December 19, 2018 • 52 mins
Stuff to Blow Your Mind hosts Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick have a brand new show -- and they're dropping a full episode of it into the STBYM feed. The show is INVENTION and this episode dives into the history, invention and legacy of the head-chopping French guillotine. What happens when we use our technology to create a more humane form of public execution? Find out, and be sure to subscribe to Invention wherever you get your podcasts.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody, this is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick.
(00:02):
Can say, we're bringing you a special treat, an episode
of our brand new other podcast, Invention. That's right. It
is an exploration of human techno history, one invention at
a time, new inventions, old inventions, ancient inventions. Each episode
a different exploration. We're so excited about this new show.
We think you're gonna love it. We really hope you do.
(00:23):
But the really important thing is don't just listen to
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yourself subscribed so you will get future episodes when they
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stuff to Blow your Mind. Dot com has some links
out to some of the bigger sites, so where you
(00:44):
can definitely subscribe, and then once you've you've subscribed to Invention,
you can rate and review Invention as well. You know,
if you want to consider us releasing a brand new podcast,
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our Christmas gift to you, you can give us a
gift in return, and it's clicking that subscribe button. Don't
just listen, subscribe, that's right, And the gift we're giving
(01:04):
you is this episode about the guillotine, and so much
more to come, like there's gonna be an episode on
sunglasses in the future, an episode on roads. I'm hoping
to do one on the saxophone. The sky is the limit.
And then of course you guys will get to inform
what we're recording as well, so we hope you enjoy
our exploration of the guillotine. Hey, welcome to Invention. I'm
(01:32):
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And you might know
Robert and I from our other show Stuff to Blow
your Mind, our other show in the How Stuff Works Network.
But today you apparently have somehow wandered into our brand
new Curiosity Store of Inventions, where we explore human ingenuity
for good, for ill, all of the stuff that comes
(01:53):
out of our imaginations and becomes the technology we use
every day or maybe just read about in history books. Yes,
the how load halls of technological, systematic and cultural invention,
the very human machines, customs and systems that altered the
course of history and today we're talking about one of
the most useful inventions of all time. It's got to
be the and Robert. Before I say it, do you
(02:14):
say it like a French guy's name, or like what
a fish breathes with? I go with guillotine because it
sounds a little more like an open face sandwich that way,
and also it has the the gee has more of
a sound to it. Yeah, I like how it sounds
kind of like the minotar the guillotine. But but apparently
guillotine in English is also somewhat acceptable pronunciation. I don't
(02:37):
think there's a firm ruling one way or another from
the lords of English pronunciation. Now, one thing is for
certain as we we ventured into this world of the guillotine.
Beheadings themselves are just a time honored way for one
human being to kill another. It's a wound that still
can't be repaired, and it is, without questions, certain death. Now,
one thing I was thinking about to illustrate this is
(03:00):
what would you even say is the quote cause of
death in a beheading so well, blood loss, loss of
oxygen to the brain. Basically, it just cuts off. It
cuts off your all your plumbing systems from all of
your your your your thinking systems. Yeah, it makes it
makes you think about how often when you hear phrases
like clinically dead, that can refer to something about circulation,
(03:21):
like the cessation of the heartbeat. Um. But yeah, so
when you separate the head from the body, I guess
you've got to be really rigorous about what you mean
by dead though I guess it also happens pretty quickly
so you don't have to worry about it too much.
But yeah, all the blood comes out of the head,
immediate loss of blood pressure, which means the brain can't
get oxygen, which means the brain can't work. Yeah, and
it's something that's just cemented in our mythology as well, right,
(03:44):
I mean, you want to kill a vampire, you wanna
kill a medusa, you want to kill a highlander, what
do you do? You cut their head off? There is
something just supernaturally potent about this form of death. Well,
I think that's absolutely true, and you see that in
a lot of archaeological finds of beheadings from human history.
Like here's a kind of strange fact. A lot of
times when you find beheaded humans from ages past, there
(04:06):
appears to be evidence that the people were beheaded posthumously.
Why did that happen? There are a lot of ways
you could explain it. I mean that you would take
a dead person and cut off their head. Maybe there's
some sort of ritual function going on here, might be
a human sacrifice. Maybe there's some kind of symbolic form
of justice being done, if it's the corps of a
(04:28):
criminal or an enemy or something. But a lot of
times it appears like it might be a form of
apotropaic magic, the kind of magic you would use to
ward off evil or bad spirits, in the same way
that you might find a skeleton from hundreds of years
ago with an iron rod driven through its hard or
with a brick in its mouth, and say the tombs
underneath Venice. Yeah, there's like a dismantling of the the
(04:52):
individual that that seems evident in these acts um you know,
and we see acts of ritual decapitation dating back thousands
of years. For instance, there's evidence in Brazil that dates
back to at least nine thousand BC, and it's uh.
In it, we find a human skull draped and amputated,
hands palm side down, covering the face as if as
(05:14):
if in grief. That's from place called Lapa Dosanto in
Uh in South America and Brazil, and a lot of
bones have been discovered there. And it's not always easy
to determine how to read the intention behind what you
see in these people. But yeah, there were all kinds
of forms of of apparently posthumous mutilation going on in
the way these bones are arranged. For example, sometimes you'll
(05:35):
find skulls, they're full of finger bones inside the skulls.
What was going on? What made the people want to
do that? It seems like it may well have formed
some kind of magical intention, but what was it? Indeed,
we can only guess now. Another kind of significance that
beheading has often had in the ancient world was that
(05:56):
it was one of the many forms of execution practiced,
of course, in ancient Greece and home Uh. And in fact,
our terms decapitation and capital punishment both come from the
Latin from capit meaning head, so like capital punishment is
punishment of the head, or that you you pay, you
pay for a crime with your head by separating it
from the other stuff. And there's some evidence that the
(06:18):
ancient Greeks and Romans viewed beheading as not a particularly
harsh punishment, but more as a particularly noble and honorable
form of execution, and you see strains of this thinking
carried into much more recent times, like when beheading was
deployed as an execution method throughout the history of England.
Not always, but it was most often reserved for the aristocracy,
(06:41):
while common criminals might more often be killed in what
was considered a less dignified way like hanging. Yeah, I mean, obviously,
beheadings in general have probably been occurring as long as
we've had weapons fine enough to inflict the blow. Uh,
you know, as long as we had you know, some
thing that couldn't knock or cut a head off. And
(07:02):
then when you start looking at these, uh, the use
of the of of a sword or an axe and execution,
you know, a lot of it comes down to the
craftsmanship of that weapon, but also the skill of the
individual using it. Yeah, that's that's a real kicker, isn't it.
I Mean, when you contract somebody to do a job
for you, a lot of times if you don't have
a previous relationship with them, you know, you don't know
(07:24):
what kind of work they're gonna do you want to
find those people you can trust, but it's hard to
find a trustworthy the executioner that you know is going
to cut your head off right right, Like you've really
got to put yourself in the in the shoes of
the condemned here right. Uh. You know, obviously you don't
want to be stoned to death. You know, you don't
want to be thrown into that burlap sack with two
wild animals and thrown into the river. You would probably
(07:44):
prefer a nice, clean beheading, but nobody wants a less
than perfect beheading. If the local warlord is doing it,
you know, that's one thing. Uh, you know, unless, however,
you're worried about the war lord inflicting an intentionally less
than perfect stroke out of personal malice. If if it's
a professional executioner that's doing the honors, well that's either
(08:06):
really good or really bad, depending on how you look
at it. Like the idea of a trained specialist doing
the d that sounds good. But on the other hand,
at death via the sort of person who either seeks
this line of work out or is not suited for
any other form of labor, that's a little uh frightening.
I would say, Plus, do you really want to be
toward the bottom of an executioner's list for the day
(08:29):
after they're tired from swinging that big old axe, like
it's your turn on Friday afternoon? Yeah, like you kind
of I want to be up there. I would want
to be up there first, let him get that that
first blow in on me. I must admit I don't
think I'd ever much considered the horrors of a weak
strike from the executioner until Game of Thrones came around,
and then I suddenly began to think, like, oh, yes,
(08:51):
this could go very wrong. But George R. Martin did
not make up this concept obviously, of of being weak.
It's swinging the execution or sword or the acts. History
is replete with stories of botched beheadings, and they are
horrific and unfortunately sometimes kind of funny. I want to
tell you a couple. This one is not so funny.
(09:12):
This concerns Mary, the Queen of Scots. So during the
reign of Protestant Queen Elizabeth the First of England in
the sixteenth century, there was obviously a lot of anxiety
about succession because Elizabeth had been born to King Henry
the Eighth and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, after Henry's
first marriage to Catherine of Aragon had been annulled, and
(09:33):
obviously lots of people at the time, especially some Catholics,
had opinions about that right. And Elizabeth's cousin, Mary Stewart,
was born to James the fifth of Scotland, who was
descended from a legitimate royal line, and so many Catholic
supporters thought, well, maybe Mary actually has a more legitimate
claim to the throne than Elizabeth does. And so Mary
(09:53):
was eventually implicated in an assassination plot against Elizabeth in
fifteen eighty six, at least she was a rigedly involved
in it, and she was sentenced to execution in seven.
So you've got Mary Stewart, Mary Queen of Scott's, going
to her execution, and the story goes that she's blindfolded
and she gets helped to the block and the executioner,
wearing all black, raises up his axe to kill her,
(10:17):
but instead of cutting through her neck, he misses and
he hits her on the head. And then some report
that she murmurs Sweet Jesus in shock before the executioner
raises his ax a second time, and then strikes again
and still fails to cut her head off completely, and
finally he quote just sawed through what remained of her neck.
(10:38):
That's that's that's rough for Mary. Yeah, and this is
you know, this is presumed main event beheading here, so right,
this is before a royal audience, right, so this would
have to be either an act of just just just
an utterly inneped executioner or one that is intentionally doing
a bad job out of mouth. It's like there seems
to be very little room in between. It's hard to
(10:59):
under stand what happened here because you know, we only
have accounts from the time, which may not even be
fully reliable. We're relying on what people told us they
saw there, right, And there could be some objective in
crafting a version of the tale that sounds more in
apt than it actually was. But it actually gets worse
because apparently so it's described sometimes that the executioner appeared
horrified at what was going on. But the headsman, after
(11:22):
he got her head off, he took hold of the
severed head and he held it up in front of
the crowd so he could hold up the severed head
and say God save Queen Elizabeth. But he grasped Mary's
head by the hair, and it turned out the hair
was a wig, so the head fell down and rolled away,
leaving him holding only a hacked up, bloody wig while
proclaiming his true queen. And then another part of the story,
(11:43):
maybe maybe not to be believed, is that after Mary's
head rolled away, her lips kept moving as if she
was talking or praying. Okay, some of that sounds like
it might have been embellished, but it also sounds like
this guy was a real hack, no pun intended. Well,
I got an even worse hack for you, because there
was a seventeenth since three English executioner named jack Ketch
catch spelled like ketchup, catch yeah, or like what's the
(12:08):
kid in the Pokemon's. I have no idea. Our very
knowledgeable producer Paul just tells me it is ash ketch Um.
