The 13th of July, 2010, was the 217th anniversary of the assassination of Jean-Paul Marat, who was one of the big players in the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. Marat's political style was similar to that of Glenn Beck, or so it seems in the book A World on Fire, by Joe Jackson, which describes the events around the discovery of oxygen and the development of modern chemistry.

The "Thinking Head" part of the title above might be misleading in the context of a "Vapor Blog." "Thinking Head" in the reading selection below, from A World on Fire, refers to the question of how long consciousness persists after a person's head is cut off.

Among the main players in the discovery of oxygen were the Englishman Joseph Priestly and the Frenchman Antoine Lavoisier. Their discoveries happened mostly in the 1770s. Priestley also discovered or invented carbonated water, and he showed that plants replenish the oxygen that animals consume; he is also attributed with having founded the modern Unitarian Church.

Lots of mice died in the experiments done by Priestley and Lavoisier. Light was not then implicated as the force that drives plants to make air, but lots of other things were happening then, such as the American Revolution and the introduction of James Watt's improved steam engine into commerce.

Dr. Priestley had a book published in the late 1780s in which he praised the French Revolution and the idea of democracy. In 1791, due to promoting such a radical idea as democracy (within the British monarchy, no less) resulted in the formation of a mob that burned two of Priestley's Unitarian meeting houses before marching to his house to burn it and kill Priestley.

Priestley escaped with his wife and children, hiding out in London and elsewhere in England until 1794 when the family emigrated to Pennsylvania where he planned to build a Utopian community on a tract of about a thousand square miles a few hundred miles west of Philadelphia. Meanwhile, Lavoisier in France was also facing hard times. It came to a head in 1794, about a month after Priestley sailed for America, when Lavoisier's head was cut off with a guillotine.

The following passage from Joe Jackson's book gives some of the details of Lavoisier's death, and contemplates a question which Jackson says was current at that time: How long does the head remain conscious after it is cut off?

The word "Farmers," capitalized, in the following passage, refers to tax collectors. Lavoisier had been a Farmer, as had his father-in-law, Jacques Paulze, another Farmer whose head was cut off the same day as Lavoisier's.

Here's the passage:

"Part of the guillotine's horror and power lay in the fact that so little could be seen by the crowd. What is not witnessed must be conjured by the mind. By May 1794, Dr. Guillotin's "humanitarian machine" had become "appalling"; the prolonged ordeal of death by torture or hanging was replaced by instantaneous decapitation, yet it was this rapidity and unerring outcome that people found so chilling. The machine towered over the crowd, a singular, stark presence in the Place de la Revolution: it weighed 1,278 pounds, while the weight of the blade alone was 88 pounds. The height of its twin posts was 14 feet; within the cradle formed by those posts the blade dropped 7 feet 4 inches. It fell in 1/20 second at 21 feet per second. The beheading took 1/50 second: the blade fell so swiftly as to seem invisible.

Such a blade towering over crowd and victim would be rife with symbolism. It came to represent the terrible instant of death, when every hundredth of a second has meaning. Even the word is potent: it hails from the Latin instans, that which hangs over, or threatens. Yet the instantaneousness of the fall and beheading begged a more terrible question: Was death simultaneous with decapitation? It was widely believed that the soul resided in the pineal gland, the precise point encountered by the blade. Did the severed head immediately lose consciousness and the soul depart, or was it possible for one to know what had happened afterward?

The question had enormous consequence for the Revolution, and was the cause of medical upheaval in the years after 1794. The "humanitarian machine" was supposed to be painless; it ended the torture of death imposed by the nobles and lifted the means of execution to that reserved for nobility. Yet was a severed head aware of its fate? What could be more terrible than an awareness of death after it happened?

There were already uneasy whispers by May 8, when Lavoisier climbed in the tumbril with his colleagues. The most famous story was of Charlotte Corday [the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat]. The executioner's assistant, a man named Legros, fished into the wicker basket where her head had fallen, picked it up by the hair, then dealt it a savage slap across the cheek. Horrified spectators claimed to see the face blush, while others claimed she was indignant. A scandal erupted, all the way to the Assembly. Another tale concerned two rivals in the National Assembly: when their heads were placed in a sack after the execution, one bit the other so badly they could not be separated. A brochure entitled Anecdotes sur les decapites collected rumors of decapitated heads that spoke. Though surely "inspired inventions of poetry," the author dwelt at length on an experiment during that century in which a head was "brought back to life," as well as on the anecdote in which the severed head of Mary Stuart was said to have groaned.

