Episode 4 of 5
Follow-up speech and the 'twinkling of an eye' remark
- When
- 1 December 1789
- Where
- French National Assembly
On 1 December 1789 Guillotin addressed the Assembly again on capital punishment; the Moniteur of 18 December 1789 recorded his 'twinkling of an eye' statement.
On 1 December 1789, Guillotin made a remark during a follow-up speech to the Assembly about capital punishment. The Moniteur of 18 December 1789 deplored the joking but repeated his 'twinkling of an eye' statement for posterity. The remark became one of the better-remembered moments of his campaign for mechanical decapitation, even as contemporaries treated it with some derision.
Sources
- Joseph-Ignace Guillotin Wikipedia, revision of 2026-08-26
Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.