The Effect
It is 17th July 1793, and the largest square in Paris is thronging with crowds so dense it has reached bursting point. The people have gathered here for a truly morbid spectacle.
An open-backed cart comes clattering into the square, wending its way through the hemming crowds, and when they see it, the onlookers explode into a frenzy. On its back sits a young woman, pale as a cloud and clad in a brilliant red blouse.
There, at the head of the square and sitting high on a wooden scaffold, the woman sees it. Taller than two men and looming darkly in its own shadow. The appliance goes by a handful of nicknames: The Half-Moon, the Fanlight, the Machine, the National Razor. Madame Guillotine. A bell begins to toll, signalling that the woman on the back of this cart is about to meet her end in the guillotine’s jaws. And indeed, she cannot help but notice the straw coffin waiting at the side of the contraption. The guards lining the scaffold commence an ominous beat on their drums.
The woman is pulled off the cart and up the steps to the instrument of death before her. She is fastened to the piece of wood known as the bascule, in order to be slid into the guillotine. The wooden clamp is closed about her neck, keeping her head firmly in place. Then, the executioner gives his signal and, with an almighty clank and a blood-chilling whoosh, the guillotine’s blade falls. In a fraction of a second it has completely severed the woman’s head, and it drops into the waiting basket.
Though it is customary for the decapitated head to be held aloft and presented to the crowd, what happens next is completely unexpected. A carpenter named Legros, present at the execution, removes the woman’s head from the basket, but before he holds it up, he slaps it across the face. When he does turn it in the direction of the crowd, something both completely extraordinary and bone-freezingly horrifying takes place. The woman’s expression visibly changes, displaying an demeanour of “unequivocal indignation” in response to being slapped. It is unmistakable. Moreover, her cheeks proceed to blush a fierce scarlet.
The woman who has just been executed and insulted post-decapitation is Charlotte Corday. She is a 24 year-old feminist and political activist who, four days previously, had assassinated the radical journalist and political agitator Jean-Paul Marat. Charlotte saw Marat as responsible for inciting a brutal outburst of violence the previous year, known as the September Massacres. She had been dressed in a red blouse for her execution to mark her out as a traitor.
By the time Charlotte Corday is killed, the guillotine has been in use for well over a year, having been invented several years earlier as a supposedly quicker and more humane manner of execution. But strange stories start to spread about how this method of state punishment may not be everything it seems; that the guillotine is, in fact, not the quick end its inventor had intended. Tales begin to circulate that heads severed by the guillotine’s blade are, incredibly, remaining conscious for many seconds after being separated from a victim’s body.
One such story arises the following year, when a manservant working for the chemist Antoine Lavoisier is also beheaded by guillotine. When the servant’s head unceremoniously plops into the basket, Lavoisier himself is on hand to attend to it. Retrieving the head immediately, Lavoisier shouts: ‘If you can understand me, man, blink! Do it now!’ To the utter shock of everyone present, not least Lavoisier, the servant blinks.
Lavoisier is himself taken to the guillotine not long after his manservant. Despite the fact his life is about to end, being a man of science, Lavoisier wishes to use his death to conduct an experiment. Allegedly, before he is killed he tells his assistant that, once his head is cut off, he will try his very best to blink for as long as he possibly can. The blade falls, and when Lavoisier’s head is retrieved from the basket, his eyes are indeed blinking. They continue to do so for fifteen to twenty seconds, after which time his face finally falls still.
And similar anecdotes keep on coming. A convicted murderer by the name of Languille is guillotined in France in the early hours of a June morning in 1905. A Dr. Beaurieux attends the execution, to try and get to the bottom, once and for all, of the reports he has heard of the signs of life in the heads of guillotine victims. Directly after Languille’s head is severed, Dr Beaurieux makes and records a series of observations. He first notes that Languille’s eyes and lips move in, quote: ‘irregular rhythmic contractions for about five to six seconds.’ A few seconds later, this spasmodic facial movement ceases, and Languille’s eyes half-close as though he is dying, with only a sliver of white eyeball visible. But the bizarre occurrence is not over. Dr Beaurieux, in his most authoritative voice, suddenly shouts: ‘Languille!’ In response to hearing his name called, Languille slowly lifts his eyelids, and distinctly fixes his gaze on Dr Beaurieux, his pupils as focused as they had been in life. After several seconds, Languille’s eyelids once again slide slowly shut, coming to rest in the same, half-closed position as they were before. But Dr Beaurieux is far from finished. ‘Languille!’ he calls again. ‘Languille!’ In response, Languille’s eyelids reopen and, as Dr Beaurieux later recorded, his, quote: ‘undeniably living eyes fixed themselves on mine with perhaps even more penetration than the first time.’ Languille’s eye begin to close for a third time, and so Dr Beaurieux again calls out the man’s name. But Languille does not look up at him again and instead, quote: ‘the eyes took on the glazed look they have in the dead.’ The whole episode, according to the doctor, lasted an incredible twenty-five to thirty seconds.
