29. France Was Still Guillotining People When Star Wars Was Released
Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities saw the guillotine transformed into a semi-independent character, whose ominous shadow dominated the tale. Today, mention of the guillotine usually brings to mind images of the French Revolution, its blade chopping through and thinning the ranks of the Ancien Regime’s aristocracy. Its most notable victims during its 1790s heyday included King Louis XVI, and his wife Marie Antoinette.
An equal opportunity killer, the guillotine also chopped off the heads of radical republicans who had executed France’s king and queen. Falling between those political extremes, tens of thousands lost their lives to the guillotine in its busiest stretch of usage, during the Reign of Terror. So ubiquitous was the instrument during this period, that it became a quasi symbol of Revolutionary France. And it stayed busy, severing heads, throughout the nineteenth century, and well into the twentieth. By the time it chopped its last neck, Star Wars was in theaters.