In leaving its present site for the Place Saint-Jacques the guillotine will only be returning home. The Place Saint-Jacques was the scene of punishment for nineteen years and a half; it was dispossessed in favour of La Roquette in 1851. The first person to suffer death at the Place Saint-Jacques (the Place de Grève having been abandoned) was an old man named Désandrieux, sixty-eight years of age, condemned for the murder of a man whose age was eighty-four. Owing to the disgraceful neglect of the authorities, Désandrieux lay in prison one hundred and twenty-eight days before he was led to execution. After him came the parricide, Benoît, the atrocious Lecenaire, David, the regicides Fieschi, Morey, and Pepin, and other murderers of greater or less notoriety. The Place Saint-Jacques saw the guillotine erected thirty-five times, and beheld the fall of thirty-nine heads.
At this date the dépôt des Condamnés was remote Bicêtre, which, as we have seen, was also the gaol from which the criminals convicted in Paris were despatched on their journey to the bagne.
A vivid picture of the condemned cell, or cachot du Condamné, very painful in its blending of the imaginative with the realistic, is given in Victor Hugo's Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné. It was a day when that veil of decent mystery which our age casts over the last torturing hours of the condemned had not been woven; and callous curiosity could, for a trifling bribe to the turnkey, uncover the grating behind which the criminal in his strait waistcoat was couched on mouldy straw.
It was a veritable journey from Bicêtre to the Place Saint-Jacques, by way of the Avenue d'Italie and the outer boulevards; midway along the Boulevard d'Italie the guillotine came in sight, and for five and twenty minutes before he reached it, the miserable victim had the death-machine for his horizon, the huge blade gripped between the blood-red arms gleaming deadlier moment by moment.
The progress was even longer and more wretched when La Grande Roquette was substituted for Bicêtre as the prison of the Condamné à mort. On a day in mid-December, 1838, a certain Perrin was carried to death from La Roquette to the barrière Saint-Jacques. An icy rain was falling, and the streets beyond the Seine were so choked with mud that at certain points the vehicle became almost embedded in it, and had to be hauled along by the crowd. Think of riding to one's death in that fashion! The Abbé Montès, riding beside the young assassin, saw him shivering, and insisted on covering him with his own hat. At the scaffold, Perrin was lifted from the cart almost dead from cold and exhaustion.
From that date there began to be a talk of changing the place of execution, but the proposals had no result, and during the next thirteen years five and twenty murderers traversed the whole length of Paris in their passage to the guillotine. Amongst them may be named the regicide Darmés, the terrible and dreaded Poulmann, Fourier, chief of the famous band of the Escarpes, the garde Général Lecompte, who fired on Louis-Philippe at Fontainebleau, and Daix and Lahr, the assassins of General Bréar. At length, in 1851, the Place Saint-Jacques ceded its dubious honours to the Place de la Roquette,—which is now about to restore them.
As La Roquette (or properly La Grande Roquette, to distinguish it from La Petite Roquette, the prison for juvenile offenders, which stands opposite) is to be abolished, it will be interesting to make a brief survey of the place in which some of the most celebrated French criminals of modern times have awaited the visit of M. Deibler, with his scissors and pinioning straps.
Here the "toilet of the guillotine" has been performed on Orsini, Piéri, Verger, La Pommerais, Troppmann, Moreau, Billoir, Prévost, Barré and Lebiez, Campi, Pranzini, and so many others, down to Vaillant and Emile Henry.
It would be impossible even to summarise all that has been said and written in France in favour of abolishing the guillotine. It was vigorously advocated during the Revolution itself, while the scaffold was flowing with blood.
Under the Convention, Taillefer rose one day with the demand: "Let our guillotines be broken and burned!" At the sitting of the of "9th Vendémiaire, year iv," Languinais exclaimed: "Should we not be happy if, having begun our session by establishing the Republic, we were able to end it by pronouncing once for all against capital punishment!"