Are you French? Did your ancestors get their heads chopped off around the end of the 18th century? They did? What a stroke of luck! Well, of sorts. For to have a relative whose twig on your family tree was cruelly snipped off by a sharp blade during the French Revolution is the latest bittersweet accessory from Montparnasse to Montpellier. Call it guillotine chic. The French are flocking to a website which asks: “Avez-vous eu un ancêtre decapité pendant la révolution?” before funnelling visitors to lists where they can check - with a mix of trepidation and pride - if their surnames match anyone's on the rolls of those executed.

The aristocrats of France's ancien régime became as popular as dry rot when revolutionary fervour swept through France. Many were separated from their heads with a slice of a guillotine blade, a device championed by Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a kindly professor of anatomy and a member of the National Assembly, whose concern was to make execution more humane. Not that it was only aristocrats who earned an appointment with “Madame Guillotine”. The death toll during the 1793-94 Reign of Terror is put between 20,000 and 40,000 - included among them counts and commoners, intellectuals and politicians, clergy and prostitutes; pretty much anyone suspected of “crimes against liberty”.

But the seeds of today's rekindled pride in having a trace of blue blood in one's veins were sown even as the corpses of the nobility were still warm. Napoleon, hoisted to power on the shoulders of liberté, egalité, fraternité, swiftly created more dubious counts than an election in Iran.

Now egalitarian France has rediscovered an affection for once frowned-upon forebears. In Australia, too, the recent discovery of what might be Ned Kelly's grave is helping to tip the balance of the outlaw's reputation from thieving murderer to romantic class warrior. Who knows? It's possible that one day people might even be proud to flaunt their family tree to show just how directly they can trace their descent from David Gest.