struck a blow for egalitarianism in more than one way? The French believed the guillotine’s ...

The supreme irony of the guillotine — an irony that caused the good doctor who invented it to brood the rest of his days — is that it was designed for humanitarian purposes. In 1789, as the French ...

Hamida Djandoubi smoked a few cigarettes in the last moments before he was executed by guillotine in a Marseilles prison, the ultimate punishment for killing his former lover, Elisabeth Bousquet.