Guillotine : its legend and lore / Daniel Gerould.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 315-320) and index.

Introduction -- Inventing the Guillotine -- Guillotine and the Death Penalty at the Time of the French Revolution -- Guillotinomania -- Talking heads and walking trunks -- Rise and fall of a tradition -- Museum, fairground, and the collector's Guillotine -- Victor Hugo, Hector Berlioz, and the condemned man -- Criminal-artist of the Guillotine -- Satirical Guillotine -- Guillotinenromantik of Georg Buchner and Antoine Wiertz -- Macabre Tales: Irving, Dumas, Janin, and Sue -- Literary eyewitnesses -- Dostoevsky's Idiot -- Novels of the French Revolution -- Guillotine burned and the Guillotine Nostalgia of Villiers de l'Isle-Adam -- Cabaret, Grand Guignol, and Broadway -- Anarchists confront the Guillotine -- Fantomas and the triumph of evil -- Guillotine in the silent film -- Aphorists, poets, and playwrights -- Nazi Guillotine -- Guillotine sails for the new world -- Campaign against the death penalty--Existentialists and Filmmakers -- Guillotines in unexpected places -- Recent plays and films about the French Revolution and the historical Guillotine -- Guillotine between word and image -- Afterword: Last words, final gestures -- Bibliography -- Index.

From Publishers Weekly: Gerould presents 200 years of the most famous executioner's tool, the guillotine, from details of its use to its appearance in literature, the visual arts and music. His historical account ranges from the guillotine's invention in the early 1790s as a means of making capital punishment more humane--through instantaneous death-to its notoriety as the great symbol of France's Reign of Terror. Gerould offers reports of post-Terror balls for relatives of the guillotined and 19th-century medical experiments to discover if consciousness remains after the head is severed. Short chapters trace guillotine themes in Hugo and Dickens, Berlioz and the performances of '70s rock icon Alice Cooper, and others. He also presents tidbits about the cult of personality surrounding France's state executioners and about underpublicized use of the guillotine by the Nazis. Though Gerould (who edited American Melodrama) never quite gets around to his promised cultural interpretation of the guillotine's role in Western imagination, this book will find an audience among those fascinated by a device that has come to represent so much about modern revolution, human rights and terror.