Types and variations of the death penalty. Decapitation

As soon as the execution was completed, the executioner gave Troer's head into the hands of the scientist. Wend immediately applied a zinc plate of a galvanic battery to one of the muscles of the head - a strong contraction of the muscle fibers immediately followed.

Wend applied the plate to the cut spinal cord, and an expression of suffering appeared on the head’s face.

The eyes of the severed head were open, and the doctor made a gesture, as if intending to poke two fingers into the eyes - the eyes immediately closed. A little later the head's eyes opened again, and Vend turned his head towards bright sun, - the eyes closed. The scientist decided to test the severed head for the perception of sounds.

Twice he shouted “Troer!”, and twice his head opened his eyes and looked in the direction where the sound came from. At the same time, Vend noted that the head was opening its mouth, as if trying to say something. The scientist put his finger in his open mouth - the head clenched the finger with its teeth so that pain was felt. As the doctor recorded, after 2 minutes 40 seconds the eyes closed forever, and the head no longer showed any signs of life.

WHAT DOES THE SEVERED HEAD THINK?

There is a version that, under the impression of this small message, read by Alexander Belyaev in a file of old Russian magazines “Niva” (No. 6, 1891), the science fiction writer wrote the book “The Head of Professor Dowell” in 1925.

It is quite possible that if A. Belyaev read this message, then in the same file, but only in No. 10, he could read at least interesting information about a severed head. Here is the message:

"In Figaro" Michel Delin describes an interesting hypnotic experiment conducted by the famous Belgian artist Wirtz over the head of a guillotined robber.

The artist has long been interested in the question: how long does the execution procedure last for a criminal and what feeling does the defendant experience? last minutes life, what exactly the head, separated from the body, thinks and experiences, and in general, whether it can think and feel. Wirtz was well acquainted with the Brussels prison doctor, whose friend, Dr. D., had been practicing hypnotism for 30 years. The artist told him his strong desire to be told that he was a criminal condemned to the guillotine.

On the day of the execution, ten minutes before the arrival of the criminal, Wirtz, Dr. D., two witnesses placed themselves at the bottom of the scaffold so that they were not visible to the public, and in sight of the basket into which the head of the executed man was to fall. Dr. D. put his medium to sleep, inspired him to identify with the criminal, monitor all his thoughts and feelings and loudly express the thoughts of the condemned man at the moment when the ax touched his neck. Finally, he ordered him to penetrate the brain of the executed person, as soon as the head was separated from the body, and analyze the last thoughts of the deceased.

Wirtz immediately fell asleep. A minute later, footsteps were heard: it was the executioner leading the criminal. He was placed on the scaffold under the ax of the guillotine. Then Wirtz, shuddering, began to beg to be woken up, since the horror he was experiencing was unbearable. But it's' too late. The ax falls. “What do you feel, what do you see?” - asks the doctor. Wirtz convulses and responds with a groan: “Lightning strike! Oh, terrible! She thinks, she sees...” - “Who thinks, who sees?” - “The head... She suffers terribly... She feels, thinks, she does not understand what happened... She is looking for her body... It seems to her that the body will come for her... She is waiting for the final blow - death, but death does not come...”

While Wirtz uttered those terrible words, witnesses to this scene looked at the head of the executed man with hanging hair, clenched eyes and mouth. The arteries were still pulsating where the ax had cut them. A stream of blood flooded his face. Wirtz continued to scream in a hypnotic sleep: “Some hand is crushing me! A huge, inexorable hand... Oh, this weight will strangle me! A red cloud obscures my eyes... But I will still free myself from this damned hand... In vain, I am not able to push it away... What is this? Am I bleeding? I am a severed head..."

The doctor kept asking, “What do you see, where are you?” - “I’m flying away into immeasurable space... Am I really dead? Is it really over? Oh, that I could unite with my body! People, have mercy on me, give me my body! Then I will live... I still think, I feel, I remember everything... My unfortunate wife, my poor child! No, no, you don’t love me anymore, you are leaving me... If you wanted to unite me with the body, I could still live among you... No, you don’t want to... Still, I love you, my poor, dear ones! Let me hug you. How, my child, do you scream in horror? Oh, I’m unfortunate, I drenched your little hands in blood! When will this end? Is the sinner condemned to eternal torment?

At these words of Wirtz, it seemed to those present that the eyes of the executed man opened and looked at them with an expression of inexpressible torment and fiery supplication. The artist continued: “No, no! Suffering cannot continue forever. The Lord is merciful... Everything earthly leaves my eyes... In the distance I see a star, shining like a diamond... Oh, how good it must be up there! Some kind of wave covers my entire being. How soundly I’ll sleep now... Oh, what bliss!..”

These were last words hypnotic Now he was fast asleep and no longer answered the doctor’s questions. Doctor D. went up to the head of the executed man and felt his forehead, temples, teeth... Everything was cold as ice, the head was dead.”

It is quite possible that A. Belyaev knew other stories about severed heads. For example, about the story that Alexander Dumas the father told in his diary. Dumas visited not only theaters, he also attended other spectacles for the people - public executions, which in early XIX there were plenty of centuries in France. Once, during the execution of an aristocratic girl, Dumas was in the front row of Parisian onlookers. When the execution was completed, the executioner, according to tradition, showed the severed head of the girl to the people. Dumas thought that the lips of the head began to move, as if she was trying to say something. To his horror, it also seemed to Dumas that the open eyes of the head stared straight into his eyes for a while, and then closed. The writer thought that he had imagined it. The severed head of the girl haunted him for several days, and at night he had nightmares. Finally, Dumas arranged a meeting with a professional executioner. And this is what the executioner told the writer:

“All executioners know very well that after cutting off heads live for another half hour: they chew the bottom of the basket into which we throw them so much that this basket has to be changed at least once a month.”

On June 25, 1905, in Paris at four o'clock in the morning, bandit Arnie Langville was executed in front of a large crowd of people. The press did not fail to inform readers in detail of this execution, which turned into a loud sensation. Here is just a small excerpt from one newspaper story:

“...The assistant executioner took the suicide bomber by the hand and pushed him towards the guillotine. It seemed that Langville's whole body was resisting this, but he quickly lay down on the block. Several seconds passed. Executioner Deibler then approached the car. He turned on the mechanism, the blade flashed, a dull thud was heard, a stream of blood shot upward, and the severed head fell into the basket. The headless corpse was thrown to the right, and it collapsed into a crude coffin filled with sawdust.

As soon as Langville's head fell into the basket, Dr. Buret, with the permission of the public overseer of the execution, raised it, wishing to conduct a most amazing experiment. Holding the severed head in his hands and looking into the absolutely lifeless face of the bandit, the doctor loudly called: “Langville! Langville!

Slowly, but extremely clearly for everyone around him, the dead man's eyelids opened slightly, and it became noticeable that his eyes were still full of life. He looked at the doctor's face for a long time, and then his eyelids closed. "Langville!" - Buret called for the second time. And again the dead man’s eyelids opened, and the head, separated from the body, sent its farewell glance. When the deceased was called out for the third time, his eyelids remained motionless, and some even claimed that they closed even more tightly.

The entire experiment lasted about thirty seconds. But the doctors who were next to the guillotine insist that glimpses of life in the severed head were observed for no more than ten seconds.”

British Major Cleve Smedley described such an incident in his memoirs. In the autumn of 1916 he took part in the Battle of the Somme. One day, during a lull, the major was standing in a trench with Lieutenant Steve Merges; officers examined the German positions. As the lieutenant turned to Smedley to tell him something, a shell exploded behind the trench. A shell fragment, like a knife, cut off the lieutenant's head at the very shoulders; the head fell on the parapet of the trench, just in front of Cleve Smedley. Shocked by what he saw, the major read horror in the eyes of his head, and his lips silently moved in a silent scream.

It is possible that A. Belyaev could have read the chapter “Life after cutting off the head” in the collection “From the Realm of the Mysterious,” compiled by priest-master Grigory Dyachenko in 1900. It stated:

“It has already been said several times that a person, when his head is cut off, does not immediately stop living, but that his brain continues to think and his muscles move until, finally, the blood circulation stops completely and he dies completely...”

EXPERIMENTS WITH CUT-OFF HEADS

Even if A. Belyaev received information about severed heads only from the Niva magazine, he knew that a head, separated from the body, lives for some, even a very short, time. The science fiction writer only had to extend her life by supplying her head with a special nutrient solution containing oxygen. A. Belyaev could not help but know about the unique experiments of the physiologist A.A. Kulyabko with a fish head; experiments were carried out in 1902. Kulyabko passed a blood substitute into the severed head of the fish through the blood vessels - the head of the fish opened and closed its mouth, moved its eyes and fins. The science fiction writer might not have known about the experiments with the severed head of a man by the French surgeon Jean Labordea; experiments were carried out in the 40s of the 19th century. The experiments ended in failure: the head connected to the circulatory system, although it lived for several minutes, did not respond to external stimuli. It is assumed that the brain was already partially destroyed before the experiment began.