With this, the Revolution entered the realm of the sacred and taboo. For the "enlightened" mind, all reasons for hope and progress, even during the current bloodbath, were set on end. The Enlightenment and Revolution led to the guillotine and Terror, and these produced a monster: a head without a body, aware of its own death -- a "thinking head." By 1795, a German surgeon, Soemmering, raised the likelihood of survival after beheading, seconded in 1796 by a French surgeon, Sue. According to both, although the unity of mind and body was severed, consciousness, seated in the cranium, remained. The sudden change of state was pregnant with horror: the victim knew what until that point in human history had been unknowable. He was aware of his own death after it occurred. The motto of the Enlightenment, "I think, therefore I am," was suddenly turned into "I think, but I am not," or "I think, but I am dead." Added Sue, "I am convinced . . . the heads would speak" if the vocal cords were not destroyed. The violent refutations by the French medical establishment suggest the two had touched a deep-seated fear.

The question of lingering consciousness has never been answered, and still lingers today. In 1836, a murderer named Lacenaire agreed to wink after decapitation, but failed to keep his promise. In 1879, attempts to elicit a reaction from a Guillotined murderer named Prunier also proved fruitless. In 1880, a doctor pumped blood from a dog into a murderer's head three hours after execution -- the lips trembled and eyelids twitched, but little more. The question seemed settled; but then in 1905, a doctor claimed that when he called the name of the murderer Languille, the severed head opened its eyes and focused on him. Two French doctors in the 1960s wrote that the brain was capable of breaking complex sugars into oxygen for as long as six minutes: "Death is not instantaneous," wrote Drs. Piedlieure and Fannier. "Every vital element survives decapitation . . . it is a violent vivisection followed by premature burial."

In the end, all is speculation. This much is known. The real cause of death in decapitation is exsanguination, Latin for "bleeding out"; a rapid loss of approximately one-half to two-thirds of the body's blood volume is sufficient to still the heart. The brain is particularly sensitive to deficiencies in oxygen and glucose and fails quickly when these are shut down. When the pressure and volume of the blood reaching the brain becomes too low to sustain consciousness, one falls into a coma. The cerebral cortex is the first to fail, but the "lower brain" -- the brain stem and medulla -- hold on longer, and with them certain reflexes. Appearance changes, and within a minute the face takes on the gray-white pallor of death as if one's essence has fled. The victim is toneless, no longer inflated with pneuma, the Greek term for the vital flame.

Lavoisier was facing a death from lack of oxygen. Like the mouse in the jar, long ago.

. . .

This much is also known. By May 8, 1794, when Lavoisier was loaded on the tumbril, the executioner was tired. Charles-Henri Sanson had been involved in executions at least since 1757, when he was assistant to his father, Charles Jean-Baptiste Sanson. That year the execution of Dimiens, the attempted regicide of Louis XV, was a horrible failure: he was to be hung, drawn, and quartered, but the horses would not dismember him, he screamed horrifically throughout, and eventually he had to be cut apart with a knife. In 1793, Charles-Henri finally inherited the chief executioner's post from his father, and he vowed to bring professionalism to the job. By May 1794, although the number of executions demanded by the Tribunal had not yet reached the 1,500 mark of June and July, the number of condemned in each "batch" had grown daily. By the height of the Terror, Sanson would boast that he and his assistants needed only "a minute per person" to get the job done. Yet by May 8, he'd not yet reached that level of efficiency. It would take thirty-five minutes to execute the twenty-eight victims in this batch, or one and a quarter minutes per person.

Sanson was a celebrity in his own way. It was he who executed Marie Antoinette, her sister-in-law Elizabeth, and the duc d'Orleans. It was he who executed Charlotte Corday, warning her of the bumps in the road so she would not pitch forward in the cart, shielding her view of the guillotine until she asked him to step away. Life cannot help but be seen as a tragedy in such an occupation, but he always tried to maintain a shred of dignity for those about to die. In August 1792, death hit close to home when his younger son, serving as assistant (as he had for his father), tripped and fell to his death from the scaffold while displaying a condemned man's head. Sanson was always first on the stage and last to leave; he opened the spectacle and gave the crowd what they desired, but such duty took its toll. "The law has been passed," he wrote to the minister of justice when the Terror was at its height.

