E RHS 612 0333

The Debate over Severed Heads: Doctors, the Guillotine and the
Anatomy of Consciousness in the Wake of the Terror

Grégoire Chamayou
In Revue d’histoire des sciences Volume 61, Issue 2, 2008, pages 333 to 365
Translated from the French by JPD Systems
ISSN 0151-4105
ISBN 9782200924904
DOI 10.3917/rhs.612.0333
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Grégoire Chamayou, «The Debate over Severed Heads: Doctors, the Guillotine and the Anatomy of Consciousness in the Wake of the
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The Debate over Severed Heads:
Doctors, the Guillotine
and the Anatomy of Consciousness
in the Wake of the Terror
Grégoire CHAMAYOU *
Abstract: In Revolutionary France after the Terror, a debate divides anat-

omists on the issue of the residual persistence of thought and feeling in
the human heads after decapitation. Movements on the face had been
observed after the execution. What do they signify? What survives in the
head? Does only irritability survive or do sensibility and consciousness
also survive? The passive experiment offered by the guillotine dramati-
cally questions the biological mode of existence of the unity of con-
sciousness. Against Samuel Thomas Sömmerring’s thesis advocating a
cerebral localization of the conditions of sensibility and consciousness,
Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis tries to redefine the self as a harmonious
totalization of the particular lives of all the fibers of the body.
Keywords: history of medicine, death penalty, guillotine, mind-body


problem.
Résumé : Dans la France révolutionnaire, au sortir de la Terreur, une

controverse divise les anatomistes pour savoir si les têtes tranchées
continuent à penser et à sentir pendant quelques instants après l’exécu-
tion. Des mouvements du visage ont en effet été observés après la déca-
pitation. De quoi sont-ils le signe ? Qu’est-ce qui survit dans la tête ?
L’irritabilité seulement, ou bien aussi la sensibilité, et la conscience ?
Avec l’expérience passive que constitue la guillotine, se pose ainsi de
façon dramatique le problème du mode d’existence biologique de
l’unité de la conscience. À la thèse d’une localisation cérébrale des
conditions organiques de la sensibilité et de la conscience défendue
par Samuel Thomas Sömmerring s’oppose une redéfinition organique
du moi comme résultante harmonique des vies particulières de chaque
fibre de l’organisme par Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis.
Mots-clés : histoire de la médecine ; peine de mort ; guillotine ; pro-

blème du corps et de l’esprit.
  *  CERPHI ENS de Lyon (site Descartes) 15, parvis René-Descartes BP 7000 69342 LYON
cedex 07
E-mail: gregoire.chamayou@free.fr
Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 I

Grégoire CHAMAYOU
On December 1st, 1789, Dr. Guillotin presented to the National

Constituent Assembly a bill for reform the Criminal Code.1 In
accordance with the principle of equal punishment under the law,
he asked that capital crimes be punished by one and the same type
of execution. This was to be the end of the old social division of
punishment that reserved decapitation for nobles and hanging for
commoners. Even in death, privileges would be swept away.
In his report presented on May 22nd and 23rd, 1791, Louis-Michel

Lepeletier de Saint-Fargeau demanded that the death penalty be
no more than the “simple deprivation of life.” This principle was
adopted on June 1st: henceforth the death penalty would consist of
“simple deprivation of life, without any torture ever being added
to it.”2 Article 4 of the Criminal Code of 1791 stipulates that “every
person condemned to death shall have his head cut off” without,
however, specifying the mode of decapitation.
As Michel Foucault has shown, a new conception of capital punish-

ment was emerging, which supplanted the old logic of execution,
“Physical suffering and bodily pain itself are no longer elements of
the sentence. Punishment moved from being an art of [inflicting]
unbearable suffering to an economy of suspended rights.”3 Thus

“an incorporeal punishing” was put in place, focused on the per-
son and depriving him of rights, even his right to live, rather than
being aimed at making the body suffer.
However, there still remained the issue of finding a technical

method befitting this new conception of a meting out a criminal
sentence. How does one take away a person’s life without causing
suffering to the body? It implies inventing a form of punishment
that is not cruel, a “humane punishment” or philanthropic method
of execution. The problem of the right kind of life had long been a
concern and the subject of lengthy debate on the fringes of med-
icine and philosophy; Henceforth, it would become a debate on
the right kind of death.
1  -  Philippe-Joseph Buchez and Pierre-Célestin Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la

Révolution française (Parliamentary History of the French Revolution) (Paris: Paulin,
1834), Vol. III, 447.
2  -  Buchez and Roux, Histoire parlementaire, 55.
3  -  Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 16.
II
The Debate over Severed Heads
“The Most Gentle of Lethal Methods”

Guillotin had called for decapitating a criminal by “the effect
of a simple mechanism.”4 Carried away by his own rhetoric, he
exclaimed: “With my machine, I’ll have your head off in the blink
of an eye, and you will suffer not at all.” The Assembly laughed.5
Little did they know. . ..
The mechanization of punishment was supposed to ensure the

unfailing nature of the execution and put a stop to bloody botching
of the old type of decapitation by sword. The mechanical device
was intended to produce instant death and obviate all suffering
by condensing death itself into a single instant. In response to the
ridicule soon aimed at Guillotin, the December 18, 1789 issue
of Le Moniteur (the Assembly’s gazette) praised him by saying he
was “the first to speak of punishment humanely in an assembly of
legislators.”6
In 1792, the Assembly asked Antoine Louis, permanent secretary

of the Academy of Surgery, to provide his “informed opinion on
the method of severing heads.”7 Louis confirmed that this matter
should not be left to the executioner’s arm. Decapitation required

the certainty of a procedure, the regularity of a mechanical device.
And, he concluded:
It is easy to build such a machine, whose effect is infallible.

Decapitation will occur in an instant according to the spirit and
intention of the new law; it will be easy to try it out on cadavers
and even on a living sheep.8
In 1752, Antoine Louis had taken part in the public debate over the
signs of death. Contrary to Jacques-Jean Bruhier, he had reasserted
there was medical certainty on the subject.9 Louis had also become
4  -  Buchez and Roux, Histoire parlementaire 448.
5  -  Buchez and Roux, Histoire parlementaire, 447.
6  -  Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur (Paris: Henri Plon,1859), Vol. II, 410.
7  -  Louis’s report is printed as an appendix to the draft bill of député Prosper-Hyacinthe
Carlier in Le Moniteur of March 22, 1792, cf. Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur,
Vol. XI (1862), 689.
8  -  Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI, 689.
9  -  Jacques Jean Bruhier, a doctor in Paris, published in 1742 a Dissertation sur l’incerti-
tude des signes de la mort (Dissertation on the Uncertainty of the Signs of death) by
Jacques-Bénigne Winslow, in which he drew up a list of apparently dead people who
Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 III

Grégoire CHAMAYOU
known as a “forensic surgery” expert.10 In 1763, for instance, he

had testified in the Calas case, with a memorandum on hanging.11
But in the report he wrote for the Assembly he was acting in a
completely new capacity. He was not exactly being consulted as
a forensic expert charged with establishing the facts during the
course of legal proceedings, but, so to speak, as an expert in the
medicine of criminal sentencing, charged with assessing the effects
of a death sentence.12
Louis, however, did not limit himself to opining on the effects of

the decapitating machine, he also provided indications on how to
perfect it.13 He thus played a double role: that of a death expert
and that of a death sentence technician. Louis’s participation in
this debate inaugurated a long and problematical collaboration of
the sciences in devising lethal techniques in the service of political
power.
If the capacity in which Louis was acting appeared to him as still

heedful of the mission of medicine, this was insofar as the duty
of a doctor is to assuage pain. The painless administration of the
new death sentence became the mission of the doctor who had
become “an agent of non-suffering”14, and the enlisting of penal

medicine [into the criminal justice system] justified itself by the
philanthropic nature of the new mode of carrying out the sentence.
had been buried alive, as a warning to the public. Louis responded to him in Lettres
sur la certitude des signes de la mort, où l’on rassure les citoyens de la crainte d’être
enterrés vivants, avec des observations et des expériences sur les noyés (Letters on the
Certainty of the Signs of Death whereby Citizens are Reassured Regarding the Fear
of Being Buried Alive and with Observations and Experiments on Drowned Persons)
Paris, 1752.
10 - Pierre Sue, “Éloge de Louis” in Éloges lus dans les séances publiques de l’Académie
royale de chirurgie de 1750 à 1792, Antoine Louis (Paris: Baillière, 1859), 435.
11 - Antoine Louis, Mémoire sur une question anatomique relative à la jurisprudence, dans
lequel on établit les principes pour distinguer, à l’inspection d’un corps trouvé pendu,
les signes du suicide d’avec ceux de l’assassinat) (Paris: Cavelier, 1763).
12 - Forensic medicine or “medicine of the bar” has been codified in France since at least
the 18th century. Cf. Gabriel Tourdes, “Médecine légale” in Dechambre, Amédee
et al., Dictionnaire encyclopédique des sciences médicales (Paris: Masson, 1874),
Vol. V, 698.
13 - Louis states: “Cutting instruments have little or no effect when they cut perpendicularly.
Examining them under a microscope, one can see that they have thicker or finer teeth
that have to be activated by being drawn across the bodies to be divided. One cannot
achieve a decapitation at one blow with an ax or cutting edge where the blade runs
in a straight line, but [it can be done] with a convex blade edge.” (Réimpression de
l’ancien Moniteur Vol. XI, 689).
14 - The expression is from Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 17.
IV
The task of actually building the machine was then entrusted to

a harpsichord maker named Schmidt with the help of the execu-
tioner, Charles-Henri Sanson15 and several carpenters. Tests were
conducted at the Bicêtre Hospital on living animals and human
cadavers.
The guillotine, “the ingeniously homicidal machine,” was officially

voted into law in 1792. Now the Revolution could be certain it had
invented “the most gentle of lethal methods.”16
History of the Debate

