We assume our revulsion at brutal death ceremonies is natural and instinctive, but it is not. On the contrary, not only were public executions not particularly shocking to those who witnessed them in the Middle Ages, they were not particularly shocking to those who saw them in the eighteenth, nineteenth or even twentieth centuries. It is our intensely imagined empathy for other people’s pain in the twenty-first century that sets us apart, and even that may be a more fragile attribute than we would care to admit. If spectacular punishment seemed like a barbaric vestige from another age to men like Dickens and Thackeray, who both wrote to condemn capital punishment after watching Courvoisier hang, it was the intransigence of spectators as well as the suffering of the victims that proved increasingly disconcerting to the authorities.
The guillotine had been designed to take the spectacle out of public executions by making them more humane and less conspicuous. The first French guillotine was made by a German piano-maker, the only man who would undertake such an offensive commission for a low enough price. Designed to be clinically efficient, it was trialled by a group of doctors, politicians and engineers at Bicêtre in early 1792. A series of live sheep and dead men were placed under the blade so that final adjustments could be made, and over the ensuing years the design was further refined to make it more efficient. The wooden runners were replaced by brass grooves that were less likely to jam; eventually little wheels were added so that the grooves no longer had to be soaped. The rope pulley, used to hoist the blade, was replaced by spring-weighted steel pincers that could be released by a lever: the blade fell two and a quarter metres in less than a second. Rubber shock absorbers were added to prevent the double crash of the blade as it rebounded from its fall. A large zinc-lined basket was positioned to catch the dead body and, instead of rolling loose around the scaffold, the head fell into a smaller basket or bucket and was quickly out of sight. A system was also developed for assembling the guillotine silently, so that the condemned prisoner did not have to spend his last night listening to the workmen’s hammer blows. Decapitation became progressively quieter, neater and more reliable.
What’s more, death no longer came at the hands of a human being per se. Instead, the force of the blow was administered by a machine, and the executioner’s role changed accordingly, transforming the devilish swordsman into a self-contained, rather fastidious engineer. Visitors to Paris who met Charles-Henri Sanson, the chief executioner during The Terror, remarked that he was surprisingly polite and well educated and that he spoke excellent English. Sanson did not need to be physically strong, but he had to be organized. The guillotine belonged to the chief executioner, and he was responsible for its upkeep. It had to be carefully constructed on a flat piece of ground and adjusted precisely to ensure a fast procedure with no glitches. Each part had to be kept clean, the blood had to be washed away and the blade sharpened, but when it came to the deathblow itself, the executioner was just another observer like everybody else. French executioners were really specialist operations’ managers, a fact that was epitomized in the twentieth century by the workmen in blue overalls who could be seen putting the guillotine together before an execution.
The government also sought to distance itself from the guillotine, and referred to it euphemistically as ‘the instrument of death’ or ‘timbers of justice’. The executioner and his guillotine occupied an autonomous realm. Neither had any official status. Those who were condemned to death were subcontracted to the executioner by the state, and so the machine appeared to be a self-sufficient entity, like an engine that required servicing and constant refuelling. Executioners came to pride themselves on their speed. During the nineteenth century, the newspapers provided details of debuts, record-breaking performances and innovative techniques, as though decapitation was a sport. In the early days, extraordinary records were set. On 31 October 1793, twenty-one members of the Girondist political faction were killed in thirty-eight minutes, while in 1804, twenty-six men were dispatched in twenty-seven minutes.
Decapitation had gone into production. In the words of the historian Ronald Paulson, it was clear ‘that the machine would continue to cut off heads, as a pinmaker continues to make pins, as long as it was supplied with bodies’. Tens of thousands of people were killed during the thirteen months of the Reign of Terror, which began in late June 1793, when the guillotine seemed to rule France and was said to have removed people’s heads at a rate of one per minute; but the rate of executions was still astonishingly high during the early nineteenth century: 134 in 1825, 150 in 1826, 109 in 1827. From 1810, death was prescribed for as many as thirty different offences, from homicide to robbery, and during the 1820s an ever-widening spectrum of political offences became punishable by death.
A steady supply of executions came to be accepted, even demanded, as proof of good government. French executioners had been publicly vilified for centuries – until, that is, they were temporarily deemed superfluous to the smooth running of society in the early twentieth century. When President Fallières, who opposed the death penalty, commuted all death sentences to life imprisonment in the early 1900s, French protestors shouted ‘Vive la guillotine! Vive Deibler!’ in the streets of Paris. Anatole Deibler, the executioner, had been satirized in the papers for years, but now he found himself ‘the defender of terrified society’. Such was the public alarm that people who thought there might be a problem finding a suitable site for executions offered their private halls and auditoriums for the purpose. The disruption was short-lived. After three years in office Fallières relaxed his stance, the guillotine blade was raised again, and public hatred of the executioner resumed.
