– again the blade leisurely descended, only succeeding indeepening the wound rather more. At the executioner’s bungling inefficiency, and their horror at the sight of the victim’s ever-increasing suffering, the crowd’s vociferous abuse now became more and more threatening and Ripert, his nerves rapidly approaching breaking point, tried twice more, then gave up; pulling a knife from his belt, he proceeded to decapitate the now badly mutilated M. Chalier. And if the expression ‘to have a bad hair day’ existed in revolutionary France, its meaning must have suddenly become clear when, on attempting to hold his victim’s head on high, the wig came loose and he found that his victim was completely bald – so he had to display it to the crowd by holding it by the ears!
One cannot but admire the panache of the French aristocrat who, when offered a glass of rum to fortify him before being taken to the guillotine, waved it away with the comment, ‘No thanks – I lose all sense of direction when I’m drunk!’
M. Lacoste
Another of the guillotine’s many clients was M. Lacoste who, like M. Chalier, was also bald. This complicated matters for the assistant executioner, whose job it was to stretch the victim’s neck ready for the blade by pulling on the hair or, failing that, the ears. But M. Lacoste had very small ears and so, although being held down by the iron collar, he managed to shake his head free of the assistant’s grasp and sink his teeth into the man’s hand just as the blade descended. The head duly fell; as usual the blood jetted all over the assistant’s hands and legs; and he looked down into the basket to see the end joint of his severed thumb still gripped firmly between the teeth of the grimacing head.
Condemned to death in 1793 by the French Revolutionary Council, the Duc de Chatelat had previously attempted to commit suicide in his cell by cutting his veins with a piece of broken glass. On the scaffold, the executioner offered to dress his wounds to stop them bleeding.
‘Don’t bother,’ the aristocrat said unconcernedly. ‘I’ll be losing the rest of it now.’
M. Collot
When one is to be guillotined, one does not expect to be delayed any longer than absolutely necessary – and certainly not all day. Similarly, when one is a spectator, one doesn’t see why, just for voicing a small criticism or two, that one should be raked in to take part in the proceedings – and then lose one’s own life into the bargain! Yet that is precisely what happened in Paris on 19 August 1792.
It all started when Monsieur de Paris, the executioner Charles-Henri Sanson, was ordered to behead a M. Collot, sentenced to death for forgery. The guillotine had been assembled on its usual site in the Place de Grève and as the horse-drawn cart containing the executioner and his victim arrived, they were greeted by a tremendous clamour from the large crowd waiting there, the outcry consisting of shouts of ‘To the Carrousel!’ The cart continued to advance, but a man seized the bridle and said that the will of the people was that the execution should take place, not there, but in the Place de Carrousel, opposite the palace of the late king, and that the executioner was to transfer his ‘tools’ there. After gaining the acquiescence of the Town Hall authorities, a procedure which took some considerable time, Sanson complied; the guillotine was dismantled and conveyed to the new location.
Meanwhile Collot, who up to now had been calm, began to struggle violently, and even more complications arose when it was discovered that most of the carpenters who had been paid to erect the guillotine on the first site and assist the executioner, had gone home on seeing it being moved away. However, members of the crowd, determined not to be cheated out of watching the execution, willingly, though amateurishly, assisted in the assembly of the machine on its new site.
By now it was nearly sunset and the felon, fearing appalling mistakes could be made in the half-light, begged that his execution might be adjourned until the next day, but the request, with its implication of further delay, was met with jeers of derision, the crowd’s attitude becoming threatening. One of those nearest the scaffold, a beardless young man wearing the red cap of the Revolution suddenly stepped forward, shrieking that Sanson was a traitor and that he should taste the guillotine himself unless he ‘operated’ without further ado. The executioner explained that without his assistants, he could not dispatch the victim.
‘You can find as much help as you require here,’ exclaimed the man. ‘The blood of aristocrats cements the happiness of the nation, and there is not one man in the crowd who is not ready to lend you a hand!’
A general cry of assent followed his words, but Sanson, noticing that despite their vocal willingness, those surrounding the scaffold had started to back away, hastened to accept the man’s offer, and prevented him from re-joining his comrades.
All was then ready for the execution, but when Collot was led to the scaffold steps he refused to mount them, and Sanson had to carry the struggling man on to the boards. On seeing the dark outline of the guillotine, Collot’s resistance became more desperate and he shrieked for mercy. The crowd grew silent, and the young ‘volunteer’ had by now turned very pale. At last, after a final struggle, the victim was strapped to the vertical plank, which was then pivoted horizontally so that his neck lay beneath the pendant blade, but his contortions were so violent that an assistant had to sit on him.
Sanson now told the young man that he could not furnish better proof of his patriotism than by taking a leading part in the execution, and he handed him the rope which released the blade. At his bidding the young man gave a tug; the blade fell, and the head dropped into the waiting basket. But this was not all, for of course it was essential to show the head to the multitude after decapitation, and the bloodthirsty onlookers were not slow in reminding Sanson that they were waiting. Determined to teach the zealous revolutionary a lesson, the executioner explained to him what he had to do. Reluctantly the young man lifted the head by the hair and advanced to the edge of the scaffold, but as he was raising his arm to display the bloody trophy to his triumphant comrades, he suddenly staggered and fell back. Charles-Henri, thinking that he had only fainted, went to his assistance – but the young man’s violent emotions had proved too much for him and had brought on a heart attack: he was dead!
