Think about how a guillotine works. It cuts off your head from your neck.

Think about how your body works. All of “you” exists in the head. You are dependent on everything below the neck to keep the head alive.

The guillotine doesn’t kill you. It separates “you” from the system that keeps “you” alive. It cuts off oxygen and energy from the brain. It is essentially suffocating, but without the muscles to suffocate.

So you are likely fully awake and aware of your surroundings. You are, in effect, holding your breath until you die, but also aware that “you” are in a tiny basket, separate from the things that keep “you” alive.

No thanks.

You know this smug motherfucker?

That’s Antoine Lavoisier, 18th century French chemist. Brilliant man. This is the guy who named oxygen. One of the founding fathers of the fucking metric system.

He was executed by guillotine during the French Revolution for adulterating tobacco. In reality, he had invented a process for curing tobacco in a way that made it more difficult for retailers to cut or modify tobacco, and the retailers really didn’t like that. He was an aristocrat prior to the revolution and, well, you can see how that ended up.

Anyway, he told his buddy to count his blinks right after his head was cut off.

His buddy counted 12.

Lavoisier was exonerated a year and a half after his death.

“La République n’a pas besoin de savants ni de chimistes; le cours de la justice ne peut être suspendu.” (“The Republic needs neither scholars nor chemists; the course of justice cannot be delayed.”) Judge Coffinhall, who sentenced Lavoisier. He himself was executed three months later

“Il ne leur a fallu qu’un moment pour faire tomber cette tête, et cent années peut-être ne suffiront pas pour en reproduire une semblable.” (“It took them only an instant to cut off this head, and one hundred years might not suffice to reproduce its like.”). Mathematician Joseph Louis Lagrange on his death.