Thinking minds, guilty thoughts, and the guillotine debate

The guillotine intended to avoid unnecessary agony in an execution. Was death instant though? We check if this question was settled, or not.

Translated from the original French version.

The guillotine: progress or a symbol of horror?

700 kilograms of wood and metal, a good four metres high and a silhouette that is forever etched in the collective memory: The guillotine has a special place in the long list of execution methods. It was developed to avoid unnecessary pain and agony during an execution, but was the catalyst for a long debate among medical professionals: is death really instantaneous? We take a look back at this question, to find if it was answered, or not.

Is the guillotine a step forward for humanity?

This execution system, which was "retired" almost 40 years ago, was actually presented as humane innovation when it was first introduced.

Before 1789, the death penalty could take very different forms depending on the nature of the crime, or status of the accused. A marquis was executed differently from a vulture, a counterfeiter differently from a highwayman or a poisoner: serial killer Catherine Monvoisin, known as La Voisin, was burnt alive and coin counterfeiter Louis Mandrin died on the wheel, while the Chevalier de La Barre, so fiercely defended by Voltaire, received a less brutal and quicker sabre cut. Robert-François Damiens, who had attempted to assassinate Louis XV, was the last to have the advantage and privilege of being quartered on the Place de Grève: the highest crime, matched with the highest torture. In short, in a society based on order and privilege like the Ancien Régime, criminals did not go to their deaths on an equal footing.

The debate in the Ancien Régime

Changes came with the revolution. The death penalty still applied, but with two important nuances. The first was a certain standardisation, if you like: the privileges of the nobility were over, and the penal code and execution sentences were the same for everyone. The second reason was that the ordeals had come to an end: After all, the death penalty was not imposed to cause pain, but to kill quickly and painlessly. From now on, the death penalty was only to be "the simple deprivation of life" by beheading, and not a brutal and violent ordeal designed to instil fear in the people.

Charlotte Corday and the question of instant death

Once the aim has been set, the question remains of how to operationalise it. This is where a philanthropic deputy comes into play: Dr Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. In December 1789, the doctor extolled the virtues of a machine developed by a surgeon, Dr Antoine Louis, to his colleagues in the Constituante. With his machine, Guillotin told his colleagues, who were divided into two camps, "I can blow your head off in the blink of an eye and you won't feel any pain. The mechanism falls like lightning, the head flies, the blood spurts, the person is no more".

Instant death without physical pain; that was the promise. A promise that was soon honoured one fine afternoon in April 1792 by a certain Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier, whose head was the first "beneficiary" of the new penal code, with a famous first article which stated that "the head of every person condemned to death shall be cut off". The execution of the highwayman went smoothly and, even if it disappointed some curious people who were unsettled by the speed of the matter, the revolution could be proud of having invented "the gentlest of all lethal means".

The medical debate in the 19th century: Can a decapitated head still feel?

The question of whether the condemned should die immediately and without pain preoccupied the judiciary and became a polemic among doctors. On 17 July 1794, Charlotte Corday, who had become famous as the Marat stabber, was executed in the middle of today's Place de la Concorde. A servant, giving in to his anger, then grabbed the young woman's head and held it out to the crowd after slapping her. One witness reported that "her cheeks were covered with a blush that attracted everyone's attention". The scandalous episode sparked a heated debate about whether Charlotte Corday was still conscious in the seconds after the execution. Why? Because Charlotte Corday blushed with shame and humiliation in the eyes of her contemporaries - in other words, she was still conscious after the axe fell.

Pro: Life remains in the body

Can a form of intelligence persist after such a brutal injury that separates the head from the body in the brain stem? The controversy began in 1795, when the famous German anatomist Samuel Sömmerring described decapitation as a "horrible way to die" and argued that "the feeling, the person, the I" remains alive for a few moments in the head severed from the body. The revolution had promised the opposite, but the prospect of a new kind of mental and psychological torture was quite horrifying. Worse still, Sömmerring claims that this period can last up to a quarter of an hour...

The controversy has only just begun. The German doctor was not alone: numerous colleagues support him. One claims to have seen the lips of a severed head moving, another that a condemned man received horrible expressions from a man whose spinal cord had been exposed by the guillotine. The father of author Eugène Sue, Jean-Joseph Sue, was also one of the medical practitioners who were convinced that "the severed head preserves the perception of the execution and the ulterior motive of its agony".

Contra: Death is final

It is hard to imagine the extent of the crisis triggered by the articles published by the opponents of the guillotine. The opponents of the Sömmerring camp were quick to counter with the argument that it was a matter of simple reflex movements, a mere residual contractility of the muscles. Another German anatomist, Georges Wedekind, added that the effect of the guillotine cumulated two main factors of unconsciousness: massive haemorrhaging and compression of the brain. A Parisian physician, Dr Francois Lepelletier, added a third parameter: the disappearance of breathing.

In short, the simultaneous severing of the arteries, trachea and spinal cord leads to immediate and definitive syncope. If life persists for some time in the condemned person's head, then it is a life without cognition, i.e. without physical or mental suffering. Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis, a famous anatomist, joined the camp of Sömmerring's opponents by urging his colleagues not to confuse sensitivity and consciousness:

"The convulsive movements prove neither pain nor sensibility; they depend only on a remnant of vitality which the death of the individual, the destruction of the ego in these muscles and in their nerves, does not immediately annihilate."