There is also a version that “The Head of Professor Dowell” is largely autobiographical. From 1917 to 1921, A. Belyaev spent almost immobility, his life took place within the confines of his bed. The writer suffered from bone tuberculosis, his body, like a butterfly pupa, was imprisoned in a plaster shell, only one head remained mobile. A. Belyaev had more than enough time to feel and realize all the doom and helplessness of a person whose only head remained functional. Therefore, a prisoner of this serious illness often experienced terrible sensations due to the inability to subordinate his helpless body to the will of his brain, A. Belyaev experienced not only physical suffering, and in yet to a greater extent soulful.

Life shows that many predictions and fantastic projects, even the most incredible ones, dreamed up by the rich imagination of science fiction writers, have already been realized. It can be assumed that the hour is not far off when a single human head will live independently for a relatively long time, and the brain will think. Everything is heading towards this, although according to the overwhelming majority of people this is orally and cruelly.

Only three years have passed since the publication of A. Belyaev’s book “The Head of Professor Dowell,” and Soviet physiologists S.S. Bryukhonenko and S.I. Chechulin has already been demonstrated live dog head connected to a heart-lung machine. The severed head behaved quite actively. When a piece of sausage was placed in the head’s mouth, it licked its lips. And when a cotton swab soaked in acid was placed on the tongue, the head showed obvious signs negative reaction,” she tried to push out the tampon. The head showed a blinking reaction when air was directed into its eyes.

Professor V.P. Demikhov was convinced that it was quite possible to keep a severed head alive.

In 1954 V.P. Demikhov carried out a completely fantastic scientific experiment: he transplanted a second head to a dog. The two-headed dog walked, ate, drank milk from a container and even bit. This unique dog lived for about two months. In 1959, Demikhov conducted a series of experiments with cut off dog heads; the heads lived for some time. But the Central Committee of the CPSU considered his experiments cruel, extremely merciless towards animals; the professor was forbidden to conduct this kind of experiment. Only a few scientists have experimented with V.P. Demikhov was considered a miracle of surgical technology.

HEAD TRANSPLANT

Similar experiments were carried out in other countries, for example, in the USA. The press reported that the American neurosurgeon, Professor Robert White, conducted a series of experiments with animals in 1973. It was not dogs who suffered for science there, but rhesus monkeys. For the experiments, we took monkeys of approximately the same age and weight. In the operating room, R. White separated the monkey's head from the body in such a way that the connection between the head and the body was maintained by two arteries and two veins; this complex operation lasted eight hours.

At the same time, in another operating room, a similar operation was carried out on a second monkey, which, according to the professor’s plan, should receive the head of the first monkey. The most responsible in this complex operation was connecting the head to the body of another monkey - no more than four minutes were allotted for everything in order to avoid irreversible processes in the separated head. The head transplant was successful, and the next three operations were also performed successfully. The heads, transplanted onto someone else's body, responded to light, sounds, and smells. They followed people with their eyes, closed their eyes when a bright light shone, and even opened their mouths when they saw bananas in the hands of the experimenters. It goes without saying that the monkey's body was paralyzed because not a single signal sent from the brain reached the spinal cord - the body itself continued to live.

However, there is already a known case when doctors managed to maintain life in a single head for as long as 20 days. In the mid-80s, a severely mutilated woman was delivered to one of the German clinics. car accident the body of a 40-year-old man; his head was not damaged, but it was almost torn off from his body and was held together only by a few veins. The doctors admitted that they were powerless to save the person. Neurosurgeons Walter Kreiter and Henry Courage immediately amputated the head and connected it to a heart-lung machine, hoping that some suitable male body would be found for this head. The doctors even managed to establish contact with the head, but the head could not speak, since it had no throat. But by the movement of the lips of the head, the doctors were able to “read” many words, from which it turned out that the head represented the tragedy of its situation.

A similar incident occurred in the USA, but it ended happily for the victim. This accident occurred on April 26, 1989 in Glaydale, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix (USA). Ten-year-old Timothy Mathias was riding his bicycle when he crashed into a truck. The boy's head was almost torn off; she was connected to the body by intact neck muscles and tendons. Fortunately, the spinal cord was not damaged. Timothy was taken to the hospital in a comatose state. Before the operation, doctors told the boy’s mother that the chances of survival were very small, no more than 5%, and if he survived, he would be doomed to a wheelchair.

The operation was carried out by surgeon Volker Sonitag, and it was carried out brilliantly: the boy’s head was sewn to the body, the head was connected to the spine with metal staples. The entire operation lasted five hours. After the operation, Timothy was in a deep coma for eight days; consciousness returned to him after three weeks. By this time, the doctors were no longer worried about the boy’s head; they were most worried about their patient’s broken leg. Fortunately, the doctors' predictions did not come true: in June Timothy took his first independent step.

At the age of seventeen, Timothy was not much different from his peers, and only the very observant could notice that when Timothy turned his head, he simultaneously, barely noticeably, turned his shoulders. Although Timothy almost lost his head, this did not affect his mental abilities at all: high school he finished with "four" and "five".

At the end of 2002, neurosurgeons at the Phoenix Neurological Institute in Arizona conducted a unique and completed complete success operation: they sewed back the head of a certain Marcos, who was almost torn off in a car accident. This tragedy occurred due to the fact that a car driven by a drunk driver crashed into the victim’s car at high speed.

In 1998, a similar complexity operation was performed by a team of resuscitators at a military hospital Black Sea Fleet Sevastopol; The operation was led by chief surgeon E. Chikin. Their patient was 36-year-old captain of the third rank Igor Kuprin, whose head was almost cut off by glass during a car accident, and it was only held on by his spine. After two weeks, the doctors’ worries passed, and a barely noticeable scar remained on the victim’s neck.

In January 1998, an accident occurred with a 24-year-old resident of Yekaterinburg, Yuri Artamonov: a rotating grinding wheel fell off and hit him in the neck. As a result of the blow, the esophagus was broken, the larynx was crushed, and the pharynx and trachea were cut. Fortunately, the victim’s spine and carotid artery remained intact. Ekaterinburg microsurgeons “sewed” the head back into place and saved the young man’s life.

In 1997, an English neurosurgeon from Bristol, Steve Gill, was the first in the world to perform a unique operation during which a woman’s head was separated from the cervical vertebra. S. Gill's patient was 36-year-old Bridget Fergel. Fate was unkind to this woman. First, the woman’s cervical vertebrae became fused due to a severe form of spondylosis. In addition to this misfortune, a new one was added: the woman fell and broke her neck. For four years, Bridget could not turn her head, and her head was constantly tilted down and slightly turned to the right.

Doctors believed that the woman was inoperable, but S. Gill refuted the conclusion of his colleagues. The operation lasted 17 hours. A wedge was driven between the base of the skull and the upper cervical vertebra, with the help of which the head was separated from the body; it was connected to the body by the spinal cord, large blood vessels and skin under the chin. The head was then returned to its place and secured with a steel plate and two screws.

Meanwhile, the above-mentioned Robert White did not want to stop at experiments on monkeys; his dream does not leave him of carrying out an operation to transplant the head of a paralyzed person or terminally cancer patient onto the body of a “headless” one, but healthy person, and thus give a doomed person a chance to prolong his life. “Why,” the professor asks, “won’t such unfortunate people as “Superman” Christopher Reeve or astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, whose flesh quickly deteriorates due to paralysis, not save their heads by transplanting them onto other bodies that otherwise will they be needed by anyone else and will they be buried?”

This will require a donor’s body, in which there is still life and blood circulating before the transplant, although this person has already been declared dead due to cessation of brain activity. Most likely, a candidate for the role of a donor will be a patient who has no chance of emerging from a coma, who is unable to breathe on his own, and whose brain stem shows no signs of activity.

The press reported that Robert was thoroughly preparing for the upcoming operation, the like of which humanity had never known. He planned to carry out this operation in Kyiv in 1998, since carrying out such an operation in the United States would meet fierce resistance “for religious and philosophical reasons.” The professor was afraid that his life would simply not be enough to obtain permission to transplant a human head. From personal experience he knew that White had spent years getting permission to experiment with monkeys, writing up mountains of paperwork and enduring battles with animal rights activists. Besides, White was in a hurry. He was once the youngest professor among American neurosurgeons, and when he made the announcement about human head transplants, he was already 71 years old.

The operation in Kyiv would have cost White less than in the USA. According to his most conservative estimates, a human head transplant in the USA, together with the preparatory stage - experiments with monkeys, training a team of doctors - would cost him a tidy sum, about 2 million dollars.

White was confident in the success of his operation, but he also knew that the human montage would be doomed to immobility, since it was not yet possible to connect the dissected spinal cord. True, the professor had hopes that in ten years neurosurgeons would develop a technique for connecting spinal cord fibers. In 1998, a report appeared on the encouraging experiments of Professor Schwab from the University of Zurich, who managed to regenerate nerve processes and fusion of cut nerve fibers of the spinal cord in rats - paralyzed rats regained mobility.

