Paris Gawks Again at the Guillotine

Paris Gawks Again at the Guillotine: "PARIS — Since the first blade plunged in 1792, the French guillotine has inspired dread and dark nicknames: the widow, the barber, the national razor. Now add a contemporary label: artistic muse.
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Horacio Villalobos/European Pressphoto Agency

A guillotine on show at the exhibition ‘Crime and Punishment’ at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.
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A 4-meter, or 14-foot, tall guillotine — veiled in black drifts of gauzy fabric — has managed to inspire a new exhibition at the Musée d’Orsay and provoke a soul-searching struggle among France’s elite arbiters of culture about what constitutes good taste for a museum.

The spring-action, 1872-vintage guillotine occupies a prime position in a Crime and Punishment exhibition that has evolved from a small show to a popular hit in the French capital. Yet the scaffold nearly was banished because it was considered too repugnant for a gallery showing.

For the Musée d’Orsay, allowing the veiled guillotine was a contentious step, so fraught that it posts alerts on its Web site warning that the exhibition of more than 400 art works from Goya to Picasso may be disturbing for younger visitors. Those admonitions are largely unheeded. The artful mayhem — images of severed heads, amputated body parts, pale blue corpses and damsels with blood on their hands and daggers — is drawing up to 4,000 people a day, nearly double the usual traffic for special exhibitions.

Group reservations for the local lycées are sold out through the end of the show on June 10 and two-hour lines outside are crowded with visitors from a demographic group — ages 15 to 25 — that is ordinarily elusive for museums.

They linger by the guillotine, which is watched over by the glowing red eyes of a Lucifer portrait by Franz von Stuck. For this generation, it is a first introduction since the guillotine had been hidden from public view for 25 years to let passions cool after the death penalty was abolished in 1981.

During exile, the scaffold was stockpiled in a heap of wood, shuffled among museums and passed to government institutions where it was happily misplaced.

Today it still evokes powerful loathing. Six years ago, the Louvre museum considered mounting the Crime and Punishment exhibition, but the museum’s president, Henri Loyrette, shied away. Within the Musée d’Orsay, most art curators opposed exhibiting the guillotine as did the museum’s president, Guy Cogeval.

“Many curators inside the house said it’s not done — it’s gruesome,” recalled Mr. Cogeval, who assumed leadership of the museum in 2008. “The majority was against it, but an artistic project is never a democratic process and I listened to the two curators and they were very adamant about having the guillotine. And I think they were right.”

Those curators — Jean Clair, 69, an art historian, and Robert Badinter, 82, a former justice minister — were so obstinate that they threatened to quit the project without La Veuve, or the Widow, according to Mr. Clair.

In an interview, he recalled a week of wrangling with museum officials that ended with a simple ultimatum: “C’est ça ou rien du tout.” All or nothing.

For Mr. Cogeval, the stubbornness was simply “a bit of theater and that is the lyrical aspect of preparing the show.” Yet Mr. Badinter and Mr. Clair believe the guillotine is essential to the exhibition because it remains a potent symbol of opposition to the death penalty.

“You have to first look to see what the guillotine is,” Mr. Clair said, citing Victor Hugo from “Les Misérables”: “One can have a certain indifference about the death penalty, not quite knowing whether to say yes or no, until one sees with their own eyes a guillotine.”

It was Mr. Badinter, a lawyer and a key figure in the abolition of the French death penalty, who embarked on a personal odyssey to create an art exhibition that explored justice, punishment and man's drive to kill.

“Why was I sure of the success of the exhibition? What does the world watch on television today — crime, the police, the police commissioner, the judges, the lawyers. Crime is an enduring fascination for humans,” said Mr. Badinter, who is working on an opera based on the novel “Crime and Punishment.”

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