I guess he's got to catch him, all right. It's
like jack ketch him right, the horror writerer. That's what
comes to my mind. I don't well anyway, this is
jack Ketch K E T C H so Jack Ketch
birthday unknown died in sixty six, who was notorious for
(12:32):
being a complete screw up at his job and bungling executions.
A couple of examples. In six three, Ketch performed the
beheading of William, Lord Russell, who was convicted for treason
in his role of in his role in the Rye
House plot, which was against King Charles the second of England,
and Catches beheading of Russell was reportedly just this clumsy horror,
(12:54):
with Ketch whacking Russell again and again with the axe,
but repeatedly failing to get his head off. And apparently
after this, Catch defended himself by complaining that Russell wouldn't
hold still, and then you got the second one. Later, James,
Duke of Monmouth, he went to the block for the
Monmouth Rebellion of six five, and he tried to pay
(13:15):
Catch not to screw up his execution. He's recorded as saying, quote,
here are six guineas for you, pray, do your business well.
Do not serve me as you did my lord Russell.
I have heard you struck him three or four times.
Then Monmouth gave three more guineas to his servant who
was standing nearby, and told his servant to pay Catch
(13:36):
only if Catch did the beheading correctly. And then Catch
said I hope I shall. Then Monmouth asked to feel
the axe blade, and he did, and he complained that
this is too dull, and Catch said, no, it's sharp enough,
it'll be heavy enough. So Monmouth got down in place
to accept his fate, and Catch brought the axe down
(13:57):
on Monmouth. And at this point it is reported that
after he got hit, Monmouth lifted his head up and
turned around and glared at Catch angrily. Then he got
back down so Ketch could hit him again, and Catch
hit him several more times, failing each time to be
head him. Then Catch got frustrated and tried to walk
away and quit in the middle of the execution, while
(14:19):
Monmouth was still alive. But the crowd yelled at him
and told him to go back and finish it, so
finally he went back. After some more blows and the
use of a knife, he finally managed to get the
duke's head off. Well that's awful, Like this guy is
a true hack. I wonder if that's where the word
hat comes from. Perhaps, uh yeah, But so you had
people whose job it was to administer what I guess
(14:42):
was supposed to be the more humane form of execution
at the time. I mean, this is different than being
you know, uh, tortured and hanged and drawn and quartered
and all that. But he this is obviously not going
the way it's supposed to. And if we're going inspired
by the Greek and Roman model, something is obviously wrong
here at Like, not only is it unnecessarily painful, this
(15:02):
does not really seem like an honorable death. This seems humiliating. Yeah,
there's nothing noble about this. You know. This is not
a finely craft instrument wielded by a by and by
an expert practitioner. This is just a clumsy exercise and horror.
But what if mechanical controls could be set in place
(15:23):
the same level of perfection, regardless of whoever you know,
happens to be wearing the hood, how tired they are,
what sort of weapon they're using, or what sort of
six stuff they're into. A machine that cannot get tired,
it can't hesitate or engage in unfair punishment. It's not
gonna judge you based on your your royal or commoner status.
(15:45):
A good blade, some gravity, and a simple frame with
a necklock, well that would be the guillotine. All right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we will discuss some precursors to the guillotine and the
tea itself. Alright, we're back. So the guillotine of late
(16:08):
eighteenth century France, which I'm sure you've heard about before,
that was involved in the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror,
the first French Republic. That guillotine was not the first
human head removal machine, not by a long shot. And
we're not saying it was. You know that it was
predated by people swinging in axe or a sword with
their hands. Of course it was. But there were organized
(16:29):
machines for doing this job more efficiently and in a
more consistent way before the guillotine was instituted in France, right,
and and they worked along the same principles. They maybe
they weren't quite as refined, but essentially the idea was
there that we should say that it was only in
the aftermath of the French Revolution that people began referring
(16:49):
to decapitation machines as guillotines. That's where the name comes from. Yes,
they had equally less refined names. They had more grizzly names.
One find. We'll meet a couple in a moment. So
as for who invented the first general decapitation machine, this
is totally unknown, lost to history, and in fact, we
don't even know for sure how many societies used a
(17:11):
device like this. There there are a lot of tales,
but many of these tales might not even be true.
We don't know for sure, right, And then how often
is the individual uh celebrated for creating such a thing
as we'll discover the naming of the guillotine, and it
doesn't really relate to the individual or individuals that created it, right.
I mean a lot of people who create execution devices
(17:33):
don't want to be associated with and when you find
the people who do want to be associated with them
or don't mind, you've got to kind of wonder about
those people. But um, So, there are a couple of
known mechanical beheading devices from England that predated the French guillotine,
and one is known as the Halifax Gibbet. So the
how Halifax is a town in West Yorkshire in England,
(17:55):
and it had this infamous beheading machine known as the
Halifax Gibbet, which was allegedly used mostly to punish petty theft,
so people would steal some small sum of money or
something worth not very much, some cloth or something, and
into the Halifax Gibbet they would go. It was described
in an eighteen thirty seven history by an author named
(18:15):
William White in the following way quote. The executions always
took place on the Great Market day in order to
strike the more terror into the neighborhood. When the criminal
was brought to the gibbet, which stood a little way
out of the town, where part of the stone platform
may still be seen on Gibbet Hill. The execution was
performed by means of an engine, which was raised upon
(18:37):
a platform four ft high and thirteen feet square, faced
on every side with stone, and ascended by a flight
of steps. In the middle of this platform was placed
two upright pieces of timber fifteen feet high, joined at
the top by a transverse beam. Within these was a
square block of wood four ft and a half long,
(18:58):
which moved up and down by means of grooves made
for that purpose. To the lower part of the sliding
block was fastened in iron axe of the weight of
seven pounds and twelve ounces. The axe, thus fixed, was
drawn up to the top by a cord and pulley.
At the end of the cord was a pin, which,
being fixed to the block, kept it suspended till the
(19:18):
moment of execution. When the culprit, having placed his head
on the block, the pin was withdrawn and his head
was instantly severed from his body. If the offender was
condemned for stealing an ox, a sheep, or a horse,
the end of the rope was fastened to the beast, which,
being driven, pulled out the pin and thus became the executioner.
(19:40):
In other cases, the bailiff for his servant cut the
rope and allowed the axe to descend. It's a little
unnecessary complexity involving fim animals, but otherwise the basic principles
of the guillotine as we've come to know it. Yeah,
it's more or less there there. There might be some
design refinements we come on later, but this is the idea.
It's it's a reliable, bowl, consistent machine that's not going
(20:01):
to mess up. Right. And of course it doesn't sound
like it was necessarily a custom blade, or maybe it was,
but it's very much based on the design of an
axe blade. Yeah, and when you see illustrations, it looks
like just a large axe head on the bottom of
a huge wooden block. Uh So, this beheading machine of
Halifax was famous enough that the English poet John Taylor
referenced it alongside the notoriously tough police of Kingston upon
(20:27):
Hull in a poem uh that that I thought was
pretty good. He writes, there is a proverb and a
prayer with all that we may not to Three strange
places fall from Hull, from Halifax, from Hell. 'tis thus
from all these three good Lord deliver us at Halifax.
The law so sharp doth deal that whoso more than
(20:48):
one threepence doth steal. They have a lynn that wondrous,
quick and well, since thieves all headless unto Heaven or Hell.
From Hell, each man says, Lord, deliver me, because from
Hell can no redemption be Men may escape from Hull
and Halifax, but sure in Hell there is a heavier tax.
It sounds pretty grim. Well. I like how it's sort
(21:10):
of captures two themes there. One is that how the
Halifax jibbit is deadly and something to be feared, but
it also contrasts it with the supposed tortures of Hell,
I guess, again emphasizing that, well, it's not as torturous
as many of the other methods that are being used. Yeah,
he's almost describing it like it's a like it's a
plane ticket to to greater rewards or suffering, depending on
(21:35):
how one supernatural revenge fantasy is playing out here. But
on the other hand, I like that it is to
a certain extent farm animals, uh, you know. Notwithstanding, it
is to a certain extent saving the horrors of an
afterlife for those imagined afterlife and not trying to um
embody them too much in the act of execution itself. Yeah. Now,
(21:59):
whether that's a actually a good thing or not, we
can discuss later. But it does seem to be there's
at least there's at least a superficial kind of humaneness
to write, even though it seems to be being lumped
on people who committing extremely pent crimes and not and
no matter what you think, really probably deserving of death.
But there's some strange stories about how people reacted to
(22:23):
what happened with at the Halifax Gibbet. The story in
Thomas Wright tells a legend quote of a countrywoman who
was writing by the Gibbet on her hampers to the
market just at the execution of a criminal when the
axe chopped his neck through with such force that the
head jumped into one of her hampers, or as others say,
seized her apron with the teeth and they're stuck for
(22:46):
some time. I don't believe that's true, or at least
the teeth. I don't believe. Again, we're coming back to
the sort of inherent comedy. I mean, it's true gallows humor,
uh that comes with beheading executions. But there's an interesting
observation from the Halifax historian John Crabtree, who has a
sort of attitude about what stories like this mean. He writes, quote,
(23:10):
it is useless employing words about this fair, but the
circumstance may serve to show with what apathy the country
people regarded this mode of punishment. Their minds were evidently
hardened by such exhibitions, and the fact develops the inadequacy
of such awful administrations of justice to produce that proper
moral and salutary effect which might have been anticipated. Such scenes,
(23:33):
often repeated, appear to harden rather than soften, to stupefy
rather than awaken the sensibilities of man's nature. And I
think we should come back to that thought later on. Indeed,
all right, so what else do we have in terms
of proto guillotine machines. Well, a quicker story is just
a copy essentially of the Halifax jibbitt, known as the
(23:54):
Scottish Maiden. So James Douglas, the fourth Earl of Morton,
who is the ruler of Scotland from fifteen seventy two
to fifteen seventy eight, he was alleged at some point
to have introduced the decapitation machine to his country of Scots,
inspired by the Halifax gibbet. Allegedly, he at some point
traveled through Halifax and he was so inspired by the
gibbet that he thought, well, I should share this same
(24:17):
technology with my countrymen. So a similar machine was built
out of oak, and it could be transported around the
country to perform beheadings wherever. But it was often accepting
the condemned at Edinburgh, and according to the National Museums
of Scotland, crimes that could get you sent to the
Scottish Maiden included murder, incest, stealing, treason, adultery, forgery and robbery.