Probably something went wrong somewhere with Robert White; The 21st century has already arrived, and his idea of ​​​​a human head transplant has never come true...

Decapitation in Europe

The tradition of beheading has deep roots in the history and culture of many peoples. So, for example, in one of the biblical deuterocanonical books it is narrated famous story Judith, a beautiful Jewish woman, who deceived herself into the camp of the Assyrians who were besieging her hometown and, having gained the confidence of the enemy commander Holofernes, cut off his head at night.

In the largest European states, decapitation was considered one of the noblest types of executions. The ancient Romans used it on their citizens because the beheading process is quick and less painful than crucifixion, which was carried out on criminals without Roman citizenship.

In Medieval Europe, beheading also enjoyed special honor. Only nobles had their heads cut off; peasants and artisans were hanged and drowned.

Only in the 20th century was decapitation recognized by Western civilization as inhumane and barbaric. Currently, beheading as capital punishment is used only in the countries of the Middle East: Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Iran.

Judith and Holofernes

History of the guillotine

Heads were usually cut off with axes and swords. Moreover, if in some countries, for example, in Saudi Arabia, executioners always underwent special training, then in the Middle Ages ordinary guards or artisans were often used to carry out the sentence. As a result, in many cases it was not possible to cut off the head the first time, which led to terrible torture for the condemned and indignation of the crowd of onlookers.

Therefore in late XVIII century, the guillotine was first introduced as an alternative and more humane instrument of execution. Contrary to popular belief, this instrument did not get its name in honor of its inventor, surgeon Antoun Louis.

The godfather of the death machine was Joseph Ignace Guillotin, a professor of anatomy, who first proposed using a mechanism for decapitation, which, in his opinion, would not cause additional pain to the condemned.

The first sentence using a terrible novelty was carried out in 1792 in post-revolutionary France. The guillotine made it possible to actually turn human deaths into a real conveyor belt; thanks to her, in just one year, Jacobin executioners executed more than 30,000 French citizens, inflicting real terror on their people.

However, a couple of years later, the beheading machine gave a ceremonial reception to the Jacobins themselves, amid the joyful shouts and hooting of the crowd. France used the guillotine as capital punishment until 1977, when the last head was cut off on European soil.

The guillotine was used in Europe until 1977

©thechirurgeonsapprentice.com

But what happens during decapitation from a physiological point of view?

As you know, the cardiovascular system, through blood arteries, delivers oxygen and other necessary substances to the brain, which are necessary for its normal functioning. Decapitation interrupts the closed circulatory system and blood pressure drops rapidly, depriving the brain of fresh blood flow. Suddenly deprived of oxygen, the brain quickly stops functioning.

The time during which the head of the executed person can remain conscious depends largely on the method of execution. If an inept executioner needed several blows to separate the head from the body, blood flowed from the arteries even before the end of the execution - the severed head was already long dead.

Head of Charlotte Corday

But the guillotine was an ideal instrument of death; its knife cut the criminal’s neck with lightning speed and very accurately. In post-revolutionary France, where executions took place in public, the executioner often raised a head that had fallen into a basket of bran and mockingly showed it to a crowd of onlookers.

For example, in 1793, after the execution of Charlotte Corday, who stabbed to death one of the leaders of the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat, according to eyewitnesses, the executioner, taking the severed head by the hair, mockingly whipped her across the cheeks. To the great amazement of the spectators, Charlotte's face turned red and her features twisted into a grimace of indignation.

Thus, the first documentary report of eyewitnesses was compiled that a person’s head severed by a guillotine was capable of retaining consciousness. But far from the last.

The scene of the murder of Marat by Charlotte Corday

©culture.gouv.fr

What explains the grimaces on the face?

The debate about whether the human brain is able to continue to think after beheading has continued for many decades. Some believed that the grimaces that made the faces of those executed were explained by ordinary spasms of the muscles that controlled the movements of the lips and eyes. Similar spasms were often observed in other severed human limbs.

The difference is that, unlike the arms and legs, the head contains the brain, a thinking center that can consciously control muscle movements. When the head is cut off, in principle, no trauma is caused to the brain, so it is able to function until a lack of oxygen leads to loss of consciousness and death.

Severed head

There are many known cases where, after cutting off the head, the body of a chicken continued to move around the yard for several seconds. Dutch researchers conducted studies on rats; they lived for another full 4 seconds after decapitation.

Testimonies of doctors and eyewitnesses

The idea of ​​what a severed human head might experience while remaining fully conscious is, of course, terrifying. A US Army veteran who was involved in a car accident with a friend in 1989 described the face of his comrade, whose head was torn off: “At first it expressed shock, then horror, and finally fear gave way to sadness...”

According to eyewitnesses, the English King Charles I and Queen Anne Boleyn moved their lips after their execution at the hands of the executioner, trying to say something.

Categorically opposing the use of the guillotine, the German scientist Sommering referred to numerous records from doctors that the faces of those executed were distorted in pain when the doctors touched the cut of the spinal canal with their fingers.

The most famous of this kind of evidence comes from the pen of Dr. Borieux, who examined the head of the executed criminal Henri Langille. The doctor writes that within 25-30 seconds after decapitation, he called Langille by name twice, and each time he opened his eyes and fixed his gaze on Borjo.

Mechanism for execution death penalty by cutting off the head

©Flickr/Paint.It.Black

Conclusion

Eyewitness accounts, as well as a number of experiments on animals, prove that after decapitation a person can remain conscious for several seconds; he is able to hear, look and react.

Fortunately, such information may still be useful only to researchers from some Arab countries, where decapitation is still popular as a legal capital punishment.

Death penalty [History and types of capital punishment from the beginning of time to the present day] Monestier Martin

Decapitation

Decapitation

Nicholas of Myra spares three innocent convicts from the death penalty. Painting by Ilya Repin. 1888 D.R.

Decapitation involves cutting the neck, that is, separating the head from the body. Cutting off a part of the body is essentially just self-mutilation, but the significance of the cut off organ is such that the mutilation leads to immediate death.

From the point of view of the variety and cruelty of methods of punishment, beheading has always been considered a “simple execution”. It existed in Asia and the East long before the Christian era. It can even be argued that this method arose back in Bronze Age simultaneously with the advent of edged weapons. Courts in ancient times imposed sentences of beheading when the crime was not punishable by burning, strangulation or stoning. One of the bas-reliefs that has reached us indicates that beheading was already known in Egypt under Ramses II.

Headless child. China. 1943 Photo "Keystone".

According to Jewish Deuteronomy (the fifth book of the Pentateuch, a summary of the Law of God), certain types of crimes were punished by beheading.

When the ruler of Judea, Herod Antipas, promised his niece Salome, the daughter of the tetrarch of Galilee Herod Philip, any reward for a dance and she demanded the head of St. John the Baptist from him, he was beheaded according to the regulations in force in the kingdom.

In Rome, “death by iron” almost immediately became the prerogative of the aristocracy. Christians were usually given over to predators or crucified, with the exception of Roman citizens, who were beheaded.

Thus, Cecilia, who was later canonized, and her husband Valer were from noble patrician families, and their heads were cut off. The inept lictor could not cut off Cecilia's head three times. The law prohibited more than three blows, and the executioner left her to bleed. The young woman died for three days.

The Roman patrician Saint Felicia raised seven sons in the Christian faith. She was reported, refused to recant and was sentenced to death along with all her children: three, like herself, were beheaded.

Another famous example is the story of the holy martyrs brothers John and Paul, who served as guards at the court of Constantia, daughter of Emperor Constantine. When Julian the Apostate ascended the throne, they retired. They were condemned to death for their Christian faith, but they were Roman citizens and demanded that the trial take place in Rome. Both were beheaded at night: the emperor was afraid that a public execution would cause unrest in Rome.

The Romans cut off the heads of captured soldiers of enemy armies. Engraving. XVIII century Private count

Saint Placidus, Saint Lucia, Saint Christophe and dozens of other Christian martyrs were beheaded.

Daniel-Rops, in his History of the Christian Church, quoting an ancient author, tells how one day the number of “righteous”, that is, Christians, whose throats were to be cut, terrified the executioner, who feared that his hand and sword might not withstand. The executioner lined up the martyrs “to cut off the heads of the victims one by one in a furious rush. He came up with this system so as not to pause in his bloody work, because if he struck without moving, the accumulation of corpses would become a hindrance to him.”

During the reign of Christian emperors, beheading began to be used more often, replacing the crucifixion left in memory of the torment of Christ.

Some “cut-offs” went down in history with their adherence to this type of execution. Thus, Charlemagne, “converting” the Saxons, beheaded more than four thousand people at Verdun.

Richard the Lionheart beheaded two and a half thousand Muslims in the Holy Land on the pretext that the ransom was not paid quickly enough.

In 1698, Peter I ordered the beheading of several hundred rebel archers. He and his associates personally executed dozens of people.

In France, the Duke of Guise, who had captured almost all of Godefroy de La Renaudie's supporters, ordered the beheading of several dozen Protestants in Amboise.

