Frank Gonzalez-Crussi
Chicago, Illinois, United States

April 15, 2019, was an ill-starred day. Parisians watched with horror as huge flames broke through the roof of Notre Dame Cathedral in a conflagration that threatened to reduce that precious jewel of gothic architecture to a heap of smoking rubble. A terrifying spectacle, indeed! The famed gargoyles must have looked like so many devils spewing fire through their gaping maws. They seemed to contort themselves grotesquely, or to fall into frenzied convulsions, the dancing flames behind them creating a fierce battle between a posse of dark devils and the orderly, celestial file of statues of saints and kings guarding the temple’s exterior. Happily, the forces of good triumphed. Five years later, the church was completely restored.

Tourists in front of the western façade can see once again, on the left-side portal, a little above eye level, the figure of one of the triumphant defenders standing between two angels. He is Saint Denys, or Dionysius, Bishop of Paris. He has been decapitated, but, unfazed by this minor inconvenience, he carries his own mitered head in his hands. That he is a saint we can easily infer by the angelic company he keeps, and by the fact that he has a halo. Except that this halo has remained on his back, above the truncated neck, at the site where his head used to be: a “reportable” case, we might say, of weak head-to-halo bonding (Figure 1).

St. Denys was sent to France (then Gaul) by Pope Fabian (reigned 236–250) to rekindle the Christian faith, for this country was then chock-full of sinful pagans, worse than today—inconceivable as this may seem. Denys did his duty, but envious heathens had him decapitated. In The Golden Legend we read that this was done of a single ax blow before the statue of the god Mercury, “but immediately his body raised itself and, guided by a heavenly light, [and, I like to imagine, followed by the laggard halo trying to catch up with the severed head], walked for about two miles to the place where he chose to rest.”¹ A shrine was raised there, which is now the Basilica of St. Denys, where the remains of French kings have rested through at least one major startle (the Revolution) and many years of indifference.

One would think that to take a stroll after decollation is a major feat, which earned St. Denys the official title of “protector of France,” as many contend (eat your heart out, St. Joan of Arc!). But, in fact, Denys has had hundreds of imitators. In the Middle Ages, every little town had to have its own “cephalophore” (head-carrier). They came in all styles, from many countries, and in male and female forms (for these two were the only genders known in times of binary backwardness). Take, for instance, St. Livier (a.k.a. Livarius, Linaire, Levier, etc,). He was a soldier who fought the Huns and dispatched decollated barbarians to the infernal netherworld, before he himself was shipped in like condition, presumably in the opposite direction, toward heavenly glory. He is represented in full battle gear, sword at his belt and his head in his hands (Figure 2).

Another marvelous example is St. Just (Justus, in Latin). He was barely nine years old when his father and uncle were persecuted by Roman policemen. Justus would not reveal where they were hiding. Therefore, he was decapitated. The body raised itself, took the head in its hands and addressed his two relatives, who had just come out of their hideout, asking them to cremate his body but take his head to his mother. Justus did not walk after decapitation: it was prowess enough for him to pronounce a speech while lacking vocal cords. In 1629–30, Rubens painted the scene, a work much admired by Delacroix when he saw it in 1847.² Imaginative art critics pretend that Justus is not addressing his relatives but his decapitators, and that he is reciting an exhortative speech of such pathetism that the fierce killers, suddenly repentant, fell on their knees and converted to the true faith (Figure 3).

It seems hard to believe, but medical science took a serious interest in the problem of sensibility after decapitation. Not to find out if it was possible, being headless, to stroll like St. Denys; to do battle like St. Livier; or to climb on the soapbox like St. Justus; but merely to determine whether a decapitated person could still feel pain, were it only for a fleeting instant. This odd line of investigation originated during the French Revolution. People were then beheading each other wholesale and came up with the idea that the use of the guillotine—a technologically improved version of an ancient killing machine—would finish off a fellow human being in the most expedite, unerring, and painless way. No more brutal hacking away on a man’s neck, no more ax blows that had to be repeated before the head separated from the body, inflicting, in the process, horrible gashes and an unbearably painful agony. Yes, the newfangled contraption would shorten the executed (hence its nickname, “the patriotic trimmer”) but also the execution time, thus sparing the public a bloody spectacle unworthy of civilized people.

An academic-medical debate ensued between two groups of scientists; but beneath the scientific arguments there was a strong underlay of nationalistic sentiment inflaming the traditional Franco-German animosity. One faction, led by the German savant Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring (1755–1830), maintained that the guillotine hits the most sensitive place in the entire body (indeed, a multitude of nerves are congregated in, or course through, the upper spinal cord), which the guillotine blade smashes, cracks, and tears as it encounters the cervical vertebrae. Therefore, this manner of execution must be so incredibly painful, that the guillotine could only be used “in countries characterized by the brutality or stupidity of their laws,”³ (viz., la belle France).

The contrary group, championed by the eminent French physiologist Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis (1757–1808), maintained that anatomical, physiological, and experimental data obtained in animals proved that the guillotine made a clean cut, produced instantaneous loss of consciousness, and therefore was a humane way of putting to death condemned criminals.

Apart from pain, would the severed head retain sufficient consciousness, be it only for the tiniest fraction of a second, to see itself physically separated from the body to which it had been joined during life? If so, this realization would be a form of torture so atrocious as to constitute, by itself, a most powerful plaidoyer for the abolition of capital punishment. But there are, in this world, questions that cannot be answered, and this is one of them. No guillotined subject could possibly come back to reliably report on his conscious perceptions following the procedure. Yet, this did not impede a number of medical men to attempt all manner of “experiments”—naïve, hair-raising, risible, dramatic, and macabre—to find an answer. What they did with freshly severed heads in pursuit of this answer is one of the most gruesome and bizarre chapters in the history of medicine.

Their efforts were to no avail, as symbolized by the writer Auguste Villliers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–1889) in his highly dramatic short story Le Secret de l’Échafaud (“The Secret of the Gibbet”). In this story, Velpeau, an eminent surgeon, aware that a friend and colleague, la Pommerais, is about to be executed, proposes to him an “experiment” that will clarify the enigma. He will catch his friend’s severed head as it falls from the guillotine, and shout into its ear the order to wink three times with one eye, while keeping the opposite eye open. If the head obeys, this will prove that it can still hear and understand. The fatal moment arrives. The head falls into Velpeau’s hands. He bends toward the “horribly white” face that is having involuntary contractions and loudly utters the agreed-upon order. One eyelid is half-lowered; the contralateral one is wide open. Velpeau, frantic, desperate, and distraught, shouts: “In the name of God, two more times this sign!” But the face has become fixed, rigid, immobile. The gibbet has kept its secret.

References

1. Jacques de la Voragine. “Saint Denys” in La Légende Dorée. Vol. 2. Paris. GF Flammarion. 1967, p. 277.
2. Musée de Beaux Arts de Bordeaux. “Peter Paul Rubens, Le Miracle de Saint Just.” https://www.musba-bordeaux.fr/fr/article/rubens-saint-just   
3. Quoted in Paul Loye: La Mort par la Décapitation. Paris. Lecrosnier et Babé, 1888, p. 16.