To talk about the so-called “guillotine cut”associated with young aristocrats French during and after French Revolution to commemorate the victims sentenced to death for guillotinewe must first frame the historical period. In the midst of French Revolutionin 1793, the so-called Regime of Terror began in France: the Committee of Public Safety, headed by the Jacobin Maximilien Robespierrecondemned to death thousands of real or alleged “enemies of the Revolution” with the decapitation by guillotine. The objective was to definitively overthrow the monarchy and the aristocracy after, in January of the same year, the King Louis XVI.
The Committee of Public Safety, established to protect France from its enemies, thus went about executing anyone even suspected of supporting the monarchy or working against the revolution. However, in 1794even with dozens of thousands of deaths behind, Robespierre and the other revolutionary leaders were arrested by the National Assembly and were sentenced to death without a public trial, interrupting the carnage.
At this point a story begins in which the boundaries between reality and legend are blurred: some sources claim that in the years that followed the Reign of Terror, that is, the final years of the eighteenth century, many young aristocrats gathered in clandestine dances to celebrate the end of a life lived in fear and the return to normality. These parties are known as bals à la victime (in Italian “victims’ dances”). On the other hand, nowadays we have these events very few reportsnone of them first-hand.
According to the few second-hand testimonies in our possession, these meetings would have been halfway between a party and a tribute to the dead and would have included a specific dress code: many women would have worn gods red collars, beads or ribbons around the neck to symbolize the point where they would receive the cut of the guillotine blade in case of capture and death sentence. Furthermore, both men and women would have cut their hair short hair at neck level as it was actually imposed on condemned people before execution (to ensure that the blade cut off the head without jamming).
This haircut actually was already in use since before the Republic and was known as coiffure à la Titus: the name was due to the fact that it was inspired by busts of Roman emperors. He was later chosen by Republican womenas a symbol of resistance, and finally it would also arrive among the young aristocrats who, as part of their mourning, would turn the cut into the coiffure à la victime. Eventually, one way or another, the style crept into the upper class fashion and even Napoleon’s wife, Josephine of Beauharnaisshows this cut in the portraits of the painter Pierre-Paul Prud’hon.
The “victims’ dances” were sensationalized throughout history and many historians have difficulty discerning accurate accounts. In the 19th century, the French historian Théophile Lavallée defined these meetings as events “in which people danced in mourning clothes and to which only individuals whose relatives had died on the scaffold were admitted”. Twentieth-century historian Ronald Schechter instead stated that the dances were “marginal entries barely mentioned by contemporaries (who entered) the historiographical canon as an undisputed fact… The stories of the victims’ dances arose mainly from the literary terrain of the “romanticism of the guillotine” and from the fantastic in the second quarter of the nineteenth century”. Indeed, without primary sources documenting the dances, it is difficult to completely distinguish fact from fiction. However, based on paintings of the time, we know that the cut was real, and so was the habit of red ribbons worn around the neck.