On July 17, 1793, Charlotte Corday was guillotined. A contempo-
rary of hers wrote: “When Charlotte Corday’s head fell under the
mortal blow of the blade, the executioner held it up for the people
to see and dared to slap it twice. The cheeks reddened in a manner
that was striking to onlookers.”17
A valet named Legros was sentenced for this gesture, intolerable in

this new situation. It added a dishonoring humiliation to the sim-
ple death that the lawmakers had intended.18 Even if all those who
witnessed the execution did not agree on whether a blush did in

fact appear on Charlotte Corday’s face, there was now doubt. If her
cheeks had blushed in indignation, her head must have seen what
was occurring because it remained conscious after being severed
from the body.
Sömmerring
In 1795, Le Moniteur published a letter by the famous German
anatomist Samuel Thomas Sömmerring (1755–1830)19 written to
15 - See the account—which is very novel like—by his descendant, Henri-Clément Sanson,
on the invention of the guillotine, Sept générations d’exécuteurs (Paris: Dupray de La
Mahérie, 1862), Vol. III, 389.
16 - The expression comes from the Goncourt brothers. Histoire de la société française pen-
dant la Révolution, de Goncourt, Edmond and Jean de Goncourt (Paris:Dentu, 1854),
468.
17 - Anonymous article, reproduced by Louis du Bois in Charlotte de Corday: Essai his-
torique, offrant enfin des détails authentiques sur la personne et l’attentat de cette
héroïne (Paris: Librairie Historique de la Révolution, 1838), 181.
18 - See the letter by Antoine Roussillon reprinted by Du Bois, Charlotte de Corday, 139.
19 - Also sometimes spelled Sömmering. Lettre de M. Soemmering à M. Oelsner sur le
supplice de la guillotine, Gazette nationale or Le Moniteur universel, 48 (18 Brumaire,
Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 V

Grégoire CHAMAYOU
his friend Konrad Engelbert Oelsner (1764–1828). In it, he asserted

that the guillotine was “a terrible type of death” given that “the
feeling, personality, and self remain alive in the severed head for
a few moments after the execution.” In seeking to put an end to
punishment of the body, hadn’t an even worse type of torture been
invented: the torture of the soul? This was where the debate began.
As the Terror had come to an end with the fall of Robespierre,

Sömmerring believed the moment was right to make his thesis
public.20 Doing so in Le Moniteur, a publication of reference, was
no random choice. Indeed, the “opinion” of Dr. Louis—which
Sömmerring intended to refute—had been published in it.
If the guillotine had been presented as the fastest, most reliable,

and least painful way to end a life, this was because no one had
reflected on “the sufferings of the sensibility, which continued after
the punishment, or calculated the duration of this state.”21
For Sömmerring, feeling was not entirely destroyed by decapita-

tion insofar as “the seat of feeling and perception of it is in the
brain” and “the operations of this awareness of feelings may occur
even though the circulation of blood through the brain has been

stopped.”22
So the guillotine inflicts a horrible death because of the obvious

intense physical pain given the concentration of nerves and the
violence of a blow whose shortness does not counterbalance the
intensity; but also because “in the head—severed from the body by
this punishment—feeling, personality, the self, remains alive for a
time, and feels the lingering pain that afflicts the neck.”23 Physical
pain is in a sense mirrored by mental torture: the terror of seeing
oneself separated from one’s body, seeing oneself dead.
an IV) – Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI, 378–379; the text is also reprinted
with a presentation by Oelsner in Magasin encyclopédique ou Journal des sciences,
des lettres et des arts (Paris, 1795), Vol. 3, 463–477.
20 - See Oelsner’s presentation, which clarifies the circumstances of the publication, in
Magasin encyclopédique, Vol. 3, 463.
21 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI 378.
22 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI 378
23 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI 378
VI
Sömmerring cites a number of witnesses to uphold this thesis. The

doctor and philosopher Melchior A. Weikard24 saw the lips of a man
whose head had been cut off move. Albrecht von Haller saw the
head of a decapitated man stare at someone who touched the mar-
row of his spine.25 It remained to be determined, as Sömmerring’s
adversaries did not fail to point out to him, what these movements
signified. Were they simply a persistent state of muscle contraction
or voluntary movements controlled by the brain and attesting to
the persistence of consciousness and sensibility?
To obtain assurances in this regard and advised by Sömmerring, a

Dr. Leveling26 conducted experiments at the very place of the exe-
cution. Having irritated the portion of the spinal cord that remained
attached to the head, he reported that the face had broken out in
horrible grimaces. In the face of this evidence, Sömmerring even
admitted regretting having recklessly involved him in these exper-
iments. He added that if air still circulated in the voice organs,
the heads would still be able to speak. The blushing on Charlotte
Corday’s cheeks in this context appeared in this context as addi-
tional evidence of consciousness surviving in the severed head.
But how long did this phenomenon last? According to the head’s

size and shape, the life force could probably continue for a rela-
tively long period of time, as was attested by the retention of heat
is this organ: about fifteen minutes. The death that was presented as
instantaneous appeared in reality to be a slow agony.
The text ends with an accusation of barbarity against revolutionary

France and an appeal to do away with the “horrible guillotine, the
atrocious game” that dishonors humanity. If the death penalty were
to be retained, there should be a return to gentler form of death. It
was known with certainty that hanging was painless as “people are
known to have come back to life after this kind of death and who
can describe a feeling that is impossible to experience in the same
way in decapitation.”27
24 - Melchior Adam Weikard (1742–1803). Sömmerring refers to his book, Der philoso-
phische Arzt (Frankfurt a. M.: Andreä, 1790), 221.
25 - Sömmerring cites Elementa physiologicae corporis humani (Lausanne, 1757–1778),
Vol. IV, 35.
26 - Heinrich Palmatius von Leveling (1742–1798).
27 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur, Vol. XI 379.
Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 VII

Grégoire CHAMAYOU
Sue, or Disseminated Sensibility

Another doctor would back up Sömmerring’s findings. In his
Opinion on the punishment meted out by the guillotine and the
pain that continues after severance,28 Jean-Joseph Sue (1760–
1830), father of the future author Eugène Sue, and a doctor at the
Charité Hospital, began by making a distinction between two types
of sensitivity, one for the sensation at the very spot where suffering
occurs and the other for awareness or the perceptibility of that sen-
sation. For example, your big toe hurts. Where is the pain? It is not
in the head. The head receives the perception of pain, of course,
but that is only via correlation with the affected member, whence
the aura of the pain has been communicated as it rises up to it. The
head acts as a center that perceives pain but does not itself suffer
although it knows the foot hurts. In addition to perceived pain, for
Sue, there is a sort of objective pain, independent of the central
consciousness.
Now let us suppose that the head of the person with gout be sep-
arated from his body: can one believe that in the very instant after
separation, his foot no longer suffers? No, because until life is
completely extinguished, there will be pain in the sick part of the

foot. . .. The foot will not be aware of the pain of the head, because
the foot does not constitute a powerful enough center of activity to
be affected by correlation as the head is; but this center can make
the foot partially aware of the pain felt by the surrounding parts.29
Sue proceeded to objectify local pain, identifiable by its own symp-

toms such as a change in color or form of the affected part of the
body.30 There is no need for cries or tears to observe the existence
of pain; it may be seen on the organ.
This assertion about local pain, different and independent from

perceived pain, leads to a disconcerting argument: the guillotine
can be reprehensible as it makes the severed head suffer but also
28 - Jean-Joseph Sue, “Opinion du citoyen Sue, professeur de médecine et de botanique,
sur le supplice de la guillotine,” Magasin encyclopédique, Vol. IV (1795), 170–189.
The text was reprinted in: Jean-Joseph Sue, Recherches physiologiques et expérienc-
es sur la vitalité, suivies d’une nouvelle édition de son opinion sur le supplice de la
guillotine ou sur la douleur qui survit à la décollation (Paris: Chez l’auteur et Fuchs,
an VI/1797), 51–76.
29 - Sue, Recherches physiologiques, 52–53.
30 - Sue, Recherches physiologiques, 57.
VIII
because of the pain with which it affects members that are sepa-
rated from the body. Indeed, according to this distinction,
if, after its division, the body hurts locally, that is, . . .without any
correlation, it is equally true that the body suffers. So why would
one want to see the pains of the body as being nothing because it is
no longer attached to the head? It suffers as a body suffers, and the
head as a head. . .. So, there is a reason for asking, in my opinion,
whether, when a leg is cut off and the stump cauterized, there is
any pain; if any member is irritated, a frog’s leg for example, even
separated from the body, is there pain in that leg?31
As for the head, it suffers just as the foot does, except, it is true, that
this sensation is amplified incomparably by its spheroidal form,
and by the function of thinking, proper to the brain it protects.
A severed head, Sue concludes, retains “perception of its execu-