Having been deserted by her lover, beautiful blonde Manette Bonhourt took her revenge by becoming a mass murderer, killing nearly twenty men by using her allure, slipping drugs in their drinks and finally killing them with repeated hammer blows.
Even as Henri Sanson, the executioner, stared admiringly at her on the scaffold on 16 May 1808, she smiled and said provocatively, ‘Don’t you think it a pity to cut off a head as beautiful as mine?’ Then, suddenly aware of the lustful expressions on the faces of the men clustered round the scaffold, she exclaimed furiously, ‘Look at the vicious lot! They’d rather see me stripped for a whipping!’
Isabeau Herman
Not only was it essential that the guillotine be in full working order, the victim also had to be secured in the correct manner so that they were unable to move. This, regrettably, was not always the case, as evidenced by a report in a document in the French National Archives dated 27 May 1806:
‘Among those executed on 14 April in Bruges was Isabeau Herman, a young girl twenty-two years old, whose beauty, youth and misfortune had attracted the sympathy of the onlookers, for on mounting the scaffold she had flung herself on her knees and begged the pardon of the crowd for the scandal she had caused by her irregular life.
The executioner, a very old man named Bongard, had failed to tie her legs to the bascule, and had left on her head her bonnet, in which her hair was gathered up. He had also omitted to cut her hair, and the movements of her head had caused some of her locks to fall on to the back of her neck.
When the blade fell, it did not sever her head, which remained full of life. She was horribly convulsed, and her legs fell off the board, leaving her in an indecent position. The executioner raised the blade a second time, but it proved unable to detach her head, until finally, at a third stroke, it was severed from her body. A how
ling mob besieged the scaffold; on every side, cries arose that the executioner must be stoned to death, and his life was only saved by the intervention of the armed police surrounding the scaffold.’
A journalist, while visiting the executioner Sanson, enquired about his daughter, to be informed that she had recently married a doctor. The visitor, believing that members of executioners’ families could only marry those of others engaged in the same way of life, expressed his surprise, but the executioner replied, ‘Eh, mon Dieu, let us look at things from a higher standpoint. To save a human body a surgeon is often obliged to sacrifice a human member, an arm or a leg! So when one of the members of the social body is gangrened, is it not the right thing to sacrifice that also?’
At that, the journalist exclaimed, ‘But permit me to point out that there is a very great difference between the two sacrifices.’
The executioner smiled slowly, then said, ‘Yes, Monsieur – in the size of the knife!’
Mme Thomas
This young French lady endeavoured to use her feminine wiles when escorted on to the scaffold on 23 January 1887 as, before an immense crowd of lascivious-minded spectators, she immediately started to remove all her clothing. With much difficulty, and assailed by a veritable barrage of lewd objections from the onlookers, the assistant executioner managed to restrain her and then had to drag her by the hair to the plank, where she was securely strapped down. He then went round to the other side of the machine, to hold her by the hair, writhing and screaming, as the blade fell.
That episode so appalled and upset Louis Deibler, the executioner, that he vowed he would never again execute a woman, and forthwith tendered his resignation; this, however, was neither accepted nor necessary, for after that occasion any death sentence passed on a woman in France was never carried out, except for some few cases during World War II.
When, on New Year’s Eve 1793, executioner Charles-Henri Sanson went to the prison in order to escort General Biron to the guillotine, he found his quarry in the head turnkey’s office, eating oysters with much gusto. On seeing the executioner the officer said, ‘Please allow me to finish this last dozen oysters!’ Sanson replied, ‘At your orders, sir.’ ‘No, morbleu,’ exclaimed the general. ‘It’s just the other way about – I am at yours!’ He leisurely continued his repast, remarking while he did so, that he would be arriving in the next world just in time to wish all his friends there a Happy New Year.
M. Laroque
One entry in the diary kept by the French executioner Charles-Henri Sanson describes how, on one occasion, a very unfortunate accident happened.
‘Only one convict remained, all his companions having been executed before him. As he was being strapped down, my son Henri, who was attending to the baskets [exchanging those containing severed heads for empty ones] called to me and I went to him. Larivière, one of the assistants, had forgotten to re-raise the blade, so when the weigh-plank, the bascule, was rapidly lowered with the convict Laroque strapped to it, his face struck the edge of the blade, which was bloody. He uttered a terrible shriek. I ran up, lifted the plank, and hastened to raise the blade. The mob hissed us and threw stones at us. In the evening Citizen Fouquier [his superior] severely reprimanded me. I deserved his blame, for I should have been in my usual place. Citizen Fouquier saw I was very sorry and dismissed me with more kindness than I expected.’
Sanson concluded that entry, as he always did, with that day’s total: ‘thirteen executions.’
In 1793 ex-Mayor of Paris, Jean Sylvain Bailly was sentenced to death by the Revolutionary Tribunal. The executioner, on climbing into the tumbrel with his victim, told an assistant to throw a coat over the man’s shoulders, as the weather was chilly and wet. ‘Why?’ asked Bailly. ‘Are you afraid I should catch a cold?’