But the “palm of primacy,” so to speak, belongs to the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, the builder of the Great Wall, who in 234 BC ordered the beheading of one hundred thousand heads in order to strengthen his power.

The practice of beheading also existed in Africa. In the 19th century, a certain Echard, quoted by Roland Villeneuve, was invited to the coronation of King Beganzin in Dahomey and left detailed description action: “I was seated on a high platform, opposite which rows of human heads were laid out. All the ground in the square was soaked in blood. These were the heads of prisoners, on which the shoulder masters practiced to their hearts' content... The matter did not end there! They brought twenty-four large baskets, each containing a living person. The baskets were placed in front of the king, and then, one after another, they were thrown from the platform down into the square, where the bloodthirsty crowd danced, sang and screamed... Any Dahomean who was lucky enough to grab the victim and cut off her head could immediately exchange it for a bunch of shells... In the end Three more groups of prisoners were brought in during the ceremony: their heads were cut off with serrated knives to prolong the torment.”

Seven hundred executions a year

Let us remember that edged weapons were used not only for quickly and completely cutting off the neck. In the East and Asia, mainly in India, China and Persia, it was used for death torture.

The person was first inflicted with rather deep wounds or “cut” in the neck, and was killed by slowly sawing off the head with a sword. The sharp blade made countless back-and-forth movements, gradually sinking into the flesh under the weight of its own weight.

Execution of Count Egmont. Often one blow was not enough. Engraving by Berger. Private count

In Europe, beheading was never torture and was carried out in approximately the same way. All European chronicles contain numerous descriptions of such executions.

In England, Russia and numerous German principalities, heads were chopped off with an axe, in France, Italy, and Spain - with a sword. The Arabs preferred the saber. In general, we can say that the northern countries preferred the axe, the Latin countries preferred the sword.

In England, during the reign of Henry VIII, there were more than seven hundred executions a year, two thirds were carried out with an axe. The monarch himself did not hesitate to send two of his six wives to the chopping block - Anne Boleyn and Katherine Howard.

In 1554, on the orders of Mary Tudor, the heads of seventeen-year-old Princess Jane Grey, her husband and father were cut off with an ax. In 1587, an ax took the life of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots, who was beheaded in prison on the orders of her cousin Elizabeth I. And again, in 1649, Charles I Stuart was executed with an ax in the square in front of Wyathall.

The soul is not in the mood for work

The execution of James of Scotland, Duke of Monmouth, in 1685 on Towerhill was horrific. “With the first blow, the executioner only wounded the legitimate son of Charles II. Monmouth raised his head and looked reproachfully at the executioner John Ketch. He struck three times in a row, but the convulsively beating head could not be separated from the body. Shouts rang out from the crowd. The executioner swore and threw the ax with the words: “The heart does not lie.” The sheriff ordered him to continue. The crowd threatened to climb the scaffold and deal with Ketch. He raised the ax and struck two more blows, but this was not enough. He had to use a knife to finally separate the Duke’s head.”

By the beginning of the 18th century, beheading in Great Britain gradually gave way to hanging. In Russia, beheading was abolished by Catherine the Great, and in Germany, in the Rhineland, the ax was used at the beginning of the 19th century. It was returned to use under the Third Reich - the Nazis used it along with the guillotine and hanging. It was with an ax that Van Der Lubbe, accused of setting fire to the Reichstag, was executed. Until 1945, hundreds of convicts were executed using this ancient method.

In Malin (the territory of modern Belgium), according to archival documents, between 1370 and 1390, out of six hundred and seventy-five executions, two hundred and seventy-seven were carried out with an ax.

In France, the ax was also used, but, as in Italy, they quickly drew a line between an ax and a sword. The condemned nobles were gradually freed from the ax used to execute commoners, giving them the right to die by the sword, a noble weapon. Over time, beheading, to which people from all walks of life were initially sentenced, became the privilege of the nobility, the ax finally became a thing of the past, and commoners began to be sent to the gallows or on the wheel.

As a result, decapitation was used less and less, and at the beginning of the 18th century, the custom, intended to inspire horror, disappeared when the executioner cut the headless body into four parts, which were hung at the main gate, while the head was placed on a pole at the place of execution.

To accept death not by a blade, but by any other means was considered humiliating in Europe. Brantôme writes that Francis I, dissatisfied with the behavior of some courtiers, promised to “ruthlessly” hang those who dishonored the ladies.

The Horn case also demonstrates the “nobility” of beheading. Count Henri de Horn, grandson of the Prince de Ligne and cousin of the regent, lured a stock exchange gambler into a trap under the pretext of buying shares worth one hundred thousand ecus. Horne and an accomplice killed and robbed this man. They were arrested. When the murder was proven, the embarrassed judges decided to consult the regent, but he declared: “Let justice be done.” The fact that the murdered man was a Jew, in the count's opinion, justified him. The judges were convinced that the regent would have mercy on his relative, and sentenced both of them to the wheel: this is how they were executed for such crimes back then. The families of the convicts quickly realized that they should not count on pardon, and demanded at least a sentence of beheading, since wheeling was considered the most shameful execution and dishonor would fall on the families and even on the regent himself, because he was also connected with Count Horne. The Regent countered with a quote from Corneille: “It is the crime that is shameful, not the scaffold.”

Decapitation with a saber. Painting by Regnault. D.R.

Two priceless heads

Love forced two noble ladies - the Duchess of Nevers and Margarita Valois - to commit a very strange act.

The lover of the first was a native of Piedmont, Count Annibal Kokonas, the second was Sir de Lamole.

Both distinguished themselves with regrettable zeal in St. Bartholomew's Night and entered the service of the Duke of Alençon, younger brother Charles IX. They entered into a conspiracy to kill the king - he was very ill and soon died - so that the crown would go to the duke, and not to his brother Henry III, who had recently become king of Poland.

The plot was discovered, Kokonas and Lamol were brought to the scaffold in April 1574. The Duchess of Nevers and Margaret of Valois received the heads of their lovers after the execution and ordered them to be embalmed in order to preserve them. Alexandre Dumas the father made these women the heroines of “Queen Margot,” and Stendhal recalled the episode of embalming heads in the novel “The Red and the Black.”

The success of the beheading procedure depended only on the performer. It was all about dexterity: the head could fly off the first time, but if necessary, several blows were delivered. The executioner's sword was heavy, with a long, wide, pointed blade. This sword was held with both hands. To operate such a weapon, the executioner required remarkable strength.

The executioner spun the sword over his head to give greater force to the blow, and brought it down on the neck of the condemned man. Decapitating a person is not so easy, because the neck is much stronger than it seems at first glance. Numerous reports of executions indicate that the executioner's sword often suffered during the procedure. Thus, in a document dated 1476, it is reported that the Parisian executioner was allocated sixty sous for “the restoration of the old sword, which was jagged during the execution of justice over Messire Louis of Luxembourg,” beheaded by order of Louis XI. In 1792, a Parisian executioner reminds the minister that “after execution, the sword becomes unsuitable for the next procedure, because it becomes memorized. It is absolutely necessary to re-process and sharpen it when it is necessary to execute several convicts at once. It should also be noted that during such executions, swords often break.”

Beheading of Marshal Biron. Engraving. Private count

As for beheading with an ax, the procedure is carried out as follows: the condemned person places his head on the block, and the executioner delivers a strong blow to the neck. When executed with a sword, the task remains the same - separating the head from the body, but there are several different techniques.

Method one: as with beheading with an ax, the convict kneels with his hands tied behind his back and places his head on a wooden block. In some cases, the convicted person was allowed to remain with his hands free. This was the case, for example, with Messrs. de Thou and Saint-Mars.

Method two: the condemned person kneels or squats, bowing his head on his chest so as to expose his neck to the executioner. In this case, the convict's hands were usually tied in front.

The third method is execution in full height. The rarest and most difficult method of decapitation, risky both for the executioner, who in this position is more difficult to strike, and for the condemned: if the executioner unsuccessfully struck, he could hit not the neck, but the head or shoulder.

Decapitation "while standing" required considerable skill from the executioner. This method was used mainly in China: this way they executed those who had the good fortune to meet the emperor, while ordinary convicts were forced to their knees during beheading.

Standing beheadings were also used in several Gulf states and were traditional in Yemen. In 1962, in the main square of Taiz, two convicts convicted of the assassination attempt on Imam Mansur were publicly beheaded in this manner.

Miraculously surviving on the chopping block

An archival document from the Côte d'Or department, published in Dijon in 1889 and signed by Clement Janin, describes a case - perhaps the only one in history - in which the executioner's clumsiness led to the pardon of a condemned man, a noblewoman named Hélène Gillet, who had been sentenced to beheading for infanticide. When a huge crowd gathered, the executioner Simon Grandjean, who was much more accustomed to wheeling and hanging than to beheading, was unable to kill the unfortunate woman. “Amidst the crowd's boos, which grew stronger, he struck several blows in a row, seriously wounding a twenty-two-year-old girl. The crowd became increasingly incensed, the executioner threw down his sword and ran away, hiding in a small chapel at the foot of the scaffold. His wife and assistant wanted to complete the execution. She tried to strangle the condemned woman with a rope under a hail of stones that flew from the raging crowd. Having failed to kill the victim, the female executioner took the scissors that she had brought to cut off the condemned woman’s hair and tried to cut her throat with them. She didn’t succeed in that either, and then she poked them several times into the victim’s body.” Outraged spectators rushed to the scaffold and grabbed married couple executioners and tore them to pieces. Helen Gillet, no matter how incredible it may seem, was saved by surgeons. Louis XIII miraculously pardoned the surviving woman, and she ended her days in the monastery of Bourg-en-Bres.

