A new exhibit is opening in Paris' Musee d'Orsay on the guillotine, a little more than three decades after it (and capital punishment in general) was outlawed in France:French guillotine exhibition opens 33 years after the last head fellThe execution method began during the years of the French Revolution:

Clair has pointed out that when it was suggested by Joseph Ignace Guillotin in 1789, the idea of making mechanical decapitation the uniform means of France's execution stemmed not from barbarity but from a desire to make death as quick and painless as possible for the victim, whether a prince or a pauper.Hanging and hacking with hatchets were considered woefully inefficient.”This machine was created out of humanist concerns as the least painful and most egalitarian means of death,” Clair told Le Figaro, adding: “Its precision and ease of use also made it the starting point for mass industrial murders.”

Interestingly, the article mentions a critic of modern French criminal justice system:

“I think it's a shame this stops at 1981,” she said, referring to a timeline of the criminal justice system in France. “Thirty years have passed since then and the state of our prisons is dreadful. They have just swept it under the carpet.”