Despite the proliferation of similar reports throughout the time the guillotine was in use, there are also more recent accounts of what has come to be known as ‘lucid decapitation.’ One such story takes place in 1989, when a US army veteran who had served in the Korean war was one day taking a taxi ride with his friend. Tragically, the taxi was involved in a horrific accident, colliding with a truck. As a result, the army veteran was pinned to his seat, but his friend was not so lucky, and was instantly decapitated by the collision. The army veteran later gave a detailed description of what had occurred. It went as follows: ‘My friend’s head came to rest face up and, from my angle, upside-down. As I watched, his mouth opened and closed no less than two times. The facial expressions he displayed were first of shock or confusion, followed by terror or grief. I cannot exaggerate and say that he was looking all around, but he did display ocular movement, in that his eyes moved from me, to his body, and back to me. He had direct eye contact with me when his eyes took on a hazy, absent expression… and he was dead.’
Heads that remain conscious for many seconds after they have been severed from the body, not only blushing or blinking but very clearly changing expression? It seems to be the stuff of fiction. But are the many witnesses to these grisly and horrifying happenings really mistaken? Are such things signs of life after death, or merely a simple series of muscle spasms? Or, alternatively, could there be another scientific reason? But what?
The Method
The forcible removal of the head has been a form of capital punishment across thousands of years of human history. Indeed, the very word capital - when used in the context of punishment - originally derives from the Latin word ‘caput’, meaning ‘head.’
Across the annals of history, there has been much debate and discussion about how long it is possible for a human head to remain conscious after its sudden removal from the body. Whilst many argue that a victim of beheading will lose consciousness almost instantaneously, due to the massive and abrupt blood pressure drop to the brain, many more people are just as certain that the accounts given of blinking eyes and moving lips provide unequivocal proof that consciousness following decapitation is entirely possible.
As we have heard, accounts describe freshly-amputated heads not only blinking their eyes, but displaying a marked change of expression. Some even cycle through a handful of emotions before they finally fall still. As disturbing as these facial movements appear to be, it would not be unusual for a suddenly severed head to display one or more muscular spasms. Even less significant parts of the body, like digits or limbs, once severed, have been observed to twitch. Such movements are commonly caused by a reflex nerve action. But can this really provide an explanation for the more complex facial movements observed in victims of decapitation, those accounts of lifelike focus and recognition?
At the height of the guillotine’s use during the bloody French Revolution, reports of consciousness in severed heads began to spread quickly. And, as well as this being a period of social and political unrest, it was also the time of both the European Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, when more and more people were attempting to expand their knowledge of science and philosophy in an effort to understand the world around them. As such, many with a passing or professional interest in science, like the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, were only too enthusiastic to conduct experiments with newly-detached heads. Indeed, it is said that many of those condemned to the guillotine during the revolution were asked to blink for as long as possible after the blade had fallen.
But not every attempt to observe signs of consciousness in decapitated heads was successful. In 1836, a convicted murderer called Lacenaire agreed to, not blink, but give a cheeky wink post execution. Ultimately, he didn’t, but whether this was because he could not or would not was never recorded. Could some heads separate from their bodies in such a way that they do experience a few appalling moments of lucidity before death, while others do not?
As early as 1795, scientists stated that, since chickens or butterflies are often seen to continue to move after decapitation or dismemberment, it is logical to assume that humans could go one better, retaining consciousness after the head is severed, even if only for a moment. In his snappily-entitled publication ‘Opinion on the Punishment Meted Out by the Guillotine and the Pain that Continues after Severance’, Dr. Jean-Joseph Sue suggested that, even if consciousness persisted for only a few moments after decapitation, it would be an ‘incalculably long’ torture for the execution victim. He concluded by suggesting that drowning might be better.
In 2014, researchers in New Zealand attached electroencephalographs - or EEGs - to the heads of anesthetised rats, and then killed them via decapitation. Surprisingly, the EEGs recorded significant activity in the rats’ brains after their heads had been severed. In the subsequent scientific paper in which they documented their findings, the New Zealand scientists concluded that rats can, unbelievably, experience a ten to fifteen second window of consciousness following decapitation. Given the similarity in mammalian physiology, it is completely possible that humans also experience similar brain activity following sudden decapitation, activity that continues until the brain finally becomes starved of oxygen.
Science still has a long way to go to understand the many and intricate complexities of the brain and how it functions. But if the signs of so-called ‘lucid decapitation’ point to anything, it is surely that the difference between life and death is not the simple ‘on-off switch’ we might think it is.
© 2025, Lora Jones. All rights reserved. Reproduction prohibited without written permission.
