In 1788, a French blacksmith named Mathurin Luchatou died of a blow to the head in his home. The operation was done in the blink of an eye, but the feud that drove it had worsened for months.
Earlier that year, the ultra-conservative Mathurin was apparently unhappy with his son Jean's new ideas about freedom and equality. Jean was outspoken about his convictions, which sparked a wave of radicalism across France. Not content with kicking his son out of the house, Mathurin tries to punish him further, preparing to marry Jean's girlfriend, Helen. The Helen family is more than happy to sell their daughter to a self-esteemed person in the community, but Helen herself despairs of being snatched from Jean and tied up with a melancholy old monster for the rest of her life.
Jean came up with a plan: one night, he came to his father's house to save Helen, then rode away and walked into the egalitarian sunset. But Mathurin interrupted their escape, and a fight ensued. Jean slammed it with a hammer. Mathurin's forehead suddenly turned red, and the old man died immediately.
Despite claiming to be justified in self-defense, Jean was convicted of murder and sentenced to wheels. The punishment was to tie prisoners face up to a large wheel and then break their bones. For centuries, this punishment was a common form of torture, execution, and humiliation throughout Europe. Some believe that this was entirely a French invention, which began as early as the sixth century.
In the weeks after the sentencing, Jean's fate became the focus of attention. Here, many argue that the young man was punished not for violence, but for his political beliefs. On the day of the execution, as Jean walked toward the gallows, dozens of locals rushed forward, grabbed him and took him to safety. The authorities were shocked, and the power of public opinion prompted King Louis XVI to give Jean a pardon.
Jean's freedom now seems to be one of countless moments of revolt that heralded the coming revolution, which swept through centuries of tradition. France never turned to the wheel again, and it suddenly seemed to belong to the distant past. A year after the Gene case, a new method of execution was first openly discussed: the guillotine, a killing machine that, as its creators insisted, would bring primordial justice, rolling heads one by one.
In the riotous 1790s, the man accused of manipulating the Paris guillotine was the one who was preparing to execute Jean before the mob intervened. He was Charles-Henri Sanson, ceo of Louis XVI and the Republican regime that overthrew the old regime. Although at the beginning of the revolution he was spurned and defiled like the executioners of his time, he ended his life as the "great Sanson" and became a hero of the French people. The entire European continent considers him to be the last bastion of France's moral integrity.
Killing people is the bloodline of the Sansen family. The first member of the family to serve as a royal executioner was Charles Henry's great-grandfather, who was forced to take up the position after the death of his father-in-law. In the next century, three other Sansonsons continued the role until 1778, when Charlie Henry took over the role. He was 39 years old at the time, but was already a veteran of executions. In 1754, when his father died of a debilitating illness, Charlie Henry took over his duties on the gallows at the age of 15. The boy exhibited amazing qualities: wisdom beyond his age and a stomach strong enough to see through the strangulation, beheading, and burning of his daily life. As a teenager, he directed the last hangouts, paintings and cantonments in French history. In retrospect, it was a relatively simple period, when the worst crime imaginable was the killing of the king.
What we know about Sanson suggests that he was an eloquent and thoughtful man. He was erudite, multilingual, and performed his official duties with the utmost seriousness. As his grandson later claimed, he may have felt that the family business was holding him back and frustrating him. He aspired to a higher position, but was forbidden by the stain of the executioner's noose. Traditionally, being an executioner allows people to live a good life, but they can't enjoy it in high society. While there is a desire for public executions, those responsible for suicide are considered mentally contaminated. The knowledge of this weighed heavily on Sanssen, who worked hard to purify the family's surname. We can't be sure of his deep thoughts about the social and political torrents of paris in the late eighteenth century, but Sanson seems proud to serve the king, even with such a brutal ending. The only thing Sanson wanted was the respect he felt deserved as a loyal servant of the king. Curiously, it was the revolution that gave him these things.