tion, and then the after-thought of its ordeal.”32 The idea that think-
ing such as this can exist in the head of a fellow human being
when it has been severed, he added, makes one tremble.
With regard to Charlotte Corday, experience shows that the cheeks

of a cadaver never redden when slapped even immediately after

death. Corday, therefore, could not have reddened with indignation.
Sue carried out numerous experiments. He decapitated many ani-

mals. And the head of a cock or butterfly keeps moving a number
of seconds after it is cut off. By analogy, Sue concluded that decap-
itation must be one of the worst punishments for a human being
because of the time it lasts. The counter-argument that the ordeal
lasts for a very short time serves no purpose as “a single minute of
pain is incalculably long for the person feeling it.”33
An alternative to decapitation had to be found. During asphyxia-

tion or drowning, said Sue, the subject no longer experiences any
pain, as has been recounted by drowning persons who were able
to be resuscitated.34
31 - Sue, Recherches physiologiques, 62–63.
32 - Sue, Recherches physiologiques, 61
33 - Sue, Recherches physiologiques, 61
34 - Sue imagines an experimental solution to this problem: “If. . . it had been possible,
prior to these poor creatures having their throats cut, to agree with a few of them
Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 IX

Grégoire CHAMAYOU
Initial Responses: Wedekind and Lepelletier

Sömmerring and Sue’s positions started an enormous crisis and
aroused numerous reactions. Two days after Sömmerring’s letter, Le
Moniteur published a response by Georges Wedekind (1761–1831),
a former colleague of Sömmerring’s at the University of Mainz and
now a doctor at the Strasbourg military hospital.35 Wedekind first
chided Sömmerring on an issue of form, for publishing his letter in
the press. He had unnecessarily distressed the family and friends
of those who had lost their lives on the scaffold and should have
directed his opinion first to the Committee of Public Safety.
Wedekind summarizes the three main arguments used to prove

that consciousness lives on and sensitivity is still present in the
severed head:
First, the seat of the soul (consciousness), the sensorium commune,

is in the head, the organization of which the guillotine does not
destroy. Consciousness must therefore remain there until the fad-
ing away of sensibility and irritability (vis vitalis) of the nervous
parts. Second, convulsions that rather often may be observed in a
head that has just been cut off prove clearly that there continues

to be irritability and sensibility in the severed head. Third, these
convulsions may be brought on again by irritating the medulla that
finds itself on the outside of the severed head; which proves that
exterior objects can still affect the sensorium.36
Sömmerring was no doubt right in locating the seat of the soul in

the brain but was that sufficient reason to conclude that conscious-
ness continued, given that the guillotine combines brings together
the two causes that lead without fail to the loss of consciousness
i.e., compression of the skull and hemorrhaging? Facial convul-
sions certainly prove that a certain amount of irritability remains
regarding the movements that directed their consciousness after being executed, by
their eyelids, eyes or jaws, if only to designate by these agreed movements whether
they were conscious of their punishment, let us have no doubt that for love of humanity
they would have agreed to turn this sad experience to the benefit of their peers. Bailli,
Malesherbes, Roland, would have been capable of such heroism; the unfortunate
Lavoisier would have seized upon this idea enthusiastically; given his impossibility of
escaping his executioners, he would have taken advantage of his last moments to make
known their horror in full” (Recherches physiologiques, 64.).
35 - Georges Wedekind, “Sur le supplice de la guillotine,” Le Moniteur, 50 (20 Brumaire
an IV/November 11, 1795), Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur Vol. XI 395–396.
36 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur Vol. XI, 396.
X
but irritability is defined precisely as a property independent of

sensibility and consciousness: apoplectic and epileptic fits are
a testament to this. And lastly, the guillotine cannot cause pain
given the speed at which the blade comes down. Thus, the story
of Corday’s head appears about as believable as the “legends of
the monasteries.”37 What professor of surgery worthy of the name
could maintain that a head can continue to blush after undergoing
such hemorrhage?
On 24 Brumaire (November 15), another response to Sömmerring

was published by Le Moniteur, signed by a Dr. Lepelletier, “phy-
sician, 3 Place de Grève,”38 who developed arguments similar to
Wedekind’s. As the guillotine does away at a stroke with the three
conditions needed for life, i.e. blood circulation, respiration and
the “vibration” arising from “perception of feeling which in turn
arises from the unity of the nervous system,”39 survival of any kind
is impossible. As for the severed head having convulsive move-
ments, “that does not prove that it still feels and knows suffering,
because every day we see people who have violent convulsive
movements declare, when they regain consciousness, that they
have no idea of having felt pain.”40

Sédillot, Gastellier and Léveillé
A series of other refutations were published in the following weeks:
“Historical and Physiological Reflections on Punishment by the
Guillotine” (Réflexions historiques et physiologiques sur le sup-
plice de la guillotine)41 by Dr. Jean Sédillot (1757–1840); a short
work by doctor and National Assembly member René-Georges
Gastellier (1741–1821) entitled “What Should One Think In the
End About Punishment by the Guillotine? A New Examination
of this Question” (Que penser enfin du supplice de la guillotine?
Nouvel examen de cette question ) where “in the end” has a partic-
ular poignancy when one knows that Gastellier had himself been
37 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur Vol. XI 396.

38 - Michel-Pierre Le Pelletier, “Au rédacteur,” Le Moniteur, 54 (24 Brumaire an IV/
November 15, 1795), Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur Vol. XI 426.
39 - Le Pelletier, Le Moniteur, 426.
40 - Le Pelletier, Le Moniteur, 426
41 - Jean Sédillot, Réflexions historiques et physiologiques sur le supplice de la guillotine
(Paris, 1795).
Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 XI

Grégoire CHAMAYOU
declared an enemy of the people and sentenced to death: “I com-

posed, while in prison, this dissertation regarding a punishment
I would have undergone on 15 Thermidor, had Robespierre not
died on the 9th”42; and a “Physiological Dissertation” (Dissertation
physiologique) on the question: “Is feeling completely destroyed at
the instant when the head is separated from the body by a cutting
instrument?” by the surgeon Dr. Jean-Baptiste-François Léveillé
(1769–1829).43
The first major argument against Sömmerring and Sue pointed out
their confusion of irritability and sensibility. Convulsions of the eyes
and face, contrary to what they claimed, do not show that sensibil-
ity survives after a head is cut off but only the automatic irritability
of the nerves, which, it is known, can continue in a member that
has been separated from the body.
Gastellier criticizes what he terms Sue’s “amazing inaccuracies” in

this regard:
Why, indeed, confuse moral sensibility and pain with the irrita-
bility of the nerves and purely mechanical sensibility? Why give
words a meaning contrary to usage? . . .If by pain, you understand

the feeling that arises from a disturbance, an alteration in the body;
neither the foot nor the nerves have that kind of feeling. If you
understand pain to be the physical injury that occurs to the foot,
the foot undoubtedly in that sense does have pain. . .. Should one
play on such an ambiguity throughout an entire brochure? 44
The second argument explains that the violence of the blow

destroys all brain activity, or at least all conscious activity. Feeling
and thought require what Gastellier calls integrity of complete
organization; and “complete organization” is definitively broken
by the blade’s edge. At the moment the neck is severed, feeling
42 - Reported in the entry on his life by Charles Brainne, Les Hommes illustres de l’Orléanais
(Orléans, 1852), 232.
43 - Jean-Baptiste Léveillé, “Is feeling entirely destroyed as soon as the head is suddenly sep-
arated from the rest of the body by some cutting instrument?”, Magasin encyclopédique
ou Journal des sciences, des lettres et des arts, 5 (1795), 453–462. The debate spread to
Germany with Professor of Medicine, Carl Friedrich Clossius (1768–1797) in Tübingen
and doctor and philosopher Carl Eschenmayer (1768–1852), a disciple of Schelling,
taking opposite sides.
44 - René-Georges Gastellier, Que penser enfin du supplice de la guillotine? Nouvel exam-
en de cette question (Paris, an IV/1796), 6–7.
XII
and thought are over: “The separation of the head from the body. . .
attacks the essence of life directly and immediately, and conse-
quently the essence of feeling and thought: and that is how Messrs.
Sömmerring and Sue are refuted.”45 Furthermore, the pain caused
by the blade must be almost nil since is only lasts an instant—that
is, an indivisible point of time.
The refutation of Sömmerring and Sue’s physiological arguments

also saw explicitly anti-abolitionist positions put forth. For Sédillot,
there was no need to invent the fable of ghost heads in order to be
against the guillotine. It was enough to describe this mode of exe-
cution, which was horrible in itself, without resorting to a “purely
metaphysical idea” which was, furthermore, unbearable and cruel
for the public. As for Gastellier, he points out that:
Though I agree with the opinion of Mr. Wedekind and Dr. Lepelletier
on the substance of the matter, I do not think, as they do, that exe-
cution by the guillotine is in some way humane. . ..Will the time
ever come when society no longer believes it has the right to take
from men a life that they receive only from nature?46
Cabanis