In France, judicial history knows of isolated cases of beheadings while standing. The most famous of them is the execution of the Chevalier de la Barra. According to some sources, he allegedly did not bow before the church procession, according to others, he violated the crucifix; be that as it may, the nineteen-year-old nobleman was sentenced to be burned for “godlessness, blasphemy, disgusting and terrible sacrilege.”

He wanted to die standing...

Taking into account age and noble origin, the fire was replaced by beheading. The sentence was carried out in Abbeville in 1766. After five hours of torture, the condemned man was led to the scaffold, and a tablet was hung around his neck, on which his crime was indicated. As the procession passed the church, de la Barre refused to kneel and publicly repent. On the scaffold, he ran his finger along the blade of his sword and asked the executioner to “show his skill, since suffering frightened him more than death itself.” He was blindfolded. Usually, the person sentenced to beheading was allowed to choose whether to be blindfolded or not. However, in cases of “shameful aggravation of punishment” this was specifically stipulated by the sentence. It was the same this time.

When the executioner ordered him to kneel, he rebelled: “Oh no! I am not a criminal and I will accept death standing.”

The young inexperienced executioner realized that the argument would only take away his strength. He struck with such force and accuracy that the head, as stated in the chronicle, “rested on the shoulders for a few more seconds and fell only when the body collapsed.”

The wits wrote several couplets and pamphlets about the executioner’s skill, which reached all the way to Paris. They were about an impatient victim, to whom the executioner answered: “Ready, monsieur, shake yourself!”

The success of the execution depended not only on the skill of the executioner, but also on the goodwill of the condemned. Let us recall the concerns expressed by the executioner Sanson when, in 1792, the National Assembly decreed that beheading be applied to all condemned persons. Sanson responded with a famous letter, expressing his concern in no uncertain terms:

“In order for an execution to be carried out as prescribed by law, not only the obedience and firmness of the condemned person are necessary, but also the skill of the executioner, otherwise dangerous complications cannot be avoided. It is also important to take into account that in the event of the simultaneous execution of several convicts, there will be too much blood, which can instill fear and trepidation in the souls of even the most courageous of those who will await their death hour... If the convicts lose their fortitude, then the execution can turn into a battle and mass slaughter... How to cope with a person who does not want or cannot control himself?”

In fact, it is almost impossible to behead a condemned person who does not obey the executioner with an ax or sword. Marshal Biron, executed as a conspirator, refused to believe until the scaffold that the king wanted his death. To behead Biron, the executioner struck unexpectedly while he was praying.

Executioners' tips

The executioners almost always managed to separate the head from the body with the first blow. The public highly appreciated such skill.

An example of an exemplary beheading is the execution of Beaulieu de Montigny, carried out in July 1737 by the executioner Prudhomme. With one blow, the executioner cut off the condemned man's head and showed it to the people from all sides, after which he laid it on the ground and began to bow to the public, like an actor. “The crowd applauded his dexterity for a long time,” the chronicle testifies.

Chinese executioners were often praised for their incredible dexterity with the saber. This reputation is confirmed by the French military attaché, who worked in China between the world wars and left a description of the public beheading of fifteen convicts.

Turkish soldiers cut off the heads of Macedonian nationalists. 1903 Photograph. Private count

“The convicts stand on their knees, in two rows, with their hands tied behind their backs. In front of each condemned person, the executioner waves his saber and strikes. The head freezes as if in indecision, and then rolls on the ground. Blood flows like a fountain from the severed arteries, and the body suddenly goes limp and slowly settles into a pool of blood. Only one convict was not immediately beheaded. His head rolled off his shoulders only after the fifth blow, the victim screamed terribly.” According to the military attaché, this happened because the convict did not pay a “tip” to the executioner.

Usually the executioners demonstrated the proper skill, and yet court chronicles are replete with descriptions of unimaginable horrors caused not by the professional dishonesty of the perpetrators, but by their monstrous ineptitude. Thus, Henri de Talleyrand, Count of Chalet, accused of conspiracy and executed in Nantes in 1626, received thirty-two blows with a sword. The spectators, frozen in horror, heard the condemned man shouting “Jesus Mary” even at the twentieth stroke.

Beheading in China. 1938 The head, blown off with one blow, will now roll on the ground. Col. Monestier.

Let's be fair to the executioner guild: at that time the executor was a soldier sentenced to the gallows, who saved his life by agreeing to take up the sword of justice - in fact, such swords were in service with the Swiss Guard. With his first blow, this would-be executioner broke the young man’s shoulder, and with the next he barely wounded him. Until the twentieth blow, the brave convict each time took his starting position in the hope of finally receiving a saving blow. He received the last twelve blows while lying down.

An equally terrible massacre occurred in 1642 in Lyon, when Messrs. de Thou and Saint-Mars were beheaded by stevedores: the city was at that time awaiting the appointment of an official executioner. De Thu's head came off with the twelfth blow. The decapitation of Saint-Mars was recorded by the secretary of the Lyon court: “The first blow to the neck came too high, too close to the head; the neck was cut in half, the body fell backwards to the left of the block, facing the sky, the legs were twitching, the arms were moving... The executioner dealt three or four more blows to the throat and finally cut off the head.”

Execution by ax in a Prussian prison. Engraving by Dete. Private count

One of the eyewitnesses testified: “He closed his eyes, pursed his lips and waited for the blow, the executioner struck it slowly and smoothly... Saint-Mars let out a scream, choking on blood. He tried to rise, as if he wanted to stand, but fell again. His head could barely rest on his shoulders. The executioner walked around him to the right, stood behind him and grabbed him by the hair. With his right hand he cut the trachea and the skin on the neck, which could not be cut. Then he threw his head onto the scaffold, it turned slightly and twitched for a long time.” Both testimonies point to the same thing: the executions of Saint-Mars and de Thou were terrible. “Mistakes” were common even for the most dexterous and experienced executioners.

Execution in Asia: the condemned man sits with his head bowed forward, awaiting the blow. Col. Monestier.

The execution of the “Boxers” in front of military representatives of the Western powers. Col. Monestier.

Decapitation with a sword has always been not the most convenient method of execution, because it required not only the skill of the performer, but also the goodwill of the condemned.

Often the people on the scaffold resisted with all the might of despair, but many humbly accepted their fate. Some even exceeded the executioner's expectations.

Thus, Madame Tiquet, a very beautiful woman of twenty-eight years old, the wife of a councilor of the Parisian parliament, suffering from her husband’s endless infidelities, cheated on him herself, and then decided to kill him by conspiring with hired killers. But her plan was discovered, she was arrested, sentenced to death, and two days later she was sent to execution. The procession had almost reached the Place de Greve when the sky suddenly darkened and a downpour began to pour. The condemned woman sat on a cart between the executioner Charles Sanson and the priest. In the blink of an eye, the square was empty, people ran to hide under the awnings of shops and arches of houses. The executioner's assistants and soldiers took refuge under the scaffold and the cart, in which the condemned woman, the executioner and the priest were still sitting in the pouring rain. “Forgive me, madam,” Charles Sanson said to Madame Tique, “but I cannot proceed with the execution, because of the rampant elements the blow will be missed.” She thanked her, and everyone began to wait for the storm to end. An hour has passed. Then the rain finally subsided and the crowd filled the Place de Greve again. Helpers and soldiers came out of their hiding places. "It's time!" - said the executioner. The condemned woman got off the cart to ascend the scaffold.

Execution of the leaders of the Boxer uprising in China. 1901 Photo "Sigma". "Illustration".

According to some accounts, as a sign of “gratitude and humility,” Madame Thiquet kissed Sanson’s hand as he helped her up the steps. The latter turned to his son, who served as his assistant, and whispered: “Take my place.” The young man hesitated for several seconds, but his thoughts were interrupted by the convict’s question:

Gentlemen, please tell me what position should I take?

“Kneel down, hold your head straight and free the back of your head, moving your hair over your face,” answered the old executioner. His son was losing his cool while the condemned woman was in position.

So good? - she asked.

When the young executioner raised the heavy sword and began to spin it in the air, the condemned woman exclaimed:

The main thing is don’t mutilate me!

The first blow cut off her ear and cheek. Blood sprayed and indignant screams were heard from the crowd. The condemned woman fell to the floor and began to thrash all over like a wounded horse. The henchman grabbed her legs to pin her to the ground. Charles Sanson, holding his hair, immobilized his head so that his son could strike again. Only with the third blow did he manage to cut off her head.

