Post-Guillotine Stress Disorder

[Hypoxia]

In Napoleon's Privates I read of Post-Guillotine Stress Disorder, the party madness after being "shaved by the national razor" fell out of common practice in post-revolutionary France. Champagne-fueled fests (orgies) required entrants to prove an immediate relative had been chopped. Women wore blood-red ribbons around their necks to show authenticity. Women destined for but saved from the guillotine (including the future Empress Josephine) had their hair cut short, which became a fashion statement.

The first personal ads in newspapers appeared then, mostly by young women, formerly of the royal court, who now had no means of support, and sought sugar daddies. Plot bunnies abound there.

Let's see stories of "survivors' balls" (as they were known). No coitus on the chopping block, of course. Is Erotic Horror the proper category?

 

[WALTERALBERT]

To Hypoxia(Whomever you are)---Sounds like an excellent story title-I just joined this site not too long ago--Some of the erotica stories on here are pretty good especially those written for tv shows and movies

 

[Carnevil9]

Little known fact*: this is how the blowjob was invented.

After criminals were beheaded, it was customary for the severed heads to be tossed into the crowd, where men would skull-fuck them as a final indignity. Of course, the heads still being warm and moist for a while, the men also enjoyed the physical sensations of the act. Marie Antoinette's skull holds the record for taking several hundred ejaculations.

But when the guillotine was mothballed, the supply of skulls to fuck dried up. Men had to convince living women with still-attached heads to provide the service. It became a big hit, and is still popular to this day in many countries of the world.

*this isn't really true, but I think it would make a good story.

 

[Hypoxia]

source material

Following is the relevant chapter from the book, more readable than the source here.

Postguillotine Stress Disorder (AD 1795)

The end of the revolutionary Terror unleashed a wave of euphoria in Paris as citizens celebrated the fact that they were still alive. Hardly had the guillotine been trundled out of sight than some one hundred dance halls opened around the city, using any space available — even abandoned monasteries and half-wrecked churches. Parisians were finally allowed to don their finery again, with the men reemerging as powdered dandies and women in scandalous dresses of a diaphanous white gauze that was almost entirely transparent, although they did wear flesh-colored body stockings underneath.

But the most frenzied events were allegedly les bals des victimes (Victims’ Balls), which could be attended only by family members of those who had gone to the guillotine (“shaved by the national razor,” as the euphemism went). Some historians suggest that these wild underground parties never occurred, since most references to them were published years later, in memoirs and histories of the 1820s. But many believe there is an element of truth, since they were referred to in the Parisian journal Le Censeur Dramatique and émigré newspapers in 1797, and the popular memory of the events is so vivid.

According to the memoirs of supposed eyewitnesses like Etienne de Jouey and General Philippe Paul de Ségur, the bals des victimes were organized by the surviving aristocrats in 1794 and 1795. To enter, guests had to provide proof of their loss with documents at the door (it had to be an immediate family member; a cousin would not do). Once inside, they could join a champagne-fueled danse macabre beneath glittering chandeliers. Women took to wearing blood-red ribbons around their necks as badges of their loss. Some, like the lovely Josephine de Beauharnais, the future Madame Bonaparte, had only barely escaped the guillotine themselves and had had their hair cropped while in prison, ready to face the block. This ragged style became a new fashion craze and was dubbed la coiffure à la guillotine.

Like White Russians 120 years later, guests indulged in manic excess in order to blot out the evil memories. “France is dancing!” wrote one nineteenth-century historian of these wakes, which mixed posttraumatic stress disorder with survivor’s guilt. “She dances to avenge, she dances to forget!”

[my note: that sounds like an inspiration for Hotel California]

The Victims’ Balls eventually petered out, but other post-Terror innovations included the first personal ads in the Year IV (1796). These Petites Affiches in Parisian newspaper classifieds were often penned by women describing themselves as between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, beautiful, broadly educated, and looking for “a position with a single gentleman” — evidently women of the former royal court who found themselves unprovided for. Other authors were more independent: a fifty-year-old lady advertised herself as possessing “accommodation, money and a not-too-ravaged appearance,” while a younger belle offered her heart to “any man who truly deserved it.”

In postrevolutionary Paris, as emotions ran high for aristocrats and patriots alike, psychotherapists would have had a field day.

--Tony Perrottet: NAPOLEON'S PRIVATES, 2500 Years of History Unzipped, pp.90-91 -- New York, 2008