In 1795, the Magasin encyclopédique published a new and deci-
sive response from the great physiologist Pierre-Jean-Georges
Cabanis (1757–1808).47 Cabanis starts out by establishing a dis-
tinction between two registers of discourse: that of philosophical
and political opposition to the death penalty and that of the phys-
iological verdict on the effects of decapitation. Although he criti-
cizes the guillotine and is ultimately opposed to the death penalty
itself, this is not on account of the supposed pain experienced by
the victim. He approaches the question from a different angle than
that of Sömmerring and Sue: some people “have sought to turn
public opinion against this type of punishment; they regard it as
very painful; and that is why they want to do away with it. I, too,
want that, but for other reasons. . ..” One should never resort to
45 - Gastellier, Que penser enfin du supplice de la guillotine? 10.
46 - Gastellier, Que penser enfin du supplice de la guillotine? 11.
47 - Cabanis, “Note adressée aux auteurs du magasin encyclopédique, sur l’opinion de
Messieurs Oelsner et Sömmerring et du citoyen Sue, touchant le supplice de la guil-
lotine par le citoyen Cabanis,” Magasin encyclopédique ou Journal des sciences, des
lettres et des arts, 5 (1795), 155–174.
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Grégoire CHAMAYOU
illusions to support a political position: “morality must reject all

errors, as much as science.”48
It is wrong, he says, to interpret muscle movement as necessarily

being the sign of sensibility. Movement does not imply sensation
any more than the faculty of producing movements implies the
faculty of feeling. Galen had cited the case of ostriches at a cir-
cus whose heads were cut off by the Emperor Commodus with
a bladed arrow and which nevertheless kept running. Every day,
carcasses of animals may be seen at butchers’ that are still twitch-
ing. Decapitated eels and slowworms continue to slide across the
ground after their heads are severed. These are a few examples of
movements that express neither consciousness nor perception.
This conclusion assumes, however, that one agrees to say that “the
soul exists and suffers only in the head”; the other option would be
to maintain that “sensation and pain must necessarily be found in
all the twitching parts of the cut-up body.”49 In choosing the latter,
Sue was being more coherent than Sömmerring: indeed, in this
case, to make muscle contraction the sign of sensibility, sensibility
has to be conceived of as distributed throughout the body, and not
as located in the brain. One would then say that “sensibility can

exist in an organ, independently of any communication with major
nerve centers, i.e. that it is distributed and operates everywhere.”50
The problem is not that this thesis is false but rather that it is not
relevant to the question posed. For, as Cabanis points out:
the question is not whether, when a leg is cut off and the stump
cauterized, there is pain in that leg, or when the severed leg of a
frog is irritated, there is pain in the frog’s leg. It is whether the man
to whom the leg belonged and the frog to which the leg belonged
have a feeling or awareness of pain. Now, it is certain they do not.51
From the moment that communication with nerve centers ceases,

the individual can no longer receive it. Is there pain stricto sensu
when there is no longer pain for oneself?
48 - Cabanis in Magasin encyclopédique.

49 - Cabanis in Magasin encyclopédique, 160–166.
50 - Cabanis in Magasin encyclopédique, 164.
51 - Cabanis in Magasin encyclopédique, 165–166.
XIV
Cabanis distinguishes between the local sensibility of living parts,

and general sensibility or the self’s awareness of being alive, con-
ceived of as a harmonious totalization of the particular lives of all
the fibers of the body. Contrary to what Sue explains, the problem
is not the survival of a diffuse sensibility but the persistence of a
unitary consciousness of sensations, brought together and synthe-
sized in the subjective unity of the self. The question concerns the
persistence of the subject of the sensation.
Having disqualified Sue’s argument, Cabanis turns to Sömmerring’s

thesis on the post-decapitation persistence of an active, conscious
sensorium commune. Several facts argue against this. What is com-
monly known as a “rabbit punch” shows that a violent blow to the
neck leads to an immediate loss of consciousness. Furthermore, a
rapid hemorrhage deprives the brain of the blood it needs to func-
tion. Each of the individual circumstances brought together by the
guillotine is enough to produce a true syncope. Cabanis concludes
from this that the head and body of a man who has been guillo-
tined endure no suffering and that death is as fast as the stroke of
the blade.52
Convulsive movements of the head, therefore, prove “neither pain


nor sensibility; they depend only on a residual life faculty that the
death of the individual, the destruction of the self, does not destroy
at a stroke in these muscles and nerves.” Following an investiga-
tion, Cabanis was also able to assert that Charlotte Corday’s face
did not blush.
Cabanis does grant, nevertheless, that, as regards the painless nature

of this mode of punishment, he only has the “certainty of analogy
and reasoning at his disposal and not the certainty of experience,”
since no direct experience of this is possible due to the irreversible
52 - Later, Marie-François-Xavier Bichat put forward the same arguments: “How little basis
there is for the opinion of those who believed that, with regard to those punished by
the guillotine, the brain could live on for a while, and even that sensations of pleasure
or pain could be relayed to it. The action of this organ is connected immediately to
its double excitation, first by movement and secondly by the nature of the blood it
receives. Now when excitation is suddenly nil, the interruption of all types of feelings
must be sudden” (Marie-François-Xavier Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie
et la mort (Paris, 1822), 383.
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Grégoire CHAMAYOU
nature of decapitation. This conclusion does prevent Cabanis from

declaring himself “fervently in favor of abolishing the guillotine.”53
The Terms of the Scientific Debate:

Irritability and Sensibility
Let us now return to the fundamental terms of the scientific debate.
Of what are the facial movements on severed heads that have been
observed a sign? What survives in the head? Does only irritability
survive or do sensibility and consciousness also survive?
To understand the two choices here, we must remind ourselves of

the meaning and controversial history of the distinction between
irritability and sensibility in eighteenth century medicine.
The classic definition of irritability was given by Albrecht von

Haller (1708–1777): “I call the irritable part of the human body the
part that becomes shorter when a foreign body touches it some-
what strongly.”54 In this conception, an irritable part of the body is
not necessarily sensitive: tendons contract when irritated without
the subject feeling the least pain. Inversely, the skin is “sensible”

but not irritable: when the skin is pricked, the subject feels pain but
the skin does not contract. Conversely, some parts of the body such
as the heart or the vagina are both sensible and irritable.
Georges Canguilhem summarizes this as follows:
By the term irritability, taken from Glisson, Haller means a property

inherent to the muscle fiber alone, different from sensibility in that
its effect is a shortening of the fiber, the source of animal move-
ment. . .. This vis propria or insita of the muscle tissue responds
to nerve stimulation but is also subject to the influence of vari-
ous stimuli: pressure, blood, electric sparks. . .. These observations
provide the key to automatic movement, that is, movement that
no sensibility relays back to the soul and no decision of the will
commands.55

54 - Albrecht von Haller, Mémoires sur la nature sensible et irritable des parties du corps
animal (Lausanne, 1756), 7.
55 - Georges Canguilhem, La Formation du concept de réflexe aux xviiie et xviiie siècles (Paris:
Vrin, 1977), 94.
XVI
But this strictly notional division between sensibility and irrita-

bility was contested in the eighteenth century by the vitalist and
animist schools of thought. The great Edinburgh animist physician
Robert Whytt (1714–1766) made short shrift of this division. In his
Physiological Essays, he tries to set up against Haller an implied
relationship of asymmetry between the two notions:
Irritability always supposes some degree of sensibility, but sensi-

bility does not necessarily include irritability, unless the part, by
its particular structure, is adapted to movement, that is, unless it is
muscular.”56
In reality, there are three types of irritability, and muscle contrac-

tion is but one among others, along with the closing of the pores,
and reddening or inflammation. Thus, contrary to Haller’s inter-
pretations, the reddening of the skin appears not only as a char-
acteristic sign of painful sensation but also as the manifestation of
skin-specific irritability—with reddening here being the equivalent
of fiber shortening in muscles.
Moreover, whereas Haller had conceived of irritability as a property

of tissues, separate from the brain and nerves, Whytt pointed out

certain irritation phenomena that contradict this thesis. Besides the
irritation phenomena produced when an organ itself is affected, he
reported others that excite a part of the body whereas the stimulus
affects a different spot (as with sneezing, for example). In the first
case, immediate communication of the organ with the brain is not
needed to produce the movement since it is enough for the muscle
or nerve to retain a certain amount of nervous force. In the second
case, on the other hand, movement, called sympathetic irritation,
requires the brain or spinal cord as an intermediary, which exper-
iments in decapitation and destruction of the spinal cord on frogs
show a contrario.
But how is residual local twitching in the muscles of detached