One of the most famous “failures” was the execution of Arthur Thomas Lally-Tollendal, the former commander of the French forces in India. He won several victories, but was besieged by the British at Pondicherry and, after stubborn resistance, surrendered. France lost India. Lally-Tollandal was captured and taken to London, where he learned that in his homeland public opinion thirsts for his blood. He asked the British to release him on parole and, proud and angry, arrived in Paris to clear himself of slander.

The judges, showing blatant partiality, sentenced him to death for treason. He was beheaded on the Place de Greve by the executioner Sanson.

Separation from the body

Mistakenly used as a synonym for the expression "cutting off the head." Separation from the body is a surgical operation in which the head is separated from the trunk of the embryo if insurmountable obstacles prevent its removal.

Beheading

This action consists of cutting the neck. The term is not medical, but is used to describe the executions of saints whose heads were cut off.

Decapitation

The action of cutting off a head. The term is used when killing by court order.

Guilloting

Decapitation by guillotine.

Head with one blow

1766 Thirty years earlier, one rainy evening, Lalli-Tollandal and two of his friends asked for shelter in a house to wait out the storm.

This house belonged to Jean-Baptiste Sanson - he was then nineteen years old, and that evening he was giving a ball on the occasion of his marriage.

The young people were returning from a picnic and found it pleasant to spend the evening with a wealthy bourgeois, hoping to have fun at his expense. Late at night, when most of the guests were already saying goodbye to the owner, Lalli-Tollandal said to his friends: “Let's leave, gentlemen, but first we’ll find out who we should thank.”

Display of the heads of the executed.

Jean-Baptiste Sanson was waiting for this moment to take revenge on the uninvited guests for their unceremoniousness and arrogance. “I am the executor of judicial sentences, gentlemen, the master of the shoulder affairs of the Paris Viscountry.” The young people turned pale. Do not forget that in those days executioners were pariahs.

Jean-Baptiste Sanson continued: “My invited guests were my assistants, colleagues from the provinces, inquirers and royal bailiffs. Ladies are their spouses and sisters.”

The silence was interrupted by Lalli-Tollandal: “What an interesting man, maybe he will allow us to look at his torture arsenal,” he challenged. Jean-Baptiste Sanson did not argue with the young revelers who delayed his wedding night. He showed them ropes, blocks, shackles, clubs and a heavy sword.

China. 1925 Photo "Sigma".

Between dogs and people

Decapitation - killing by cutting the bone marrow in the medulla oblongata or just below. Judging by observations made during the execution of criminals and experiments in beheading dogs in late XIX centuries, death occurs for various reasons. In dogs, death was caused not by dissection of the bone marrow or irritation of the nerve centers, but by bleeding and suffocation.

Inhibition caused by effects on the brain leads to death more quickly in humans than by vascular damage. The famous scientist Luayal said that human brain does not have time to perceive pain after cutting the neck. This is why the death masks of beheaded people and dogs are so different. The face of a beheaded man expresses despondency and dispassion, while pain and horror are read on the animal’s face.

On the other hand, experiments on decapitating dogs have proven that in animals it is possible to achieve the same calm expression as in humans if the head is cut off at the level of the medulla oblongata and the respiratory center. Loyal characterized the post-mortem movements of decapitated criminals as reflexes due to loss of sensitivity.

For or against

In France, as elsewhere, public opinion changes depending on current events. The number of supporters of the death penalty always increases after serial crimes.

- 1962: 34% for the death penalty.

- 1964: 51 %.

- 1972: 63 %.

- 1978: 60 %.

- 1979: 55 %.

- 1981: 62 %.

- 1982: 63 %.

- 1984: 65 %.

- 1988: 72 %.

- 1990: 74 %.

Lalli-Tollandal ran his finger along the blade. “With a weapon like that,” he said, “you can be sure to take off your head with one blow.” The executioner boldly replied: “If ever the fate of Monsieur Saint-Mars befalls your grace, then, since I cannot entrust the beheading of a nobleman to my assistants, I give you my word that I will not keep you waiting and I will not need ten attempts.”

The joke made a bad impression on Lally-Tollandal. By the time he achieved high position, Jean-Baptiste Sanson, suffering from paralytic attacks, had already handed over the business to his son Charles and retired to his home in Brie-Comte-Robert.

Having learned about the sentence imposed on the night visitor and Louis XV’s refusal to pardon, Jean-Baptiste Sanson returned to Paris, repeating one single phrase: “I don’t want him to suffer, I promised him.”

“I will be on the scaffold,” he told his son, “and I will give you advice so that he does not suffer.”

The end of history reminds ancient tragedy. Robert Christoff described these events in his History of the Sansons:

“A tragic memory, a terrible set of circumstances, a sad day has come. Arriving at the Place de Grève, Lalli-Tollandal ascended the scaffold, supported by two Sansons, the young Charles-Henri and his father Jean-Baptiste, who was not yet an old man, his illness had made him weak. The muscles lost strength, the legs became weak, and the kidneys hurt. On the scaffold, Lalli-Tollandal stared at Jean-Baptiste Sanson, as if he wanted to tell him: “Remember your promise.” While the servant brought a chair to the executioner, he, rolling up his sleeves, said to the condemned: “At our age, Mr. Count, it is no longer possible to kill, you can only die. “Here is my son,” he added, pointing to Charles-Henri, “he will keep his father’s word.”

Public execution in Jeddah by beheading. The photograph was taken by a European through the shutters. Photo "Gamma".

Countries that practice saber beheading

There are now three countries left in the world where they continue to carry out public beheadings of criminals.

These are Saudi Arabia, Qatar and North Yemen, where executions are also used.

The convict thanked him with a nod of his head. But young Charles-Henri Sanson had never executed a nobleman and did not know how to handle a heavy sword. For two days before his execution, he trained on dummies. For this occasion, the father ordered a stronger and sharper sword to be made than the previous one.

“Now chop!” - the count shouted. Charles-Henri raised his sword and, making three turns in the air, brought it down on the old man's neck. At that moment, his long gray hair was untied, and the blade of the sword slid through it, breaking the condemned man's jaw. Lalli-Tollandal fell, but immediately rose and knelt again. The huge crowd exploded, insults and threats rained down. One of the servants grabbed the condemned man by the ears and ordered the others to saw through the back of his head with a blade jagged from the previous blow.

Charles-Henri Sanson held out his weapon and the inhumane operation began. The sea of ​​people surrounding the scaffold began to swell. The archers stood at the ready.

Then old Jean-Baptiste Sanson, to whom the strength that he considered irretrievably gone had returned, jumped up and ran up to the henchman who was sawing his neck and snatched the sword from him. The sword whistled in his emaciated hands, and the bloody head of Count Lally-Tollandal rolled onto the scaffold. Jean-Baptiste Sanson collapsed next to him, exhausted."

In France, beheading with a sword disappeared after the revolution, when they came up with new way decapitate a person. However, in some German principalities, beheading with an ax was practiced until the first half of the 19th century, and then they again turned to this method under the Third Reich.

Muslim law...

In modern times, three countries still use saber beheadings: Qatar, North Yemen (they also shoot here) and Saudi Arabia. In the latter there is no criminal or procedural code, but Sharia law applies. If a crime is involved that is not described in any of the six classical works of the Hanbali, jurists turn to the texts of other schools of Islamic law.

The law is supplemented by decrees and regulations issued by the king. Saudi Arabia carried out three hundred and eleven public executions between 1981 and 1989. They took place in the main cities of the kingdom: Mecca, Riyadh, Medina, Daman, Khayyal, Tabuk, most often in the square opposite the palace of the provincial governor.

Secret shooting

Sometimes executions are carried out in several cities at the same time. Thus, sixty-three people who attacked the main mosque of Mecca were divided into eight groups and publicly executed on the same day in eight cities of the kingdom.

Let us recall the public execution in Jeddah in 1980 of one of the daughters of King Khaled: she was sentenced to death by stoning for adultery, while at the same time her lover was beheaded with a saber in the same square.

The execution was filmed with a hidden camera and shown on one of the English channels, causing the anger of the royal authorities, so that the English Ministry of Foreign Affairs had to make an official apology. As if Saudi Arabia is not proud of its “saber” justice.

The severed head bit the executioner

There are many different stories about severed heads and decapitated torsos. mystical stories. It is difficult to figure out what is true and what is fiction. At all times, these stories attracted great attention from the public, because everyone mentally understood that his head without a body (and vice versa) would not live long, but I really wanted to believe the opposite... A terrible incident during an execution. For thousands of years, beheading was used as a type of death penalty. In medieval Europe, such an execution was considered “honorable”; the heads were cut off mainly for aristocrats. Simpler people faced the gallows or the fire. At that time, beheading with a sword, ax or an ax was a relatively painless and quick death, especially with the great experience of the executioner and the sharpness of his weapon.