In the decade following the capture of the Bastille, all the most basic assumptions about the frenchman's life and death were called into question. In December 1789, the newly formed National Convention debated the citizenship of Jews, actors and executioners, three groups that had previously been stripped of their citizenship. In the age of liberty, equality and fraternity, the claim that many people think that executioners should be considered full citizens is completely absurd. "The exclusion of executioners is not based on prejudice," Abbe Mori said. All good people shudder when they see a man killing his own kind. To evoke these emotions, Sanssen wrote a letter to Parliament on behalf of every executioner in France. Addressing the taboo surrounding the death penalty, he wrote, was a revolutionary duty, and failure to do so would expose superstition, cowardice, and hypocrisy. "Either conclude that the crime must go unpunished," he challenged them, "or an executioner is needed to punish it." ”
The situation proved to be in Sanssen's favour: French society's perception of executions and executioners was undergoing a seismic shift. Until now, there has been a strict class divide here: the rich are beheaded, while the peasants suffocate and writhe at the end of the rope. Just a few weeks ago, Dr. Joseph Ignace Guiyottan proposed a vague but startling post-revolutionary public execution. He suggested the introduction of some sort of beheading machine to ensure that all citizens sentenced to death had the same death, and to remove traces of medieval pain and revenge from the acts of execution, leaving only a speedy judicial trial. "With my machine," he said, though he didn't have a specific design in mind, "I cut off your head in the blink of an eye and you won't feel anything." "Many people find it difficult to take Dr. Giyottan's vision of a killing machine seriously. According to 19th-century historians, his contemporaries considered Gyotán a joke, and one of them thought he was a "man without talent and fame ... A nosake who makes himself nosy". However, Gyottan's view of equal rights on chopping boards resonates with people. In October 1791, a law regulating executions was passed, prohibiting any means other than beheading.
Looking at the worn blades he used to cut off people's heads, perhaps anticipating an increase in their workload, Sanson explained that it was impossible to carry out every death sentence with a sword; A more effective approach is needed. With this new law, Dr. Giyottan's ridiculous idea of a killing machine became urgent. As the number of death row inmates increased, engineer Dr. Anthony Lewis was recruited to quickly design an operational device, and a man named Tobias Schmidt was hired to build it.
On 17 April 1792, Sanssen and government officials at the Hospital of Bissett conducted a trial run. On this day, bales of hay, several corpses and a live sheep were placed under the blades of the guillotine. A few weeks later, Sanson appeared in front of a large crowd in Paris to watch the guillotine's public appearance. Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, a notorious roadblocker, was the first to face this terrible new ritual. No one, not even Sanson, could predict how many people would follow.
Ad hoc reports on the first few guillotine incidents left the audience feeling a sense of disappointment. This revolutionary approach to the death penalty is efficient and efficient, without the exaggerated scenes of traditional executions. Some see it as progress: perhaps now the death penalty will no longer be a source of mass entertainment. In fact, it simply marks the evolution of the landscape from the Middle Ages to the modern era. The slow and gloomy aging process is replaced by rapid clinical atrocities filled with gushing blood from finished products. People no longer expect those convicted to win the support of the masses with a quiet dignity. Against the backdrop of a partisan revolution, fearless sacrifice became the tone. The men and women who had been placed under the sword by Sanson often danced and sang, mocking their enemies with their last words. Historian David Groedt writes, "People must show supreme contempt for death, both in language and in gesture." The end of a person's bloody life, even convicted people often see it as "a wonderful show".
For those who support the revolution, the cleansing and condemnation of the revolution, the guillotine is a humanitarian tool for achieving ultimate justice, and it soon gained mythical status. With the movement of the hand controlling the machine, Sanson's image changed. The public, forgetting his family's long-standing dedication to the Bourbon dynasty, now cheers for Sansson in the streets, calling him "the avenger of the people," a hero who represents the power and wisdom of the masses. His popularity was so high that his executioner uniforms — striped trousers, triangle hats and green coats — became street fashion for men, while women wore petite guillotine-shaped earrings and brooches.
Most strikingly, Sanson became an acceptable face of the revolution among the sharpest critics. The story is filled with his grace and courtesy, his love of gardening and animals, and his tenderness as a father and husband. Many English visitors to France found the principles of the Revolution unpleasant and the violence in the name of the Revolution indescribable, and they praised Sanssen – even though he executed King Louis XVI in January 1793. Perhaps they saw in him a shadow of an old, aristocratic France, one who did not impose his own opinions and who stoically carried out the tasks entrusted to him by the state, which were endowed not only by the state, but also by heredity and tradition over the centuries.
