Travelers' Tales Paris

by James O'Reilly

  Next the heads of Lafayette’s mother-in-law, her mother, and one of her daughters rolled into the basket, all for the crime of being aristocrats; and the head of André Chenier, 31, poet, about whom Giordano would write an opera 100 years later. Chenier’s crime was that he had written articles in the Journal de Paris protesting the excesses of the Revolution.

  Day by day the guillotine worked. It killed the rich and poor, the known and unknown, 1,109 of them men, including at least one seventeen-year-old boy; 197 of them women, including 51 nobles and 23 nuns, the rest being for the most part maids, hair-dressers, and seamstresses from noble households.

  The problem became what to do with the corpses, and one morning Riedain woke up and found that a hole had been broken through the wall at the bottom of his garden. Hordes of men were chopping down his fruit trees, digging vast ditches in his lawn, building a heavy door into the breach in his wall. Riedain rushed up and protested. The nation has need of your place, he was told. The ditches got deeper and deeper. He shouted, pleaded, got nowhere. He ran off to plead before the proper ministry. What about his prison hospital? He was doing important work for the Revolution. Again he got nowhere. The first ditch was twenty-five feet long, fifteen wide, twenty deep. The second was even bigger, thirty by twenty by twenty-four.

  Night fell, and here came the cartloads of corpses into the garden. Men worked by the light of torches. The headless male, female, and adolescent bodies were first stripped, then dumped naked into the hole. The heads were shaken out of sacks. Sometimes one or another escaped and was booted in like a soccer ball. The bloody clothing, meanwhile, was being inventoried by scribes to be sold.

  It rained a lot that summer and the garden turned to mud. The carts were heavy and some nights the men could barely push them up to the edge. Night after night the carts came through, and the corpses fell one upon the other in the ditches, where they were sometimes covered by a light dusting of lime. The ditches remained open, and through the neighborhood on every night breeze moved clouds of stench. After almost two months, neighborhood outrage reached such a pitch that the guillotine was moved back to what is now the Place de la Concorde in front of what is now the Hotel Crillon. But at night fresh corpses continued to arrive here. Finally the order was given: the immense ditches, containing now about half of all the victims of the Terror, were to be filled in. The depths were measured. In the first ditch the headless corpses lay eight feet thick, in the second only five.

  Altogether more than 3,000 people were executed in Paris alone, among them many of the best men France had. More than 110,000 others, including all the rest of France’s best, had fled abroad, where they stayed. Napoleon, 30 years old, walked into an empty capital and took over.

  By 1802 some of the émigrés had trickled back to Paris, many wanting to visit the graves of guillotined loved ones. In most cases they were unable to find out where they were, for although the executions had taken place in public, the burial details had worked at night and in secret lest grief or rage provoke demonstrations. Officially, the mass graves at 35, Rue de Picpus did not exist. But the surviving Noailles sisters, Adrienne de Lafayette and Pauline de Montagu, learned of a lacemaker who had followed the cart containing the corpses of her father and brother.

  The girl led them here.

  The two women decided to buy the property. But they had no money anymore and so were obliged to sell subscriptions to other bereaved relatives, the ones they knew, the ones with blood as blue as their own. In time they invited the present order of nuns to establish a new convent here and to build a new church over the ruins of the old.

  They also set aside a corner of the garden as a private cemetery for themselves—this cemetery in which I stand—with the result that I walk now past tomb after tomb of counts and marquesses and princes and dukes and their female equivalents. There can’t be such a conglomeration of nobility anywhere else in the world. Hardly a commoner’s tomb anywhere. It is very strange. The commoners are all back there under the trees, headless, buried twenty feet deep, indistinguishable from the aristocrats who died with them.

  I am quite alone in this enormous garden, and I walk over to look at the wall where the breach was made for the carts. The carts were painted red so the blood would not show, or at least not show so much. The breach is still visible. After the Revolution it was filled in with stones that are not quite the same color. Also the lintel is still there—the great thick beam that the workmen embedded in the wall so that the doorway would not collapse on the horses and carts.

