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wine-merchants took advantage of this loophole, freely selling their own ‘Champagne’, much to the annoyance of the French.
    The saucer-like coupe from which champagne is sometimes drunk is not based on a mould of Marie Antoinette’s breast. It was first manufactured in 1663 (in England), well before her reign. No alternative English topless model has yet been suggested.

Where was the guillotine invented?
     
     
    Halifax in Yorkshire.
    The Halifax Gibbet consisted of two fifteen-foot wooden uprights between which hung an iron axe mounted on a lead-filled cross-beam controlled by a rope and pulley. Official records show at least fifty-three people were executed using it between 1286 and 1650.

    Medieval Halifax made its fortune from the cloth trade. Large quantities of expensive cloth were left outside the mills to dry on frames. Theft was a serious problem and the town’s merchants needed an efficient deterrent.
    This, and a similar, later, Scottish device called the Maiden, may well have inspired the French to borrow the idea and come up with their own name.
    Dr Joseph Ignace Guillotin was a humane, mild-mannered doctor who disliked public executions. In 1789, he put to the National Assembly an ambitious plan to reform the French penal system and make it more humane. He proposed a standardised mechanical method of execution which didn’t discriminate against the poor (who were messily hanged), as opposed to the rich (who were relatively cleanly beheaded).
    Most of the proposals were rejected out of hand, but the notion of an efficient killing engine stuck. Guillotin’s recommendation was picked up and refined by Dr Antoine Louis, the Secretary of the Academy of Surgeons. It was he, not Guillotin, who produced the first working device with its characteristic diagonal blade in 1792. It was even called, briefly, a Louison or Louisette, after its sponsor.
    But somehow, Guillotin’s name became attached to it and, despite the best efforts of his family, there it has stubbornly remained. Contrary to popular folklore, Guillotin was not killed by his eponymous machine; he died in 1814 from an infected carbuncle on his shoulder.
    The guillotine became the first ‘democratic’ method of execution and was adopted throughout France. In its first ten years, historians estimate 15,000 people were decapitated. Only Nazi Germany has used it to execute more, with an estimated 40,000 criminals being guillotined between 1938 and 1945.
    The last French person to be guillotined was a Tunisian immigrant called Hamida Djandoubi, for the rape and murderof a young girl in 1977. The death penalty was finally abolished in France in 1981.
    It is impossible to test accurately how long a severed head remains conscious, if at all. The best estimate is between five and thirteen seconds.  
    JOHN SESSIONS It was maintained by contemporary witnesses that a lot of the heads were quite sentient.
    STEPHEN Yeah. They twitched.
    ALAN They’re going, ‘You bastards!’
     

 

     

Where was ‘La Marseillaise’ written?
     
    The French National anthem was not written in (or about) Marseilles but in Strasbourg (which is half German). Far from being inspired by the Revolution, the words were written by a Royalist who (though he himself was French) dedicated it to a German and lifted the music from an Italian. It was originally called ‘Battle Hymn for the Army of the Rhine’ (the longest river in Germany).

    La Marseillaise was commissioned as a marching song to inspire the French army. Claude Rouget de Lisle (1760–1836) was an amateur composer and artillery officer. At a lavish banquet thrown to mark France’s declaration of war on Austria in April 1792, the mayor of Strasbourg asked de Lisle: ‘Monsieur, write for us a song that will rally our soldiers from all over to defend their homeland.’ After drinking a little toomuch champagne, de Lisle returned to his quarters, where he fell asleep at his harpsichord, to wake (he claimed) with both