 In France, until the abolition of capital punishment in 1981, the main method of execution had been by beheading by means of the guillotine.Other than a small number of military cases where a firing squad was used (including that of Jean Bastien-Thiry) the guillotine was the only legal method of execution from 1791, when it was introduced by the Legislative Assembly during the last days of the kingdom French Revolution, until 1981.Before the revolution, beheading had typically been reserved to noblemen and carried out manually.