Off With Their Heads!

I cannot profess my love of the anime The Rose of Versailles any clearer than I did in this post. Lately, I have been spending my spare time, of which I have an abundance, watching the series and drooling over the costumes and googling French history.

This brief introduction brings me to the point of this post, which contrary to what you may expect is not about Lady Oscar, but about the guillotine. I’ve always been part fascinated part repulsed by the guillotine as a way to die. It’s an apparatus that beheads people, that’s for one, and for two it is a manifestation of that dark human capacity to produce violence in the name of mercy. After all, it was principally thought of as a tool to achieve a swift and painless death — much gentler than, say, burning at the stake.

The guillotine was used in countries like Italy and Scotland long before it was introduced in France. But the French, as usual, put their improving touches on it and made it a lot more functional than its other European predecessors by changing the shape of the blade and advancing its mechanics. However, it should be noted that the famous French guillotine was first built by a German.

To further my knowledge of the death machine, I came across this wonderful website which details its history and, for my and your viewing pleasure, introduces pictures of actual guillotines and a number of executions. The site has a few graphic pictures so I would not advise you to visit if this will disturb you. Otherwise, the site offers an extensive account of the machine’s history complete with factual, visual, and mechanical particulars. It’s great, I promise.

I was wondering, while reading about the history of the guillotine, why anyone would want to witness an execution of another human being in front of their eyes: the person, wearing a collar-less white shirt, bound and led by the executioner and his assistants, then his head is rested in the lunette, and then it is chopped off by the descending blade and flung into the zinc tub while the body is rolled into a basket on the side. The blade is then cleaned and the head grabbed by the hair to join the body in the basket.

So I was wondering why anyone would want to watch a scene this horrific. Ironically, I myself was looking for pictures of guillotine executions as I munched on the thought. My excuse was that I was curious, I wanted to see how the guillotine worked and what it did to the human form, and at the same time I had the moral justification that I was merely looking at pictures and would never have attended an actual execution, unlike these barbaric onlookers.

But the fact remains that I, too, wanted to watch. This curiosity to “see what happens” is somewhat evil I think, as it is certainly not entirely innocent. I believe this is why people crowded prison yards and other public areas where guillotine executions were held: to see what happens. Will the doomed attempt to escape? Will he or she say something dramatic to their executioner? Will they address the crowd? Or will they burst out in tears? Will this execution be similar to the one before it? What, exactly, will happen?

I suppose a desire, or a curiosity, to witness so explicit an act of violence inflected on another human being is heavily primal. Even if we like to label it as “justice,” we relish in designing death.* We are, oddly enough, the principal spectators of grotesque shows that we stage with us as victims, too. Simply put, we recycle horror and we love it. Off with our heads!

*The notion of “designing death” to serve “justice” reminds me of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, one of the best and most twisted stories about punishment and mechanics I have ever read (coincidentally revolving around a death machine). Highly recommended. You can read it here.