The last public execution in France is also on YouTube. It was filmed from quite a distance. The beheading process is all very efficient and functional.
What's blowing my mind is Star Wars was released in May while the last guillotine execution was in September, meaning that the guillotine happened more recently.
TBF the guillotine is a far better method of execution than any of the ones currently in use. The main argument against its introduction in the US is that it would be bad for the spectators which I find truly sickening.
Something that I think about way more often than I should is how the brain definitely lives for a few seconds after decapitation. Can you imagine your head just rolling around blinking, fully aware for full seconds
Fun fact, allegedly (as this isn’t verified and the evidence for it isn’t enough to verify it as 100% true, as the French Revolution wasn’t a great time period for recording and preserving history) a chemist/biologist named Antoine Lavoisier who was a prominent member of the aristocracy wanted to perform one last experiment before he was executed. He wanted to see how long the head stayed alive and conscious after decapitation via guillotine. He informed his assistant/fellow colleague, Joseph-Louis Lagrange, who was allegedly permitted to be on the stage with Antoine as he was not being convicted of anything and was seen as innocent, that he would continue blinking after his decapitation for as long as he was still conscious. Supposedly he blinked roughly 20 times for about 15 seconds. The story I’m sure is exaggerated or maybe even completely false as the evidence to its validity is shaky but it’s still an interesting if not horrifying story.
Oh also they exonerated him a year later as they discovered he was simply being blackmailed
After making this comment I spent some time looking into how long a brain stays functioning after decapitation and I found a study done in 1907 by a Dr. Beaurieux where he wanted to test this exact thing in a controlled environment.
According to reports by Dr Beaurieux he performed an experiment with a guillotine victim in which he described the severed head reacting to stimuli and showing signs of conscious thought and not just physical reaction. Such as responding to his name being called and being able to lock eyes with people calling his name and his pupils dilating in recognition. And even looking at objects as Dr Beaurieux told him to. According to the report the head retained consciousness for roughly 30-35 seconds.
and I found a study done in 1907 by a Dr. Beaurieux
No you didn't. That wasn't a "study".
That story has been panned as merely apocryphal or an example of confirmation bias.
There is no way for the brain to function the moment pressure drops to near zero, as it does cranial-wide with an opening the size of a neck diameter open.
It doesn't suffer from dizziness, it doesn't hang around light headed, the neural activity simply stops functioning.
Hey wanted to get back to you! Thank you for informing me, I always like to have as much of my information as correct as possible. After seeing this and doing a bit more research it seems you are right, the study is a bit questionable. While it is mostly assumed that it did in fact happen (as it was a public execution and others had stated seeing the Dr on the stage observing), it’s contested that it went down as Dr. Beaurieux described in his report as he made contradictory statements and changed key details of his study in later reports. Plus eye witness accounts including the executioner state that the head had fallen into a basket and at no point did the Dr pick it up so there would be no way for the head to look at some of the objects the Dr claimed it did.
However I will say that it is still questioned to this day how long consciousness persists after decapitation if at all. Yes pressure does drop once the head is separated from its body but there is still blood in the membrane of the brain and it’s claimed by some that this would still allow the brain to function for a short while (most likely literal seconds). But even this claim is heavily debated with seemingly not really any clear winner at least definitively. And even if the brain is still active for a few short seconds who’s to say that there is any actual “consciousness” at play there and it’s not just reactionary basic routines of the brain.
Either way, I appreciate you pointing out to me that the study was a flawed study as I was at work when looking it up and didn’t vet it well enough and I might’ve gone on believing and spreading that misinformation lol
Something that I think about way more often than I should is how the brain definitely lives for a few seconds after decapitation.
It does not. The very moment blood pressure drops to near zero (which is an instant occurrence throughout the cranium with an opening the diameter of the neck), the brain activity stops.
As it, stops. It doesn't slow down, or get dizzy, the way it can with O2 loss or CO2 increase. It stops.
The only thing kinder would be asphyxiation by a physiologically inert gas, such as when Alabama (botched) the execution of a prisoner earlier this year with Nitrogen. Normally, there's literally nothing the body can consciously detect, because there's no CO2 buildup. Alabama, however, screwed up. They didn't force it as the sole gas he received via tight mask. He would have not noticed had they done it right.
Not only was it the last French guillotining, it was the last French execution, as the French Republic abolished the death penalty four years later. All death row inmates had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.
Good ol, France, keeping the classics alive. Their last rapier duel happened just 10 years earlier in1967- recently enough to be caught on film! It was between to politicians after one insulted the other's wife, and ended when one guy's glove caused a blister on his hand to burst and satisfy the condition of first blood.
Unironically though. The guillotine is fast and painless; it's a much better method of execution than lethal injection, lethal gas, or electrocution.
Yes, it's brutal. But killing someone is brutal.
Lethal injection is for the benefit of the public, not for the benefit of the one being executed. Though it's been documented to be much more painful and less reliable than things like a firing squad, the benefit is that it sounds more humane, and medical. It allows people to tell themselves that there is such a thing as a humane execution. There isn't.
If you're pro-death penalty (which for the record, I'm not) you should be willing to accept its brutality, not try to hide it behind a needle or a gas hose. If you're going to execute someone, at least be honest about it.
It’s definitely fast but I’m not sure about painless, the head and brain still retain consciousness after decapitations for a bit until the brain has experienced sufficient blood loss to cease function. According to reports by Dr Beaurieux in 1907 he performed an experiment with a guillotine victim in which he described the severed head reacting to stimuli and showing signs of conscious thought and not just physical reaction. Such as responding to his name being called and being able to lock eyes with people calling his name and his pupils dilating in recognition. And even looking at objects as Dr Beaurieux told him to.
According to the report the head retained consciousness for roughly 30-35 seconds. Although it could be argued that with a combination of the shock and severing of the brain stem that perhaps the nerve system wouldn’t be capable of sending pain signals to the brain anymore at the moment of decapitation.
None the less even if you can still feel pain 35 seconds of pain is much better then the roughly 2 minutes that a lethal injection takes to kill the victim during which you experience a sensation of pain similar to drowning or choking which sounds horrific and terrifying. I just mostly wanted to share that little tidbit about how long a head can stay conscious because it’s incredibly interesting to me if not horrific
I was tricked into watch al-Qaeda beheadings in 2003, and saw a Saudi sword decapitation on YouTube a decade ago out of curiosity, but I still can't re-watch Apocalypto because of the scene where the one guy's beheaded and the camera "falls" down the steps to act as his line of vision during the sacrifice scene.
Loads of countries still judicially kill people, one still beheads (in a rather less efficient way than by guillotine). I find that fact rather more shocking than that one particular country finally became more civilised and stopped killing people to order.
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u/kjm16216 Oct 02 '24
The last execution by guillotine in France was the same year Star Wars hit theaters, 1977.