guillotine

A woman protester nearby was dressed as Marie-Antoinette, the queen executed by guillotine during the French revolution.

From Barron's ● May 1, 2026

“Consolidation now hangs over the film industry like a guillotine, with job losses likely and the future of the theatrical movie-going experience in question,” Lauzen wrote in her report.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jan. 1, 2026

The Sept. 1 protest had “little to no energy,” according to an internal Portland police summary, before federal officers dispersed the crowd to collect a prop guillotine that had been brought.

From Salon ● Nov. 14, 2025

“It’s not like the guillotine is coming out,” said Roberts, the retired banker, who spoke via Zoom from a vacation in Paris.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Oct. 17, 2025

In A Tale of Two Cities, when the guillotine chops off a head, the sound effects team hacked a cabbage with a cleaver.

From "Spooked!" by Gail Jarrow

After drying during a series of slow corkscrews, the new magazine’s edges were chopped smooth by guillotines and emerged through an opening.

From New York Times ● Jun. 16, 2024

Even news of guillotines, massacres, and growing public hostility to religion did not deter the most hopeful Francophiles, who dismissed such accounts as exaggerations by British propagandists.

From Slate ● Oct. 24, 2022

“During downturns,” Stern says, “the financial guillotines hit hardest in regions where clusters are weakest.”

From Nature ● May 3, 2016

A reviewer for an English newspaper saw guillotines.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Nov. 5, 2015

He loved to think of himself as a woodman swinging an axe against rotten institutions and dying beliefs; but he weighted no guillotines.

From Shelley, Godwin and Their Circle by Brailsford, Henry Noel

Because of this mediocre king, who clung so desperately to the fantasies of absolutism that he was later overthrown and guillotined by his own people, the American experiment with republican government was able to commence.

From Slate ● May 30, 2025

The French have maintained a love-hate relationship with kings ever since they guillotined King Louis XVI in 1793.

From Washington Times ● Mar. 23, 2023

It guillotined the notion that great cuisine was necessarily French in its fundamentals.

From New York Times ● Nov. 27, 2021

Marie Antoinette sent the jewellery away for safekeeping before she was guillotined during the French revolution.

From BBC ● Nov. 9, 2021

That was Rahel being Sydney Carton being Charles Darnay, as he stood on the steps, waiting to be guillotined, in the Classics Illustrated comic’s version of A Tale of Two Cities.

From "The God of Small Things" by Arundhati Roy

The “age of chivalry is gone,” Edmund Burke lamented after the guillotining of Marie Antoinette of France on Oct.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jan. 8, 2026

France likes to dream of revolution, ever re-enacting the popular uprising of 1789 that led to the guillotining of the king and queen and the abolition of the monarchy three years later.

From New York Times ● Mar. 24, 2023

Otherwise – as in the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in Donizetti's Maria Stuarda and the guillotining of Andrea and Maddalena in Giordano's Andrea Chénier – the pleasure is all in the anticipation.

From The Guardian ● Jan. 20, 2011

The guillotining of his father made Louis Philippe the Orleanist pretender to the throne.

From Time Magazine Archive

Mirabeau, the orator of the Revolution, had already disappeared, being so fortunate as to die naturally, before the practice of mutual guillotining was established.

From Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 426 Volume 17, New Series, February 28, 1852 by Chambers, William