For some, those aspects of the guillotine that had seemed most progressive – its speed, and its mechanical self-sufficiency – quickly became sources of revulsion. During The Terror, the machine appeared to be a power unto itself, a triumph of technology that was at once both impressive and deeply threatening. Those who had argued for its introduction had thought it would dignify the deaths of common men, but instead it depersonalized its victims, making them all seem the same. A machine could not discriminate. Beheading was no longer a means by which the accused could attain distinction through death; instead it stripped individuality and reduced everyone to the same basic biological components: heads and bodies. The powerhouse of the Revolution gradually came to embody conservative values, and chopping off heads was another way of maintaining the status quo.
Occasionally a victim stood out from the crowd. After one mass execution, when more than fifty ‘conspirators’ were guillotined in 28 minutes on 17 June 1794 – among them a grocer, a musician, a teacher and a lemonade-seller – even Sanson, the famous executioner, could not tolerate the bloodshed. An eighteen-year-old girl, Nicole Bouchard, was one of those killed, and she seemed so fragile and thin to Sanson that ‘a tiger would have pitied her’. Sanson was overcome and had to leave the scaffold. That night he wrote in his diary:
Terrible day. The guillotine devoured 54. My strength went, my heart failed me. That evening, sitting down to dinner, I told my wife that I could see spots of blood on my napkin … I don’t lay claim to any sensibility I don’t possess: I have seen too often and too close up the sufferings and death of my fellow human beings to be easily affected. If what I feel is not pity it must be caused by an attack of nerves; perhaps it is the hand of God punishing my cowardly pliancy to what so little resembles that justice which I was born to serve.
Meanwhile, a news-seller stood on the streets of Paris and shouted, ‘Here’s the list of winners of the lottery of the most holy guillotine. Who wants to see the list? There were sixty today, give or take.’
Sanson knew his place was at the centre of an unstoppable show, and all the performers had to play their part. Nicole had performed perfectly. When an aide who came to bind her tiny wrists asked, ‘This is just a joke, isn’t it?’, Nicole had smiled through her tears and replied, ‘No, Monsieur, it’s real.’
Others were not so composed in the face of deat
h. Louis XV’s mistress, Madame du Barry, was unable to control her fear when she was escorted to the guillotine in December 1793. She struggled on the scaffold and begged the crowd to save her. This was not the done thing. Victims were meant to display courage and restraint, like Nicole Bouchard. They might say a few words to win the audience’s admiration, but their demeanour should embody a selfless determination to ‘die well’: only then might they prove the justness of their cause and proffer their claim to immortality. Condemned prisoners often rehearsed the moment of their death beforehand, with other prisoners playing the part of the executioner and his assistants. When Adjutant General Boisguyon positioned himself under the blade, he said to Sanson: ‘Today’s the actual performance: you’ll be surprised how well I know my role.’
Madame du Barry did not know her role. She suffered from a dreadful case of performance anxiety, and as she screamed and collapsed the executioner grew anxious and the crowd began to respond. They began to pity du Barry and wonder whether the execution should be called off, despite her crimes. The painter Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun remembered the scene in her memoirs and, noting that ‘the populace is more easily stirred by pity than by admiration’, she believed that ‘if the victims of these terrible times had not been so proud, had not met death with such courage, the Terror would have ended much earlier’. Had the victims, too, fallen under the spell of the guillotine? Du Barry’s last words were ‘Encore un moment, monsieur le bourreau, un petit moment’; but the show must go on.
Perhaps du Barry’s intoxicating fear, her inability to play along, reminded the spectators that day that they, too, were playing a part in the show. Perhaps they began to feel uncomfortable, as though they were partly responsible for her agonies. The guillotine had transformed decapitation into a dispassionate procedure that minimized the brutality as much as possible, but taking the drama out of death is a dangerous ideal. The Terror demonstrated well enough that the only thing more horrifying than a severed head is a society that finds it mundane. For most of our history, the dramatic force of a beheading has taken precedence over political ethics, and even the guillotine could not, in the end, defuse the drama. It was the moments when proceedings did not go to plan, when the performers forgot their lines, or the crowd misbehaved, that exposed the fragility of the production. State executions are a tenuous collaboration between all the players. Some participants wield more power than others, some are powerless, but even a condemned criminal can upset the script. And the crowd, unable to resist the horror of this definitive theatre production, are complicit in its success.
In the twenty-first century, the camera has brought an end to the spontaneity of beheading events. Like reality shows, beheadings that have been ‘made for television’ provide an edited version of events, and the executioner now shares his power with his film producer. Part of the story is left on the cutting-room floor. If this seems to make light of the horrific murders that are depicted online, then that, too, is part of the effect, because we – the spectators – can now watch without ever actually seeing someone die. The show is bigger than ever before, and there is little chance of upsetting it now, since the participants are never in the same place together and it is unclear who is accountable for staging the event.