In order for the executioner to try, the convict or his relatives paid him a lot of money, this was facilitated by the widely circulating terrible stories about a dull sword and an incompetent executioner who cut off the head of the unfortunate convict with only a few blows... For example, it is documented that in 1587, during the execution of the Scottish queen For Mary Stuart, the executioner needed three blows to decapitate her, and even then he had to resort to using a knife...

Even worse were the cases when non-professionals got down to business. In 1682, the French Count de Samozh was terribly unlucky - they could not get a real executioner for his execution. Two criminals agreed to perform his work in exchange for pardon. They were so frightened by such a responsible job and so worried about their future that they cut off the count’s head only on the 34th attempt!

Residents of medieval cities often became eyewitnesses to beheadings; for them, execution was something like a free performance, so many tried to take a place closer to the scaffold in advance in order to see such a nerve-wracking process in detail. Then such thrill-seekers, widening their eyes, whispered about how the severed head grimaced or how its lips “managed to whisper the last goodbye.”

It was widely believed that the severed head still lived and saw for about ten seconds. That is why the executioner raised his severed head and showed it to those gathered in the city square; it was believed that the executed man in his last seconds saw a jubilant crowd, hooting and laughing at him.

I don’t know whether to believe it or not, but once in a book I read about a rather terrible incident that happened during one of the executions. Usually the executioner raised his head to show the crowd by the hair, but in this case the executed man was bald or shaved, in general, the hair on his brain container was completely absent, so the executioner decided to raise his head by the upper jaw and, without thinking twice, put his fingers into his slightly open mouth. Immediately the executioner screamed and his face was distorted by a grimace of pain, and no wonder, because the jaws of the severed head clenched... The already executed man managed to bite his executioner!

How does a severed head feel?

The French Revolution brought beheadings to the masses by using “small mechanization” - the guillotine, invented at that time. Heads were flying in such quantities that some inquisitive surgeon easily begged the executioner for a whole basket of male and female “vessels of the mind” for his experiments. He tried to sew human heads to the bodies of dogs, but was a complete fiasco in this “revolutionary” endeavor.

At the same time, scientists began to be increasingly tormented by the question - what does a severed head feel and how long does it live after the fatal blow of the guillotine blade? Only in 1983, after a special medical study, scientists were able to answer the first half of the question. Their conclusion was this: despite the sharpness of the execution weapon, the skill of the executioner or the lightning speed of the guillotine, the person’s head (and probably the body!) experiences several seconds of severe pain.

Many naturalists of the 18th-19th centuries had no doubt that a severed head was capable of some very a short time live and in some cases even think. There is now an opinion that the final death of the head occurs a maximum of 60 seconds after execution.

In 1803, in Breslau, a young doctor Wendt, who later became a university professor, conducted a rather terrible experiment. On February 25, Wendt asked for the head of the executed murderer Troer for scientific purposes. He received his head from the hands of the executioner immediately after the execution. First of all, Wendt conducted experiments with the then popular electricity: when he applied a plate of a galvanic apparatus to the cut spinal cord, the face of the executed man was distorted by a grimace of suffering.

The inquisitive doctor did not stop there, he made a quick false movement, as if about to pierce Troer’s eyes with his fingers; they quickly closed, as if noticing the danger threatening them. Then Wendt shouted loudly in his ears a couple of times: “Troer!” With each of his screams, the head opened its eyes, clearly reacting to its name. Moreover, the head was recorded attempting to say something; it opened its mouth and moved its lips a little. I wouldn’t be surprised if Troer tried to send someone so disrespectful to death to hell young man…

In the final part of the experiment, a finger was inserted into the head's mouth, while it clenched its teeth quite tightly, causing sensitive pain. For two whole minutes and 40 seconds the head served the purposes of science, after which its eyes finally closed and all signs of life faded away.

In 1905, Wendt's experiment was partially repeated by a French doctor. He also shouted his name to the head of the executed man, while the eyes of the severed head opened and the pupils focused on the doctor. The head reacted to its name twice in this way, and the third time its vital energy had already run out.

The body lives without a head!

If the head can live without a body for a short time, then the body can function for a short time without its “control center”! A unique case is known from history with Dietz von Schaunburg, executed in 1336. When King Ludwig of Bavaria sentenced von Schaunburg and his four Landsknechts to death for rebellion, the monarch, according to knightly tradition, asked the condemned man about his last wish. To the great amazement of the king, Schaunburg asked him to pardon those of his comrades whom he could run past without a head after execution.

Considering this request to be sheer nonsense, the king nevertheless promised to do it. Schaunburg himself arranged his friends in a row at a distance of eight steps from each other, after which he obediently knelt down and lowered his head on the block standing on the edge. The executioner's sword cut through the air with a whistle, the head literally bounced off the body, and then a miracle happened: Dietz's headless body jumped to its feet and... ran. It was able to run past all four landsknechts, taking more than 32 steps, and only after that it stopped and fell.

Both the convicts and those close to the king froze in horror for a short moment, and then everyone’s eyes turned to the monarch with a silent question, everyone was waiting for his decision. Although the stunned Ludwig of Bavaria was sure that the devil himself had helped Dietz escape, he still kept his word and pardoned the friends of the executed man.

Another striking incident occurred in 1528 in the city of Rodstadt. The unjustly convicted monk said that after the execution he would be able to prove his innocence, and asked not to touch his body for a few minutes. The executioner's ax blew off the condemned man's head, and three minutes later the headless body turned over, lay on its back, carefully crossing its arms over its chest. After this, the monk was posthumously declared innocent...

At the beginning of the 19th century, during the colonial war in India, the commander of B Company, 1st Yorkshire Line Regiment, Captain T. Mulven, was killed under extremely unusual circumstances. During the assault on Fort Amara, during hand-to-hand combat, Malven cut off the head of an enemy soldier with a saber. However, after this, the decapitated enemy managed to raise his rifle and shoot straight into the captain’s heart. Documentary evidence of this incident in the form of a report from Corporal R. Crickshaw was preserved in the archives of the British War Ministry.

About a shocking incident during the Great Patriotic War, of which he was an eyewitness, a resident of the city of Tula, I.S. Koblatkin, reported to one of the newspapers: “We were raised to attack under artillery fire. The soldier ahead of me had his neck broken by a large fragment, so much so that his head literally hung behind his back like a terrible hood... Nevertheless, he continued to run before falling.”

The phenomenon of the missing brain

If there is no brain, then what coordinates the movements of a body left without a head? In medical practice, numerous cases have been described that make it possible to raise the question of some kind of revision of the role of the brain in human life. For example, the famous German brain specialist Hufland had to fundamentally change his previous views when he opened the skull of a patient suffering from paralysis. Instead of a brain, it contained a little more than 300 grams of water, but his patient had previously retained all his mental abilities and was no different from a person with a brain!

In 1935, a child was born at St. Vincent's Hospital in New York; his behavior was no different from ordinary babies; he ate, cried, and reacted to his mother in the same way. When he died 27 days later, an autopsy revealed that the baby had no brain at all...

In 1940, a 14-year-old boy was admitted to the clinic of the Bolivian doctor Nicola Ortiz, who complained of terrible headaches. Doctors suspected a brain tumor. He could not be helped and died two weeks later. An autopsy showed that his entire skull was occupied by a giant tumor, which almost completely destroyed his brain. It turned out that the boy actually lived without a brain, but until his death he was not only conscious, but also retained sound thinking.

An equally sensational fact was presented in a report by doctors Jan Bruel and George Albee in 1957 to the American Psychological Association. They talked about their operation, during which a 39-year-old patient had all his right hemisphere brain Their patient not only survived, but also fully retained his mental abilities, and they were above average.

Transfer similar cases we could continue. Many people, after operations, head injuries, and terrible injuries, continued to live, move and think without a significant part of the brain. What helps them maintain a sound mind and, in some cases, even productivity?

Relatively recently, American scientists announced their discovery of a “third brain” in humans. In addition to the brain and spinal cord, they also discovered the so-called “abdominal brain,” represented by a collection of nervous tissue on the inside of the esophagus and stomach. According to Michael Gershon, a professor at a research center in New York, this “abdominal brain” has more than 100 million neurons, which is even more than in the spinal cord.

American researchers believe that it is the “abdominal brain” that gives the command to release hormones in case of danger, pushing a person to either fight or flee. According to scientists, this third “administrative center” remembers information, is able to accumulate life experience, and affects our mood and well-being. Maybe it is in the “abdominal brain” that the answer to the intelligent behavior of headless bodies lies?

Heads are still being cut off

Alas, no abdominal brain will allow one to live without a head, and they are still chopped down, even for princesses... It would seem that beheading, as a type of execution, has long since sunk into oblivion, but back in the first half of the 60s. In the 20th century, it was used in the GDR, then, in 1966, the only guillotine broke and criminals began to be shot.

But in the Middle East you can still quite officially lose your head.

In 1980, there was literally an international shock documentary English cinematographer Anthony Thomas, which was called "Death of a Princess". It showed the public beheading of a Saudi princess and her lover. In 1995, a record 192 people were beheaded in Saudi Arabia. After this, the number of such executions began to decrease. In 1996, 29 men and one woman were beheaded in the kingdom.