(24:39):
But there's an ironic twist. So James Douglas, the Earl
fourth Earl of Morton, was a supporter of James the sixth,
and Morton opposed the Catholic faction of Mary, Queen of
Scott's who he discussed earlier, Mary Stewart, and he was
eventually implicated in a plot to murder Mary's second husband,
Lord Darnley, and was put to death in June one,
(25:01):
decapitated by the Scottish maiden that he brought to Scotland. Ah,
there's your poetic justice, and legends of that kind will
appear again and again in this episode. Actually, well, yes,
and even beyond this episode, because this isn't that a
common theme? The man destroyed by his own invention, by
his own machine. It happens enough in the movies that
(25:23):
you should think it happens more often in reality. Though
in the movies it's especially common when that invention is
some kind of hybrid animal, like I created a shark ape,
and you know it swings from the trees, taking bites
out of people who could have known my shark ape
would turn on me, And yet it always happens. Alright, So,
as we've been discussing, there were similar devices already used
(25:45):
in Europe and had been for centuries before the guillotine
came around. But the individual who is often credited as
the inventor of the guillotine is a French surgeon and
physiologist Antoine Louis who lives seventy three through sev Yeah,
he is often credited as the inventor, though based on
what I was reading, it appears to me was maybe
(26:07):
designed by some sort of committee of which Louis was
the leader. Right, And this is actually all the more fitting,
uh when we really get to the heart of the
guillotine here, because it is this, this thing that is
it is this utilization of technology and this there's a
there's an air of civility to it. Uh. This this
taking something that is kind of that is rather barbaric
(26:30):
and making it a little less so. Well, it's bureaucratic violence. Yes,
it very much embodies the idea of retributed violence by
the state, taken out of the emotional hands of the
single executioner and placed into the hands of a disembodied
machine that is created by a committee through drafts. Yes,
you know, we have another episode that we're recording this
(26:51):
week on vending machines, and it's amazing this the similarities
involved here, This this these sometimes these struggles over what
exactly is happening when a machine does the bidding of
a human. If a machine is vindan, say, blasphemous literature,
as we discussed in this other episode, then who is
it fault foresaid literature sale and uh. And there's a
(27:13):
sense of that here too. It's like the bureaucracy has
condemned you to death. The machine is actually doing the execution.
We're just merely, you know, pushing the button, pulling the string,
et cetera, to carry out this judgment. Right, But we
do at least have Antoine Louis to associate with the
creation of the machine, even if it wasn't just him alone,
(27:33):
but because of his association with it, it was often
early on it was called names, not the guillotine yet,
but names like the Louisette or the louis Zone, which
doesn't have as much of a ring to it. Oh,
I kind of like it. I could see executions by
the Louisette. Yeah, I guess it would have grown on us.
But at any rate, later it definitely came to be
named after Joseph Ignace Guillotan, who lived seventeen thirty eight
(27:59):
through eighteen four team. He was a physician. Uh, he
was a National Assembly member, and he played a major
role in passing legislation that made death by machine the law.
The loose idea here is that it would this kind
of legislation would provide the best possible version of beheading
to all classes of society. And we do have to
(28:20):
point out that, despite some urban legends out there, uh,
Guillotine himself was not killed by his own machine. And
he wasn't actually a huge fan of execution either. It's
not like he was a huge execution enthusiasts. Well, no,
exactly the opposite. Guilloton opposed the death penalty. He wanted
the abolition of the death penalty, but he didn't think
(28:41):
that he could accomplish that directly. Right, this seemed the
best reasonable next step. Right, It's like, if I can't
we can't eradicate it, we're going to have it. We
might as well make it clean and uh and fair
to all involved. According to a popular legend, Guillotan was
born when his pregnant mother was out walking one day
(29:01):
and she overheard the screams of a condemned criminal being
broken on the wheel and breaking on the wheel was
you know, a classic death by torture type method where
a person would be stretched out on a wheel in
a kind of starfish post and they'd have their limbs
broken with an iron rod or with a club, just
insane brutality. So he was very much opposed to that
(29:22):
sort of thing, not only just the bar the barbaric
nature of the execution, but the public nature of the
idea that that women and children, uh, just innocent bystanders
might just walk through town and witness such such horror.
So he was thinking, maybe if less children end up
watching this, the better, Yes, and make it. Yeah, it's
(29:44):
more systematic, it's more you know, the act itself is
less flashy, and then we're just gonna make it less
for performance. So Gia Tom was not out there lobbying
to get this machine named after his family. No, no,
it just it ended up sticking. Now a cool lit
fact here that sounds like something right out of an
Allan Moore comic book. But along with Benjamin Franklin, H.
(30:06):
Guillotine investigated the work of Franz Mesmer of Mesmerism, you know,
the the the form of hypnotism that we had back
in the day, uh, and they investigated him on behalf
of King Louis, the League of Extraordinary Gentleman exactly. So
another way of thinking, you alluded to this a minute ago,
(30:28):
Robert like the idea that it would be the best
method for all the classes. So another way of thinking
about the motivation for the institution of the guillotine at
this time in history was that it supposedly extended the
democratic and egalitarian principles of the French Revolution to common criminals,
essentially extending them the courtesy of the honorable beheading that
(30:53):
was more often reserved for nobles and aristocrats instead of
more shameful and common and painful deaths like hanging, burning,
or breaking on the wheel, which you were more likely
to get if you were just some lower class petty criminal. Now,
as for the idea Guillotin had, thinking that this would
shield children from the gruesome practice of execution, Unfortunately this
(31:14):
did not work out. I was reading a section from
a book called Children's Toys of by Gone Days, A
History of playthings of all people's from prehistoric times to
the nineteenth century by Carl Grober, published in nineteen and
the author writes, quote, the worst monstrosity of the kind
was the outcome of the French Revolution, which indeed was
(31:36):
over rich in aberrations of taste. The toy shops put
on the market little guillotines with which little patriots could
be head figures of aristocrats. They're still survives some specimens
of this pretty and diverting machine, one of which bears
the date seventeen ninety four, and he's got an illustration.
These were not models, but pure toys. And in proof
(31:58):
of this we have the king's evidence from one whom
we should never suspect of wishing to give so bloodthirsty
a toy to his little son. And here the author
is speaking of the romantic poet Johann wolf Kan von Gta.
So Gruber tells the story and that in December sevente
Girta wrote a letter to his mother and Frankfort, asking
(32:21):
if she would buy a toy guillotine for his little son.
And she replied, dear son, anything I can do to
please you is gladly done and gives me joy. But
to buy such an infamous implement of murder, that I
will not do at any price. If I had authority,
the maker should be put in the stocks, and I
would have the machine publicly burnt by the common executioner.
(32:42):
And I guess this is sort of the seventeen nineties
equivalent of like asking your grandmother to buy you a
copy of Doom for Christmas in the nineteen nineties. Yeah, well,
I'm glad that you brought up Doom here. And just
because it's it's easy for us to look back on
this account and think, oh, these children of a more
you know, barbarous age. But go to any toy store
and look at the machine gun based toys that are
(33:07):
on display. There. All the various guns, like true true
murder weapons, um, not even methods of bureaucratic execution, but
weapons of just wanton violence. Uh, these are all represented
in toys even today. Uh. Likewise, I can't help but
think back on how much I wanted the slime pit
when I was a kid. This was a master's of
(33:29):
the universe. Place set the device and basically you would
lock he man or some other figure into the machine
and it was like shaped like a skull, and then
it would dump slime on top of the head of
the poor hero. And it was I think that maybe
the actual lore of it was like I would make
them mutate or something. But it was very much Uh,
it was very much like a guillotine, except instead of
(33:50):
a blade, it was slime. It was like, clearly an
instrument of execution, of of ritualized death for your toys.
So you're arranging an execution for he man exactly. So
you know, the idea of a toy guillotine. It makes
perfect sense. Uh, we can't. We can only distance ourselves
from such an idea so much. Though. I also have
(34:12):
to wonder I somehow detect between the lines. This could
have been one of those situations where and Robert, I
bet you're familiar with this, where a dad buys or
requests a toy for his child because secretly he wants
to play. Uh. In fact, Gerta wrote in faust quote
ages no second childhood age makes plain children. We were
(34:34):
true children. We remain again much like it is today. Now.
We mentioned that Guillaton was responsible for introducing legislation that
would eventually lead the French National Assembly to say, okay,
we're only going to be killing people by beheading machine.
Now that that's that's going to be the new method
of execution. That's what's humane, that's what the state should
(34:56):
be up to and so I think in just a
minute we should turn to the sheen itself. But I
just wanted quickly before we do that, to discuss where
it is that this rumor came from. The guillotam was
killed by the machine that he recommended putting in place
for executions in France, and I think I know maybe
a few threads of where the story came from. Obviously,
(35:18):
we had that ironic story of the Earl of Morton earlier, right,
so we can see how that might have influenced confused
the telling, right. But then there are a couple of
other examples. So Dr Antoine Louis, the secretary of the
Academy of Medicine and physician to King Louis, the one
who we talked about earlier, chairing that committee that designed
the device. He was actually temporarily condemned to die in
(35:41):
the machine that he designed or helped design, though he
escaped this fate basically during a change of power, So
he narrowly escaped going to the guillotine himself. And then
King Louis the sixteenth, who was interested in mechanical engineering,
is said to have made refinements to the design of
the guillotine like recommending an angled blade while he was
(36:03):
still in power, before the device was eventually turned on
the king himself and on his wife Marie Antoinette. And
so there's another kind of like creator and then killed
by his creation. Irony there since he apparently or at
least allegedly offered refinements to the design. All right, Well,
on that note, we're gonna take one more break, and
when we come back, we'll discuss the machine itself in
(36:23):
more detail, and we'll also discuss its legacy. All right,
we're back. So now we're at the machine itself, the
French guillotine of the seventeen eighties and onward. And the
question is was it actually built? Well, of course it was.
This one was definitely built. Some of the inventions were
(36:44):
discussing on this show, you know, maybe didn't get out
of the blueprint phase. This definitely saw action. So, after
the legal standard of execution by machine was approved by
the National Assembly in the construction of the machine was
delegated to a politician named Pierre Louis red Areo, who
I'm always going to struggle with that name, so I'll
(37:05):
just call him Pierre here. Uh. He apparently had trouble
finding a contractor who could build the machine since no
one wanted their name associated with it, and eventually found
a taker is a taker from Germany, and so the
guillotine was constructed by a German harpsichord maker named Tobias Schmidt.
Apparently he also supplied a leather sack that would catch heads.
(37:27):
And now you can you just gotta wonder about Tobias.
I can just imagine the scenario. It's like, so, honey,
what are you working on today? I get this new
contracted it pays well, it's gonna really help us out
next month. Oh who are you putting a hots harpsichord
of chord for? Well, it's not quite a harpsichord. Well,
I'm just imagining in his shop while he's working on
the guillotine that harpsichord music is constantly playing Dan Dan
(37:51):
Dean Dan Dan dy. Anyway, according to the memoirs of
the French executioner Enrie Clement Sans Song in eighteen seven six,
since On came from a line of a long line
of executioners, and he so he has these memoirs about
his family's exploits, cutting off heads and performing executions in France,
(38:11):
and his memoirs are considered probably only partially reliable, but
his up close description of the workings of the guillotine
is fairly straightforward. So I see, I feel like he's
probably on the right track here, all right, I'm gonna
read part of this and I'm gonna I'm gonna go
for an executioner's voice. Here do it. On a scaffold
from seven to eight feet high, two parallel bars are
(38:31):
made fast in one end. Their top part is united
by a strong crossbar. To this crossbar is added a
thick iron ring, and which is past a rope which
fixes and retains a ram. This is perpendicularly armed with
a sharp and broad blade, which gradually becomes broader on
all its surface, so then instead of striking perpendicularly, it
(38:52):
strikes sideways, so that there is not an inch of
the blade that does not serve. The ram ways from pounds,
and its weight is doubled. When it begins to slide down.
