What Happens to the Human Body During Guillotine Execution? JJ

In the spring of 1792, a new device called the guillotine stood in a public square in Paris for the very first time, promising something no execution method in France had ever promised before. A quick death, the same death for everyone. But what it actually did to the human body and what happened after the job was carried out is a very different story.

Before 1792, the way someone was executed in France depended on their social class. If you were a noble, you were usually beheaded with a sword. This was seen as an honorable way to die and was often much quicker. But if you were a commoner, you could be hanged or face even more brutal punishments, such as being broken on the wheel, where a prisoner’s bones were smashed with a heavy wheel or iron bar.

In many cases, the victim stayed alive for hours before finally dying. A French physician named Ysef Ignas Guuten believed this system was unfair and cruel. On October 10th, 1789 during the early months of the French Revolution, he spoke before the French National Assembly, the country’s new lawmaking body.

He argued that every person, no matter whether they were rich or poor, noble or commoner, should face the same method of execution. He wasn’t suggesting a specific machine at that time. His goal was to create a fair, equal, and much faster way of carrying out death sentences. The job of designing that machine was given to Antoine Louie, the secretary of the French Academy of Surgery and one of France’s leading medical experts.

Louie worked together with Tobias Schmidt, a German harpsacord maker living in Paris. Because Schmidt had the woodworking and engineering skills needed to build it. Before using the machine on a living person, they tested several early versions on animal carcasses and human corpses.

These tests helped them figure out the right blade angle, height, and amount of force needed to cut through the neck quickly and cleanly. By April 1792, the machine was ready to be used on a living person. The living person would be a man named Nicolola Jacqu Balletier. He was brought to the Plastrev, a public square in Paris where executions were often carried out.

He’d been found guilty of robbery and murder. A large crowd gathered to watch because public executions were treated as entertainment at the time. People expected a long and dramatic spectacle, just like the hangings and brutal public punishments they’d seen before. But as soon as the blade was released, it fell and everything was over within seconds.

Several accounts written at that time say the crowd was disappointed. Some people even shouted that they wanted the old gallows back because the execution had ended too quickly to be entertaining. That reaction showed exactly what the machine had been built for. It was never designed to entertain the crowd.

It was created to carry out executions as quickly as possible and with as little suffering as the technology of 1792 could provide. Just 16 months later in 1793, France entered one of the darkest periods of the French Revolution, a time known as the reign of terror. The revolutionary government led mainly by Maximillian Robespierre [music] and his allies believed that anyone who opposed the revolution was a threat to the New Republic.

Thousands of people were arrested, often based on little evidence or simply on suspicion. During this [music] period, historians estimate around 17,000 people were officially sentenced to death across France. Many thousands more died in prisons or were killed without formal [music] trials. In Paris alone, about 2,600 people were executed, most of them in the public square that is now called the Plast Concord.

The man responsible for carrying out most of these executions in Paris was Charles Enri Sasso. He came from a family that had served as official executioners for the French monarchy for four generations. Execution was their family’s profession, and Sanson himself oversaw thousands of deaths during the revolution. Among those he executed were two of the most famous people in French history.

On January 21st, 1793, King Louis V 16th was taken to the scaffold, the raised wooden platform where the guillotine stood. He was found guilty of treason after the French monarchy was abolished the previous year, and France became a republic. According to witnesses, the king tried to speak to the crowd and declare his innocence before the execution, but the revolutionary authorities ordered drums to [music] be beaten loudly so his voice could not be heard. Moments later, the blade fell.

News of the king’s execution spread across Europe within days. Many royal families were horrified, fearing that revolutionary ideas could spread to their own countries and put their monarchs at risk. Those fears helped push several European nations into war against revolutionary France. Just 9 months later, on October 16th, 1793, Queen Marie Antoanet was taken to the very same scaffold.

She had spent months imprisoned under harsh conditions while waiting for her trial. During that time, she lost a great deal of weight, and witnesses said her hair turned almost completely gray, something many believed was caused by the extreme stress of her imprisonment. Like her husband, she was publicly executed by the guillotine.

A large crowd watched, and according to reports from the time, many people cheered when the executioner lifted her severed head for everyone to see. As the reign of terror continued, the revolution began to destroy many of the very people who had helped start it. George Danthon, one of the most powerful and influential leaders of the early French Revolution, had once worked alongside Maxmillian Robes Pierre.

But in 1794, Danthon believed the mass executions had gone too far and wanted the violence to end. Robes Pierre saw him as a threat. He accused Danthon of corruption and secretly supporting enemies of the revolution. Danthon was arrested, put on trial, and executed by guillotine in April 1794. His death removed one of the last major voices inside the government that had been calling for moderation instead of more bloodshed.

