On This Day in HistoryOn This Day in 1793, Revolutionaries Executed the King of France by Guillotine, a Deadly Machine They Saw as a Symbol of EqualitySupporters of the French Revolution killed Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, with the same apparatus used to execute common criminals The guillotine became Frances official method of capital punishment in spring 1792. Public domain via Wikimedia CommonsThe execution of Louis XVI on January 21, 1793, is one of the French Revolutions most iconic moments. That morning, the French king made his last procession to the Place de la Rvolution. An hour-and-a-half-long coach journey through the streets of Paris brought the monarch to the guillotine and a raucous crowd of thousands of spectators.When his executioners led him up the stairs, according to one republicans account, Louis declared, I die innocent. I pardon my enemies, and I desire that my death should serve the French people and appease the wrath of God.It was a dramatic scenemany artists, both for and against the revolution, would depict that fateful day. And the machine that brought about Louis death would ultimately become just as iconic as the revolutions act of mob violence.The guillotines story in France had begun just a few years prior. In late 1789, during a discussion about reforming the French penal code, physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin proposed a standard system of capital punishment for all. At the time, execution methods tended to vary based on the class or rank of the criminal in question, which also led to marked differences in suffering.Highwaymen were broken on the wheel, witches burnt at the stake and thieves hung, wrote Eamonn Carrabine, a sociologist and criminologist at the University of Essex in England. Aristocrats, on the other hand, were usually beheaded with a sword, a privilege that was not extended to most commoners, who were decapitated by an unwieldy heading axe that bludgeoned its way through the neck, often requiring several attempts.History of the GuillotineWatch on Guillotin, himself opposed to capital punishment, proposed a decapitation machine that would kill its victims as quickly and painlessly as possible. Though the device was named after Guillotin, he was not its inventor; similar machines had already been employed in Europe.The guillotine became Frances official method of capital punishment in spring 1792. Its first victim was a common thief, Nicolas Jacques Pelletier.As revolutionaries geared up for the execution of the king at the end of 1792, Maximilien Robespierre, the revolutionary who would soon go on to play a key role in the Reign of Terror, proclaimed that the kings punishment necessitated the solemn character of a public vengeance.Employing the same machine that hadliterally taken the lives of common criminals proved to be an important symbol for the revolution.The death of the king thus invested the guillotine with a solemnity and grandeur commensurate with its function as the instrument of the peoples justice, wrote historian Daniel Arasse in The Guillotine and the Terror.By destroying the sanctity and inviolability of the king, the guillotine had become sacred in its own right, Arrasse explained.The machines grisly status as a king-killer lived on. Representations of events like the October 1793 execution of Louis wife, Marie Antoinette, and British counter-revolutionary propaganda in the 1790s and 1800s helped popularize the idea that aristocrats were martyrs and the main victims of revolution executioners, wrote historians Claire Rioult and Romain Fathi for the Conversation. Even today, the guillotine is a common symbol at protests against inequality.However, these narratives often overlook a crucial fact. Though the guillotine claimed the life of Frances king and queen, the majority of its estimated 15,000 to 17,000 victims werent aristocrats, but rather commoners.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Teresa Nowakowski|| READ MORETeresa Nowakowski is a print and multimedia journalist based in Chicago. They cover history, arts and culture, science, travel, food and other topics.