  There are plaques by the breach and more plaques on the wall that surrounds the mass graves—to the sixteen Carmelites, to André Chenier, and to others. If you enjoy reading such things, this is the place for you. You will be busy a long time. Nor is there any similar place elsewhere. There were mass graves in other parts of Paris at the time, but as the city expanded the others were built on; this is the only one extant.

  The 1,500 people piled together under my feet, plus that many again who lie today under buildings, were all beheaded by one man, Charles-Henri Sanson. Sanson, who was 50 years old in 1789, came from a family of executioners. The Sansons were themselves the executioners, or were related to the executioners, of eighteen cities in all, and Charles-Henri was the fourth generation in an unbroken line from father to son to serve as executioner of Paris. After him the post would go to his son, and then his grandson, six generations in all before the line petered out.

  At the beginning executioners were not allowed to marry outside the profession. By law their houses were painted red. If they had daughters they were sometimes obliged to nail a sign to the front door to warn suitors away. The baker baked their bread apart, and in church their pew was set apart. Commissions brought to them were not handed over but tossed at their feet.

  Their job was even messier at first than it later became. In addition to merely killing people, the early Sansons and their relatives and colleagues in other places also had to cut off hands, cut off ears—the left one first because it was thought to control sexual activity—and stretch people out on the wheel so as more easily to break their legs with iron bars. If the court’s sentence called for it they had to peel a criminal like an orange with red-hot pincers or stretch him on the rack until all his limbs were dislocated. Sometimes the executioner used the retentum immediately, or almost immediately. The retentum was a cord so fine the mob couldn’t see it. The executioner strangled the victim, then performed the heavy stuff on the corpse. Whatever happened, eventual death was certain. Vagrants and petty thieves were hanged. Homosexuals were burned. Bad women or bigamists were scourged. Serious felons were decapitated: swords for the nobility, axes for commoners. Executions were popular entertainment. To get the best places, spectators began to gather the night before; they lit fires, bought food from vendors, who abounded.

  The first four Paris Sansons were all named Charles, the last two Henri. The sire of the dynasty was an army lieutenant stationed in Rouen who had the misfortune to fall in love with the Rouen executioner’s daughter. He was, in more ways than one, invited into the family. At his first execution, when ordered to start clubbing the condemned man, he is said to have fainted. This was the origin of the legend that the Sansons were at heart kind, sensitive, gentle. There would be more publicity of this nature during the Revolution. Once inside the profession this first Charles found he could not get out. The top job in Rouen being already taken, he moved to Paris, where he made a name for himself.

  His son, the second Charles, performed his first execution at eighteen. The prisoner was a woman who had tried to poison her husband. The windows all around were selling, it was said, for 50 louis d’or apiece. The boy’s father ordered him to sword off her head. Butchery. He was trembling so much it took him five or six swings.

  The third Charles inherited the post at seven, his father having willed it to him on his deathbed. His mother, née Marthe Dubut, had to hurry him over to the public prosecutor’s office, where she pleaded for t
he appointment to be approved, and it was. From then on the child had to witness every execution to make it legal. He did not himself perform one until he was eighteen. At thirty-five and in bad health he resigned—one almost wants to say abdicated—in favor of his oldest son, the Charles-Henri of the Revolution, who was then only fifteen—too young. Back to the public prosecutor went Marthe Dubut, dragging her grandson by the hand. The boy had been assisting his father on the scaffold from the age of eleven, she testified. He was certainly experienced. Grandma claimed the job as the family’s right, and again got her way.

  This newest Sanson was supposedly the most soft-hearted of the lot, and the execution of a man who had murdered his mistress’s husband is offered as proof. Charles-Henri, by then sixteen, could not watch. A mulatto assistant began bludgeoning the man while Charles-Henri looked away. The mistress, meanwhile, was being made to watch; she was later hanged.

