The veteran film actor's first novel is a macabre, blackly comic fictional biography of the man who invented the mechanism of execution much feared during the French Revolution.

How long did the guillotine's blade hang over the heads of French criminals? Was it abandoned in the late 1800s? Did French citizens of the early days of the twentieth century decry its brutality? No. The blade was allowed to do its work well into our own time. In 1974, Hamida Djandoubi brutally tortured 22 year-old Elisabeth Bousquet in an apartment in Marseille, putting cigarettes out on her body and lighting her on fire, finally strangling her to death in the Provencal countryside where he left her body to rot. In 1977, he became the last person executed by guillotine in France in a multifaceted case as mesmerizing for its senseless violence as it is though-provoking for its depiction of a France both in love with and afraid of The Foreigner. In a thrilling and enlightening account of a horrendous murder paired with the history of the guillotine and the history of capital punishment, Jeremy Mercer, a writer well known for his view of the underbelly of French life, considers the case of Hamida Djandoubi in the vast flow of blood that France's guillotine has produced. In his hands, France never looked so bloody...

The guillotine is a most potent image of revolutionary France, the tool whereby a whole society was 'redesigned'. Tracing the development of the guillotine, this book recounts the stories of famous executions, the lives of the executioners, and the research into whether the head retained consciousness after it was separated from the body.

The guillotine is a most potent image of revolutionary France, the tool whereby a whole society was 'redesigned'. Tracing the development of the guillotine, this book recounts the stories of famous executions, the lives of the executioners, and the research into whether the head retained consciousness after it was separated from the body.

The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon is built around a bizarre historical event and an off-hand challenge. The event? In December 1840, nearly twenty years after his death, the remains of Napoleon were returned to Paris for burial—and the next day, the director of a Paris hospital for the insane admitted fourteen men who claimed to be Napoleon. The challenge, meanwhile, is the claim by great French psychiatrist Jean-Étienne-Dominique Esquirol (1772–1840) that he could recount the history of France through asylum registries. From those two components, Laure Murat embarks on an exploration of the surprising relationship between history and madness. She uncovers countless stories of patients whose delusions seem to be rooted in the historical or political traumas of their time, like the watchmaker who believed he lived with a new head, his original having been removed at the guillotine. In the troubled wake of the Revolution, meanwhile, French physicians diagnosed a number of mental illnesses tied to current events, from “revolutionary neuroses” and “democratic disease” to the “ambitious monomania” of the Restoration. How, Murat asks, do history and psychiatry, the nation and the individual psyche, interface? A fascinating history of psychiatry—but of a wholly new sort—The Man Who Thought He Was Napoleon offers the first sustained analysis of the intertwined discourses of madness, psychiatry, history, and political theory.

Against the dramatic backdrop of the French Revolution, historian Scurr tracks Robespierre's evolution from lawyer to revolutionary leader. This is a fascinating portrait of a man who identified with the Revolution to the point of madness, and in so doing changed the course of history.

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A history of public executions in France from the medieval spectacle of suffering to the invention of the Revolutionary guillotine, up to the last public execution in 1939. Paul Friedland explores why spectacles of public execution were staged, as well as why thousands of spectators came to watch them.

In this collection of forty vignettes, biologist Harold Morowitz delights in discovering scientific principles behind such everyday phenomena as doing laundry or registering a car with the DMV. The title essay reflects on the circumstances that caused the name of Joseph Ignace Guillotin to become connected to a mechanical contraption he neither invented, built, nor used. While he relies on the disciplines of science to illuminate life on earth, Morowitz celebrates -- with wonder and wit -- the world's unfathomable mysteries.

The persistent myths of the French Revolution--that the destruction of the old order brought unrivaled freedom and happiness for Europe--are shattered in this rousing study of the political violence and social turmoil that struck France in the late 18th century. In the midst of the terrors which unfettered Enlightenment ideology unleashed on the West, Christian hope arose anew to bring true light to one of history's darkest hours.