How sharp is a guillotine?
Generally the guillotine is sharp. However like scissors cutting paper the blade can become blunt and may have not cut off the head completely but would have killed the victim. Executioners would have had a knife to show the public that the head had fallen into the tumbril. There was however another problem with the guillotine. If it was not set up properly the blade could jam. This was the reason for ending public executions in France. In 1939 Eugene Weidmann was the last person executed in public. The guillotine was not set up properly and the blade jammed at least a couple of times. Weidmann was forced to lie there for more than an hour while the guillotine was rebuilt. Disturbances in the public were used as a reason for ending executions in public.
While I’m not sure how sharp the guillotine blade actually was, the reason that the executioner would have had a knife is because the blade wouldn’t always slice through the victim’s neck the first time through. You have to imagine that it’s a thin, sharp blade. It wouldn’t have been able slice through hair and skin and muscle and bone and then more muscle and more skin in just one go. I’ve had a teacher tell me that there have been records of executioners having to drop the blade six or seven times to completely sever the head. You may have heard how efficient the guillotine was… well, it wasn’t that efficient.
