Editing Guillotine (section)

=== Reign of Terror ===
[[File:Execution of Louis XVI.jpg|thumb|The execution of [[Louis XVI of France|King Louis XVI]]]]
[[File:Exécution de Marie Antoinette le 16 octobre 1793.jpg|thumb|Queen [[Marie Antoinette]]'s execution on 16 October 1793]]
[[File:Execution robespierre, saint just....jpg|thumb|The execution of [[Maximilien Robespierre]]; the person who had just been executed in this drawing is [[Georges Couthon]]. Robespierre is the figure marked "10" in the [[tumbrel]], holding a handkerchief to his shattered jaw.]]
Louis Collenot d'Angremont was a royalist famed for having been the first guillotined for his political ideas, on 21 August 1792. Before and during the [[Reign of Terror]] (between June 1793 and July 1794) about 17,000 people were guillotined, including former [[Louis XVI of France|King Louis XVI]] and Queen [[Marie Antoinette]] who were executed at the guillotine in 1793. Towards the end of the Terror in 1794, revolutionary leaders such as [[Georges Danton]], [[Louis Antoine de Saint-Just|Saint-Just]] and [[Maximilien Robespierre]] were sent to the guillotine. Most of the time, executions in Paris were carried out in the Place de la Revolution (former Place [[Louis XV of France|Louis XV]] and current [[Place de la Concorde]]); the guillotine stood in the corner near the Hôtel Crillon where the City of Brest Statue can be found today. The machine was moved several times, to the [[Place de la Nation]] and the [[Place de la Bastille]], but returned, particularly for the execution of the King and for Robespierre.

For a time, executions by guillotine were a popular form of entertainment that attracted great crowds of spectators, with vendors selling programs listing the names of the condemned. But more than being popular entertainment alone during the Terror, the guillotine symbolized revolutionary ideals: equality in death equivalent to equality before the law; open and demonstrable revolutionary justice; and the destruction of privilege under the ''[[Ancien Régime]]'', which used separate forms of execution for nobility and commoners.<ref>{{Cite book|title="The Guilloine and the Terror"|last=Arasse|first=Daniel|publisher=Penguin|year=1989|location=London|pages=75–76}}</ref> The Parisian ''[[sans-culottes]]'', then the popular public face of lower-class patriotic radicalism, thus considered the guillotine a positive force for revolutionary progress.<ref>{{Cite book|title="Goodness Beyond Virtue: Jacobins During the French Revolution "|last=Higonnet|first=Patrice|publisher=Harvard|year=2000|location=Cambridge, MA|pages=283}}</ref>