I’d always generally assumed that Colby Cosh was a libertarian-leaning chap, but here he is banging on the table for executing criminals with that revolutionary French device, the guillotine:
A double guillotine
Musée de la Révolution française via Wikimedia Commons.
The history of the death penalty in the English-speaking world looks extremely bizarre from any vantage point in the year 2021. The electric chair, now abolished throughout the United States, has always been a stupid, barbarous idea: it sprouted from a time when electricity was a fashionable new technology, and then just kind of stuck around for a century. Gas chamber arrangements came and went.
Hanging, which is still employed in Japan, has centuries of technique behind it, but is recognizably a holdover from a period when the risk of prolonged death was considered a feature, not a bug. Now the U.S. depends on lethal injection methods, some of them antiquated or illogical, that are very capable of being screwed up.
And in the meantime, the guillotine had its foolproof two-century run in France. The famous Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin was a revolutionary opponent of capital punishment who advocated for the device as being more humane than existing methods. Can this be argued against even now? Measurement of the suffering involved with various methods of execution (or euthanasia) involves more uncertainty than anyone likes to admit, but patients receiving lethal injection, whether at their own request or the law’s, do receive sedation before actually being administered a fatal substance. The maximum duration of suffering in a beheading is a matter of seconds, not minutes; and if you believe in capital punishment without cruelty, there is no reason a person with a guillotine appointment should not be permitted to load up in advance on drugs of their own choosing.
The guillotine’s last use in France, and anywhere else in the world, took place on Sept. 10, 1977. It is associated in Anglo-Saxon minds with everything from French revolutionary terror to the Gestapo and the Stasi. There are good reasons to be reluctant to introduce mechanization of any kind into the process of executing murderers. Perhaps it makes the fatal step toward killing mere political enemies a little easier.
But, again, Americans used the electric chair without noticeable shame for more than 100 years: it came into use on a wave of passion for modernity before anyone even knew exactly how electricity kills you. Beheading’s principal problem, assuming one is willing to contemplate the taking of a human life by the state, is janitorial.