It is enclosed in the groove of the bars. A
spring makes it fast to the left bar. A band
of iron descends along the outside of the same bar,
(39:12):
and the handle is locked to a ring with a padlock.
So that no accident is possible, and the weight only
falls when the executioner interferes to a way plank. Strong
straps are fastened by which the criminal is attached under
the armpits and over the legs, so that the body
cannot move as soon as the way plank goes down.
(39:32):
The head being between the bars, is supported by a
rounded crossbar. The executioner's assistants lower another rounded crossbar, the
head being thus grooved in a perfect circle, which prevents
it from moving in any way. This precaution is indispensable
in regard to the terrible inconveniences of fear. The executioner
(39:54):
then touches the spring. The whole affair is done so
quickly that only the thump of the blade when it
slide down and forms the spectators that the culprit is
no longer of the living. The head falls into a
basket full of brand and the body is pushed into
another wicker basket line with very thick leather. That's a
(40:14):
heck of a rating, Robert, Yeah, that was going to
do a number on my throat. But I'm sorry. Maybe
I should have taken part of it, but I was
just enjoying listening to your Henri Clement. Well, there's a
precision in his in his description of the act that
I felt like I had to had to capture now obviously,
so he's described how the device works now, but they
(40:35):
had to test it out before they can make sure
to try it on a human, right, So you know,
you always wonder like, how do you test a guillotine?
You put a watermelon in there, do you gallagher it? Well,
I suppose you could, but it's kind of a waste
of a good melon, and ultimately you want to test
it on the real thing, right, So they use dead bodies.
Oh yeah, also farm animals like sheep and calves. Yeah,
because you just I mean, it makes sense you want
(40:57):
to make sure you're cutting through actual vertebrate tissue there
and most notably the neck. And then on a officials
installed and used the guillotine for the first time. Right.
So the first victim of the French guillotine was Nicholas
Jacques Beltier who was a highwayman, and he was executed
where the machine was erected at the Plas de grev
(41:20):
And they're so a large crowd came out, obviously to
witness the first execution by the new machine, but it
was reported that the crowd was somewhat unimpressed, and they
found the efficiency of the killing less entertaining than the
forms of execution they were used to, even the more
classic beheadings. Nevertheless, over time, the executions that the guillotine
(41:40):
became a very popular spectator event during the reign of Terror,
and you know, in generally afterwards when the guillotine was used,
people would show up to watch. So we see a
little success here. Like it was clearly less dramatic, uh,
you know, there was less theater in the act. And
yet at the same time, a few things are more
drum mattic in life than the ending of a life
(42:02):
like this is the people. You can understand why people
would still turn out even if you had made things
a little more precise. Now, putting aside the question, I
guess what we can talk talk about in a minute
of or whether it's ever humane to just execute somebody,
was it actually true that the guillotine was a more refined,
(42:23):
more humane version of execution than what came before? Was it?
Was it an improvement if you were somebody who was
interested in reducing the suffering of humankind, yeah, I mean
you could again, you could say the concept is inherently controversial,
but still others took issue with just how humane it was.
So op Prussian doctor Samuel Thomas summer Ing, who lives
(42:45):
seventeen fifty five through eighteen thirty he studied the cadavers
of guillotine victims, and he argued that severed heads were
still capable feeling and since, and he wrote an essay
on this in seventeen nine. So he he was something
of a poly math. In addition to naming the twelve
pairs of cranial nerves, he also invented a telegraphic system
(43:05):
and made discoveries in paleontology, specifically with the pterodactyl fossils.
They're not dinosaurs, folks, that's a different thing. So this
was you know, this was not just this wasn't just
some crazy guy coming up and sanah, the heads are
still alive. You know, he was he was making a
an expert argument that, like, I'm not sure that this
is great what we're doing. Maybe it's a little it's
(43:27):
almost a little too precise. Yeah. The core takeaway of
his essay on the humanity of the guiatain was that
we can't rule out that it's possible that a severed
head could still be having experience, could experience being severed.
Now we knew, And there were a lot of tales
of this happening, right of people running to check out
the heads of the decapitated, in various doctors checking in
(43:49):
and seeing what was going on with the eyes. And
there was a lot of interest in this in determining what,
you know, what happens to consciousness at death, like this
was a perfect clinical exercise for for weighing in on it. Yeah,
the classic tales about this thin get repeated the most
often are like seeing someone's cheeks flush with anger when
they behold someone, or who's someone who mocks them or
(44:12):
something like that, or or who slaps them in the face,
or thinking that that I severed head would be like
looking at people as if it recognized them, something like that. Yeah,
and obviously there's a lot of indelishment with these stories,
but we don't know how much to trust them. Yeah,
we really don't know how much to trust them. But
we do know today that that any kind of activity
(44:33):
scene in the heads after death, most of this is
going to be reflective twitching of muscles. So um, basically,
coma and brain death are probably gonna occur within two
to three seconds of decapitation due to interruption of blood
flow to the brain. So just the massive sudden drop
in blood pressure, Yeah, that's gonna be Yeah. So any
(44:56):
tales of like, you know, confronting the head, having any
kind of like moment of human uh contact, even it
it's just in the eyes. Uh, it's pretty clear that
that is all just embellishment of stories or just wishful
thinking on the part of the observer. So what is
the legacy of this machine, this this machine of bureaucratic violence.
(45:17):
And if we try to look at it from with
our perspective, from today, with our hindsight, and you know,
with with the kind of value judgments we would make,
was the guillotine a step forward or a step backward?
Was it as uh Giatan envisioned a more humane way
of doing business when the state was just you know,
couldn't be convinced not to kill people, or did it
(45:39):
perhaps enable a worse state of affairs where more people
could be sent to their deaths with impunity than would
have been the case otherwise. Yeah, I think you could
probably go either way on it. I mean, one thing
is for certain. It it changed the way executions were
performed in France for nearly two hundred years. It was
actually used in France up until nineteen seventy seven, that's
when the last execution occur via guillotine, before the outlying
(46:02):
of capital punishment in one it also took on symbolic way.
It's just this this symbol of the reign of terror
and perhaps to a larger extent, a symbol of systematically
violent rebellion. Yeah. I read one author point out, certainly
not in defending the guillotine or the use of the guillotine,
but it just pointing out a kind of strange irony
that the guillotine now to us symbolizes this this horror,
(46:26):
this horror period of bureaucratic violence, which it certainly was.
But we look at that and we think of that
period as a reign of terror. But don't think the
same way say about the Napoleonic Wars, which killed far
more people than the guillotine ever did. Not that that
makes the killings of the guillotine any less horrific. It's true, now,
you know. One the one thing about the weirdness of
(46:46):
this whole situation that stands out. I mean, aside from
just the inherently weird nature of of a beheading machine
machine that cuts off heads, there is still something highly
symbolic going on here. I think to the means of
an exit usition, and you'll typically see an expression of
of power involved. Say it's a physical strength or you know,
(47:07):
vengeful spirit or increasingly a culture's greatest technological achievements. Isn't
it weird to think about how these methods climb the
tree of developing technology? So starting with varying levels of
tool proficiency, you know, axes and swords, weapons, weapon crafting,
then we go into gunpowder, uh, you know, firing squads, electricity,
(47:30):
and the electric chair. It is weird to trace through
history execution methods just sort of like tracking with whatever
is the most interesting new technology we have available. Yeah, chemicals, pharmaceuticals,
I mean, why an electric chair? That is just such
a strange idea to even come up with. French philosopher
(47:50):
Michelle Fuco he weighed in on this, and he pointed
out that penal technology is of course an expression of power,
but we also have to dwell in the fact that
it does this through everyday technology, ubiquitous technology. So if
it's something like electricity or even you know or even
you know, pharmaceuticals, chemicals. Uh, it's it's taking aspects of
(48:13):
everyday life and turning them into the the system, the
tool of of justice. So like our everyday use of
energy and the consumer economy, a constant reminder of the
methods of death that the state can inflict upon people
if they if they don't stay in line exactly. Now,
one small area of the legacy of the guillotine comes
(48:35):
down to its use in medical terminology. So there are
two primary means of amputation. Um in terms of like
amputating a limb or what have you. You have flap
amputations in which flaps of flesh are left so that
you can fold them and close the stump of the wound.
And then there are guillotine amputations, which which are more
of a straight down affair with no immediate concerns for
(48:56):
flap tissue. So in guillotine amputation, it's more about cutting
out infected tissue and making sure drainage of proper drainage occurs,
and then secondary surgery is performed to create the flap
tissue to close everything off into a stump. But obviously
that's like a secondary appellation, like you wouldn't you wouldn't
have called that guillotine cutting in the surgical since before
(49:19):
the guillotine, right, But it is certainly an example where
if you're you, you encounter this terminology now in in
medical science and uh, and it stems from the use
of this execution device. That being said, there's a lot
of medical terminology that stems from various weapons and so forth.
Of course, so I want to come back to this
question that we've been teasing throughout where you can't help
(49:42):
but wonder if Josephine Guioton pushed us in exactly the
wrong direction, if he was actually against the death penalty
and trying to institute more humane treatment of criminals. You know,
it's hard not to notice that by sanitizing a horrible act,
it often seems like you make the act easier to
(50:04):
carry out. And I mean, just think about how this
applies to modern methods of state sanctioned killing, everything from
lethal injection to drone strikes. Does the sanitizing and distancing
and depersonalization opportunity provided by lethal technology encourage us to
make ourselves able to kill more while feeling less about it. Yeah,
(50:28):
I mean, ultimately, is the the botched execution that we've
discussed already, Are those not maybe a more honest depiction
of what's going on? This this this fallible, um barbaric
human effort, not this uh precision of the holy blameless machine. Well,
I mean, obviously we're not going to sit here and
(50:49):
advocate brutal botched executions with Jack Catch hacking at us
with a sword or an axe. But yeah, at least
with that, I'm not saying that's preferable, But I do
see what you're saying that it's at least there you're
acknowledging that something brutal and weird is going on, and
you can't just you know, clean it up in your
mind and ignore it because you're hearing the screams and
(51:10):
it's splattering on you, and it's so brutal that it's
almost funny. You know. It's interesting. You know, in this
show we talk about innovation and inventions and how how
they change the world, and and so often you see
that that people have to look back and try to
figure out what changed and how it changed us. Uh,
And here we are hundreds of years later looking back
(51:33):
and saying, well, what did the guillotine mean? What did
it do? And what are the ultimate ramifications of this advancement. Well,
I positive that maybe one takeaway from it is that
the truth is it has showed us that there is
no good or clean or sanitary way to kill a person,
and any belief that there is, in fact turns out
(51:55):
to be a kind of brutalizing and dehumanizing illusion. All
So that's it for this week's episode of Invention. If
you want to learn more about the show and check
out other episodes, head on over to our website invention
pod dot com. Big thanks to Scott Benjamin for research
assistance with this episode, Thanks to our audio producer Torii Harrison.