When a video showing the decapitation of an unidentified woman in Mexico was shared on Facebook in October 2013, with no warning of its graphic content, it caused an outcry. Facebook initially refused to remove the video, because it claimed to act only as a facilitator, connecting people rather than editing their discussions. The social networking site stated that people were sharing the video in order to condemn it, and that if users were celebrating the footage the site’s response would have been different. When the media story gathered pace, however, and David Cameron described the decision as ‘irresponsible’, Facebook removed the video, agreeing that it ‘glorifies violence’, and announced a review of its policy towards users who share violent images and videos.
Facebook did not want to be seen as irresponsible, but it did not want to be responsible for the actions of its users either. In this case, eschewing responsibility for the people who shared the video online meant eschewing responsibility for the spectators, especially children, who might not understand the nature of the footage before deciding to watch. The internet diffuses responsibility for events, while making it easier than ever to take part in them. We can watch people’s deaths without social recrimination, without anyone else even having to know about it. The question of whether, or how, family members, the young and the vulnerable can be protected from traumatic images is far from being resolved. For the rest of us, watching has become a matter of private conscience. But perhaps this has always been so, because the real power of the crowd lies in the possibility that we might decide not to watch.
4
Framed Heads
Marc Quinn, a founding member of the ‘Young British Artists’ movement, is known for his sculpture Self. It is a cast of the artist’s head made from 9 pints of his own frozen blood. Self is an ongoing project: Quinn’s first ‘blood head’ sculpture was made in 1991, and he has made another one every five years since, to document his ageing. Charles Saatchi bought the first of these blood busts, and the fourth was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.
Quinn has referred to Self as the ‘ultimate portrait’. ‘To me this sculpture came from wanting to push portraiture to an extreme, a representation which not only has the form of the sitter, but is actually made from the sitter’s flesh.’ Quinn’s fascination with the limits of human representation has led him to produce casts of his head made from his own excrement, and casts of his newborn son’s head made from the placenta. Of course, however explicit these works are, they fall short of the ultimate portrait: would Quinn dedicate his own body, after death, to his artistic mission and put his severed head in a glass refrigeration unit for the world to see? ‘Yes, I have thought about it,’ Quinn says. ‘At the moment I haven’t really come to any conclusion of what would be interesting, and I have to think about my family’s wishes too. But it really would be the ultimate work, using what’s left behind.’
It is shocking, but the idea of Quinn’s ‘ultimate portrait’ plays on a long tradition of sculptures in death that are considered to give the truest likeness of their subject. A portrait in life can only capture a moment in time, but a portrait in death lays claim to something essential about that person’s life as a whole. Usually a portrait records a relationship, or at the very least an interaction, between the artist and the sitter, but there can be no such relationship when ‘the sitter’ is dead. A subject’s last portrait becomes the truest precisely because it is beyond their influence. Entirely unmediated by the sitter, it is a representation apparently free from the constraints of artistic interpretation or posing.
Quinn’s concept is reminiscent of the tradition of making death masks, which thrived in the nineteenth century. Death masks celebrated the idea that the moment of death reveals the purest subject, one no longer encumbered by the cares of life. From Abraham Lincoln to Alfred Hitchcock, and from William Wordsworth to James Dean, countless writers, politicians, composers and celebrities had layers of plaster ladled over their faces in the hours after their death so that they might leave an accurate impression of their countenance forevermore. Death masks offered a physical trace of the person. Although they claimed the authenticity of being uninfluenced by the artist, there was considerable artistry to the job. The subject’s face was oiled before successive layers of plaster, each only a few millimetres thick, were applied and embedded with threads so that they could be removed when dry without damaging the impression.
It was considered important to start work on a death mask as soon after death as possible, to capture the best likeness, before the blood had cooled and the features had stiffened. One master of the art, George Kolbe, bemoaned, ‘How often I have been told that the dead man had been so beautiful – but now he is so repulsive.’ The boundary between life and death o
ffered a moment of clarity, when the inner person would be honestly revealed for the first and last time. Death masks were a popular form of memorial not only among society’s elite – the faces of many guillotined criminals were also fixed in plaster in this way, each cast providing a permanent version of the head that had been held up to the crowds on execution day.
Quinn’s ‘ultimate portrait’ echoes the sinister work of the guillotine itself, of course, which the historian Daniel Arasse has described as a ‘portrait machine’. The guillotine produced an instantaneous ‘portrait’ to be held up to the waiting crowd as proof of the status of a traitor: a person was eternally ‘captured’ in this kind of portrait. Indeed, one of the French executioner’s assistants became known as ‘the photographer’ because it was his job to adjust the victim’s pose in the final seconds before death. He had to grab the prisoner’s hair (or grab his ears if he happened to be bald) and pull him into position under the blade, because everything must be perfect for the final picture.
If a photograph stopped time and transformed its subject into an object that could be possessed, the guillotine took a photograph that held its subject motionless forever. Like a camera, the guillotine’s gruesome picture was produced in a flash, thanks to a contraption that was a wonder of modern science and engineering. And the results were governed by physical laws as much as by human artistry, because all the ‘photographer’ had to do was press a button and the picture appeared, as surely as light falling on a lens.
Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found Page 11