However, he admits that he is arguing "from the certainty of analogy" with animal experiments and not "from the certainty of experience"; and since decapitation is irreversible, it is obviously impossible to imagine a direct experience.

Was the debate over? Not in the slightest. The debate of 1795, which very often goes hand in hand with a philosophical and penal debate on the abolition or retention of the death penalty, reflects a recurring controversy in the medical debate throughout the 19th century about the distinction between sensation and consciousness - an existential debate which, incidentally, has by no means disappeared and is resurgent today in a different form in the case of brain-dead patients.

At the end of the 18th century, no doctor denied that a form of life was still present for a few moments in the head of a decapitated person. But what is the nature of what still survives in a head that has just suffered such a sudden and violent injury? Finally, what is death, when does it come, and what kind of death are we talking about? The death of consciousness, the death of the ability to feel or think? Biological death? The disappearance of the soul? (a concept that was still taken for granted by many believers of the time, including doctors). And if there is a soul, is it located in the brain?

Things turns into a gothic novel

Pain, conscience ... These are all questions that could have been considered settled at the turn of the 19th century. But this was far from being the case, even if only from the point of view of the general public. Victor Hugo's famous text Le dernier Jour d'un condamné (The last day of a condemned man), published in 1829, bears witness to this. In this monologue, which is supposed to reflect the thoughts of a man who is to be executed a few hours later, Victor Hugo has his character say:

"And then, one does not suffer...are they sure of that? Who told them? Is it said that a severed head has ever stood up bloody on the edge of the basket and called out on people? 'It doesn't hurt! Are there any reports of the dead of their kind coming to thank them and say: That's well made up? Just stick with it. The mechanics are good."

The debate was still raging among doctors. The experiments continued well into the 19th century and even beyond. In 1885, Dr Jean-Vincent Laborde launched an experiment that sounded like a little Doctor Frankenstein: he set about recovering the body of a decapitated man immediately after the fall of the axe in order to carry out some small experiments, which he published in the Revue Scientifique in November of the same year.

Experiments with dogs

As the Parisian execution regulations made his life difficult, he turned to the provinces and, in this case, to Troyes. The city mayor authorised him to quickly retrieve the head of a murderer named Gagny. Seven minutes after the axe fell, Laborde received the man's head. The aim: insert electrodes into the brain to stimulate it, perfuse the left carotid artery by connecting it to the bloodstream of a "powerful dog" and "inject suitably heated bovine blood into the right carotid artery...".

The poor man was having a hard time: the poorly sharpened axe had shattered the soft tissue, and it took him a good ten minutes to locate the carotid arteries that had retracted deep into the remains of Gagny's neck. But Laborde persisted and ten minutes later noticed that the deceased's face, which had been supplied with animal blood, was visibly changing colour. The electrical impulses in turn triggered reflex facial reactions, including spectacular contractions of the eyelids and eyebrows as well as some jaw clatter, which made the experiment quite sympathetically imaginable. Laborde managed to achieve these results over a period of more than forty minutes - one really wishes for Gagny that any form of consciousness had been impossible at this point.

Deal with a murderer

This episode, which could have been taken from a Lovecraft novel, is not the last. 25 years after Laborde, it is now the turn of the main physician at the Hôtel-Dieu in Orléans, Dr Gabriel Beaurieux. With the blessing of the Attorney General, Beaurieux struck a deal ante mortem with the convicted Henri Languille, who had been sentenced to 165 francs, a silver watch, a pair of shoes and four bottles of wine after the murder of a publican.

On 28 June 1905, Anatole Deibler himself cut Languille in two, whose last words on this earth were to call the executioners and those present a "bunch of peasants". Le Matin wrote in its report the next day:

"At that moment, we all rush towards the bucket into which the head has just fallen (...) Dr Beaurieux has the decapitated head in his hands. "Languille!" he shouts, "Languille!" We stand there stunned. The eyelids have just lifted. The two eyes, which are still full of life, stare into Dr Beaurieux's eyes for a long time, then the eyelids fall back again. "Languille!" the doctor calls out a second time. The eyelids rise again and the eyes stare into the doctor's again. They close again and Dr Beaurieux calls out for the third time: "Languille! Languille!" But this time the eyelids remain closed, for good."

To be honest, the journalists have probably whitewashed a story that is nevertheless causing a nice little scandal at a time when the debate about abolishing the death penalty was raging. In any case, this is the line of defence of the public prosecutor, but not that of Dr Beaurieux: although he denies having taken the condemned man's head in his hands, he wrote:

"I then saw the eyelids lifting slowly, without any convulsive contraction. I was dealing with very lively eyes that were looking at me. The whole thing had lasted twenty-five to thirty seconds".

This is the last time a doctor has directly addressed this question - at least in a human. In 2016, a team from the Donders Brain Institute, led by Clementina van Rijn, took up the question as part of a study on rats that were decapitated under electroencephalogram. The neuroscientists observed waves of "consciousness" that decreased rapidly, but not immediately - about four seconds - after decapitation, before disappearing completely after 17 seconds. CNRS neurobiologist Georges Chapouthier believes it is very likely that consciousness does not extend beyond these initial four seconds. But it persists, at least in rats. An old debate is hence reignited...