This is a study of the guillotine and its role in the French Revolution, concentrating as much upon the social and psychological contexts - the mythology and theatre of the guillotine - as upon the history and transformations of the guillotine's invention. The book offers a thesis which argues, for example, that the guillotine acts as an enlightenment machine, as the begetter of a new physiology of the headless body politic, as an aristocratic/democratic art of dying, and as the source of a new kind of criminological portraiture.