According to records of the time and later testimony of his family, Sanssen was haunted by guilt and doubts about his role in the king's execution, a moment considered by many to be the symbolic beginning of the guillotine's most notorious era. In the months after Louis's death, tensions between the revolutionary leaders gradually eased and reached their peak in terror, and over the course of a year or so, the government sought to eliminate even the most vague signs of counter-revolution. "Terror is nothing more than swift, harsh and rigid justice," said Robespierre, who was the mastermind of state-sanctioned violence that year. Between June 1793 and July 1794, 16,500 people were sentenced to death throughout France. The avalanche of killing unleashed dark forces that had nothing to do with the revolution's stated goals. In the northern town of Cambre, a priest named Joseph Le Brunn found a new profession, became a local executioner at the beginning of terrorism, cast himself into a mini-Robspil, liquidated personal grudges, indulged in apparent violence, and killed dozens of people under the most untenable excuses.
Just before the horror began, Sanson was devastated by a personal tragedy in which his son, who, according to family tradition and his assistant, raised a severed head to the crowd, fell from the execution table, and died. On top of the grief, it was now wave after wave of massacres; 12 months later, Sanson was ordered to execute more than two thousand people. His diary — at least, his grandson quoted him — shows the immense pressure he was under. On June 17, 1793, when he was sent to behead 54 times, his comment was "terrible day's work". Another day, he apparently hired 16 aides to help with the execution. "They're organizing the guillotine service as if the guillotine will always exist." One morning, he offered Marie Antoinette's neck; The other was George Danton, who was perhaps a key figure in overthrowing the monarchy. It is impossible to understand the fate of the factions within the factions, or to predict which noble patriot will be condemned as a traitor next. "Great citizens and good people walked one by one toward the guillotine," Sanson revealed in his diary. "How much more will it swallow?" The guillotine is no longer a machine of justice, but an instrument of tyranny.
Ironically, the Executioner's Office was one of the few hereditary institutions that emerged unscathed in the 1790s. On August 20, 1795, about a year after Robespierre's fall and the unofficial end of terror, an exhausted Sanson gave his duties to his son Henry. In his 39-year career, Sanson has killed nearly 3,000 people. Henry proved to be a very different figure from the old school, and he stayed until 1840, when the monarchy had been restored and the Sansson family was back in the royal family, not the heroes of the revolution. The transformation of the executioner's public image is only a short phase.
After Henry's death, the job was given to his son, Henry Clement, who found the family's legacy to be an unbearable burden of shame. The execution caused him to come out of the honeycomb, made him unwell, and had nightmares to torment him. He began to drink and gamble. Sometime in 1847, he told the government that he could not carry out that day's execution because he had become a guillotine to pay off debts and had no funds to buy them back. It was the end of seven generations of coalition government for the Sanson family, the country's most unpopular public office. Henry Clement wrote a history of The Sanson executioner, and it is said that he quoted heavily from Charlie Henry's diary during the Revolution. Such diaries have survived, so it is impossible to know the veracity of such claims, and it is convenient that these excerpts are in keeping with Henry Clement's statement that his famous grandfather, like him, was struggling with his duties, a stain that prevented him from choosing another path in life.
From Dumas to Hillary Mantel, Charles-Henry Sanson is a household name in France and is a troublesome figure in many works of fiction. More recently, he has been adapted into a comic book series of romantic anti-heroes, a delicate but talented young man who is forced by the irresistible demands of family honor to carry out terrifying missions in a world turned upside down. Of course, the memory of the guillotine is even more indestructible. It was last used in France in 1972. Lawyers for one of the death row inmates wrote that when his client was sentenced to death, he was disgusted by the celebration scenes in Paris and likened them to the mob of the early years of the guillotine: "There is no doubt that if the executioner, like Sanson, raised two heads in front of them, the audience would have applauded and screamed with joy" But as far as we know, Sanson himself rarely rejoiced in that chilling moment. When he was asked how he felt during the execution, he replied, "Sir, I'm always in a hurry to get it done."