Old and New Paris: Its History, Its People, and Its Places, v. 1

by H. Sutherland Edwards

The earliest political executions had for their scene the Place du Carrousel, whilst ordinary criminals continued to be decapitated on the Place de Grève. On the 10th May, 1793, the Convention, sitting then at the Tuileries, just opposite the ugly guillotine, called upon the Executive Council to choose another site. The Commune selected the Place de la Révolution (Concorde), where the guillotine was in operation until the 12th June, 1794. It was then erected in the Place du Trône. Some persons had suggested the Bastille; but in the eyes of the people this was a place which had acquired an almost sacred character. Under the Empire and the Restoration the guillotine stood on the Place de Grève, and under Louis Philippe at the Barrière St. Jacques, whilst to-day it is transferred to the Place de la Roquette.

During the Reign of Terror the French nation was so familiarised with the idea of violent death that executions did not produce the same feeling of horror as at ordinary times. And now the real character of the Frenchman began to assert itself. In the gaols it became a favourite diversion with the prisoners to “play at the guillotine.” People gave burlesque names to the horrible machine, such as “national razor,” etc. It is even said that ear-rings in the shape of miniature guillotines were now largely worn by fashionable ladies. Within their Paris mansions aristocrats were accustomed to kill the time by means of a toy guillotine, which was placed on the table during dessert. Beneath this instrument were passed in succession several puppets, {330} whose heads, representing those of leading Paris magistrates, liberated from the hollow trunk, as they rolled off the block, a red liquid like blood. All present, and especially the ladies, thereupon saturated their handkerchiefs with the fluid, which contained a highly agreeable scent.

Under the Government of the Commune of Paris, the mob seized the guillotine and burnt it in the open street. Of late years the Paris executioner has distinctly improved the instrument. The scaffold, which was once an adjunct to it, has quite disappeared, and the criminal has no longer to climb a rude staircase before placing himself beneath the knife.

CHAPTER XXX.
THE EXECUTIONER.

The Executioner—His Taxes and Privileges—Monsieur de Paris—Victor of Nîmes.

THE executioner is one of the most curious, interesting, and important figures in the history of France in general and of Paris in particular. Going back to the thirteenth century, we find that there already existed an individual whose duty it was to whip, hang, behead, break on the wheel, and burn in the name of the law. He was then called the Executioner of High Justice, and every bailiwick possessed such a functionary. An ordinance of 1264 against blasphemers provides that “anyone who has offended by word or deed shall be beaten, naked, with rods; that is to say, men by a man, and women by a woman, without the presence of any man.” Hence some historians have inferred that the office of bourrelle, or female executioner, existed. This is an error; though it is quite true that the wife or the daughter of the bourreau was usually preferred for the duty of whipping female misdemeanants. As to the rest, an elaborate apprenticeship had to be gone through by the executioner before he was deemed fit for his work, the law stipulating that he must be competent to whip, quarter, break on the wheel, fork, clip off ears, gibbet, dismember, and so forth. For a long time the executioner wore a special costume—a cassock wrought in the colours peculiar to the town in which he operated, and bearing in front the representation of a gibbet, and, behind, that of the scaffold staircase—emblems somewhat too obvious of his infamous profession. So soon as the office of bourreau was permanently established, large taxes were enfeoffed to him, and the executioners of France now became so jealous of their prerogatives that one of them in 1560 sued a gentleman at law because, seizing a thief who tried to take his purse, he had drawn his sword and cut off the rascal’s ear. In thus acting the gentleman was accused of having infringed on the executioner’s rights and invaded his profession, the ear technically belonging to the executioner as one of his perquisites. No less curious than manifold were the taxes and privileges of all kinds enjoyed by this functionary. When he performed an execution on the domain of a monastery he was entitled, amongst other things, to the head of a pig; and the Abbé of Saint-Germain paid him an annual tax of this kind. The heads, moreover, of any pigs found straying in the streets or highways of Paris belonged to the executioner. During the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries the Parisians had permitted their pigs to stroll about in the public thoroughfares; but when the son of Louis le Gros was killed by a fall from his horse, which had stumbled over one of these wandering animals, it was forbidden thenceforth to allow them outside their owners’ premises—though an exception was made in favour of the monks of Saint-Antoine, who were still at liberty to let out their pigs, which were distinguished by a peculiar mark on the ear. Any pig found walking abroad without this mark was now seized by the executioner, who could demand either its head, or, in lieu thereof, four sous. Another of his curious privileges was to levy a tax on young women leading objectionable lives. He received duty, moreover, on the goods vended by different classes of shopkeepers, and could walk into their shops and help himself to a certain fraction of their stock. Still more extraordinary than any hitherto mentioned was the tax he levied on all sick persons living in the suburbs of Paris, who were compelled {331} to pay him four sous apiece every quarter. Some of the tolls taken at bridges went into his pocket. He was permitted to despoil the criminals he put to death. At first he could only take possession of what they had upon them above the girdle; but ultimately he obtained everything. Besides the innumerable imposts and perquisites of all kinds belonging to his office, he received a fixed fee for each execution. This, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, was 15 sous. In 1721 his taxes were for the most part abolished, and in lieu thereof an annual salary of 16,000 francs was assigned to him; though, out of this sum, he had to keep two assistants. In 1793 the National Convention entirely reformed the criminal legislation so far as concerned the executioner. By a decree of 13th June it decided that there should be an executioner to every department of the Republic. He was to be remunerated at the expense of the State. In towns with a population not exceeding 50,000 he was to receive a salary of 2,400 francs, besides another 1,600 francs for two assistants (in the departments), or 4,000 francs for four assistants (at Paris). In the French capital today the bourreau has a fixed salary of 5,000 francs, and 10,000 francs for the maintenance of his formidable machine.

