The Man Who Promised He Would Try To Blink After Being Beheaded - Antoine Lavoisier

Antoine Lavoisier was a dreamy French chemist responsible, in part, for the metric system and a few other crimes against humanity (‘hydrogen’, the elementary table…). The facts of Lavoisier’s death are, meanwhile, suitably enough, a mix of brutal fact and legend sympathique.

Let’s start with the facts. Lavoisier was condemned to death by a people’s court in 1794 – a typical example of the revolution’s Saturn-like eating of its own children. When mercy was asked for so that he could continue his experiments the judge responded with the words ‘La révolution n’à pas besoin de savants’, ‘the revolution doesn’t need scholars’, forgetting for a moment that the revolution was a direct result of scholars: echoes of Pol Pot shooting people with glasses.

As it happened Lavoisier would be pardoned a little more than a year after his death – this is fact too. But facts are hard to come by at the guillotining…

It is said by numerous authorities that Lavoisier, in his last service to science, agreed to blink for as long as he could after the blade came down and that blink he did, for as many as thirty seconds, depending on the source.

But is this story true? The most serious biographers are uncertain about the judge’s comment, quoted above. And they are downright hostile to the idea of Lavoisier’s blinking his way into eternity.

So where does the story come from? Quite simply human curiosity about the fate of the head when the blade has separated it from the body and a desperate attempt to add some romance to the industrialisation of killing with the guillotine.

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