(52:16):
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(00:02):
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(01:04):
you is this episode about the guillotine, and so much
more to come, like there's gonna be an episode on
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And then of course you guys will get to inform
what we're recording as well, so we hope you enjoy
our exploration of the guillotine. Hey, welcome to Invention. I'm
(01:32):
Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And you might know
Robert and I from our other show Stuff to Blow
your Mind, our other show in the How Stuff Works Network.
But today you apparently have somehow wandered into our brand
new Curiosity Store of Inventions, where we explore human ingenuity
for good, for ill, all of the stuff that comes
(01:53):
out of our imaginations and becomes the technology we use
every day or maybe just read about in history books. Yes,
the how load halls of technological, systematic and cultural invention,
the very human machines, customs and systems that altered the
course of history and today we're talking about one of
the most useful inventions of all time. It's got to
be the and Robert. Before I say it, do you
(02:14):
say it like a French guy's name, or like what
a fish breathes with? I go with guillotine because it
sounds a little more like an open face sandwich that way,
and also it has the the gee has more of
a sound to it. Yeah, I like how it sounds
kind of like the minotar the guillotine. But but apparently
guillotine in English is also somewhat acceptable pronunciation. I don't
(02:37):
think there's a firm ruling one way or another from
the lords of English pronunciation. Now, one thing is for
certain as we we ventured into this world of the guillotine.
Beheadings themselves are just a time honored way for one
human being to kill another. It's a wound that still
can't be repaired, and it is, without questions, certain death. Now,
one thing I was thinking about to illustrate this is
(03:00):
what would you even say is the quote cause of
death in a beheading so well, blood loss, loss of
oxygen to the brain. Basically, it just cuts off. It
cuts off your all your plumbing systems from all of
your your your your thinking systems. Yeah, it makes it
makes you think about how often when you hear phrases
like clinically dead, that can refer to something about circulation,
(03:21):
like the cessation of the heartbeat. Um. But yeah, so
when you separate the head from the body, I guess
you've got to be really rigorous about what you mean
by dead though I guess it also happens pretty quickly
so you don't have to worry about it too much.
But yeah, all the blood comes out of the head,
immediate loss of blood pressure, which means the brain can't
get oxygen, which means the brain can't work. Yeah, and
it's something that's just cemented in our mythology as well, right,
(03:44):
I mean, you want to kill a vampire, you wanna
kill a medusa, you want to kill a highlander, what
do you do? You cut their head off? There is
something just supernaturally potent about this form of death. Well,
I think that's absolutely true, and you see that in
a lot of archaeological finds of beheadings from human history.
Like here's a kind of strange fact. A lot of
times when you find beheaded humans from ages past, there
(04:06):
appears to be evidence that the people were beheaded posthumously.
Why did that happen? There are a lot of ways
you could explain it. I mean that you would take
a dead person and cut off their head. Maybe there's
some sort of ritual function going on here, might be
a human sacrifice. Maybe there's some kind of symbolic form
of justice being done, if it's the corps of a
(04:28):
criminal or an enemy or something. But a lot of
times it appears like it might be a form of
apotropaic magic, the kind of magic you would use to
ward off evil or bad spirits, in the same way
that you might find a skeleton from hundreds of years
ago with an iron rod driven through its hard or
with a brick in its mouth, and say the tombs
underneath Venice. Yeah, there's like a dismantling of the the
(04:52):
individual that that seems evident in these acts um you know,
and we see acts of ritual decapitation dating back thousands
of years. For instance, there's evidence in Brazil that dates
back to at least nine thousand BC, and it's uh.
In it, we find a human skull draped and amputated,
hands palm side down, covering the face as if as
(05:14):
if in grief. That's from place called Lapa Dosanto in
Uh in South America and Brazil, and a lot of
bones have been discovered there. And it's not always easy
to determine how to read the intention behind what you
see in these people. But yeah, there were all kinds
of forms of of apparently posthumous mutilation going on in
the way these bones are arranged. For example, sometimes you'll
(05:35):
find skulls, they're full of finger bones inside the skulls.
What was going on? What made the people want to
do that? It seems like it may well have formed
some kind of magical intention, but what was it? Indeed,
we can only guess now. Another kind of significance that
beheading has often had in the ancient world was that
(05:56):
it was one of the many forms of execution practiced,
of course, in ancient Greece and home Uh. And in fact,
our terms decapitation and capital punishment both come from the
Latin from capit meaning head, so like capital punishment is
punishment of the head, or that you you pay, you
pay for a crime with your head by separating it
from the other stuff. And there's some evidence that the
(06:18):
ancient Greeks and Romans viewed beheading as not a particularly
harsh punishment, but more as a particularly noble and honorable
form of execution, and you see strains of this thinking
carried into much more recent times, like when beheading was
deployed as an execution method throughout the history of England.
Not always, but it was most often reserved for the aristocracy,
(06:41):
while common criminals might more often be killed in what
was considered a less dignified way like hanging. Yeah, I mean, obviously,
beheadings in general have probably been occurring as long as
we've had weapons fine enough to inflict the blow. Uh,
you know, as long as we had you know, some
thing that couldn't knock or cut a head off. And
(07:02):
then when you start looking at these, uh, the use
of the of of a sword or an axe and execution,
you know, a lot of it comes down to the
craftsmanship of that weapon, but also the skill of the
individual using it. Yeah, that's that's a real kicker, isn't it.
I Mean, when you contract somebody to do a job
for you, a lot of times if you don't have
a previous relationship with them, you know, you don't know
(07:24):
what kind of work they're gonna do you want to
find those people you can trust, but it's hard to
find a trustworthy the executioner that you know is going
to cut your head off right right, Like you've really
got to put yourself in the in the shoes of
the condemned here right. Uh. You know, obviously you don't
want to be stoned to death. You know, you don't
want to be thrown into that burlap sack with two
wild animals and thrown into the river. You would probably
(07:44):
prefer a nice, clean beheading, but nobody wants a less
than perfect beheading. If the local warlord is doing it,
you know, that's one thing. Uh, you know, unless, however,
you're worried about the war lord inflicting an intentionally less
than perfect stroke out of personal malice. If if it's
a professional executioner that's doing the honors, well that's either
(08:06):
really good or really bad, depending on how you look
at it. Like the idea of a trained specialist doing
the d that sounds good. But on the other hand,
at death via the sort of person who either seeks
this line of work out or is not suited for
any other form of labor, that's a little uh frightening.
I would say, Plus, do you really want to be
toward the bottom of an executioner's list for the day
(08:29):
after they're tired from swinging that big old axe, like
it's your turn on Friday afternoon? Yeah, like you kind
of I want to be up there. I would want
to be up there first, let him get that that
first blow in on me. I must admit I don't
think I'd ever much considered the horrors of a weak
strike from the executioner until Game of Thrones came around,
and then I suddenly began to think, like, oh, yes,
(08:51):
this could go very wrong. But George R. Martin did
not make up this concept obviously, of of being weak.
It's swinging the execution or sword or the acts. History
is replete with stories of botched beheadings, and they are
horrific and unfortunately sometimes kind of funny. I want to
tell you a couple. This one is not so funny.
(09:12):
This concerns Mary, the Queen of Scots. So during the
reign of Protestant Queen Elizabeth the First of England in
the sixteenth century, there was obviously a lot of anxiety
about succession because Elizabeth had been born to King Henry
the Eighth and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, after Henry's
first marriage to Catherine of Aragon had been annulled, and
(09:33):
obviously lots of people at the time, especially some Catholics,
had opinions about that right. And Elizabeth's cousin, Mary Stewart,
was born to James the fifth of Scotland, who was
descended from a legitimate royal line, and so many Catholic
supporters thought, well, maybe Mary actually has a more legitimate
claim to the throne than Elizabeth does. And so Mary
(09:53):
was eventually implicated in an assassination plot against Elizabeth in
fifteen eighty six, at least she was a rigedly involved
in it, and she was sentenced to execution in seven.
So you've got Mary Stewart, Mary Queen of Scott's, going
to her execution, and the story goes that she's blindfolded
and she gets helped to the block and the executioner,
wearing all black, raises up his axe to kill her,
(10:17):
but instead of cutting through her neck, he misses and
he hits her on the head. And then some report
that she murmurs Sweet Jesus in shock before the executioner
raises his ax a second time, and then strikes again
and still fails to cut her head off completely, and
finally he quote just sawed through what remained of her neck.
(10:38):
That's that's that's rough for Mary. Yeah, and this is
you know, this is presumed main event beheading here, so right,
this is before a royal audience, right, so this would
have to be either an act of just just just
an utterly inneped executioner or one that is intentionally doing
a bad job out of mouth. It's like there seems
to be very little room in between. It's hard to
(10:59):
under stand what happened here because you know, we only
have accounts from the time, which may not even be
fully reliable. We're relying on what people told us they
saw there, right, And there could be some objective in
crafting a version of the tale that sounds more in
apt than it actually was. But it actually gets worse
because apparently so it's described sometimes that the executioner appeared
horrified at what was going on. But the headsman, after
(11:22):
he got her head off, he took hold of the
severed head and he held it up in front of
the crowd so he could hold up the severed head
and say God save Queen Elizabeth. But he grasped Mary's
head by the hair, and it turned out the hair
was a wig, so the head fell down and rolled away,
leaving him holding only a hacked up, bloody wig while
proclaiming his true queen. And then another part of the story,
(11:43):
maybe maybe not to be believed, is that after Mary's
head rolled away, her lips kept moving as if she
was talking or praying. Okay, some of that sounds like
it might have been embellished, but it also sounds like
this guy was a real hack, no pun intended. Well,
I got an even worse hack for you, because there
was a seventeenth since three English executioner named jack Ketch
catch spelled like ketchup, catch yeah, or like what's the
(12:08):
kid in the Pokemon's. I have no idea. Our very
knowledgeable producer Paul just tells me it is ash ketch Um.
I guess he's got to catch him, all right. It's
like jack ketch him right, the horror writerer. That's what
comes to my mind. I don't well anyway, this is
jack Ketch K E T C H so Jack Ketch
birthday unknown died in sixty six, who was notorious for
(12:32):
being a complete screw up at his job and bungling executions.
