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 guillotine's 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.
- ISBN10 0713990082
- ISBN13 9780713990089
- Publish Date 29 June 1989
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 6 December 1991
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
- Imprint Allen Lane
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 208
- Language English