The executioner asks nothing and will make no demands for himself in his capacity of executioner. This post is supposed to be worth 17,000 livres -- but when the cost of his assistants has been deducted, as well as all the different and numerous expenses that he pays out of his own pocket, it will be seen that he is very unlucky to have such a post. And indeed the executioner cares little for the post. He has fulfilled his duties for forty-three years. The overwhelming work that it entails makes him wish to bring his services to an end.

Since Sanson rode with each batch on its way to the scaffold, Lavoisier saw a little man, delicate and dapper, with carefully combed hair, an elegant coat, and a hat in the current English fashion. The executioner was vain, but he was not cruel or rude. The condemned had their hands tied behind their backs: Sanson helped seat them in the cart and advised them how to weather jolts along the way. The iron gate separating the large cobbled courtyard of the Palais de Justice from the street swung open. The tumbril lurched forward at 4 p.m.

As the Farmers were not personally famous, the crowd at the beginning of the route was not as large as it had been for Marat's assassin or the King. Still, they were known as a group, and spectators trickled out to mock them. It was a warm, still afternoon; the spring of 1794 had been unusually humid, and from the blood-soaked stones at their destination it was said that a terrible vapor was rising, sickening all who lived near. The cart was preceded by horsemen and musketeers, clearing a way through the crowd. Old, tall houses look down on them along the route; they emerged from the rue du Roule and turned left into the rue Saint-Honore. At this point, the flood of onlookers grew enormous due to the proximity of the markets. The carts were held up in the narrow street, and old Papillon d' Auteroche, one of the Farmers, remarked, "What grieves me most is to have such unpleasant heirs."

Lavoisier rode silently to the Place de la Revolution. Looking across the Seine, he could see the College Mazarin where he'd spent his early years. When the tumbril rolled to the foot of the scaffold, it was 5 p.m. and still light. A crowd stood in a circle around the guillotine: a police report described the Place de la Revolution "filled with people running with all their might, lest they should miss the sight." Almost all had opera glasses. Three assistant executioners stood on the platform, putting final touches to the machine.

The Farmers were executed in the order in which their names appeared on the indictment: Lavoisier's father-in-law, Jacques Paulze, was third. Antoine was fourth on the list.

Since he could not see the proceedings, this is what he would hear. The executioner held Paulze by the right arm, an assistant by the left. A third would take his feet. Paulze was thrown against the plank onto his stomach. There were three dull thuds from above: the plank sliding forward. The neck clamp falling into place. The blade coming down. Then it was Antoine's turn.

There is a story that persists today, two hundred years later, of these last few seconds of Antoine Lavoisier. In one version, he tells a friend or assistant to watch when the blade descends and he will test the mystery of the thinking head. He'll start blinking before the ax is released and see how long he keeps blinking when his head is severed. In the second version, Sanson himself recognized the great scientist and said he had always wondered how long life and consciousness remained. Would M. Lavoisier help him with this truly metaphysical problem? Sanson is said to have requested. In both versions, Lavoisier takes the challenge: he blinks rapidly before the latch is sprung; he hears its release and concentrates on research as he never has before. The blade falls. He blinks ten times after his head falls in the basket. In other versions fifteen, or twenty. At least one story swears to thirty blinks before his mind dims.

But this, like Coffinhal's statement [that France doesn't need scientists], is also apocryphal. Sanson did not recognize the great scientist; he would have recorded it otherwise, as he did Papillon d' Auteroche's comment about his heirs. The bodies were stacked in the wagons, the heads collected in a large wicker basket. All were taken to a large common grave that would contain the 943 victims guillotined at the Place de la Revolution between March 25 and June 9, 1794. The graves were dug in a waste land called Errancis, which meant "maimed man." But the myth outweighed the truth. Death itself couldn't keep Lavoisier from research, people found comfort in thinking, and this was the greatest experiment. Could even death be quantified? How did it measure up in the scales?

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