Posted by Orin Kerr:
Methods of Execution in France, 1792 to 1981:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2007_12_30-2008_01_05.shtml#1199309689
Sorry for the gruesome subject matter, but [1]my post on foreign law
and methods of execution brings to mind the practices used in the
favored country among those Justices who favor looking to foreign law:
France, or as Justice Breyer would put it, La République Française.
[2]Wikipedia has a fascinating history of methods of execution in
France. It seems that from 1792 to 1981, when [3]France abolished
capital punishment, the only allowed method of execution was the
Guillotine. The Guillotine was originally designed in the late 18th
Century to be a more humane method of execution: the idea was that it
would be fast, painless, and certain.
The basis for the machine's success was the belief that it was a
humane form of execution, contrasting with the methods used in
pre-revolutionary, ancien régime (former regime) France. In
France, before the guillotine, members of the nobility were
beheaded with a sword or axe, while commoners were usually hanged,
a form of death that could take minutes or longer - other more
gruesome methods of executions were also used, such as the wheel,
burning at the stake, etc. In the case of decapitation, it also
sometimes took repeated blows to sever the head completely. The
condemned or the family of the condemned would sometimes pay the
executioner to ensure that the blade was sharp in order to provide
for a quick and relatively painless death.
However, it seems that the use of the Guillotine was plagued by
concerns that it was not as swift and painless as it was designed to
be. Critics argued that in fact those executed by the Guillotine
suffered greatly in the seconds after the blade fell:
From its first use, there has been debate as to whether the
guillotine always provided as swift a death as Dr Guillotin hoped.
. . . . [in light of] the possibility that the very swiftness of
the guillotine only prolonged the victim's suffering. The blade
cuts quickly enough so that there is relatively little impact on
the brain case, and perhaps less likelihood of immediate
unconsciousness than with a more violent decapitation, or long-drop
hanging.
Audiences to guillotinings told numerous stories of blinking
eyelids, moving eyes, movement of the mouth, even an expression of
"unequivocal indignation" on the face of the decapitated Charlotte
Corday when her cheek was slapped. Anatomists and other scientists
in several countries have tried to perform more definitive
experiments on severed human heads as recently as 1956. Inevitably
the evidence is only anecdotal. What appears to be a head
responding to the sound of its name, or to the pain of a pinprick,
may be only random muscle twitching or automatic reflex action,
with no awareness involved. At worst, it seems that the massive
drop in cerebral blood pressure would cause a victim to lose
consciousness in several seconds.
Anyway, that's Wikipedia's take; I don't know how accurate it is.
References
1. http://volokh.com/posts/1190749819.shtml
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guillotine
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_France
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