Only 3 months later, the same machine claimed the man who had used it more than anyone else. On July 28th, 1794, Robes Pierre’s own allies turned against him. They feared that if they did nothing, they would be the next names added to his growing list of enemies. He was arrested [music] and during the night before his execution, he suffered a gunshot wound that shattered his jaw.

Historians still debate exactly how that happened. Some believe Robespierre tried to take his own life but failed, while others believe he was shot by a soldier during his arrest. [music] The truth has never been confirmed. The next day, Robespierre was taken to the guillotine with his jaw tightly wrapped in bandages.

Just before the execution, the executioner removed the bandage so his neck could be placed properly into the machine. Witnesses said the sudden movement caused him to let out a loud scream in pain. It is one of the very few cases where a person about to be executed by the guillotine was heard screaming moments before the blade fell.

These are the famous names that most people remember when they think about the guillotine. But to understand why the machine became so feared, we have to move away from the politics for a moment and look at how it actually worked. The guillotine was designed to be simple, reliable, and easy to operate. It consisted of two tall wooden beams standing upright and connected at the top forming a frame about 4.

6 m or 15 ft high. A heavy steel blade was suspended at the top and held in place by a rope until the executioner released it. Below the blade was a wooden board called the bascule, which tilted the prisoner into position face down. The neck was then secured between two curved wooden pieces called the lunette, which locked the head in place so it could not be moved at the last moment.

The blade itself weighed around 40 kg or about 90 lb. When released, it fell roughly 2.3 m or 7.5 ft, speeding up the entire way down because of gravity. By the time it reached the neck, it’s estimated to have been traveling about 6 to 7 m/s. The blade was also carefully shaped for one important reason. Instead of having a flat edge, it was built with an angled blade. This wasn’t for appearance.

A straight blade would have needed to cut through the entire width of the neck all at once, which would require much more force. An angled blade starts cutting one side of the neck a split second before the other, much like slicing through a hard object with a knife at an angle instead of pushing straight down.

This design made the cut much more efficient and allowed the machine to slice through the skin, muscles, blood vessels, and the bones of the spine in a single movement with remarkable consistency. From the moment the blade was released until it completely passed through the neck, the entire process took less than 1 second.

But what happened inside the human body during the few seconds after the head was separated is where science becomes much less certain. When the guillotine blades cut through the neck, it severed the spinal cord, which carries signals between the brain and the rest of the body. It also cuts through the trachea or windpipe which carries air to the lungs, the esophagus which carries food to the stomach [music] and the next largest blood vessels including the corateed arteries which supply blood to the brain and jugular veins which carry blood back to

the heart. The head is completely separated from the body almost instantly. Even though the head is separated immediately, the heart doesn’t stop beating at that exact moment. Like any muscle, the heart can continue beating on its own for several more seconds if it still has enough oxygen. Because of this, blood is pushed out of the severed blood vessels in the neck under pressure rather than simply flowing out slowly.

People who witnessed guillotine executions at the time often described a sudden and powerful burst of blood, which is exactly what doctors would expect while the heart is still pumping. Inside the separated head, however, blood pressure drops to almost zero [music] immediately because it’s no longer connected to the body’s circulation.

Without a fresh supply of oxygen rich blood, [snorts] the brain begins running out of oxygen within seconds. The body left on the buscule often continued to move for a short time after the execution. Witnesses sometimes saw the arms or legs twitch, the [music] muscles tighten, or the body jerk unexpectedly. These movements were involuntary, meaning they happened automatically and were not under the person’s control.

They do not mean the person was still alive or conscious. Instead, they are caused by the nervous system and spinal reflexes continuing to fire briefly after the brain has been separated. A similar thing can happen when chickens bodies continue moving for a short time after its head has been cut off.

The body’s reactions are well understood by modern medicine. But the severed head lying in the basket beneath the guillotine is where one of history’s longest running medical debates begins. For more than two centuries, doctors, scientists, and eyewitnesses have argued over the same question, whether the brain could remain conscious even for a few seconds after decapitation.

[music] During the French Revolution, several eyewitnesses claimed they’d seen strange reactions from freshly severed heads. Some said the eyes appeared to follow movement. Others believed facial expressions changed when someone called out the victim’s name. These stories quickly spread and became part of the growing mystery surrounding the guillotine.

However, most of these accounts were based on personal observations rather than controlled scientific studies, making it impossible to know how accurate they really were. One of the most famous stories involves the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier, one of the greatest scientists of his time. He was executed by guillotine in 1794 because of his connection to a tax collection organization that the revolutionary government considered corrupt and associated with the old monarchy.