members explained, when nerves no longer communicate with the
spinal cord? One first possible answer is to attribute these phenom-
ena to a property of living matter. The use materialists hastened to
make of the concept of irritability is known, to the detriment of
56 - Robert Whytt, Physiological Essays (Edinburgh: Hamilton, Balfour, and Neill, 1755)
[back-translated from the French: Essais physiologiques (Paris, 1759), 202–2039].
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Grégoire CHAMAYOU
Haller who found himself forced to publicly distance himself from

this school of thought after Julien Offroy de La Mettrie had ren-
dered a very embarrassing homage to him in L’Homme-machine.57
The second classic answer consisted in attributing these phenom-
ena to a principle of bodily animation, a soul imagined as both a
principle of sensation and movement. According to this method
of seeing things, if detached members continue to move, that is
because a bit of sensible soul has, as it were, remained trapped in
them.
Whytt adopts the second assumption, which implies not con-

ceiving of the soul as residing solely in the brain. If it did, Whytt
objects, citing Giorgio Baglivi, “How is it that a pigeon lives for
several hours after being deprived of this very essential part? How
is it that it can fly from one place to another?”58 Whytt thus argues
for the persistence of the soul or “sensible principle” as distinct
from the matter contained in the detached parts of a body.
But this second response in turn gave rise to a number of diffi-

culties that sparked numerous debates. The first classic problem
has to do with the disjunction between sensibility and conscious-
ness. Can “sensibility” be discussed separately from any central

perception of sensations? Physiologically speaking, how would it
be possible for nerves that no longer communicate with the brain
to retain sensibility? While it is indeed “impossible to explain this
phenomenon,” the fact remains, Whytt insists, that:
there is reason to believe that the parts of various insects continue

to be sensible long after are they are separated. Boyle relates that
flies couple and lay eggs after their heads have been cut off. Redi
reports that “the head of a viper bites a half hour after being
severed from the body. I have often observed that the eyelids,
nostrils and muscles of the lower jaw in the severed head of a
frog continued to move for half an hour when the brain or skin on
the head was touched with a probe; the eyes and eyelids in the
57 - Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, “Dédicace à Monsieur Haller,” in Œuvres philosophiques

(Paris: Tutot, 1796), Vol. III, 100. In the body of the text, La Mettrie cites a series of ex-
periments that back his materialist thesis: “A drunken soldier in one stroke of his sword
took off the head of a turkey. The animal remained standing; then it walked, ran [. . .]
it is easy to see much the same phenomenon in small cats or dogs whose heads have
been cut off.” (Œuvres philosophiques, 170–171.)
58 - Whytt, Essais physiologiques, 233.
XVIII
head would sometimes move even without being touched. The

head of the frog is therefore animated for a considerable amount
of time.”59
The second problem concerns the nature of the soul as a life prin-
ciple. As in classical definitions, matter is a composite reality
whereas the soul, a psychic entity, is conceived of as a single thing.
So, to accept the scattered persistence of fragments of the soul in
pieces of the body is to contradict this fundamental principle. The
case of the dismembered insect has thus been a topos in debates
on the unity of the soul and the status—logical or real—of —the
distinction between its faculties since Antiquity.60 The case of “seg-
mented insects” poses a particular difficulty in that these detached
members retain for a time their ability to move, their sensation, etc.
Leibniz responded thus:
Although it may be that a soul has a body comprised of parts

animated by separate souls, the soul or form of the whole is not
thereby comprised of souls or forms of the parts. As for an insect
that is cut up, it is not necessary that the two parts remain ani-
mated, even if they retain some movement. At least, the insect’s
soul will only remain in one of the parts.61

The issue was revived in the eighteenth century by Haller’s exper-
iments on irritability, which showed the persistence of move-
ments in severed parts of a body: “I ripped out the intestines of
this animal as it was dying, and I opened them up. The sides
of the wound flapped down as usual, and formed a mouth-like
shape, and the intestines twitching with the peristaltic movement
moved across on the table.”62 For his part, Kant summarized the
problem as follows: “Each animal has a soul (as an immaterial
principle) and yet the parts of the animal seem to demonstrate a
vita propria.”63
59 - Whytt, Essais physiologiques.

60 - The issue is related to Aristotle’s questioning as to “whether each one of these is a soul
or part of a soul, and, if a part, whether it is only logically distinct or separable in
space” (De Anima, II, 413b 15).
61 - Wilhelm G. Leibniz, “À Arnauld,” April 30, 1687, Philosophische Schriften (Berlin:
Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1879), Vol. II, 100.
62 - Albrecht von Haller, Deux mémoires sur le mouvement du sang et sur les effets de la
saignée (Lausanne, 1756), 335–336.
63 - Immanuel Kant, “Opus postumum,” in Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Preussischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1938), Vol. XXII, 418.
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Grégoire CHAMAYOU
From this perspective, the classical solution for ensuring that the
continued movement of a member move after being separated from
the animal did not contradict the thesis of the unity of the soul was
to distinguish a number of life principles in the body—to diffract,
as it were, the concept of life in order to preserve the unity of soul
and thereby anticipate any materialist objection. It is for example
possible to maintain that the irritable life of the organs continues
even when they are no longer animated by any sensible soul.
Now by realigning irritability with the sensible principle, the ani-

mists shut themselves off from this type of solution, and opened
themselves up to criticism. Thus, Whytt felt it necessary to specify:
It does not follow that, because the soul, or the sensible princi-
ple, continues to animate severed animal parts, it is really divisible
and separable into as many parts as the body. Mr. de Haller most
unjustly attributes this opinion to me.64
In France, the Montpellier School also maintained, against Haller,

that irritability did not act independently from sensibility, and it did
not suffice to explain the movements of amputated members of an
animal. Paul-Joseph Barthez reinterpreted in this way experiments

by Haller, Felice Fontana, and Claude Perrault on snake heads or
lizard tails, which, according to him, did not show simple, blind
contractions but true movements governed by some kind of per-
ceptions or sensations. Barthez concluded that:
The influence of sensible forces on moving [parts] in the move-

ments of amputated parts is proved because they are analogous to
those that would exist if the animal were whole. The sensibility that
occurs thus differs from the sensibility that exists when the con-
nections of the soul and body decide on movements consciously
reflected on. Sensibility with consciousness must be distinguished
from sensibility that is local and proper to the parts.65
As has been pointed out by Roselyne Rey, Sue’s conception is

theoretically very close to these schools.66 But the rejection of a
strict division between irritability and sensibility also has a tactical
64 - Whytt, Essais physiologiques, 239–240.
65 - Paul-Joseph Barthez, Nouveaux éléments de la science de l’homme (Paris, 1806),
Vol. II, 209.
66 - Roselyne Rey, Histoire de la douleur (Paris: La Découverte, 1993), 131.
XX
function for him in the debate. We have seen that the principal
objection to Sue’s thesis was to say that movements of the face on
severed heads required the sufficient condition of simple irritability,
which by definition differs from sensibility.67 Unlike Sömmerring,
Sue perceived the solid basis for this objection, and attempted to
anticipate it by proceeding in two stages. First, he agreed with
his critics that the movements of the severed head come funda-
mentally from the same principles as those observed in separated
members. He then questioned whether irritability is in every case
a sufficient explanatory principle, and developed the idea of local
sensibility spread throughout the body.
Whereas Sömmerring took as a basis the idea of sensory-motor

functions being centralized in the brain to assert that the head con-
tinues to feel when unattached from the body, it was, on the con-
trary, by virtue of a dissemination of sensorial functions throughout
the body that Sue could come to the conclusion that the head,
even more than the other detached members, feels pain.
These two positions correspond to the terms of a fundamental the-

oretical dilemma brought out by Canguilhem. In the absence of a
real theory of reflexes, one might think that “either the sympathy of

the parts of the body was ensured by the soul, a single principle of
feeling and movement located in the brain (sensorium commune),
or that this came from communication among nerve fibers at the
fringes, as it were, of the central anatomical seat of the soul.”68 Sue
opted for the second idea. His treaty on vitality contained images
of an acephalous fetus that he had studied for a long time and the
skeleton of which he kept in his study. His observation of this head-
less body strengthened his paradoxical idea that pain did not need
to be perceived by consciousness in order to exist. Revealingly,
whereas Sömmerring dissected heads without bodies to try and
locate in them the functions of the soul, Sue dissected headless
bodies.
67 - This argument is also put forward by Sébastien Mercier: “[. . .] this irritability or muscle
contraction in a body that is still warm, though deprived of life, cannot stimulate the
least sensibility, and should not be confused with it. No one has ever thought that when
a worm or eel is cut into several pieces, the animal’s sensibility can be stimulated by
irritating one of the separated pieces with the point of a pin.” (Sébastien Mercier, Le
Nouveau Paris, reprinted (Paris: Mercure de France, 1994), 209.
68 - Canguilhem, La Formation du concept de réflexe, 98.
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Grégoire CHAMAYOU
However, as Cabanis pointed out, the argument of dissemination of

sensibility does not stand up, since as it merely postpones the truly
decisive question, which was immediately put to Sömmerring, and
ultimately to Sue, namely: does not decapitation necessarily bring
about—if not the termination of brain activity—the extinction of
consciousness?
It should be pointed out that when Cabanis uses the conceptual

pair sensibility/irritability, he does completely subscribe to Haller’s
doctrine. Cabanis’ position in this regard is rather complex:
although he disagrees with Sue, he does not, unlike Gastellier, uni-
laterally reject Sue’s notion of sensibility without sensation, or the
connection made between sensibility and irritability. In his later
writings, he did indeed criticize the limited, hermetic nature of this
distinction. Thus, the Relations of the Physical and Moral in Man
(Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (1801) asserts that
there may without contradiction be sensibility without sensation,
that is, without perceived impressions.69 Cabanis also thought of
irritability as a consequence of sensibility by explaining that “iso-
lated impressions, the irregular movements that continue to exist
a few instants after severing, come from the lingerings of a partial
sensibility that will not be renewed.70