In 1997, approximately 125 people were beheaded worldwide. At least as far back as 2005, Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Qatar had laws allowing beheadings. It is reliably known that in Saudi Arabia a special executioner used his skills already in the new millennium.

As for criminal acts, Islamic extremists sometimes decapitate people. There have been cases where criminal gangs of Colombian drug lords did the same thing. In 2003 acquired world fame a certain extravagant British suicide who decapitated himself with the help of a guillotine he himself constructed.

P.S. My name is Alexander. This is my personal, independent project. I am very glad if you liked the article. Want to help the site? Just look at the advertisement below for what you were recently looking for.

CHANCE FOR THE HEAD

One executioner, who carried out death sentences against French nobles at the end of the 18th century, said: “All executioners know very well that after cutting off heads live for another half an hour: they gnaw the bottom of the basket into which we throw them so much that this basket has to be changed after at least once a month...

In the famous collection of beginnings this century“From the Realm of the Mysterious,” compiled by Grigory Dyachenko, there is a small chapter: “Life after cutting off the head.” Among other things, it notes the following: “It has already been said several times that a person, when his head is cut off, does not immediately stop living, but that his brain continues to think and his muscles move until, finally, the blood circulation stops completely and he will die completely...” Indeed, a head cut off from the body is capable of living for some time. Her facial muscles twitch and she grimaces in response to being pricked with sharp objects or having electric wires connected to her.

On February 25, 1803, a murderer named Troer was executed in Breslau. The young doctor Wendt, who later became famous professor, asked for the head of the executed man to spend with her scientific experiments. Immediately after the execution, having received the head from the hands of the executioner, he applied the zinc plate of the galvanic apparatus to one of the anterior cut muscles of the neck. A strong contraction of muscle fibers followed. Then Wendt began to irritate the cut spinal cord - an expression of suffering appeared on the face of the executed man. Then Doctor Wendt made a gesture, as if wanting to poke his fingers into the eyes of the executed man - they immediately closed, as if noticing the threatening danger. He then turned the severed head to face the sun and the eyes closed again. After this, a hearing test was done. Wendt shouted loudly in his ears twice: “Troer!” - and with each call, the head opened its eyes and directed them in the direction from which the sound came, and it opened its mouth several times, as if it wanted to say something. Finally, they put a finger in her mouth, and her head clenched her teeth so hard that the person putting the finger felt pain. And only after two minutes and forty seconds the eyes closed and life finally faded away in the head.

After the execution, life lingers for some time not only in the severed head, but also in the body itself. As historical chronicles testify, sometimes headless corpses in front of large crowds of people showed real miracles of balancing act!

In 1336, King Louis of Bavaria sentenced the nobleman Dean von Schaunburg and four of his Landsknechts to death because they dared to rebel against him and thereby, as the chronicle says, “disturbed the peace of the country.” The troublemakers, according to the custom of that time, had to cut off their heads.

Before his execution, according to knightly tradition, Louis of Bavaria asked Dean von Schaunburg what his last wish would be. The desire of a state criminal turned out to be somewhat unusual. Dean did not demand, as was “practice”, either wine or a woman, but asked the king to pardon the condemned Landsknechts if he ran past them after... his own execution. Moreover, so that the king would not suspect any trick, von Schaunburg specified that the condemned, including himself, would stand in a row at a distance of eight steps from each other, and only those whom he passed, having lost his head, would be pardoned. will be able to run. The monarch laughed loudly after listening to this nonsense, but promised to fulfill the wish of the doomed man.

The executioner's sword fell. Von Schaunburg's head rolled off his shoulders, and his body... jumped to his feet in front of the king and courtiers present at the execution, numb with horror, irrigating the ground with a stream of blood frantically gushing from the stump of his neck, and quickly rushed past the Landsknechts. Having passed the last one, that is, taking more than forty (!) steps, it stopped, twitched convulsively and fell to the ground.

The stunned king immediately concluded that there was a devil involved. However, he kept his word: the Landsknechts were pardoned.

Almost two hundred years later, in 1528, something similar happened in another German city - Rodstadt. Here they sentenced to beheading and burning the body at the stake a certain troublemaker monk, who with his supposedly abominable sermons embarrassed the law-abiding population. The monk denied his guilt and after his death promised to immediately provide irrefutable evidence of this. And indeed, after the executioner cut off the preacher’s head, his body fell with its chest onto the wooden platform and lay there motionless for three minutes. And then... then the incredible happened: the headless body turned over on its back, laid right leg to the left, crossed his arms over his chest and only then froze completely. Naturally, after such a miracle, the Inquisition court pronounced an acquittal and the monk was duly buried in the city cemetery...

However, let's leave the headless bodies alone. Let us ask ourselves: do any thought processes occur in a severed human head? At the end of the last century, a journalist from the French newspaper Le Figaro, Michel Delin, tried to answer this rather complex question. This is how he describes an interesting hypnotic experiment conducted by the famous Belgian artist Wirtz over the head of a guillotined robber. “The artist has long been interested in the question: how long does the execution procedure last for the criminal himself and what feeling does the defendant experience in the last minutes of his life, what exactly does the head, separated from the body, think and feel, and in general, whether it can think and feel. Wirtz was well acquainted with the doctor of the Brussels prison, whose friend, Dr. D., had been practicing hypnotism for thirty years. The artist told him his strong desire to be told that he was a criminal condemned to the guillotine. On the day of the execution, ten minutes before the criminal was brought in, Wirtz, Dr. D. and two witnesses placed themselves at the bottom of the scaffold so that they were not visible to the public and in sight of the basket into which the head of the executed man was to fall. Dr. D. put his medium to sleep by inducing him to identify with the criminal, to monitor all his thoughts and feelings and to loudly express the thoughts of the condemned man at the moment when the ax touched his neck. Finally, he ordered him to penetrate the brain of the executed person, as soon as the head was separated from the body, and analyze the last thoughts of the deceased. Wirtz immediately fell asleep. A minute later, footsteps were heard: it was the executioner leading the criminal. He was placed on the scaffold under the ax of the guillotine. Then Wirtz, shuddering, began to beg to be woken up, since the horror he was experiencing was unbearable. But it's' too late. The ax falls. “What do you feel, what do you see?” asks the doctor. Wirtz writhes in convulsions and answers with a groan: “Lightning strike! Oh, terrible! She thinks, she sees...” - “Who thinks, who sees?” - “Head ... She is suffering terribly... She feels, thinks, she does not understand what happened... She is looking for her body... it seems to her that the body will come for her... She is waiting for the final blow - death, but death does not come..." While Wirtz said These terrible words, witnesses to the described scene looked at the head of the executed man, with hanging hair, clenched eyes and mouth. The arteries were still pulsating where the ax had cut them. Blood covered his face.

The doctor kept asking, “What do you see, where are you?” - “I’m flying away into immeasurable space... Am I really dead? Is it really over? Oh, if only I could connect with my body! People, have mercy on my body! People, have mercy on me, give me my body! Then I will live... I still think, I feel, I remember everything... Here are my judges in red robes... My unfortunate wife, my poor child! No, no, you don’t love me anymore, you are leaving me... If you wanted to unite me with the body, I could still live among you... No, you don’t want to... When will this all end? Is the sinner condemned to eternal torment? At these words of Wirtz, it seemed to those present that the eyes of the executed man opened wide and looked at them with an expression of inexpressible torment and supplication. The artist continued: “No, no! Suffering cannot continue forever. The Lord is merciful... Everything earthly leaves my eyes... In the distance I see a star, shining like a diamond... Oh, how good it must be up there! Some kind of wave covers my entire being. How soundly I will sleep now... Oh, what bliss!..." These were the last words of the hypnotic. Now he was fast asleep and no longer answered the doctor’s questions. Doctor D. went up to the head of the executed man and felt his forehead, temples, teeth... Everything was cold as ice, the head was dead.”

In 1902, the famous Russian physiologist Professor A. A. Kulyabko, after successfully reviving the child’s heart, tried to revive... the head. True, for starters, just fish. A special liquid, a blood substitute, was passed through the blood vessels into the carefully cut off head of the fish. The result exceeded the wildest expectations: the fish head moved its eyes and fins, opened and closed its mouth, thereby showing all the signs that life continues in it.

Kulyabko's experiments allowed his followers to advance even further in the field of head revitalization. In 1928 in Moscow, physiologists S.S. Bryukhonenko and S.I. Chechulin demonstrated a living dog’s head. Connected to a heart-lung machine, she in no way resembled a dead stuffed animal. When a cotton wool soaked in acid was placed on the tongue of this head, all the signs of a negative reaction were revealed: grimaces, slurping, and an attempt to throw the cotton wool away. When putting sausage into the mouth, the head was licked. If a stream of air was directed onto the eye, a blinking reaction could be observed.

In 1959, the Soviet surgeon V.P. Demikhov repeatedly conducted successful experiments with severed dog heads, claiming that it was quite possible to maintain life in a human head.
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