Is Death by Guillotine Painless?

The controversy over capital punishment revolves around a series of moral questions. Does the state have the authority to take a life? And if so, how should that life be most humanely snuffed? Drug and lethal gas cocktails can be unpredictable; electrocution can be seemingly barbaric; death by guillotine, in contrast, is almost ceremonial—the offender beheaded with one swift cut of the blade.

Despite its viscerally gruesome nature, some argue that the guillotine might be the most painless of execution methods. A heavy blade makes abrupt work of nerves, tendons, and the spinal cord. In theory, that should mean an instant death. But is it really? And how would we ever know?

Life After Death

It’s exceedingly difficult to get anecdotal data on whether someone who has been beheaded continues to endure physical discomfort. If we take the question to mean whether someone’s consciousness persists following decapitation, there’s a bit more to go on.

Anecdotal reports of the guillotined remaining briefly aware have persisted throughout the centuries. When English queen Anne Boleyn was deprived of her corporeal form in 1536, witnesses swore her lips continued moving, as though she had one final message to communicate. In 1905, ambitious French physician Jacques Beaurieux tried calling out the name of a man, Languille, who had just been beheaded. The man, he said, appeared to fix his gaze on him.

Beaurieux wrote:

“Next Languille’s eyes very definitely fixed themselves on mine and the pupils focused themselves. I was not, then, dealing with the sort of vague dull look without any expression, that can be observed any day in dying people to whom one speaks: I was dealing with undeniably living eyes which were looking at me. After several seconds, the eyelids closed again, slowly and evenly, and the head took on the same appearance as it had had before I called out.”

But critics have charged that Beauriuex’s story was inconsistent. Though he insisted he didn’t touch the head, it would have been almost impossible to make eye contact with Languille given that his cranium had fallen into a bucket.

Scientists have attempted to provide more objective data in animals. A 2013 study [PDF] out of New Zealand examined the brain activity of beheaded rats using electroencephalographic (EEG) monitoring. Tiny, rodent-sized guillotines were crafted and the rats sedated before being beheaded. Surprisingly, EEG activity persisted for 10 to 15 seconds following the severing of their heads—a window where they could, in theory, experience pain. The same could be true for humans.

Does this mean those reports of prisoners looking perturbed were valid? Not necessarily. Muscle movements in the face could have been post-mortem twitches that observers inferred to be conscious expressions.

The Origins of the Guillotine

In 1789, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin advocated for death by a gravity-assisted blade like a guillotine (which were already in existence) by making it sound almost serene. “Like a cool breath on the back of the neck,” he said. “The blade hisses, the head falls, blood spurts, the man exists no more … With my machine, I’ll have your head off in the blink of an eye, and you will suffer not at all.” Three years later, the guillotine was the law of the land.

Not long after, physicians and others began to express doubt about the lack of suffering part of that pitch. Charlotte Corday was said to blush after her beheading, though that seems unlikely given the lack of a circulatory system. The doubt persisted through France’s use of the device, which ran all the way though 1977. Put another way, the guillotine was still in use just as Star Wars was hitting theaters.

A 2023 paper published in the journal Cureus summarized the debate: “The evidence currently available to us is scant, and the studies that imply that there is a retained awareness in decapitated rats for several seconds suffer from a low sample size. While the best evidence currently available to us suggests that is nearly instant in decapitation for both human and rodent models, it is possible that the truth will never be fully known.”