MovieChat Forums > Hornblower: The Frogs and the Lobsters (1999) Discussion > guillotines; also gun loading

guillotines; also gun loading

posted 15 years ago by takseng
2 replies | jump to latest

The critiques I offer below are out of love. It is hard to imagine that the immensely complex historical data could be managed in a movie and better than in this ITV version of the life of fictional British Naval hero Horatio Hornblower. Re: use of guillotine and loading of guns.

In the fourth of the first series, I know as "The Wrong War," I was troubled by the French Lord Moncouton that he loads and carries a guillotine as a precious possession and proceeds to execute several villagers with it for despoiling his estate. He seems to be unaware of the irony that the guillotine was invented by the Revolution as method of execution which was to be more efficient, more reliable and more humane than other forms of execution, and an expression of equality, executing common thieves and the King in the same machine.
I'm wondering if this is true to Forrester's book, the series I read long ago, as he had a passion for the details of the methods and technology of the times, as well as the character of the politics of the various nations involved in the Napoleonic wars, and if he wrote of such an anomaly, one character or another would surely been aware of and spoken of the irony.

While we usually see the loading of cannon, we do not see the agonizing process it was to load cannon in the middle of a gun-deck slippery with blood and with flying splinters everywhere, as Forrester describes them, but, especially, I have yet in the series to see anyone reload a musket or a pistol, any of which would have been breech loaders in those days and required considerable effort to be prepared each time fired. Only in the fifth episode, "Mutiny," does the possibility of a gun not being loaded, or correctly loaded enter the scene.
In the Hornblower novels, the dangers of the deck and the possibility of a gun, not only failing in any of several ways when Hornblower's side desperately needs a particular shot, but blowing up, sometimes killing or blinding one or more of the crew, was fairly common occurrence.

[–] falacta 14 years ago

Sorry to burst your bubble but the guilloutine existed before the French revolution and was recommended as a "humane" way of execution by a royal physician upon the suggestion of its namesake in the French national assembly. It was introduced by the monarchy.

What the French revolution did was unify the execution procedure which traditionally was beheading for nobility and strangulation/hanging for peasants/citizens (this was carried on to the 20th century where hanging was considered the less "honorable" way of execution, e.g. Nazi members condemned to death objected to not being allowed the firing squad.) and the use of a mechanical device became necessary because of the number of executions.

On top of things the irony was not lost on him because imho the Marquee brought this little toy with him because as an aristocrat he fled the country because of fear of execution by guilloutine. Otherwise he would have simply shot or hanged everyone instead of hauling such a bulky thing along.

I don't know if Forrester used this special ploy in his book but it is such a strange plot element that it would be strange to have been invented by the screen writers.

And in the 18th/19th century most guns/weapons were muzzle loaders. There had been attempts at breech loading cannon as early as the 16th century but the construction was way more complex and insecure, especially the sealing of the chamber. Ironically breech loading cannon also took longer to load than muzzle loaders which was another reason the latter was adopted for general usage.

For the reliability: i guess for dramatic reasons there are virtually no indications of anyone loading his muskets/pistols but on several occasions they fail to go off, I think.

[–] lilale777 14 years ago

It's in the book. Read the chapter about Quiberon again - I checked it, it's in the book.