The executioner is still regarded in France with much of the abhorrence which has always been felt for him; but although he is an outcast from the ordinary world, admission to churches, theatres, promenades, and public places generally is not to-day, as it once was, denied to him. Whenever his place becomes vacant there is a rush of candidates for it more multitudinous and more eager than for any other State office whatsoever. To be “Monsieur de Paris,” as the executioner is styled, seems the pinnacle of ambition with only too large a section of the public. Once, indeed, the post of bourreau, although not, as some have imagined, hereditary, remained long in the same family; and that of Sanson produced seven generations of executioners, from 1688 to 1847. The post has seldom been a sinecure, and it was particularly far from being so during the centuries which followed the thirteenth. Thence, until the eighteenth, the executioner was a terribly busy man, hanging, quartering, and otherwise judicially massacring with scarcely a cessation. Kings with many enemies would sometimes make a pet of him. Louis XI. took a particular fancy to Tristan, whom he called his colleague. This man, by the way, had a genius for his ghastly business, chopping off heads with a dexterity well calculated to excite the favour of a king who had determined that all heads should fall which were difficult to bend.

It was not only upon the persons of criminals that the executioner had to operate. He was sometimes required to burn or behead dummies representing offenders who had eluded capture. Peter the Cruel, King of Castile, having killed one of his subjects, was condemned to death. But as the person of the king was sacred, he was only executed in effigy, the bourreau beheading with his sword an image intended to represent him.

The public executioner has generally been more loathed in France than even in England. And justly so; for in the former country his work for many centuries has been peculiarly infamous, not to say diabolical. In the present day, it is true, “Monsieur de Paris” simply touches a button and his victim, without a struggle or a pang, is no more. But he was not always so humane. Once it was his own hand that dealt slow death and inflicted fiendish torture. It was he who quartered the condemned wretch—who attached horses, that is to say, to his legs and arms, and then drove them in four different directions. It was he who burned or broke on the wheel—the latter an indescribably ghastly operation, in which he used an iron bar to break almost every bone in the victim’s body. It is not surprising, therefore, that even to-day “Monsieur de Paris,” with such a history behind him, should be the object of a detestation which Ketch himself, or Marwood, failed to excite.

The Revolution of 1789, although it swept away his privileges, completely rehabilitated that bourreau whose services it was so frequently to require; and a decree of the Convention decided that thenceforth this functionary should be admitted to the rank of officer in the army. It was even proposed to confer upon him, as executioner, a new and finer title—that of “National Avenger”; and M. Matton de la Varenne was quite eloquent in his praise. “What would become of society?” he said; “of what use would be the judges, of what avail authority, if an active and legitimate force did not exist to avenge outrages committed upon citizens whom it is the care of the law to protect? If the punishment of the guilty is dishonourable to those who administer it, the magistrate who has pronounced the sentence, the {332} notary who has drawn it up, the protractor and the criminal lieutenant who cause it to be executed beneath their eyes should bear part of the dishonour. Why should he who puts the last hand to the work be reputed infamous for duties which are simply the complement of those of the magistrate?” The argument was specious enough; but the difference between the two functionaries named is, after all, precisely the difference existing between a civic corporation which decrees that its town shall be kept clean, and the scavenger whom it hires to scrape the streets.