Execution: A Guide to the Ultimate Penalty (24 page)

‘On a scaffold from seven to eight feet high, two parallel and vertical bars are made fast at one end; – their top part is united by a strong cross-bar. To this cross-bar is added a thick iron ring, in which is passed a rope which fixes and retains a ram [a weight]. This is armed with a sharp and broad blade, which gradually becomes broader on all its surface in a triangular configuration, so that instead of striking perpendicularly, it strikes sideways, so that there is not an inch of blade which does not serve.

The ram weighs from sixty to eighty pounds, and its weight is doubled when it begins to slide down. It is enclosed in the grooves of the vertical bars. A spring makes it fast to the left-hand bar and a band of iron descends along the outside of this same bar, the handle on which is locked to a ring with a padlock, so that no accident is possible, and the blade only falls when the executioner operates it.

To a vertical weigh plank strong straps are fastened, by which the criminal is attached under the armpits and over the legs, so that he cannot move. As soon as the weigh plank goes down, the head, falling between the bars, is supported by a rounded cross-bar. The executioner’s assistant lowers another rounded cross-bar, the head being thus grooved in a perfect circle, which prevents it from moving in any way. This precaution is indispensable, in regard to the terrible inconveniences of fear.

The executioner then touches the spring. The whole thing is done so quickly that only the thump of the blade when it slides down informs the spectators that the culprit is no longer of the living. The head falls into a basket full of bran and the body is pushed into another wicker basket lined with very thick leather.’

Just what would the victim experience after dismounting from the tumbril? He – or she – would be assisted up the scaffold steps to where the machine waited, the fearsome blade, weighted by the ram – also known as the tup, head or monkey – suspended between its uprights. Immediately in front of and at right-angles to the uprights was a wide, vertical plank, known as the bascule, and the victim would be required to face this. There, the executioner would secure the victim’s left arm to the bascule with the straps attached, one assistant doing the same with the victim’s right arm, while the other assistant would bind the legs in similar manner.

Instantly, then, the bascule, which was hinged to a horizontal bench extending between the uprights, would be pivoted, causing it to fall flat on to the bench, the victim’s neck thereby coming to rest on a semi-circular support immediately beneath the blade.

Even as the bascule fell, an assistant would slide a crescent-shaped piece of iron, the lunette, down on to the back of the victim’s neck, locking him there immovably, thereby eliminating any mishaps due to fainting or, possibly, struggling. The executioner would then release the blade which, taking a mere three-quarters of a second to descend, would scythe through the neck –
voilà
!

Had the authorities but known it, the introduction of such a machine was timely, for within a matter of months the Revolution would demand the heads not just of a score or two of common criminals but of thousands of hated aristocrats. Sanson and his team achieved such a high degree of decapitating expertise that they were able to behead 12 victims in 13 minutes, the time factor having to allow for the removal of the body and the head, the scattering of sand on the blood-soaked boards, and the ushering of the next victim up the steps. One wonders whether slaughter of such magnitude could have taken place had only the inadequate sword been available; perhaps Dr Guillotin’s humane machine in actual fact made possible a greater massacre than otherwise could have occurred.

All the time the machine was being built and tested, a live human being, Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier, a criminal destined to be the first official victim of the guillotine, had been waiting in prison since the previous December. At last, on 25 April 1792, wearing a red shirt, as required by the law, he was led to the scaffold erected in the Place de Grève, watched by a large crowd eager to see the novel invention at work.

The guillotine, also red in colour, had been fully prepared, and without any delay Sanson and his assistants, rehearsals now over, went into action. Within seconds the three sounds that were to become the most feared in France were heard – the loud bang as the bascule swung horizontally to strike the bench; the metallic clang as the iron collar, the lunette, was swung across to pin the victim’s neck motionless, followed almost immediately by the resounding crash as the weighted blade fell, its impact in the block beneath the now-severed head shaking the entire structure, the noise reverberating around the square.

The watching public were not satisfied. The guillotine was too swift, too clinically effective. Where was the absorbing spectacle of the writhing body on the rope’s end or the flashing blade whirled by the executioner before removing the head from the quivering, kneeling victim; the felon strapped to the wheel, writhing as his limbs were shattered by the iron bar? ‘Bring back our wooden gallows,’ they chanted.

But following this successful baptism of the machine, manufacture was started in earnest in order to supply the major towns with their own guillotines. The device itself was given various names – the People’s Avenger, the Patriotic Shortener, the National Razor – but became known to later executioners as
la bécane
. Nowadays the word means ‘bike’ but in earlier usage meant an old shunting-engine, the passage of the guillotine blade along its grooves resembling the jolting progress of the engine along the tracks.

The lunette which held the head down was the ‘head breaker’, which forced the victim to ‘look through the little window’; the weight propelling the blade was the ‘travelling bag’, and the wicker receptacle in which the body was deposited was the ‘family picnic basket’.

Hardly surprisingly, a guillotine craze swept through France. Toy manufacturers made small models of it as playthings for children, with larger replicas for their parents complete with effigies of politicians and others which, when beheaded, were found to contain perfume or expensive liqueurs. The young ladies of Paris wore guillotine-shaped silver ear-rings and brooches; if nothing else, the device had given French fashion a head start, in more ways than one!

