All 16 Uses of

guillotine
in
Les Miserables

As for the Bishop, it was a shock to him to have beheld the guillotine, and it was a long time before he recovered from it.
Chpt 1.1

guillotine = a device used to behead people executed by the state

One may feel a certain indifference to the death penalty, one may refrain from pronouncing upon it, from saying yes or no, so long as one has not seen a guillotine with one's own eyes: but if one encounters one of them, the shock is violent; one is forced to decide, and to take part for or against.
Chpt 1.1

The guillotine is the concretion of the law; it is called vindicte; it is not neutral, and it does not permit you to remain neutral.
Chpt 1.1

Songs are like the guillotine; they chop away indifferently, to-day this head, to-morrow that.
Chpt 3.3

Their business was to go at night and gather up on the scaffold the heads and bodies of the persons who had been guillotined during the day; they bore away on their backs these dripping corpses, and their red galley-slave blouses had a clot of blood at the back of the neck, which was dry in the morning and wet at night.
Chpt 3.3

The Republic, a guillotine in the twilight; the Empire, a sword in the night.
Chpt 3.3

To fall in love with Pere Duchesne, to make sheep's-eyes at the guillotine, to sing romances, and play on the guitar under the balcony of '93—it's enough to make one spit on all these young fellows, such fools are they!
Chpt 3.5

Citizens, I declare to you, that your progress is madness, that your humanity is a dream, that your revolution is a crime, that your republic is a monster, that your young and virgin France comes from the brothel, and I maintain it against all, whoever you may be, whether journalists, economists, legists, or even were you better judges of liberty, of equality, and fraternity than the knife of the guillotine!
Chpt 3.5

He obstinately maintained his opinion against his keeper of the seals; he disputed the ground with the guillotine foot by foot against the crown attorneys, those chatterers of the law, as he called them.
Chpt 4.1

The Greve having disappeared with the elder branch, a bourgeois place of execution was instituted under the name of the Barriere-Saint-Jacques; "practical men" felt the necessity of a quasi-legitimate guillotine; and this was one of the victories of Casimir Perier, who represented the narrow sides of the bourgeoisie, over Louis Philippe, who represented its liberal sides.
Chpt 4.1

And I shall certainly go to see him beheaded on the guillotine, the wretch!
Chpt 4.11

La Fontaine perhaps; magnificent egoists of the infinite, tranquil spectators of sorrow, who do not behold Nero if the weather be fair, for whom the sun conceals the funeral pile, who would look on at an execution by the guillotine in the search for an effect of light, who hear neither the cry nor the sob, nor the death rattle, nor the alarm peal, for whom everything is well, since there is a month of May, who, so long as there are clouds of purple and gold above their heads, declare…
Chpt 5.1

Definition:

a device used to behead people (most associated with the French Revolution); or executing someone in such a manner

A guillotine consists of a weighted blade that falls downward between two vertical poles.