Overall, Cabanis’ position is thus closer to that of Whytt and Sue
than to Haller and Sömmerring’s position. However, here the line of
separation is less about the issue of sensibility’s mode of existence
than about the persistence of a center of conscious perception. The
problem is that of the survival of the self. As Cabanis points out
in this regard, allowing for unconscious sensibility disseminated
throughout the body in no way resolves the issue.
69 - “Irritability is the faculty of contraction that appears to be inherent to muscle fiber, and
which the muscle has even after death, or after it has been separated from the nerve
reaction centers. The fiber, stimulated by various stimuli, alternately contracts and ex-
pands and that is all. But, in coordinated movements of organs, there is more than
this, and everybody agrees with this. Now apart from these movements determined by
perceived impression, there are a number of movement that are determined by impres-
sions of which an individual is in no manner aware. . . and yet they cease when the
organ no longer communicates with the sensible centers, in a word, they cease with
sensibility. . .. So, as we are only calling sensation [by the name of] perceived impres-
sion, there is truly sensibility without sensation.” (Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du
moral de l’homme, in Œuvres (Paris, 1824), Vol. IV, 276–277.)
70 - Cabanis, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme.
XXII
The Problem of the Biological Mode

of Existence of the Unity of Consciousness:
Where does the Self Reside?
Whereas Sue was able to assert, somewhat paradoxically, that the
persistence of sensibility without perception was the same as the
presence of an unconscious sensible life, entitled as such to respect
and consideration, Cabanis rephrases the question as: the only per-
tinent death here is that of the individual, the self or subject.
There is a plurality of deaths in death just as there is a multiplicity of

lives in life but these various deaths that are usually merged in the
apparent unity of an event here became spectacularly desynchro-
nized by this new execution technique. The guillotine produced a
phenomenon of imperfect death, posing the question of which death
is the death of the self, which biological death is the death of the per-
son. To answer this, it was necessary to come up with a theory of the
anatomical and physiological mode of existence of the life of the self.
Now in response to the question “Where does the self live in the
body?” Sömmerring provided an original answer, which largely

explains his position in the debate. When his letter was published
in Le Moniteur, he was putting the finishing touches to his treatise
The Organ of the Soul (L’Organe de l’âme),71 which, as the title
indicates, rekindled age-old debates on the location of the seat
of the soul. We know that Descartes thought he had discovered
it in the pineal gland (conarium), a simple organ located in the
brain, and right for carrying out the functions of sensory motor
centralization normally associated with the notion of the seat of
the soul.72 Bonnet, for his part, favored the corpus collosum as
the location for the sensorium commune.73 Sömmerring took up
71 - Samuel T. Sömmerring, Über das Organ der Seele (Königsberg, 1796).

72 - René Descartes, Passions de l’âme, § 31 in Oeuvres, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery
(Paris: Vrin/CNRS, 1964–1974), Vol. XI, 351 – hereafter abbreviated as AT, followed by
the volume number), § 32 (AT XI, 352–353) Principes de la philosophie, IV, § 189
(AT IX, 310); Dioptrique (AT VI, 109); Traité de l’homme (AT XI, 129).
73 - In his book Contemplation de la nature (1764), Charles Bonnet (1720–1793) wrote:
“Anatomy infers from various experiences that the part of the brain called the corpus
callosum is the immediate instrument of the soul’s operations. . .. The corpus callo-
sum is thus a small organic machine, destined to receive impressions that come in
from different points of the body and transmit them to the soul.” (Charles Bonnet,
œuvres complètes (Neuchâtel, 1781), Vol. IV, 137.) But later, he admitted having to
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Grégoire CHAMAYOU
this vocabulary to formulate an innovative solution. The sensorium

commune is defined as what enables us to meld together various
sensations, which are transmitted to us by the sense organs, in a
single representation. Expressed another way, it is the faculty that
unifies heterogeneous sensations, the sense that unifies all the
senses, and also the sense that is common to the five senses. This
common sense is also conceived of as a locatable organ, as the
Encyclopédie reminds us, defining the sensorium as “that place
or part where the sensible soul is supposed to reside in the most
immediate manner.”74
As the sensorium commune was viewed as a body organ, most of

the debates on it were about its location. Here, Sömmerring’s great
originality was to identify the sensorium as a fluid. The cerebrospi-
nal fluid in contact with the nerve endings located in the wall of
the cerebral ventricles can explain our capacity to link heteroge-
neous sensations physiologically, as the different nerves are bathed
in the same water, as it were:
If we admit there is a common place for sensation (sensorium com-

mune), and that it is in the brain, then, I believe, it is likely, if
not demonstrable, that this sensorium commune is made up of the

fluid in the cerebral cavities (aqua ventriculum cerebri).75
To lend credence to his thesis, Sömmerring then sought to show

that a liquid can be chemically organized, which in his view was
the condition needed to perform the function of unifying the vari-
ous sensorial flows and ensure unity of apperception. Kant encour-
aged Sömmerring to pursue this line of research.76
Now if the soul’s organ resides in a chemically organized liquid in

the middle of the brain, it is understandable that it might remain
active despite severance of the spinal cord. The question is, nev-
ertheless, whether, despite the severing of the arteries, spinal cord
and trachea, the brain functions can continue, or, if, among other
“give up on determining precisely what part of the brain makes up the seat of the soul”
(Palingénésie philosophique (Geneva, 1769), 130).
74 - Encyclopédie, ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1772),
Vol. XV, 55.
75 - Sömmerring, Über das Organ der Seele, 31–32.
76 - Immanuel Kant, letter to Sömmerring in Écrits sur le corps et l’esprit (Paris:
GF-Flammarion, 2007), 102–103.
XXIV
things, stopping blood circulation does not cause an instant shut-

ting off of the conscious activity of the organ. The thesis of a syn-
cope, an immediate loss of consciousness, is the main argument
used by Sömmerring’s critics.
But Cabanis opposes Sömmerring for a more basic reason: He does

not share his conception of the anatomical and physiological exis-
tence of the self. For Sömmerring, what we call personality assur-
edly resides with consciousness only in the brain. For Cabanis, on
the contrary, the self is not a separate entity that can be located
in a part of the body but an overall phenomenon arising from the
organic relationship between different parts of a living body.77 The
unity of consciousness corresponds to the unity of the body and
not to an organ as a single unit.
When the self is conceived as a total phenomenon, it cannot be

represented as a being hidden away somewhere in the brain. Even
if the brain lives on in a way, this is no longer the life of the self.
As Daniel Arasse has written, the horror of the “dying head” was
conjured up due to a devaluing of the brain as the seat of per-
sonality, with Sömmerring et Cabanis representing the two terms
of a “cleavage between a traditional conception of medicine, still

founded on an analogical reading of the body and its signs, and a
modern conception of it that understands the notion of an organ-
ism body according to a very different model.”78
From Experiments on the Headless Body

to Experiments on the Bodiless Head
The fundamental phenomenon of this debate, and undoubtedly the
most intriguing one, is the fact that a punishment could become an
experiment. This strange process whereby an instrument of justice
could become an experimental apparatus needs to be examined.
77 - Cabanis specifies: “Microscopic discoveries have taught us that life is everywhere and
that therefore there is pleasure and pain everywhere, and in the very organization of
our fibers, there may be innumerable causes of specific lives the correspondence and
harmony of which with the entire system, by means of the nerves, constitute the self.
What arises from all this is not what Citizen Sue claims; for the self only exists in gen-
eral life; and the sensibility of fibers, when they are isolated, correspond no more with
it [the self] than the fibers of animals which can develop in different part of the body.”
(Cabanis Cabanis in Magasin encyclopédique, 164.)
78 - Daniel Arasse, La Guillotine et l’imaginaire de la Terreur (Paris: Flammarion, 1997), 58.
Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 XXV

