Arc Space London

The French guillotine was conceived in the late eighteenth century as a rational, egalitarian, and supposedly humane instrument of state execution. Yet its cultural afterlife was anything but orderly.

In nineteenth- and twentieth-century France, it generated a haunting visual and literary mythology: severed heads, post-mortem animation, bodily fragments, and fantasies of life persisting after death.

In this lecture, Laetitia Barbier traces the guillotine not only as a political technology, but as a disturbing image-making force that continues to shape the imagination.