A couple of examples. In six three, Ketch performed the
beheading of William, Lord Russell, who was convicted for treason
in his role of in his role in the Rye
House plot, which was against King Charles the second of England,
and Catches beheading of Russell was reportedly just this clumsy horror,
(12:54):
with Ketch whacking Russell again and again with the axe,
but repeatedly failing to get his head off. And apparently
after this, Catch defended himself by complaining that Russell wouldn't
hold still, and then you got the second one. Later, James,
Duke of Monmouth, he went to the block for the
Monmouth Rebellion of six five, and he tried to pay
(13:15):
Catch not to screw up his execution. He's recorded as saying, quote,
here are six guineas for you, pray, do your business well.
Do not serve me as you did my lord Russell.
I have heard you struck him three or four times.
Then Monmouth gave three more guineas to his servant who
was standing nearby, and told his servant to pay Catch
(13:36):
only if Catch did the beheading correctly. And then Catch
said I hope I shall. Then Monmouth asked to feel
the axe blade, and he did, and he complained that
this is too dull, and Catch said, no, it's sharp enough,
it'll be heavy enough. So Monmouth got down in place
to accept his fate, and Catch brought the axe down
(13:57):
on Monmouth. And at this point it is reported that
after he got hit, Monmouth lifted his head up and
turned around and glared at Catch angrily. Then he got
back down so Ketch could hit him again, and Catch
hit him several more times, failing each time to be
head him. Then Catch got frustrated and tried to walk
away and quit in the middle of the execution, while
(14:19):
Monmouth was still alive. But the crowd yelled at him
and told him to go back and finish it, so
finally he went back. After some more blows and the
use of a knife, he finally managed to get the
duke's head off. Well that's awful, Like this guy is
a true hack. I wonder if that's where the word
hat comes from. Perhaps, uh yeah, But so you had
people whose job it was to administer what I guess
(14:42):
was supposed to be the more humane form of execution
at the time. I mean, this is different than being
you know, uh, tortured and hanged and drawn and quartered
and all that. But he this is obviously not going
the way it's supposed to. And if we're going inspired
by the Greek and Roman model, something is obviously wrong
here at Like, not only is it unnecessarily painful, this
(15:02):
does not really seem like an honorable death. This seems humiliating. Yeah,
there's nothing noble about this. You know. This is not
a finely craft instrument wielded by a by and by
an expert practitioner. This is just a clumsy exercise and horror.
But what if mechanical controls could be set in place
(15:23):
the same level of perfection, regardless of whoever you know,
happens to be wearing the hood, how tired they are,
what sort of weapon they're using, or what sort of
six stuff they're into. A machine that cannot get tired,
it can't hesitate or engage in unfair punishment. It's not
gonna judge you based on your your royal or commoner status.
(15:45):
A good blade, some gravity, and a simple frame with
a necklock, well that would be the guillotine. All right,
we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
we will discuss some precursors to the guillotine and the
tea itself. Alright, we're back. So the guillotine of late
(16:08):
eighteenth century France, which I'm sure you've heard about before,
that was involved in the French Revolution, the Reign of Terror,
the first French Republic. That guillotine was not the first
human head removal machine, not by a long shot. And
we're not saying it was. You know that it was
predated by people swinging in axe or a sword with
their hands. Of course it was. But there were organized
(16:29):
machines for doing this job more efficiently and in a
more consistent way before the guillotine was instituted in France, right,
and and they worked along the same principles. They maybe
they weren't quite as refined, but essentially the idea was
there that we should say that it was only in
the aftermath of the French Revolution that people began referring
(16:49):
to decapitation machines as guillotines. That's where the name comes from. Yes,
they had equally less refined names. They had more grizzly names.
One find. We'll meet a couple in a moment. So
as for who invented the first general decapitation machine, this
is totally unknown, lost to history, and in fact, we
don't even know for sure how many societies used a
(17:11):
device like this. There there are a lot of tales,
but many of these tales might not even be true.
We don't know for sure, right, And then how often
is the individual uh celebrated for creating such a thing
as we'll discover the naming of the guillotine, and it
doesn't really relate to the individual or individuals that created it, right.
I mean a lot of people who create execution devices
(17:33):
don't want to be associated with and when you find
the people who do want to be associated with them
or don't mind, you've got to kind of wonder about
those people. But um, So, there are a couple of
known mechanical beheading devices from England that predated the French guillotine,
and one is known as the Halifax Gibbet. So the
how Halifax is a town in West Yorkshire in England,
(17:55):
and it had this infamous beheading machine known as the
Halifax Gibbet, which was allegedly used mostly to punish petty theft,
so people would steal some small sum of money or
something worth not very much, some cloth or something, and
into the Halifax Gibbet they would go. It was described
in an eighteen thirty seven history by an author named
(18:15):
William White in the following way quote. The executions always
took place on the Great Market day in order to
strike the more terror into the neighborhood. When the criminal
was brought to the gibbet, which stood a little way
out of the town, where part of the stone platform
may still be seen on Gibbet Hill. The execution was
performed by means of an engine, which was raised upon
(18:37):
a platform four ft high and thirteen feet square, faced
on every side with stone, and ascended by a flight
of steps. In the middle of this platform was placed
two upright pieces of timber fifteen feet high, joined at
the top by a transverse beam. Within these was a
square block of wood four ft and a half long,
(18:58):
which moved up and down by means of grooves made
for that purpose. To the lower part of the sliding
block was fastened in iron axe of the weight of
seven pounds and twelve ounces. The axe, thus fixed, was
drawn up to the top by a cord and pulley.
At the end of the cord was a pin, which,
being fixed to the block, kept it suspended till the
(19:18):
moment of execution. When the culprit, having placed his head
on the block, the pin was withdrawn and his head
was instantly severed from his body. If the offender was
condemned for stealing an ox, a sheep, or a horse,
the end of the rope was fastened to the beast, which,
being driven, pulled out the pin and thus became the executioner.
(19:40):
In other cases, the bailiff for his servant cut the
rope and allowed the axe to descend. It's a little
unnecessary complexity involving fim animals, but otherwise the basic principles
of the guillotine as we've come to know it. Yeah,
it's more or less there there. There might be some
design refinements we come on later, but this is the idea.
It's it's a reliable, bowl, consistent machine that's not going
(20:01):
to mess up. Right. And of course it doesn't sound
like it was necessarily a custom blade, or maybe it was,
but it's very much based on the design of an
axe blade. Yeah, and when you see illustrations, it looks
like just a large axe head on the bottom of
a huge wooden block. Uh So, this beheading machine of
Halifax was famous enough that the English poet John Taylor
referenced it alongside the notoriously tough police of Kingston upon
(20:27):
Hull in a poem uh that that I thought was
pretty good. He writes, there is a proverb and a
prayer with all that we may not to Three strange
places fall from Hull, from Halifax, from Hell. 'tis thus
from all these three good Lord deliver us at Halifax.
The law so sharp doth deal that whoso more than
(20:48):
one threepence doth steal. They have a lynn that wondrous,
quick and well, since thieves all headless unto Heaven or Hell.
From Hell, each man says, Lord, deliver me, because from
Hell can no redemption be Men may escape from Hull
and Halifax, but sure in Hell there is a heavier tax.
It sounds pretty grim. Well. I like how it's sort
(21:10):
of captures two themes there. One is that how the
Halifax jibbit is deadly and something to be feared, but
it also contrasts it with the supposed tortures of Hell,
I guess, again emphasizing that, well, it's not as torturous
as many of the other methods that are being used. Yeah,
he's almost describing it like it's a like it's a
plane ticket to to greater rewards or suffering, depending on
(21:35):
how one supernatural revenge fantasy is playing out here. But
on the other hand, I like that it is to
a certain extent farm animals, uh, you know. Notwithstanding, it
is to a certain extent saving the horrors of an
afterlife for those imagined afterlife and not trying to um
embody them too much in the act of execution itself. Yeah. Now,
(21:59):
whether that's a actually a good thing or not, we
can discuss later. But it does seem to be there's
at least there's at least a superficial kind of humaneness
to write, even though it seems to be being lumped
on people who committing extremely pent crimes and not and
no matter what you think, really probably deserving of death.
But there's some strange stories about how people reacted to
(22:23):
what happened with at the Halifax Gibbet. The story in
Thomas Wright tells a legend quote of a countrywoman who
was writing by the Gibbet on her hampers to the
market just at the execution of a criminal when the
axe chopped his neck through with such force that the
head jumped into one of her hampers, or as others say,
seized her apron with the teeth and they're stuck for
(22:46):
some time. I don't believe that's true, or at least
the teeth. I don't believe. Again, we're coming back to
the sort of inherent comedy. I mean, it's true gallows humor,
uh that comes with beheading executions. But there's an interesting
observation from the Halifax historian John Crabtree, who has a
sort of attitude about what stories like this mean. He writes, quote,
(23:10):
it is useless employing words about this fair, but the
circumstance may serve to show with what apathy the country
people regarded this mode of punishment. Their minds were evidently
hardened by such exhibitions, and the fact develops the inadequacy
of such awful administrations of justice to produce that proper
moral and salutary effect which might have been anticipated. Such scenes,
(23:33):
often repeated, appear to harden rather than soften, to stupefy
rather than awaken the sensibilities of man's nature. And I
think we should come back to that thought later on. Indeed,
all right, so what else do we have in terms
of proto guillotine machines. Well, a quicker story is just
a copy essentially of the Halifax jibbitt, known as the
(23:54):
Scottish Maiden. So James Douglas, the fourth Earl of Morton,
who is the ruler of Scotland from fifteen seventy two
to fifteen seventy eight, he was alleged at some point
to have introduced the decapitation machine to his country of Scots,
inspired by the Halifax gibbet. Allegedly, he at some point
traveled through Halifax and he was so inspired by the
gibbet that he thought, well, I should share this same
(24:17):
technology with my countrymen. So a similar machine was built
out of oak, and it could be transported around the
country to perform beheadings wherever. But it was often accepting
the condemned at Edinburgh, and according to the National Museums
of Scotland, crimes that could get you sent to the
Scottish Maiden included murder, incest, stealing, treason, adultery, forgery and robbery.
(24:39):
But there's an ironic twist. So James Douglas, the Earl
fourth Earl of Morton, was a supporter of James the sixth,
and Morton opposed the Catholic faction of Mary, Queen of
Scott's who he discussed earlier, Mary Stewart, and he was
eventually implicated in a plot to murder Mary's second husband,
Lord Darnley, and was put to death in June one,
(25:01):
decapitated by the Scottish maiden that he brought to Scotland. Ah,
there's your poetic justice, and legends of that kind will
appear again and again in this episode. Actually, well, yes,
and even beyond this episode, because this isn't that a
common theme? The man destroyed by his own invention, by
his own machine. It happens enough in the movies that
(25:23):
you should think it happens more often in reality. Though
in the movies it's especially common when that invention is
some kind of hybrid animal, like I created a shark ape,
and you know it swings from the trees, taking bites
out of people who could have known my shark ape
would turn on me, And yet it always happens. Alright, So,
as we've been discussing, there were similar devices already used
(25:45):
in Europe and had been for centuries before the guillotine
came around. But the individual who is often credited as
the inventor of the guillotine is a French surgeon and
physiologist Antoine Louis who lives seventy three through sev Yeah,
he is often credited as the inventor, though based on
what I was reading, it appears to me was maybe
(26:07):
designed by some sort of committee of which Louis was
the leader. Right, And this is actually all the more fitting,
uh when we really get to the heart of the
guillotine here, because it is this, this thing that is
it is this utilization of technology and this there's a
there's an air of civility to it. Uh. This this
taking something that is kind of that is rather barbaric
(26:30):
and making it a little less so. Well, it's bureaucratic violence. Yes,
it very much embodies the idea of retributed violence by
the state, taken out of the emotional hands of the
single executioner and placed into the hands of a disembodied
machine that is created by a committee through drafts. Yes,
you know, we have another episode that we're recording this
(26:51):
week on vending machines, and it's amazing this the similarities
involved here, This this these sometimes these struggles over what
exactly is happening when a machine does the bidding of
a human. If a machine is vindan, say, blasphemous literature,
as we discussed in this other episode, then who is
it fault foresaid literature sale and uh. And there's a
(27:13):
sense of that here too. It's like the bureaucracy has
condemned you to death. The machine is actually doing the execution.