Grégoire CHAMAYOU
The guillotine was not only “experimental” in the sense that the
apparatus required testing—which was carried out at the Bicêtre
Hospital—prior to being used but above all in the sense that this new
mechanism gave rise to new death-related phenomena linked to a
new method of producing cadavers that could be used immediately
in research in experimental medicine. Here the guillotine appears as
an instrument of phenomeno-technology in the Bachelardian sense
as a procedure producing phenomena that are the object of science.79
Decapitation had of course been practiced before the guillotine

came into existence, and had already given rise to similar kinds of
questioning. Hemey d’Auberive, in his Anecdotes on Decapitated
Persons (Anecdotes sur les décapités) cites an experiment reported
in the seventeenth century by Bohuslaus Balbinus. In Prague, the
head of a young man who had just been decapitated was picked
up and placed back onto the neck of his body: immediately and for
a few moments it showed signs of life.80 However, observation on
such a scale had never been possible prior to the guillotine and its
intensive use during the Terror.
There are long series of observations on decapitated animals in

the history of physiology. These experiments consisted basically of

observing the body or parts of the body when they were separated
from the head. The main question asked was how these organs
could move without being connected to the brain, in a theoretical
context where the central functions of the spinal cord were not
known and in which, as Canguilhem writes,
the reflecting of the sensible impression to the periphery was thought

to occur only at the level of the encephalon and so made all local
movement depend on anatomical integrity. . .. Haller wondered
how an animal could continue to live after ablation of the brain and
here he reported a number of observations on insects, and ‘cold-
blooded quadrupeds’ such as frogs (Whytt), turtles (Redi), and lizards
(Tachard), which for several days can still walk and even couple.81
79 - “True scientific phenomenology is thus essentially a phenomeno-technolgy. It strength-
ens what shows through behind what appears. It learns by what it constructs” (Gaston
Bachelard, Le Nouvel esprit scientifique (Paris: PUF, 1999), 17.)
80 - Hemey d’Auberive, Anecdotes sur les décapités (Paris: 1797). Kershaw also cites a text
by Pierre Gautier, “Tête d’un décollé, conserve-t-elle, plusieurs instants après sa décol-
lation du tronc, la faculté de sentir?” published in Paris in 1776. Cf. Alistair Kershaw, A
History of the Guillotine (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1958), 80.
81 - Canguilhem, La Formation du concept de réflexe, 95.
XXVI
These decapitation experiments remained fundamentally guided

by the subtractive logic of disturbance-based experiments, consist-
ing of “damaging, destroying or removing a part to see its use from
the disturbance its removal caused.”82 The experiment, typical of
Galen’s experimental reasoning, but still applied by Haller, con-
sisted of removing an organ to determine whether it was indis-
pensable to performing the function being studied. If a function
continued to be performed when an animal had been deprived
of an organ, the organ could not be the sole and necessary cause
of the function. If the body of a headless animal remains irritable,
then irritability can occur without there being a connection to the
central nervous system.
With the spontaneous experiment the guillotine provided, and the

real move to the human being that it brought about, a reversal
ensued: the question of bodies without heads being alive gave way
to that of heads without bodies being alive. At this there was an
inversion of the focus of interest. The problem of the life of organs
themselves and the relative independence of decentralized func-
tions vis-à-vis a center of organic functions viewed as the seat of
the soul (sensorium commune) was replaced by the opposite prob-
lem: now the question was no longer how living phenomena dis-

seminated throughout the body could continue to survive uncon-
nected to a sensory motor center, but whether, without a periphery,
central functions could exist residually.
The particular epistemological difficulty of this question comes

from its being about internal sense, which, by definition, is not
observable from an external position. This is the classical problem
of the interiority of consciousness: How does one prove the pres-
ence or absence of consciousness, which is a matter of internal
sense, by external sense phenomena? This classic problem here
becomes methodologically crucial. The internal sense can only be
experimented upon through introspection, and since decapitation
is irreversible, as Cabanis writes, in this area one can only arrive
at “a certainty by analogy and reasoning, and not experiential cer-
tainty.”83
82 - Claude Bernard, Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale (Paris: GF-

Flammarion, 1966), 151.
Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 XXVII

Grégoire CHAMAYOU
A “Metaphysical Experiment”
Maupertuis could only imagine being able to dissect persons who
had been condemned to death and subject them to “metaphysical
experiments” that would settle once and for all the old debates
on the union of the soul and body.84 Ironically, the guillotine fur-
nished a real instrument for this macabre utopia of progress in the
sciences and the arts.
It has been shown how Sömmerring’s problematic is part of the

long history of metaphysical debates on the location of the soul
but it should be pointed out that the continuity between the clas-
sic questionings in this issue and the debate over severed heads
is only a seeming one. Of course, here, we see an old meta-
physical question being in part translated into anatomy but this
reactivation takes place in terms of the fundamental categories
of the judicial realm. The new problem was posed in legal-phil-
osophical terms: In the new conception of capital punishment,
life must be taken away from the person, the legal subject, which
entailed determining precisely where this subject resides phys-
ically in the body. Hence the need to produce a theory of the
mode of organic existence of the personality and to translate

the philosophical category into a physical object. Paradoxically,
if the task of finding the subject’s corporeal substrate is a sine
qua non, this is because the body is no longer the direct aim of
inquiry. The problem of the somatic naturalization of the philo-
sophical subject thus arises from the “decorporalization” of the
legal subject.
So it was not so much a search for the metaphysicians’ “soul” as

for the lawyers’ self or personality, and the question became that of
the biological mode of existence of the “subject” function: where
exactly does the legal subject reside in the flesh-and-blood body?
The difficulty stems from the heterogeneity of the two: it will be
hard to find the legal subject in the flesh of the body with the aid
of a scalpel. This fundamental aporia lies at the heart of the last
phase of the debate on severed heads—a constitutive aporia of the
84 - Maupertuis writes: “Perhaps many discoveries on the marvelous union between the
soul and the body could be made if we dared to seek connections in the brain of a
living man.” (Maupertuis, “Lettres sur le progrès des sciences,” in Œuvres (Lyon: 1768),
Vol. II, 410–411.) See page 426 for the notion of metaphysical experience.
XXVIII
modern anthropological knowledge that being established at the

end of the eighteenth century, in which Man was born discursively
from this impossible “pinning down” of the transcendental subject
onto the somatic subject.85
A “Passive Experiment”
But here an objection may be made: to what extent can we talk
about experimentation here when the doctors were not strictly
speaking the instigators of the phenomenon they were analyzing?
The guillotine is a case of what Claude Bernard called a passive

experiment, that is to say a phenomenon observed by specialists
without their having brought it about directly. For an observation to
become an experiment, it is indeed not necessary for the observer
to have directly and personally set his hand to it.86 The decisive cri-
terion is not so much the direct manual intervention of the observer
as the questioning of the phenomenon with an experimental idea.
The experiment may sometimes only be an observation invoked
with a view to experimental control.
In the passive experiment of the guillotine, the medical gaze con-


verts the event into an experiment, which enlists the external fact
of decapitation into an experiment that may be questioned, and
observations that may be subjected to comparison. This annexation
of externalities by experimental science for purposes of exploiting
them cognitively, I should like to call “experimentalization.” In the
nineteenth century, there would be a broad movement of experi-
mentalization of the world, a movement for which the debate on
severed heads represents a founding event.
But the description of this movement is only complete if one

recalls that doctors—Guillotin and Louis—also intervened prior to
the occurrence of the phenomenon. Thus, an external factor was
indeed annexed to medical science but not without medical sci-
ence having itself first been recruited by the political establish-
ment to develop a scheme for the death sentence. Therefore, here
85 - Cf. Michel Foucault, Le Pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours au Collège de France, 1973–1974

(Paris: Seuil, 2003), 57.
86 - Bernard, Introduction, 36.
Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 XXIX

Grégoire CHAMAYOU
not only was there a hijacked, secondary use of the phenome-

non but also collaboration and co-production of it in an integrated
approach.
With Guillotin and Louis, doctors became technicians of death.

The unprecedented and scandalous nature of this new positioning
of medical knowledge has been emphasized. It was unprecedented
because it broke with the traditional mission of medicine. Even in
cases where a doctor supervised torture, he remained nonetheless
in charge of making sure the patient did not die, whereas here it
was no longer a question of avoiding death in order to make suf-
fering endure but of giving absolute acceleration to death in order
to avoid all suffering. And it was scandalous because this new role
flouted the historical mission of medicine: to treat illness, to pre-
serve health, and above all, according to the Hippocratic Oath, not
to harm. A contradiction thus appeared between what had been
medicine’s historic role and its technical and institutional integra-
tion into the power to punish as the art of killing—and it led to a
crisis.
Here is the fundamental problem: not only did medicine attain a

new position of expertise but also, and above all, in the late eigh-

teenth century it entered into the service of what Foucault called
thanatopolitics, the reverse side of biopolitics whose purpose is
death and, which like biopolitics, instrumentalizes medicine by
integrating it into the exercise of its power.87 The debate over sev-
ered heads is rooted in this tension, this definitional crisis about
the art of medicine, which stems directly from the new role that
Louis agreed to take on.
Many years later, a doctor returned to the debate over severed

heads and wondered whether “Louis should have thought himself
obliged. . . to accept this strange mission that the lawmaking com-
mittee had given him; whether this mission was honorable for him,
and in accord with the spirit of his profession.”88 To answer this
87 - Cf. Michel Foucault, “La technologie politique des individus,” Dits et écrits (Paris:
Gallimard, 1999), Vol. IV, 826: “As the population is never anything other than what
the State watches over in its own interest, of course, the State may, as needed, massacre
it. Thanatopolitics is thus the reverse of biopolitics.”
88 - Louis Dubois, “Recherches sur les dernières années de Louis et de Vicq d’Azyr,”
Bulletin de l’Académie impériale de médecine, 32 (1866–1867), 39. Dubois adds: “In
XXX
question, the author tells a story about Bonaparte in Egypt order-

ing the doctor of his general staff, Dr. Desgenette, to finish off the
wounded men, who were holding back his advance, by adminis-
tering opium to them. The doctor replied: ‘My duty is to preserve
life.’ Louis too, the author continues,
could have said to the lawmaking committee: ‘My duty is to con-

serve.’ The art to which he had devoted his life, was, after all, an
art of preservation and not of destruction; he was not obliged to
demonstrate to the delegates of the National Assembly that the cer-
vical vertebrae come together in overlapping structures in such a
way that there is no joint and that to severe the neck, a blade of
significant weight, cutting obliquely, etc. is required. All this is odi-
ous and repellent. It is not to arrive at notions such as these that we
undertake long years of study and arduous observations.89
Experiments, Expertise and Critique