On reaching the guillotine, the executioner discovered that the carpenters had forgotten some of the floorboards of the scaffold. The tumbrel party had to go back and collect the lengths of timber, the beams taking up so much space in the cart that both executioner and victim had to walk behind!
Eugen Wiedman
Public executions ceased in England in 1868, but continued in France until 1939, the last one there being that of Eugen Wiedman. Wiedman had a life-long criminal record of assault and armed robbery, and in 1937 changed his modus operandi by kidnapping Jean de Koven, an American dancing instructor, and holding her to ransom. But things went badly wrong for him and in desperation he murdered her, the remains not being found until four months later, buried beneath the steps of a villa in La Voulze. He subsequently went on a killing spree, killing four men and a woman, until eventually being captured during
a shoot-out with the police. Charged with the multiple murders, he had little defence against the evidence produced in court, especially the long length of cloth he had forced down the dancer’s throat, and that, together with other witnesses’ testimonies, convinced the jury of his guilt, and he was sentenced to death, his execution to take place on 17 June 1939.
The guillotine was sited in the Place de Grève in Versailles, and in order to attract as little attention as possible the execution was scheduled for four o’clock in the morning. But the authorities failed to take into consideration the keen interest, indeed enthusiasm, of the public for such a spectacle. Hundreds of guillotine aficionados, determined to witness the felon’s decapitation, started their vigil on the previous evening, filling the bars and cafés around the square and drinking throughout the night. Having had the hair at the back of his neck trimmed and his shirt collar cut away, and after smoking his last cigarette and sipping his last tot of rum, Wiedman arrived with his escort and, of course, Henri Desfourneaux, the executioner. The cheers of excitement reverberated around the square, followed by a hectic scramble as the crowd jostled to get a good viewpoint around the Widow Maker.
It was then that things started to go wrong. In order to minimise the publicity which the preparations would otherwise have attracted, no scaffold on which the guillotine would normally have been positioned had been erected, the killing machine itself therefore stood in the square at ground level. Consequently, the close proximity of the mob, many of them drunk, fighting to get as near as possible despite the police cordon, together with the sheer cacophony of noise, badly affected the usually well-drilled performance of Desfourneaux and his assistants. Strapping Wiedman to the bascule and quickly pivoting it into its horizontal position, it was then discovered that it was out of alignment with the lunette, the iron collar which should have gripped the victim’s neck and held his head immovable. Not daring to waste time attempting to re-adjust the mechanism, and knowing that at all costs the man’s neck had to be held beneath the blade, Desfourneaux did the only thing possible: he ordered his assistant to seize the felon’s hair and ears, and pull his head forward.
Even as the man obeyed, the executioner released the blade; it descended rapidly, severing the head and sending the assistant reeling backwards, his clothes soaked with the blood which pumped from the torso to flood across the ground and into the gutters surrounding the guillotine.
So appalled were the authorities at such a shocking debacle and the barbaric behaviour of the spectators that a decree was hastily passed that all future executions were to take place in private behind prison walls.
When the French ex-Revolutionary leader Georges-Jacques Danton mounted the scaffold in 1794 to be guillotined, he surveyed the crowds contemptuously and said, ‘Do not forget to show my head to the mob – they have not often seen one like it!’
Hanging
John Barns, William Mossman and Bernard Means
In 1785 these three men were convicted of serious crimes; Means and Barns for housebreaking and thieving, Mossman for theft. For some reason their leg-irons had been struck off the night before their execution, and none of them were prepared to go quietly to the scaffold. Under heavy escort they were led to the place of execution and in front of a large crowd – triple hangings were extremely popular among the townsfolk –
they stood in line on the drop, the nooses were placed around their necks and the ropes tightened. And every rope broke! Amid pandemonium the trio were led down the steps again and made to sit there under heavy guard, to wait until prison officials returned from town with fresh supplies.
Wife-murderer William Borwick stood on York’s scaffold and commented wryly that he hoped the rope was strong enough, because if it broke he would fall to the ground and be crippled for life.
James Bell
There were occasionally hangmen who were too tender-hearted for their own good. John Williams of Edinburgh, making his debut on the scaffold, was one who was so lachrymose that when ordered to hang murderer James Bell on 13 July 1835, he could not see through his tears to adjust the noose. The superintendent of the prison had to tell him to move aside and took over himself. Needless to say, the crowd did not appreciate hangmen who sympathised with their victims – why, they might even be tempted to shorten their sufferings, thereby depriving onlookers of their rightful entertainment – and Williams, dodging stones thrown by the crowd as he made his escape, decided that his first hanging was going to be his last, and he resigned the next day.
English hangman William Calcraft always rejected the accusation that he had actually put anyone to death. ‘All I did,’ he explained, perhaps tongue-in-cheek, ‘was to make the preliminary arrangements required by law, as solemnly pronounced by an English judge – I placed the noose around the culprit’s neck and then allowed him to execute himself by falling!’
Amazing True Stories of Execution Blunders Page 8