We're just merely, you know, pushing the button, pulling the string,
et cetera, to carry out this judgment. Right, But we
do at least have Antoine Louis to associate with the
creation of the machine, even if it wasn't just him alone,
(27:33):
but because of his association with it, it was often
early on it was called names, not the guillotine yet,
but names like the Louisette or the louis Zone, which
doesn't have as much of a ring to it. Oh,
I kind of like it. I could see executions by
the Louisette. Yeah, I guess it would have grown on us.
But at any rate, later it definitely came to be
named after Joseph Ignace Guillotan, who lived seventeen thirty eight
(27:59):
through eighteen four team. He was a physician. Uh, he
was a National Assembly member, and he played a major
role in passing legislation that made death by machine the law.
The loose idea here is that it would this kind
of legislation would provide the best possible version of beheading
to all classes of society. And we do have to
(28:20):
point out that, despite some urban legends out there, uh,
Guillotine himself was not killed by his own machine. And
he wasn't actually a huge fan of execution either. It's
not like he was a huge execution enthusiasts. Well, no,
exactly the opposite. Guilloton opposed the death penalty. He wanted
the abolition of the death penalty, but he didn't think
(28:41):
that he could accomplish that directly. Right, this seemed the
best reasonable next step. Right, It's like, if I can't
we can't eradicate it, we're going to have it. We
might as well make it clean and uh and fair
to all involved. According to a popular legend, Guillotan was
born when his pregnant mother was out walking one day
(29:01):
and she overheard the screams of a condemned criminal being
broken on the wheel and breaking on the wheel was
you know, a classic death by torture type method where
a person would be stretched out on a wheel in
a kind of starfish post and they'd have their limbs
broken with an iron rod or with a club, just
insane brutality. So he was very much opposed to that
(29:22):
sort of thing, not only just the bar the barbaric
nature of the execution, but the public nature of the
idea that that women and children, uh, just innocent bystanders
might just walk through town and witness such such horror.
So he was thinking, maybe if less children end up
watching this, the better, Yes, and make it. Yeah, it's
(29:44):
more systematic, it's more you know, the act itself is
less flashy, and then we're just gonna make it less
for performance. So Gia Tom was not out there lobbying
to get this machine named after his family. No, no,
it just it ended up sticking. Now a cool lit
fact here that sounds like something right out of an
Allan Moore comic book. But along with Benjamin Franklin, H.
(30:06):
Guillotine investigated the work of Franz Mesmer of Mesmerism, you know,
the the the form of hypnotism that we had back
in the day, uh, and they investigated him on behalf
of King Louis, the League of Extraordinary Gentleman exactly. So
another way of thinking, you alluded to this a minute ago,
(30:28):
Robert like the idea that it would be the best
method for all the classes. So another way of thinking
about the motivation for the institution of the guillotine at
this time in history was that it supposedly extended the
democratic and egalitarian principles of the French Revolution to common criminals,
essentially extending them the courtesy of the honorable beheading that
(30:53):
was more often reserved for nobles and aristocrats instead of
more shameful and common and painful deaths like hanging, burning,
or breaking on the wheel, which you were more likely
to get if you were just some lower class petty criminal. Now,
as for the idea Guillotin had, thinking that this would
shield children from the gruesome practice of execution, Unfortunately this
(31:14):
did not work out. I was reading a section from
a book called Children's Toys of by Gone Days, A
History of playthings of all people's from prehistoric times to
the nineteenth century by Carl Grober, published in nineteen and
the author writes, quote, the worst monstrosity of the kind
was the outcome of the French Revolution, which indeed was
(31:36):
over rich in aberrations of taste. The toy shops put
on the market little guillotines with which little patriots could
be head figures of aristocrats. They're still survives some specimens
of this pretty and diverting machine, one of which bears
the date seventeen ninety four, and he's got an illustration.
These were not models, but pure toys. And in proof
(31:58):
of this we have the king's evidence from one whom
we should never suspect of wishing to give so bloodthirsty
a toy to his little son. And here the author
is speaking of the romantic poet Johann wolf Kan von Gta.
So Gruber tells the story and that in December sevente
Girta wrote a letter to his mother and Frankfort, asking
(32:21):
if she would buy a toy guillotine for his little son.
And she replied, dear son, anything I can do to
please you is gladly done and gives me joy. But
to buy such an infamous implement of murder, that I
will not do at any price. If I had authority,
the maker should be put in the stocks, and I
would have the machine publicly burnt by the common executioner.
(32:42):
And I guess this is sort of the seventeen nineties
equivalent of like asking your grandmother to buy you a
copy of Doom for Christmas in the nineteen nineties. Yeah, well,
I'm glad that you brought up Doom here. And just
because it's it's easy for us to look back on
this account and think, oh, these children of a more
you know, barbarous age. But go to any toy store
and look at the machine gun based toys that are
(33:07):
on display. There. All the various guns, like true true
murder weapons, um, not even methods of bureaucratic execution, but
weapons of just wanton violence. Uh, these are all represented
in toys even today. Uh. Likewise, I can't help but
think back on how much I wanted the slime pit
when I was a kid. This was a master's of
(33:29):
the universe. Place set the device and basically you would
lock he man or some other figure into the machine
and it was like shaped like a skull, and then
it would dump slime on top of the head of
the poor hero. And it was I think that maybe
the actual lore of it was like I would make
them mutate or something. But it was very much Uh,
it was very much like a guillotine, except instead of
(33:50):
a blade, it was slime. It was like, clearly an
instrument of execution, of of ritualized death for your toys.
So you're arranging an execution for he man exactly. So
you know, the idea of a toy guillotine. It makes
perfect sense. Uh, we can't. We can only distance ourselves
from such an idea so much. Though. I also have
(34:12):
to wonder I somehow detect between the lines. This could
have been one of those situations where and Robert, I
bet you're familiar with this, where a dad buys or
requests a toy for his child because secretly he wants
to play. Uh. In fact, Gerta wrote in faust quote
ages no second childhood age makes plain children. We were
(34:34):
true children. We remain again much like it is today. Now.
We mentioned that Guillaton was responsible for introducing legislation that
would eventually lead the French National Assembly to say, okay,
we're only going to be killing people by beheading machine.
Now that that's that's going to be the new method
of execution. That's what's humane, that's what the state should
(34:56):
be up to and so I think in just a
minute we should turn to the sheen itself. But I
just wanted quickly before we do that, to discuss where
it is that this rumor came from. The guillotam was
killed by the machine that he recommended putting in place
for executions in France, and I think I know maybe
a few threads of where the story came from. Obviously,
(35:18):
we had that ironic story of the Earl of Morton earlier, right,
so we can see how that might have influenced confused
the telling, right. But then there are a couple of
other examples. So Dr Antoine Louis, the secretary of the
Academy of Medicine and physician to King Louis, the one
who we talked about earlier, chairing that committee that designed
the device. He was actually temporarily condemned to die in
(35:41):
the machine that he designed or helped design, though he
escaped this fate basically during a change of power, So
he narrowly escaped going to the guillotine himself. And then
King Louis the sixteenth, who was interested in mechanical engineering,
is said to have made refinements to the design of
the guillotine like recommending an angled blade while he was
(36:03):
still in power, before the device was eventually turned on
the king himself and on his wife Marie Antoinette. And
so there's another kind of like creator and then killed
by his creation. Irony there since he apparently or at
least allegedly offered refinements to the design. All right, Well,
on that note, we're gonna take one more break, and
when we come back, we'll discuss the machine itself in
(36:23):
more detail, and we'll also discuss its legacy. All right,
we're back. So now we're at the machine itself, the
French guillotine of the seventeen eighties and onward. And the
question is was it actually built? Well, of course it was.
This one was definitely built. Some of the inventions were
(36:44):
discussing on this show, you know, maybe didn't get out
of the blueprint phase. This definitely saw action. So, after
the legal standard of execution by machine was approved by
the National Assembly in the construction of the machine was
delegated to a politician named Pierre Louis red Areo, who
I'm always going to struggle with that name, so I'll
(37:05):
just call him Pierre here. Uh. He apparently had trouble
finding a contractor who could build the machine since no
one wanted their name associated with it, and eventually found
a taker is a taker from Germany, and so the
guillotine was constructed by a German harpsichord maker named Tobias Schmidt.
Apparently he also supplied a leather sack that would catch heads.
(37:27):
And now you can you just gotta wonder about Tobias.
I can just imagine the scenario. It's like, so, honey,
what are you working on today? I get this new
contracted it pays well, it's gonna really help us out
next month. Oh who are you putting a hots harpsichord
of chord for? Well, it's not quite a harpsichord. Well,
I'm just imagining in his shop while he's working on
the guillotine that harpsichord music is constantly playing Dan Dan
(37:51):
Dean Dan Dan dy. Anyway, according to the memoirs of
the French executioner Enrie Clement Sans Song in eighteen seven six,
since On came from a line of a long line
of executioners, and he so he has these memoirs about
his family's exploits, cutting off heads and performing executions in France,
(38:11):
and his memoirs are considered probably only partially reliable, but
his up close description of the workings of the guillotine
is fairly straightforward. So I see, I feel like he's
probably on the right track here, all right, I'm gonna
read part of this and I'm gonna I'm gonna go
for an executioner's voice. Here do it. On a scaffold
from seven to eight feet high, two parallel bars are
(38:31):
made fast in one end. Their top part is united
by a strong crossbar. To this crossbar is added a
thick iron ring, and which is past a rope which
fixes and retains a ram. This is perpendicularly armed with
a sharp and broad blade, which gradually becomes broader on
all its surface, so then instead of striking perpendicularly, it
(38:52):
strikes sideways, so that there is not an inch of
the blade that does not serve. The ram ways from pounds,
and its weight is doubled. When it begins to slide down.
It is enclosed in the groove of the bars. A
spring makes it fast to the left bar. A band
of iron descends along the outside of the same bar,
(39:12):
and the handle is locked to a ring with a padlock.
