What angle must the blade be? Is it good to have a high attack angle, or one that’s nearly flat?
How heavy should the apparatus holding the blade be? How far should it travel? Is keen sharpening important, or does the weight do most of the work? What kind of latch/release do you use?
Lastly, morbid extra credit, did they ever execute someone with their face up, so they could see the blade coming?
EDIT FOR CLARITY: Way more complex than an axe or a noose.
This thread led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, so I suppose I’ll post some of my meager findings.
Of course, the Wikipedia Article On The Guillotine includes a brief history documenting the evolution of it’s invention, but is sparse on the technical specifications, which online searches also turned up a bit sparse.
I did eventually land on this technical schematic PDF of the Guillotine from archive.org.
Somewhat amusing to find, you can also pay for the blueprints to creating a historically accurate replica guillotine here.
As a morbid aside, the Wikipedia article details under the Controversy Section the dispute as to whether a decapitated head remained alive shortly after the beheading and the eye witness account of someone witnessing the staring of a decapitated man’s eyes after calling out his name multiple times. The description is deliciously macabre.
Don’t think this really answered your question OP, but nevertheless, this was intriguing for me to look into, so thanks for sparking my curiosity with your post!
EDIT: Fixing various small typos.
A couple of observations from the schematics: