What It Was Like To Watch A Beheading By Guillotine

It was common for groups of women to attend beheadings, knitting and conversing while gathered around the guillotine. Called tricoteuses, these women initially gathered for local government debates, but officials eventually banned them from public assemblies, so they turned to executions for entertainment instead. They crafted small items during the events, including Phrygian caps, or liberty caps.

Despite their domestic origins, the women became associated with bloodthirst and anger as the French Revolution progressed. Tricoteuses reportedly counted their stitches as they counted heads being chopped off, and they developed a violent and hateful reputation.

The literary introduction to tricoteuses by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities (1859) helped to further this representation. Dickens had written his tricoteuses, namely Madame Defarge, as characters who would weave executed victims' names into their work. Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905) also featured tricoteuses "who sat there and knitted, whilst head after head fell beneath the knife, and they themselves got quite bespattered with the blood of those cursed aristos."

The guillotine could execute 12 people every 13 minutes, which exponentially increased the death count during the French Revolution. Over time, the guillotine's efficacy improved, primarily due to the efforts of Charles-Henri Sanson, who personally tested the machine on animals and cadavers.

Sanson had tested the guillotine for the first time in public on Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier. The precision with which Pelletier's head had separated from his body apparently pleased Sanson, and the guillotine's use spread.

Spectators began gathering to watch soldiers, called gendarmes, lead carts that carried condemned individuals. One eyewitness described the carts:

The same carts as those that are used in Paris for carrying wood; four boards were placed across them for seats, and on each board sat two, and sometimes three victims; their hands were tied behind their backs, and the constant jolting of the cart made them nod their heads up and down, to the great amusement of the spectators.

Regardless of how the condemned behaved during their walk to the guillotine, there was often a somber mood among the procession of officials when they approached the machine and line of soon-to-be victims. JG Millingen described an execution in 1793; it featured "culprits [who] were led out in turn, and, if necessary, supported by two of the executioner's valets."

Millingen also recalled the other side of solemnity, indicating that he had seen "some young men actually dance a few steps before they went up to be strapped to the perpendicular plane."

In 1813, Colonel Francis Maceroni recounted an execution that took place in Rome:

The deep solemn chanting of the miserere was now heard, as from a distance the procession approached the silent square. Not a word was uttered, save a low murmuring sound when the two sufferers were seen advancing, each supported by a priest on either side, who recited prayers that were repeated by the dying man.

Many guillotined victims - but not all - had their last words recorded for posterity. Before his execution in 1793, King Louis XVI gave a speech to the crowd, telling them, "I die innocent of all the crimes laid to my charge; I pardon those who have occasioned my death; and I pray to God that the blood you are going to shed may never be visited on France." 

Officials expected the condemned to remain stalwart in the face of death, but not all abided by this. Louis XV's mistress, Madame du Barry, begged the crowd and perhaps her executioner to give her "one more moment."

Marie-Antoinette, by some accounts, uttered her final words as an apology to her executioner for having stepped on his foot. 

Because the guillotine offered a figuratively hands-off approach to capital punishment, executioners did not particularly feel guilty for ending a life. Executioners focused on the machine itself rather than on bloodshed or striking a blow; they also made preparations and cleaned up after the event.

The speed of execution via guillotine removed some of the religious and social connections between death and execution, lessening the spectacle's emotional aspect. The public criticized it at first for being too easy and clinical. During the new execution procedure, crowds reportedly yelled, "Give me back my wooden gallows!"

In 1793, the executioners marched King Louis XVI to the guillotine in front of a large crowd. The sans-culottes, or working-class commoners, arrested the monarch in 1792, and he stood trial the following year for committing crimes against the people. His conviction and subsequent execution, according to priest Henry Essex Edgeworth, culminated in the king being dragged "under the ax of the guillotine, which with one stroke severed his head from his body." 

By other accounts, Louis XVI's neck was reportedly thick and may have required more than one drop of the guillotine blade. In Louis-Sébastien Mercier's version of events, the first blow only cut part of the king's head and sliced his jaw, but it failed to take off his head.

Botched guillotine executions were possible - some even claim rampant - even though the device's creator had designed it to prevent the displacement of a hand-held ax. On one recorded occasion in Pamiers, France, a guillotine blade did not descend completely and only hit the condemned man in the neck. After five attempts, the man's head still wasn't off.

As the executioners tried to figure out the problem, the man stood up and tried to escape. After someone grabbed him, he started spraying blood into the crowd, then got decapitated by hand.