<P> Sensing the growing discontent, Louis XVI banned the use of the breaking wheel . In 1791, as the French Revolution progressed, the National Assembly researched a new method to be used on all condemned people regardless of class, consistent with the idea that the purpose of capital punishment was simply to end life rather than to inflict pain . </P> <P> A committee was formed under Antoine Louis, physician to the King and Secretary to the Academy of Surgery . Guillotin was also on the committee . The group was influenced by the Italian Mannaia (or Mannaja: which had been used ever since Roman times), the Scottish Maiden and the Halifax Gibbet, which was fitted with an axe head weighing 7 pounds 12 ounces (3.5 kg). While these prior instruments usually crushed the neck or used blunt force to take off a head, devices also usually used a crescent blade and a lunette (a hinged two part yoke to immobilize the victim's neck). </P> <P> Laquiante, an officer of the Strasbourg criminal court, designed a beheading machine and employed Tobias Schmidt, a German engineer and harpsichord maker, to construct a prototype . Antoine Louis is also credited with the design of the prototype . The memoirs of the official executioner claim that King Louis XVI (an amateur locksmith) recommended that an oblique blade be used instead of a crescent blade, lest the blade not fit all necks (ironically, the king's own was offered up discreetly as an example). The first execution by guillotine was performed on highwayman Nicolas Jacques Pelletier on 25 April 1792 . He was executed in front of what is now the city hall of Paris (Place de l'hôtel de ville). All citizens deemed guilty of a crime punishable by death were from then on executed there, until the scaffold was moved on 21 August to the Place du Carrousel . </P> <P> The machine was successful because it was considered a humane form of execution, contrasting with the methods used in pre-revolutionary Ancien Régime . In France, before the invention of the guillotine, members of the nobility were beheaded with a sword or an axe, which often took two or more blows to kill the condemned . (The condemned or their families would sometimes pay the executioner to ensure that the blade was sharp, to achieve a quick and relatively painless death .) Commoners were usually hanged, which could take many minutes . In the early phase of the French Revolution, the slogan À la lanterne (in English: To the Lamp Post!, String Them Up! or Hang Them!) had become a symbol of popular justice in revolutionary France . The revolutionary radicals hanged officials and aristocrats from street lanterns . Other more gruesome methods of execution were also used, such as the wheel or burning at the stake . </P>

When was the guillotine first used in france