Bloodshed is the lyric of the mob and the mob had plenty to sing about when Madame Guillotine was erected in La Place de la Revolution. They executed their king, Louis XVI, in January 1793. Hundreds of the military attended. What were they there for? To give the monarch a royal send off? To prevent the mob storming the scaffold and tearing him to pieces with their bare hands? Snatching the royal head from his executioners and making off with it, still dripping?
Since then the blade has sung to the sharpening stones many times. A good supply of victims have screamed, pleaded, begged, but have been forced down onto the bascule, slid forward, their ankles bound, their arms bound to their sides, their hands bound behind them, until, framed in the republican window, they have heard their last sound on this earth and their lives have flashed away.
And who's turn is it now, this fine day in May 1794?
He pleads as he has pled since his arrest, but only for the life of his wife, Marie-Anne Pierrette. From the moment of his arrest he has known he will not be spared, but has begged that Marie-Anne be spared, that she shall not be declared guilty by association. No such guarantee has been given. He has not seen her in the months since his arrest. He does not know where she is. This is his grief as he steps forward, prostrates himself on the horrible sledge, accepts his fate. The crew do not speak to him. They don't care who he is. He's one of the régime, isn't he? Another corrupt and greedy bastard getting what he deserves.
Should they care to ask they would discover his name is Antoine Lavoisier, but this will mean nothing to them.
Let us examine the record of this criminal, this enemy of the Republic.
He attended the College of Four Nations of the University of Paris.
After graduating, and in no particular order, he -
Devised a street lighting system for Paris.
Drew plans for improving the ventilation of public buildings and prisons.
Determined by experiment the precise amount of moisture to add to tobacco to better preserve its quality.
Verified by careful experiment that matter could not be created or destroyed in chemical processes but was converted in form - what we now call the Law of Conservation of Mass. This work demolished an earlier misunderstanding of combustion known as phlogiston theory.
Showed - again by careful experiment - that substances always reacted together in fixed quantities by weight. Two parts of hydrogen burned with sixteen parts of oxygen to form eighteen parts of water. Chemists now call this 'stoichiometry'. It is a feature of all chemical reactions. Lavoisier has been called 'The Father of (modern) Chemistry.'
Showed that respiration in animals is a slow combustion process. This work explained why animals were warmer than their surroundings, laid the foundations of sport physiology and training methods that monitor oxygen take-up rates.
Classified chemical elements (carbon, sulphur, hydrogen etc) and compounds (water, copper sulphate, nitric acid etc) under a system that was rapidly adopted throughout Europe.
Sadly for him he was also a member of one of the régimes subsets, and even worse he was a tax-collector. He was accused of adulterating tobacco, tax fraud, shovelling money abroad to the enemies of La République and though he put up a robust defence for himself and 27 co-accused, the judge declared that 'the Republic has no need of scientists and chemists and the course of justice must not be delayed.'
His wife, Marie-Anne Pierrette, fifteen years his junior - portraits show a woman of heartbreaking 'little girl' prettiness - helped him in his experiments, kept records, checked his calculations, made drawings of his experimental apparatus. No wonder he anguished over her fate.
We know she survived. Eighteen months after his death his belongings were sent to her with a curt note. 'The the widow of Lavoisier, wrongly convicted.'
Enlightenment thinkers such as Denis Diderot - he had to be very careful of what he said about La Révolution and the Catholic church - were horrified by his execution. The mathematician and astronomer Joseph-Louis Lagrange declared -
'They cut off his head in a trice: in a hundred years we shall not see a better.'
Vive La Révolution!