  Soon afterwards a man named Damiens stabbed Louis XV. Although the King was only nicked, Damiens was sentenced to horrendous torture. Knowing himself too tenderhearted to carry out the sentence, the boy executioner (so the story goes) went to his grandmother for help. Marthe Dubut must have been one tough lady. She summoned one of her other sons, who was executioner at Reims, and they bought strong horses. On the appointed day the boy and his uncle went to the conciergerie, where the prisoner had his arms dislocated by estrapade and his feet twisted in the boot. Onwards to the scaffold, where the uncle held the would-be renegade’s hand in the brazier and an assistant began peeling off his skin with red-hot pincers. Other assistants poured boiling oil and boiling lead onto the wounds. The limbs were then attached to the four horses, which tried three times to pull the man apart. Finally his limbs had to be severed with axes. Every rooftop around was crowded with people.

  This was the climate in October 1789 when Joseph Guillotin, 51, a medical doctor and delegate, made a speech in the Estates Général. A quick and humane method of capital punishment had to be found, he argued. All persons regardless of rank should be similarly executed. Torture must be abolished once and for all. There should be no confiscation of the condemned man’s property—justice did not permit the nation to ruin his family as well. After execution his family should be allowed to claim his body if it wished.

  Guillotin was from Saintes. He had once studied for the priesthood in Bordeaux. He had left to study medicine in Paris and was by now an extremely high-priced doctor—consultations cost 36 livres, about double what others dared charge.

  Guillotin began to research capital punishment. He found Cranach, that showed primitive. He found engravings by Dürer, by Cranach, that showed primitive guillotines. He found descriptions of such machines elsewhere, and he brought this information to Charles-Henri Sanson.

  In Sentimental Education, set in the 1840s, Flaubert wrote: “‘But do you imagine the press is free? Do you imagine we are free?’ said Deslauriers passionately. ‘When I think that you have to fill in anything up to 28 forms just to keep a boat on the river, I feel like going off to live among the cannibals.’”

  —Mort Rosenblum, The Secret Life of the Seine

  The executioner, we are told, had grown tall and strong. His features were classic, his manner pleasant. He took himself seriously, and he was a snob. He had tried to call himself the Chevalier de Longval, but this did not catch on. He had tried to dress himself in blue, the color reserved for the nobility, had gotten officially reprimanded, and so took to wearing green coats stylishly cut. His title was Bourreau—axman—which he found undignified, and he had petitioned the King to be called instead the Executor of Criminal Judgments. The King, now Louis XVI, had so decreed it. The people went on calling him Bourreau anyway—or else, cynically, Monsieur de Paris. He played the violin and the cello, how well we do not know, and was friends with Tobias Schmidt, a maker of harpsichords.

  It was to Schmidt that he brought Dr. Guillotin’s ideas. It was Schmidt, whose name has barely come down to us, who designed the guillotine, but it was the humane Dr. Guillotin whose name got attached to it. He came to be seen as one of the villains of the Revolution, and even of history. During his lifetime—he lived until 1814—he often seemed an object of horror, or else an object of fun. People who passed him in the street would shake their head or give themselves karate chops to the back of the neck. He died a disillusioned man.

  In March of 1792 Sanson and Schmidt submitted their designs to a government official at the Tuileries. The King came in and looked them over. He was an enthusiastic amateur locksmith, and it is said that he made suggestions for improving the design of the machine that would ten months later lop off his own head.

  The first guillotine was built, and on April 15 Sanson tried it out on some live sheep. Two days later he decapitated three corpses—two men and one woman—in the courtyard of the hospital at Bicêtre, while a crowd of officials, including Dr. Guillotin, looked on. Eight days after that it was used on a thief named Jacques Pelletier. It worked so perfectly that Tobias Schmidt, the harpsichord maker, got orders for 34 more. Someone is supposed to have said: I hope this doesn’t make killing people too easy.

  The Terror began the next year, and a guillotine mentality, guillotine fads, swept over the city, together with insane rumors. Did severed heads feel pain, was the guillotine humane or not? Learned men, and some not so learned, disputed this point. Experiments were conducted on heads. When pricked with a knife point, tongues were said to retract into the mouth; when turned to the sun, pupils were said to dilate. Charlotte Corday’s cheeks were said to have blushed when one of Sanson’s assistants slapped her face as he showed her head to the crowd. The general belief seemed to be that severed heads continued to feel pain until they had cooled.