So that no accident is possible, and the weight only
falls when the executioner interferes to a way plank. Strong
straps are fastened by which the criminal is attached under
the armpits and over the legs, so that the body
cannot move as soon as the way plank goes down.
(39:32):
The head being between the bars, is supported by a
rounded crossbar. The executioner's assistants lower another rounded crossbar, the
head being thus grooved in a perfect circle, which prevents
it from moving in any way. This precaution is indispensable
in regard to the terrible inconveniences of fear. The executioner
(39:54):
then touches the spring. The whole affair is done so
quickly that only the thump of the blade when it
slide down and forms the spectators that the culprit is
no longer of the living. The head falls into a
basket full of brand and the body is pushed into
another wicker basket line with very thick leather. That's a
(40:14):
heck of a rating, Robert, Yeah, that was going to
do a number on my throat. But I'm sorry. Maybe
I should have taken part of it, but I was
just enjoying listening to your Henri Clement. Well, there's a
precision in his in his description of the act that
I felt like I had to had to capture now obviously,
so he's described how the device works now, but they
(40:35):
had to test it out before they can make sure
to try it on a human, right, So you know,
you always wonder like, how do you test a guillotine?
You put a watermelon in there, do you gallagher it? Well,
I suppose you could, but it's kind of a waste
of a good melon, and ultimately you want to test
it on the real thing, right, So they use dead bodies.
Oh yeah, also farm animals like sheep and calves. Yeah,
because you just I mean, it makes sense you want
(40:57):
to make sure you're cutting through actual vertebrate tissue there
and most notably the neck. And then on a officials
installed and used the guillotine for the first time. Right.
So the first victim of the French guillotine was Nicholas
Jacques Beltier who was a highwayman, and he was executed
where the machine was erected at the Plas de grev
(41:20):
And they're so a large crowd came out, obviously to
witness the first execution by the new machine, but it
was reported that the crowd was somewhat unimpressed, and they
found the efficiency of the killing less entertaining than the
forms of execution they were used to, even the more
classic beheadings. Nevertheless, over time, the executions that the guillotine
(41:40):
became a very popular spectator event during the reign of Terror,
and you know, in generally afterwards when the guillotine was used,
people would show up to watch. So we see a
little success here. Like it was clearly less dramatic, uh,
you know, there was less theater in the act. And
yet at the same time, a few things are more
drum mattic in life than the ending of a life
(42:02):
like this is the people. You can understand why people
would still turn out even if you had made things
a little more precise. Now, putting aside the question, I
guess what we can talk talk about in a minute
of or whether it's ever humane to just execute somebody,
was it actually true that the guillotine was a more refined,
(42:23):
more humane version of execution than what came before? Was it?
Was it an improvement if you were somebody who was
interested in reducing the suffering of humankind, yeah, I mean
you could again, you could say the concept is inherently controversial,
but still others took issue with just how humane it was.
So op Prussian doctor Samuel Thomas summer Ing, who lives
(42:45):
seventeen fifty five through eighteen thirty he studied the cadavers
of guillotine victims, and he argued that severed heads were
still capable feeling and since, and he wrote an essay
on this in seventeen nine. So he he was something
of a poly math. In addition to naming the twelve
pairs of cranial nerves, he also invented a telegraphic system
(43:05):
and made discoveries in paleontology, specifically with the pterodactyl fossils.
They're not dinosaurs, folks, that's a different thing. So this
was you know, this was not just this wasn't just
some crazy guy coming up and sanah, the heads are
still alive. You know, he was he was making a
an expert argument that, like, I'm not sure that this
is great what we're doing. Maybe it's a little it's
(43:27):
almost a little too precise. Yeah. The core takeaway of
his essay on the humanity of the guiatain was that
we can't rule out that it's possible that a severed
head could still be having experience, could experience being severed.
Now we knew, And there were a lot of tales
of this happening, right of people running to check out
the heads of the decapitated, in various doctors checking in
(43:49):
and seeing what was going on with the eyes. And
there was a lot of interest in this in determining what,
you know, what happens to consciousness at death, like this
was a perfect clinical exercise for for weighing in on it. Yeah,
the classic tales about this thin get repeated the most
often are like seeing someone's cheeks flush with anger when
they behold someone, or who's someone who mocks them or
(44:12):
something like that, or or who slaps them in the face,
or thinking that that I severed head would be like
looking at people as if it recognized them, something like that. Yeah,
and obviously there's a lot of indelishment with these stories,
but we don't know how much to trust them. Yeah,
we really don't know how much to trust them. But
we do know today that that any kind of activity
(44:33):
scene in the heads after death, most of this is
going to be reflective twitching of muscles. So um, basically,
coma and brain death are probably gonna occur within two
to three seconds of decapitation due to interruption of blood
flow to the brain. So just the massive sudden drop
in blood pressure, Yeah, that's gonna be Yeah. So any
(44:56):
tales of like, you know, confronting the head, having any
kind of like moment of human uh contact, even it
it's just in the eyes. Uh, it's pretty clear that
that is all just embellishment of stories or just wishful
thinking on the part of the observer. So what is
the legacy of this machine, this this machine of bureaucratic violence.
(45:17):
And if we try to look at it from with
our perspective, from today, with our hindsight, and you know,
with with the kind of value judgments we would make,
was the guillotine a step forward or a step backward?
Was it as uh Giatan envisioned a more humane way
of doing business when the state was just you know,
couldn't be convinced not to kill people, or did it
(45:39):
perhaps enable a worse state of affairs where more people
could be sent to their deaths with impunity than would
have been the case otherwise. Yeah, I think you could
probably go either way on it. I mean, one thing
is for certain. It it changed the way executions were
performed in France for nearly two hundred years. It was
actually used in France up until nineteen seventy seven, that's
when the last execution occur via guillotine, before the outlying
(46:02):
of capital punishment in one it also took on symbolic way.
It's just this this symbol of the reign of terror
and perhaps to a larger extent, a symbol of systematically
violent rebellion. Yeah. I read one author point out, certainly
not in defending the guillotine or the use of the guillotine,
but it just pointing out a kind of strange irony
that the guillotine now to us symbolizes this this horror,
(46:26):
this horror period of bureaucratic violence, which it certainly was.
But we look at that and we think of that
period as a reign of terror. But don't think the
same way say about the Napoleonic Wars, which killed far
more people than the guillotine ever did. Not that that
makes the killings of the guillotine any less horrific. It's true, now,
you know. One the one thing about the weirdness of
(46:46):
this whole situation that stands out. I mean, aside from
just the inherently weird nature of of a beheading machine
machine that cuts off heads, there is still something highly
symbolic going on here. I think to the means of
an exit usition, and you'll typically see an expression of
of power involved. Say it's a physical strength or you know,
(47:07):
vengeful spirit or increasingly a culture's greatest technological achievements. Isn't
it weird to think about how these methods climb the
tree of developing technology? So starting with varying levels of
tool proficiency, you know, axes and swords, weapons, weapon crafting,
then we go into gunpowder, uh, you know, firing squads, electricity,
(47:30):
and the electric chair. It is weird to trace through
history execution methods just sort of like tracking with whatever
is the most interesting new technology we have available. Yeah, chemicals, pharmaceuticals,
I mean, why an electric chair? That is just such
a strange idea to even come up with. French philosopher
(47:50):
Michelle Fuco he weighed in on this, and he pointed
out that penal technology is of course an expression of power,
but we also have to dwell in the fact that
it does this through everyday technology, ubiquitous technology. So if
it's something like electricity or even you know or even
you know, pharmaceuticals, chemicals. Uh, it's it's taking aspects of
(48:13):
everyday life and turning them into the the system, the
tool of of justice. So like our everyday use of
energy and the consumer economy, a constant reminder of the
methods of death that the state can inflict upon people
if they if they don't stay in line exactly. Now,
one small area of the legacy of the guillotine comes
(48:35):
down to its use in medical terminology. So there are
two primary means of amputation. Um in terms of like
amputating a limb or what have you. You have flap
amputations in which flaps of flesh are left so that
you can fold them and close the stump of the wound.
And then there are guillotine amputations, which which are more
of a straight down affair with no immediate concerns for
(48:56):
flap tissue. So in guillotine amputation, it's more about cutting
out infected tissue and making sure drainage of proper drainage occurs,
and then secondary surgery is performed to create the flap
tissue to close everything off into a stump. But obviously
that's like a secondary appellation, like you wouldn't you wouldn't
have called that guillotine cutting in the surgical since before
(49:19):
the guillotine, right, But it is certainly an example where
if you're you, you encounter this terminology now in in
medical science and uh, and it stems from the use
of this execution device. That being said, there's a lot
of medical terminology that stems from various weapons and so forth.
Of course, so I want to come back to this
question that we've been teasing throughout where you can't help
(49:42):
but wonder if Josephine Guioton pushed us in exactly the
wrong direction, if he was actually against the death penalty
and trying to institute more humane treatment of criminals. You know,
it's hard not to notice that by sanitizing a horrible act,
it often seems like you make the act easier to
(50:04):
carry out. And I mean, just think about how this
applies to modern methods of state sanctioned killing, everything from
lethal injection to drone strikes. Does the sanitizing and distancing
and depersonalization opportunity provided by lethal technology encourage us to
make ourselves able to kill more while feeling less about it. Yeah,
(50:28):
I mean, ultimately, is the the botched execution that we've
discussed already, Are those not maybe a more honest depiction
of what's going on? This this this fallible, um barbaric
human effort, not this uh precision of the holy blameless machine. Well,
I mean, obviously we're not going to sit here and
(50:49):
advocate brutal botched executions with Jack Catch hacking at us
with a sword or an axe. But yeah, at least
with that, I'm not saying that's preferable, But I do
see what you're saying that it's at least there you're
acknowledging that something brutal and weird is going on, and
you can't just you know, clean it up in your
mind and ignore it because you're hearing the screams and
(51:10):
it's splattering on you, and it's so brutal that it's
almost funny. You know. It's interesting. You know, in this
show we talk about innovation and inventions and how how
they change the world, and and so often you see
that that people have to look back and try to
figure out what changed and how it changed us. Uh,
And here we are hundreds of years later looking back
(51:33):
and saying, well, what did the guillotine mean? What did
it do? And what are the ultimate ramifications of this advancement. Well,
I positive that maybe one takeaway from it is that
the truth is it has showed us that there is
no good or clean or sanitary way to kill a person,
and any belief that there is, in fact turns out
(51:55):
to be a kind of brutalizing and dehumanizing illusion. All
So that's it for this week's episode of Invention. If
you want to learn more about the show and check
out other episodes, head on over to our website invention
pod dot com. Big thanks to Scott Benjamin for research
assistance with this episode, Thanks to our audio producer Torii Harrison.
(52:16):
If you would like to get in touch with us
directly with feedback on this episode or any other, to
suggest a topic for the future, or just to say hi,
let us know how you found out about the show
where you listen from all that kind of stuff, you
can email us at contact at invention pod dot com.
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