The performance in the Place de Grève was but the overture for what was to come, for on 10 August 1792 the Terror erupted, heralding the cascades of blood which would flow from more than 20,000 victims of the French Revolution. Not for nothing was the guillotine nicknamed the Red Theatre, for while the star role was occupied by Charles-Henri Sanson, a vast, albeit unwilling chorus was waiting in the wings for its turn to ‘look through the little window’.

The family Sanson,
corps d’élite
of French executioners, could trace their scaffold tenure back to 1688, when Charles Sanson, known as Longval, was first granted the status of Executioner of the High Works and Criminal Sentences, down to Henri-Clement Sanson who, after having executed more than 100 persons, forfeited the post in 1847.

Just as now, when executives have company cars, expense accounts and similar perquisites, so in the seventeenth century the State Executioner was entitled to
droit de havage
, literally the ‘right to dip into’. According to a document preserved in the French National Archives, Charles Longval was granted, among other privileges:

‘the use of the house and residence of the Market Pillory, without being troubled or disturbed therein for any cause whatsoever, with the right of levying from every vendor carrying eggs either on neck or arm, one egg; from every load two eggs; from every cart a half-quarter; from those bringing, by land or by water, green peas, medlars, hemp-seed, mustard-seed, millet, walnuts, dried fruit, chestnuts or hazelnuts, a full spoonful as has always been the custom; from every outside vendor carrying butter, either on neck or on arm, or cheese, chickens or freshwater fish, six deniers; from each well-boat, twenty sous and a carp; from each sack of peas or broad beans in the pod, one sou; and for every case of oranges and lemons, one sou’s worth. For every waggon of oysters in the shell, one quarter, and from every person carrying brooms, one broom; from every horse load, two brooms and from every waggonload, six brooms; from every vendor bringing coal, a scuttleful; from the company of ropemakers, ropes for executions; all of which the said Sanson will enjoy, as well as exemption from all subsidies for the watch, the guard, bridges and thoroughfares, and the importation of wines and drinks, with the right for himself and his servants to carry arms, offensive and defensive, by reason of his office.’

Such bountiful largesse, free and ample amounts of food, fuel, brooms, ropes, cheap wine, all valuable perquisites with no merchant daring to deny him, doubtless compensated the executioner of the day for the loathing he endured from the general public. The families of the Sanson hierarchy lived in tightly knit communities of their own, usually in isolated places, sometimes even having to paint their houses red as an indication of their trade. Unable to socialise outside their own circles, scorned and avoided, their children spurned at school, their daughters forbidden to marry into families other than those of other executioners, the prejudice was such that even communications intended for them were thrown on the ground rather than delivered directly into their hands.

Charles-Henri Sanson, Monsieur de Paris at the time of the French Revolution, was one of seven brothers, all of whom bestrode scaffolds at one time or another, as did their father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Charles’s sisters married executioners of other cities, and his sons and grandson followed in his bloodstained footsteps.

It could have been assumed that those engaged in such a profession would be uneducated and callous brutes, taking lives as casually as they took their
havage
, but this was far from the truth where Charles-Henri was concerned. Sensitive, well educated and musically talented, he did his job thoroughly and efficiently, in the knowledge that not only was he administering the judgment of the court but the crimes committed by his victims justified the torture and execution he had to inflict.

All that dedication was to change, however, when the Revolution brought not murderers and thieves to his scaffold but men and women too, who had led blameless, if affluent lives, and whose only crime was that of being aristocrats. The executioner slowly began to find the strain unbearable as the mobs delivered more and more of the doomed upper classes to the Bastille and other prisons, there to wait in torment before appearing before the mockery of the tribunal and the inevitable sentence of death; then to be transported in the filthy tumbrils through streets lined with gloating, jeering crowds to where Sanson and his assistants waited for each batch of victims...

The condemned, stumbling down from the carts, had to be marshalled into line, there to watch while each in turn was led up the steps on to the scaffold, where blood flowed everywhere, soaking the boards, dripping down through the cracks into the sand-filled pit beneath, attracting the dogs of the neighbourhood despite the wire netting which surrounded the scaffold, the decomposing smell bringing frantic complaints from those living in the locality.

Victims on the verge of collapse had to be half-dragged, half-supported as they were hustled to the bascule, the straps secured, the board swung over, the blade released. Without a second’s delay, the body had to be rolled into the wicker basket at the side, the head dropped on top of it, the next victim then being helped up the steps in a bizarre and nightmarish procession.

Sanson, far from considering himself as the keeper of the nation’s conscience or the final arbiter of the public’s revolt against those who had battened on the masses, was almost overwhelmed by the sheer horror of his task as he and his team beheaded 40, sometimes 50 or more a day. At the height of the Terror Sanson decapitated 300 men and women in three days, 1,300 in six weeks, and between 6 April 1793 and 29 July 1795, no fewer than 2,831 heads fell into the waiting baskets.