I shouldn’t be surprised, I know

but I guess I figured cutting off heads was so, I dunno, 18th century:

Jeremy Mercer’s WHEN THE GUILLOTINE FELL, about the last person executed by guillotine in France, in 1972, for a grisly murder in Marseille, to Michael Flamini at St. Martin’s, in a nice deal, by Kristin Lindstrom at the Lindstrom Literary Group (world).

Interestingly, though you can only trust Wikipedia as far as you can throw it, they claim the guy died in 1977…

Also fyi, this particular execution was non-public. The last public guillotining was of Eugene Weidmann in 1939.