The debate over severed heads arose first from enlisting medicine
in the service of punishment. In this version, the doctor appears
all at once as technician, expert and experimenter. He applies
and implements political decisions; he judges and evaluates their
effects; he varies phenomena and tests theories. This triple posi-

tioning corresponds to a certain critical posture of the scientist,
based on technical mastery, expertise and experimentation. What
is at stake here is the position of medical knowledge between sci-
ence, technical application, and politics.
There was a paradoxical position, defined at the end of the eigh-

teenth century, of medical knowledge vis-à-vis political power.
Though subordinated to medical knowledge in technical terms,
medical knowledge was no less of a lawmaker, on account of its
access to the laws of nature. Kant describes in another context this
ambiguous status of the doctor: subject to political authority as a
technician, but holding “legislative” authority insofar as he draws
his knowledge directly from “the nature of things themselves.”90
truth, a strange consultation! And which until then had never undoubtedly been asked
of a man exercising the healing art: it was always been decapitation that was wanted
but with three conditions: certainty, speed and uniformity, the surgeon’s tuto et cito.”
(Recherches, 29–30.)
89 - Dubois, Recherches, 40.
90 - Emmanuel Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties (New York: Abaris, 1979), 41–3.
Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 XXXI

Grégoire CHAMAYOU
The physician may thus state the truth but only in hypothetical
imperative mode: “If you want a painless death, then you must. . ..”
In this case, the physician must not pronounce on the ends that
govern his practice of medicine, and which are presupposed,
but only on what has to be done in relation to the objective pre-
sented to him. Technical subordination to written law and scien-
tific authority founded on the laws of nature are the two features
that define the paradoxical position of the doctor as expert and
technician. With the authority of its knowledge and the position of
expertise attributed to it by the political powers, medical science
can judge and if necessary criticize criminal policies on the basis
of experimental evaluation of their effects. Ultimately the question
is whether doctors agree to respond to the demands of political
power solely from the position of expert-experimenter they have
been given, and, thus, whether they limit their critique to simply
evaluating the effects of decapitation.
Here we have the issue of the registers of criticism, of which there

are at least two, corresponding to two opposing modes of reason-
ing: a technician’s critique from below, which observes effects in
order to bring to light the unexpected, unintended, dysfunctional
consequences, and a teleological critique of principle which does

not criticize the relative efficacy of the means but the intrinsic per-
tinence of the ends.
Expert critique provided by the expert is Sömmerring’s chosen

position in the debate: going against the expert opinion that pro-
vided justification for the guillotine, his strategy is to bring into
play a counter-assessment. But the other side of this type of posi-
tioning is that it disallows the questioning of assumptions, in this
case, the death penalty itself. In this schema, only expert critique
of the means belongs to scientific discourse, whereas a critique of
the ends lies beyond its scope, inasmuch as a physician’s discourse
must henceforth, be strictly reserved so that it may remain scientific
What is striking in some of the texts by Sömmerring’s adversaries,

who are openly abolitionist, is their refusal to give up this critique
of the ends and to limit medical discourse to expert evaluation of
the means. In my opinion, that is the meaning of Cabanis’ position,
which both rigorously distinguishes and closely articulates the two
XXXII
registers of critique, on the basis of a twofold refusal: he will nei-

ther bend the truth to the demands of political argumentation, nor
abandon the critical outlook and limit himself to the ancillary role
of a technical expert.
Even if Louis’s opinion as an expert is correct, even if the guillotine

is indeed painless, as a doctor one may still be opposed to this
mode of execution in particular, and the death penalty in general,
precisely because medicine is not defined as a pure instrumental
technique but as a practice guided by its own ends, which specif-
ically prohibit it from becoming the executioner’s assistant. It is
because we are in charge of care that we oppose the death penalty.
It is because physiology is part and parcel of the art of healing that
it must not be used to advise those in power in matters of capi-
tal punishment, unless it wishes to deny itself. In other words, a
principled, teleological critique does not necessarily lie outside its
discourse. A critique of ends is possible if it is uttered in the name
of the very aim of medicine, understood as the medical art and not
simply as a technique that may be enlisted in support of any ends.
Whereas the definition of the discourse of science by the crite-

rion of “value neutrality” opens the door to its being instrumen-

talized to serve ends that contradict its very mission, the analysis
of this debate invites us to understand science as a practice that is
oriented towards ends and cannot be dissociated from the essen-
tial aims that define it as a historical project. The choice for the
discourse of scientist will be to decide whether it restricts itself
to expert critique corresponding to the technical function that is
invited to fulfill, or whether steps outside that framework in order
to question the presuppositions and purposes of its practice in the
social world.
Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 XXXIII

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The Debate over Severed Heads: Doctors, the Guillotine and the

Anatomy of Consciousness in the Wake of the Terror

Available online at:

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Abstract: In Revolutionary France after the Terror, a debate divides anat-

Keywords: history of medicine, death penalty, guillotine, mind-body

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Résumé : Dans la France révolutionnaire, au sortir de la Terreur, une

Mots-clés : histoire de la médecine ; peine de mort ; guillotine ; pro-

Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 I

On December 1st, 1789, Dr. Guillotin presented to the National

In his report presented on May 22nd and 23rd, 1791, Louis-Michel

As Michel Foucault has shown, a new conception of capital punish-

© Armand Colin | Downloaded on 30/07/2022 from www.cairn-int.info (IP: 213.200.31.202)

However, there still remained the issue of finding a technical

1 - Philippe-Joseph Buchez and Pierre-Célestin Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la

“The Most Gentle of Lethal Methods”

The mechanization of punishment was supposed to ensure the

In 1792, the Assembly asked Antoine Louis, permanent secretary

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It is easy to build such a machine, whose effect is infallible.

Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 III

known as a “forensic surgery” expert.10 In 1763, for instance, he

Louis, however, did not limit himself to opining on the effects of

If the capacity in which Louis was acting appeared to him as still

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The task of actually building the machine was then entrusted to

The guillotine, “the ingeniously homicidal machine,” was officially

History of the Debate

A valet named Legros was sentenced for this gesture, intolerable in

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Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 V

his friend Konrad Engelbert Oelsner (1764–1828). In it, he asserted

As the Terror had come to an end with the fall of Robespierre,

If the guillotine had been presented as the fastest, most reliable,

For Sömmerring, feeling was not entirely destroyed by decapita-

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So the guillotine inflicts a horrible death because of the obvious

Sömmerring cites a number of witnesses to uphold this thesis. The

To obtain assurances in this regard and advised by Sömmerring, a

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The text ends with an accusation of barbarity against revolutionary

Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 VII

Sue, or Disseminated Sensibility

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Sue proceeded to objectify local pain, identifiable by its own symp-

This assertion about local pain, different and independent from

A severed head, Sue concludes, retains “perception of its execu-

With regard to Charlotte Corday, experience shows that the cheeks

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Sue carried out numerous experiments. He decapitated many ani-

An alternative to decapitation had to be found. During asphyxia-

Revue d’histoire des sciences I Volume 61-2 I July-December 2008 IX

Initial Responses: Wedekind and Lepelletier

Wedekind summarizes the three main arguments used to prove

First, the seat of the soul (consciousness), the sensorium commune,

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Sömmerring was no doubt right in locating the seat of the soul in

but irritability is defined precisely as a property independent of

On 24 Brumaire (November 15), another response to Sömmerring

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37 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur Vol. XI 396.

1  -  Philippe-Joseph Buchez and Pierre-Célestin Roux, Histoire parlementaire de la

37 - Réimpression de l’ancien Moniteur Vol. XI 396.

48 - Cabanis in Magasin encyclopédique.

53 - Cabanis in Magasin encyclopédique, 171.

57 - Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, “Dédicace à Monsieur Haller,” in Œuvres philosophiques

59 - Whytt, Essais physiologiques.

71 - Samuel T. Sömmerring, Über das Organ der Seele (Königsberg, 1796).