I first came across this toy guillotine in Karl Gröber’s book ‘Children’s Toys of Bygone Days’ (1932) and have only found his black and white photograph of it, on which I have based my drawing. Note that the feet of the doll are pointing upwards, like in the photograph, rather than downwards in the manner of a real execution. When Gröber’s book was published this guillotine was part of the collection of Henry-René D’Allemagne – a librarian, historian, and collector (1863-1950) – but I have not been able to find out its current whereabouts.  

I am not sure why I was initially so surprised, or why I found it any more gruesome than other toy killing implements like guns, arrows, grenades, or tanks. It might be because decapitation seems such a graphic form of killing – defiling a body and physically breaking it into separate parts. But that same aspect makes the mechanics of guillotine deaths much easier to grasp than many other kinds of deaths; without our heads it is evident we can no longer work, much like a wind-up toy does not work if we have lost the key.

My thoughts soon drifted to children gleefully defacing Barbie dolls and popping off their heads, and to the many headless Lego figures I have in my house, patiently waiting for their turn to have a head once again, hoping they can go back to being miniature people rather than being doomed to exist forevermore as torsos with limbs.

It struck me, too, that there were many connections to be made here – the Queen in Alice in Wonderland, forever shouting ‘Off with her head!’, the last lines of Oranges and Lemons (‘Here comes the chopper to chop off your head, Chip chop chip chop’) or the Spanish rhyme ‘Aserrín Aserrán’, which also talks of chopping off heads (“…y les cortan el pescuezo”) in certain versions, which is always accompanied by tickling the child, who laughs gleefully.

I thought of the general gruesomeness of certain images in children’s literature – Cinderella’s stepsisters cutting off their toes and heels to squeeze those dainty glass slippers on, while blood dripped from the stubs; or Max and Moritz, who were so naughty that they ended up being ground up and gobbled up.

I also remembered horrible accidents from more recent sources, like Chicken Soup in Sendak’s Really Rosie (sung by Carole King), who fatally chokes on a chicken bone (‘a little bone, a bitty thing, no bigger than my pinky’), and Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, who start at ‘A is for Amy falling down the stairs’ and go all the way to ‘Z is for Zillah who drank too much gin’.

Told as rhymes or stories, we tend to chuckle or not to dwell on them too much, but we all pause when we see a real blade.  

Gröber’s book mentions that during the French Revolution it was quite fashionable for toy guillotines to be given to children to play with, and that Goethe himself had requested his mother get one as a gift for his son. He refers to a letter sent by Goethe’s mother to her son on December 23, 1793, where she refuses to buy a ‘murder machine’ for her grandson. I spent hours trying to find the original source for this quote, and at one point even wondered whether the letter was real at all, or whether it was one of those quotes that had just been repeated verbatim throughout the years without checking and had possibly been misattributed. But finally, with a little help, I found the letter in German. Goethe’s mother spells out that she is drawing the line there, and finds it beyond disturbing to encourage children to entertain themselves with killing and blood.

But evidently Goethe was fascinated by this machine – Rüdiger Safranski’s book ‘Goethe und Schiller: Geschichte einer Freundschaft’ contains a mention of him buying Schiller’s son a toy guillotine. I wonder whether his own son ended up with one too; something tells me he did.

Louis-Marie Prudhomme, a journalist and historian of the time, wrote in ‘Histoire générale et impartiale des erreurs, des fautes et de crimes commis pendant la Révolution Française’ (1797) that Pierre Gaspard Chaumette gave the young Dauphin a toy guillotine while he was in prison. I confess to have known nothing about Chaumette, or about the Dauphin and his role in Marie Antoinette’s execution, but after briefly investigating, it is evident that the gift was unspeakably twisted and macabre.

Though the mechanism of the guillotine was not invented by the French, Revolutionary France adopted it as a symbol of sorts. At one point several people were routinely guillotined every day in Paris. Pro-Republic women wore guillotine-shaped earrings, and family and friends of those who had been executed wore red ribbon chokers in homage to them. Children went along to executions, which were treated as public spectacles to be enjoyed, with many consuming food and drinks afterwards in the stalls and establishments nearby.

Children are said to have decapitated dolls (some of which were apparently made specially for the purpose, so they appeared to bleed – here I am reminded of today’s dolls that cry, pee and poop, or those unicorns that poop glitter), as well as small animals such as rats. I have not found any references of the time that confirm this, but it does not seem far-fetched. 

In many ways, a toy guillotine offered the ultimate role play game. It offered a chance to laugh at death; a chance or an attempt to normalise the horror witnessed daily. But perhaps more importantly, in a time of chaos and uncertainty, it offered a chance to be the executioner, the hero, the person holding all the power, unlike the adults in their lives, who were completely exposed to the extreme volatility of the situation.

This is a hard object to look at. Let’s look at it from a different point of view. Try not to squirm right now, but wouldn’t you like to put something in there and see it in action, sharp and well-oiled? Perhaps something innocuous like a run-of-the-mill, plain wax candle. Just to see how smoothly it worked? You could get someone else to operate the mechanism if you felt too squeamish. But would you watch as the blade dropped, if it were just a white candle?