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Excerpt taken from the book The Story of French (Ch. 6)

Vandalisme (vandalism), anarchisme (anarchism) and terrorisme (terrorism) all took their present meaning in English from French terms coined during the Revolution. Some terms disappeared, at least temporarily. Parlement (parliament) was abolished as a royalist institution in 1790 (it referred to the high tribunal in the ancien regime); after several generations it reappeared in France with the English meaning of the term.

Commoners also influenced the language. In the early days of the Revolution, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, Louis XVI’s doctor, actively promoted reform of capital punishment. Before the Revolution only criminals of high rank and nobles were executed by decapitation, which was more humane than hanging, strangulation or quartering. Guillotin’s machine for beheading was almost named the louisette or louison, after the surgeon Antoine Louis, who perfected it with the help of a German mechanic (Louis XVI himself suggested making the blade angular so it would cut better). In 1790 it was named the guillotine, though it was also known simply as la veuve (the widow). Guillotin was jailed during the Terror along with many high-profile reformers (on the basis that they were not revolutionary enough), but he escaped his invention and died a natural death in 1814.