Whether the guillotine was more humane than the axe, the noose, the electric chair, the firing squad, and lethal injection is a medical, as well as a political and moral, question. The most effective resolution would be to let the question fade away by the universal prohibition of state-inflicted death penalties. While societies struggle toward this goal, a second medical or scientific question may be asked: was death by guillotine so instantaneous as to be truly painless? Some believe not. They argue that because the blade, cutting rapidly through the neck and spinal column, had relatively little impact on the head encasing the brain, there may not have been immediate unconsciousness. If this is true, should one believe that some victims were aware of what was happening? Witnesses to guillotining have described blinking eyelids and movement of the eyes, lips, and mouth. As recently as 1956, anatomists experimenting with the severed heads of guillotined prisoners explained this by saying that what appeared to be a head responding to the sound of its name or to the pain of a pinprick on the cheek might only have been a random muscle twitch or an automatic reflex action; that no intelligent awareness was involved. Certainly, the shock of the blow to the spinal column and a sudden, massive drop in cerebral blood pressure must bring a loss of consciousness rapidly, if not instantaneously. But in that flicker of time, was there awareness?
In June 1905, a respected French medical doctor was permitted to experiment with the freshly severed head of a prisoner named Languille. He reported that “immediately after the decapitation … the spasmodic movements ceased.… It was then that I called out in a strong sharp voice: ‘Languille!’ I saw the eyelids slowly lift up … with an even movement, quite distinct and normal.… Next, Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves.… I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me.… After several seconds, the eyelids closed.… I called out again, and once more the eyelids lifted and living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time. Then there was a further closing of the eyelids … [and] no further movement.”
What awareness, if any, a severed head might have is something that Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, Georges Danton, Maximilien Robespierre, and tens of thousands of others who died by the guillotine may have discovered. We cannot know.
Dissent in Russia, Final Partition of Poland
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION had a dramatic impact on Catherine, not only because the empress was horrified by the degradation, humiliation, and violent destruction of the French monarchy but because she feared that revolutionary fervor would spread. Her belief that she must act to protect herself and Russia precipitated a significant reversal in her early liberal thinking about freedom of thought and expression. In the political and military sphere, her fear of what she called the “French poison” resulted in—or was used to justify—a rare event in European history: the complete disappearance of a large, proud nationstate.
In the beginning, as a young woman and new empress, Catherine had been the admiring friend of the
By 1789, after twenty-seven years on the throne, Catherine had achieved some of the liberal goals formulated in her youth. She had helped to create a Russian intelligentsia. Among the nobility, more people attended universities, traveled abroad, spoke foreign languages, and wrote plays, novels, and poetry. Promising young men were sent at state expense to study and acquire knowledge in foreign schools and universities. Educated men, not born to the nobility, had become senior government officials, poets, writers, doctors, architects, and painters. But then, seeming to call into question her early efforts and goals, came the grim reality of Pugachev, followed, twenty years later, by the events in France.