  Meanwhile, there were charms for bracelets in the form of guillotines, and toy guillotines for children. Small guillotines were sold to farmers for beheading chickens. At dinner parties similar guillotines beheaded tiny dolls; out flowed a red liqueur into which men dipped their fingers, women their handkerchiefs. Songs were written. Cartoons appeared, in one of which Sanson himself lay bound under the blade; according to the caption he had guillotined everyone else, so there was no one left to guillotine but himself.

  Sanson had four assistants, then seven; two tumbrels, then nine. Some days he worked from dawn to dark. He complained of overwork, of burgeoning expenses. He kept asking the Committee of Public Safety for more money; eventually he got it, a bonus of 20,000 livres. Between March 1793 and July 1794, a period of 502 days, he, his brothers, his sons, and whatever other assistants were on the scaffold with him killed 2,362 people. Sensitive? Softhearted? Some were people Sanson knew and had had official contact with; others he came to know, for the ride to the place of execution was frequently long, sometimes two hours or more, and he would converse with them. In addition there were rain delays—Paris is a rainy place—and a rainy, bloody scaffold with that great snaggletooth hanging overhead was too dangerous to work on. While the rain lasted, executioner and condemned prisoners alike would huddle under the scaffold, and again Sanson would converse with them. Sometimes he would apologize for making them wait.

  He executed everyone sent to him, no questions asked, nine men over 80, sixteen artists, twenty-five writers, the King, the Queen, the actress Marie Grandmaison and her 18-year-old-serving girl, and eventually, Danton, Robespierre, Public Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville, and most of the others, the signers of the death warrants, the very men he had been taking his orders from.

  Under the Revolution he became, in his own eyes at least, a figure of importance. As he saw it he was respected everywhere he went. He was certainly good at his job. The mass graves in this garden attest to that. He once killed 21 men in 38 minutes. He made them get out of the carts and stand in rows facing away from the scaffold. One by one he ordered them to mount the steps. On top their legs were bound together with ropes. Their arms were already bound. They were strapped to the bascule. Their heads were tipped into the lunette. The two halves came togeth
er and locked. Down came the blade. Unstrap him. Undo the ropes. Into the basket with him. Next.

  Such speed was possible because virtually none of the victims made a fuss. They were all too proud. The rich were especially haughty. They looked out over the cheering mob, their lips came together in what was close to absolute contempt, and they went to their deaths without so much as a grimace. Madame du Barry, once the mistress of Louis XV but now a raddled, middle-aged woman, did kick and scream. It took three men to hold her while her hair was cut and her arms bound. But she was the exception. It was the opinion of a number of witnesses that if everyone had behaved just like her the public would have sickened of the spectacle much more quickly than it did; the Terror would never have lasted so long.

  As far as Sanson was concerned the Revolution produced only one tragedy. One day his son Gabriel, who had been assisting him on the scaffold from the age of eleven, but who was by then a grown man, was parading around the perimeter showing someone’s head to the mob. He fell off the edge and was killed instantly. There were railings around every scaffold after that, but Sanson, it was said, was never the same.

  The guillotine devoured nearly everyone who came near it, with one glaring exception—Sanson himself—which seems, on the face of it, incredible. He was arrested twice. A Royalist press was found in a room in his house that he had rented out. He argued his way of that one. Later on he and his two brothers were arrested and charged with being Royalist sympathizers—they had hanged, clubbed, and broken the King’s enemies for years, had they not? What else could they be? A charge like this was sufficient to send scores of men to the scaffold, but the Sanson case posed a special problem: who do you get to execute the executioners? In the 1790s you could not just phone up some other town and fly in a substitute. Meanwhile, death warrants were piling up on somebody’s desk. People were waiting to be executed, and there was no one to do it.