According to the story, Lavoisier arranged an experiment before his execution. He supposedly told a friend that after the blade fell, he would blink his eyes for as long as he remained conscious so someone could measure how long awareness lasted. The story claims he blinked somewhere between 11 and 15 times before stopping. It is certainly a fascinating story, but there is one major problem.

Historians have never found any reliable documents written at that time that prove it actually happened. No trustworthy eyewitness account from 1794 confirms the experiment. And because of that, most historians today consider it a legend rather than an established historical fact. More serious attempts to answer the question came more than 100 years later.

In June 1905, a French physician named Gabrielle Boreo was given the rare opportunity to examine the severed head of a convicted murderer named Enri Lang immediately after his execution. Boreo carefully watched the head and later wrote a detailed report describing what he had seen. According to Boreo, he called out Langi’s name just after the execution.

He claimed that the man’s eyelids slowly opened and that his eyes appeared to focus directly on him. After a few moments, the eyes closed again. Boro called the name a second time and said the same thing happened once more before all movement stopped completely. He believed these reactions suggested that Langi had remained conscious for a very brief period after decapitation.

Now, not every doctor agreed with his conclusion. Other physicians argued that these movements did not necessarily prove awareness. They pointed out that muscles controlling the eyes and eyelids can continue to twitch automatically for a short time as the nervous system shuts down.

In their view, the eyes may have opened because of reflexes, not because the brain was still consciously seeing or recognizing anything. The problem was that no one at the time had a way to directly measure brain activity after decapitation. As a result, the debate remained unresolved, and simple human observation was never enough to settle the question definitively.

Modern technology has allowed researchers to study the question much more carefully, although ethical limits mean these studies cannot be performed on humans. Instead, scientists have used animal studies to better understand what happens to the brain after decapitation. In 2011, researchers at Utre University in the Netherlands carried out a controlled study using decapitated rats.

They monitored the animals brain with an EEG or electronphilogram, [music] a device that records the brain’s electrical activity. The goal was to measure exactly how long the brain remained active after the head was separated from the body. The researchers found that recognizable brain wave patterns continued for about 4 seconds after decapitation.

Brain activity then gradually weakened instead of stopping immediately. It was only after about 17 seconds that electrical activity in the brain had almost completely disappeared. These results showed that the brain does not instantly become inactive the moment the head is separated from the body. Some level of brain function can continue for several seconds.

However, the researchers were very careful about what their findings actually meant. They stressed that rat brains and human brains are not identical and their study did not prove that a human would remain conscious or aware during those final seconds after decapitation. Many other scientists point to another important fact.

As soon as the head [music] is separated from the body, blood pressure inside the head collapses almost immediately because it’s no longer connected to the heart. The brain depends on a constant supply of oxygen rich blood under pressure to keep working normally. Once that blood flow stops, the brain begins shutting down very quickly. Because of this, many researchers estimate that if any consciousness remains after decapitation, it would likely last somewhere between 2 and 10 seconds at most.

They often compare it to what happens to fighter pilots during extreme hygiene maneuvers. When powerful G forces temporarily prevent enough blood from reaching the brain, pilots can suddenly black out [music] within seconds. Decapitation cuts off blood flow even more completely, making it unlikely that the brain could continue functioning normally for very long.

Even with modern science, no study has been able to give a final answer. There is still no direct way to measure a person’s conscious experience after decapitation. Today, the most cautious scientific view is that a very brief period of fading brain activity may be possible. But that does not necessarily mean a person remains fully aware, thinking clearly, or consciously experiencing what is happening.

Most researchers who’ve studied the subject believe that if any awareness exists at all, it would probably be extremely short, rapidly fading, and far from normal consciousness. While doctors and scientists continued debating what happened during those final seconds, the guillotine itself remained in use in France for almost two more [music] centuries, carrying out executions long after the French Revolution had ended.

For generation after generation, it remained a normal part of the French justice system. Over the years, the machine itself was improved to make it more reliable. The earliest versions worked by cutting a rope by hand to release the heavy blade. Later models were redesigned with spring-loaded or other mechanically operated release systems, making the blade drop more consistently every time.

Although the basic design remained almost unchanged, these improvements helped ensure that every execution was carried out in the same way. The last person ever executed by guillotine in France was Kamida Jandubi on September 10th, 1977. He was executed in the city of Marseilles after being convicted of the torture and murder of a young woman.

Just 4 years later in 1981, France officially abolished the death penalty. From that moment on, no one in the country could be legally executed again, and the guillotine was permanently removed from the French justice [music] system.