guillotine

A woman protester nearby was dressed as Marie-Antoinette, the queen executed by guillotine during the French revolution.

From Barron's ● May 1, 2026

The guillotine blade that was allegedly used comes from the Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors, by descent from the family of Charles-Henri Sanson, the executioner, whose son Henri may have pulled the lever.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 8, 2026

“Consolidation now hangs over the film industry like a guillotine, with job losses likely and the future of the theatrical movie-going experience in question,” Lauzen wrote in her report.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 1, 2026

The Sept. 1 protest had “little to no energy,” according to an internal Portland police summary, before federal officers dispersed the crowd to collect a prop guillotine that had been brought.

From Salon ● Nov. 14, 2025

“They don’t use the guillotine anymore,” Soheil says.

From "Internment" by Samira Ahmed

After drying during a series of slow corkscrews, the new magazine’s edges were chopped smooth by guillotines and emerged through an opening.

From New York Times ● Jun. 16, 2024

Even news of guillotines, massacres, and growing public hostility to religion did not deter the most hopeful Francophiles, who dismissed such accounts as exaggerations by British propagandists.

From Slate ● Oct. 24, 2022

“During downturns,” Stern says, “the financial guillotines hit hardest in regions where clusters are weakest.”

From Nature ● May 3, 2016

A reviewer for an English newspaper saw guillotines.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 5, 2015

The abolition of rotten boroughs brought down a thousand ominous references to noyades, fusillades, and guillotines.

From Studies in Literature by John Morley

Because of this mediocre king, who clung so desperately to the fantasies of absolutism that he was later overthrown and guillotined by his own people, the American experiment with republican government was able to commence.

From Slate ● May 30, 2025

The last queen of France was guillotined in 1793 at the age of 37, along with her husband at the height of the French Revolution.

From BBC ● Nov. 14, 2024

The French have maintained a love-hate relationship with kings ever since they guillotined King Louis XVI in 1793.

From Washington Times ● Mar. 23, 2023

Soon after Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were guillotined in France, the revolutionary government abolished slavery in 1794, not just in Saint-Domingue but in all French colonies.

From New York Times ● May 20, 2022

That was Rahel being Sydney Carton being Charles Darnay, as he stood on the steps, waiting to be guillotined, in the Classics Illustrated comic’s version of A Tale of Two Cities.

From "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

The “age of chivalry is gone,” Edmund Burke lamented after the guillotining of Marie Antoinette of France on Oct.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 8, 2026

France likes to dream of revolution, ever re-enacting the popular uprising of 1789 that led to the guillotining of the king and queen and the abolition of the monarchy three years later.

From New York Times ● Mar. 24, 2023

Otherwise – as in the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in Donizetti's Maria Stuarda and the guillotining of Andrea and Maddalena in Giordano's Andrea Chénier – the pleasure is all in the anticipation.

From The Guardian ● Jan. 20, 2011

Britons who prize the dignity of Parliament were far from amused by the guillotining and the cavorting.

From Time Magazine Archive

And there was one doughty Scot—Dalrymple of Dakota, who was guillotining more wheat with four hundred labourers and three hundred harvesters, than five thousand peasants could garner by hand.

From The Romance of the Reaper by Herbert Newton Casson