Classical music's march to the scaffold


News that revamped BBC Radio 3 attracted a record audience in Q1 2025 and programme presenter Norman Lebrecht's euphoric support for the network's new regime should be seen in the context of the following extract. This comes from a paper entitled The guillotine: Shadow, spectacle and the terror in volume 20 of the academic publication Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal:
 
'Executions were the most frequent and popular of revolutionary festivals, and the guillotine was at the centre of entertainment celebrating the Republic. A sense of the fairground spectacle and amusing novelty is conveyed in the following passage: 
"Around the scaffold people sold mementos and lists of the scheduled executions. There were restaurants and cabarets de la Guillotine, where the latest victims were lists as “catch of the day” and satirical songs and poems were performed. The crowds were especially dense near the Jardin des Tuileries where, it was commonly known, one had the best view of the proceedings. The demand for related ephemera far exceeded the geographical site of the Place. Many fashionable drawing rooms in Paris had novelty miniature guillotines that were used to slice bread or fruit at dinner parties, and toy replicas were popular. . .Wax molds of the severed heads were also available to a paying audience at the wax museum run by Dr. Philippe Curtis in Paris, where Madame Tussaud apprenticed". (O’Rourke, 2017: 26)'

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