Executioners

by Phil Clarke

  The Role of the Executioner

  It is an exorbitant power – to kill your fellow man. The whole thing happens like in a movie. They bring in the first one and then the second, and in twenty seconds, two people are decapitated. You come out with an incredible sense of power – only God can do that!’

  Today, this is how Fernand describes his former life as an executioner. Yet he feels that this power was wisely used, at least in his case, arguing that the role of executioner is an honourable one, since the execu­tioner simply carries out the law of the govern­ment in as humane, reliable and impartial a way as possible. What Fernand does not – perhaps, cannot – do is to look beyond the law and ask how culpable were the condemned men sent to the guillotine at a time when war prevailed. His story points up the fact that the executioner does not ask questions about the morality of the death penalty, but merely to carries out the letter of the law in the most competent way he can.

  Marcel Chevalier

  Marcel Chevalier’s name has gone down in history as the last executioner to ply his trade in France. He took up his appointment as Chief Executioner in 1976, taking over from Andre Obrecht, who had been in the post for over twenty years. However, in his new role, Chevalier only went on to perform two executions, that of Jerome Carrein, a child rapist and murderer, and Hamida Djandoubi, who had tortured and strangled his girlfriend to death. Carrein was put to death on 23 June 1977 in the town of Douai, and Djandoubi on 10 September 1977 in Marseilles. Both were beheaded with the guillotine, under the capital punishment laws that had been introduced during the French Revolution. In 1981, capital punishment was finally abolished in France, and with it the guillotine. The macabre post of Monsieur de Paris, as France’s Chief Executioner was popularly known, also came to an abrupt end.

  Friends in High Places

  Marcel Chevalier was born in Montrouge on 28 February 1921. Aged thirteen, he began work as a printer. After World War II, he met Marcelle Obrecht, the niece of Chief Executioner Andre Obrecht, and married her on 12 June 1948. In this way, Chevalier became connected to the small, secretive world of the execution business. Marcel and his wife went on to have two children, a girl named Dominique, born in 1952, and a boy named Eric, born a year later.

  Beginning in 1958, Chevalier began working as an executioner. He performed about forty executions in total, and when his wife’s uncle retired in 1976, he applied for the post of Chief Executioner, known in popular parlance as the ‘Monsieur de Paris’. The following year, Chevalier was required to carry out two executions in his new post, those of Jerome Carrien and Hamida Djandoubi, who had both been sentenced to death.

  Hoping that his son would follow in his footsteps, Chevalier decided to give his son, Eric, an early apprenticeship into the job by allowing him to be present at the executions, so that he would under­stand what the illustrious position of Chief Executioner involved. Unfortunately – or fortunately, perhaps, depending on one’s point of view – Eric never had the chance to take over the family trade, since the abolition of capital punishment meant that his father’s work became redundant.

  First Candidate

  Chevalier’s first candidate for the chop was a high-profile villain called Jerome Carrein, who had attracted the loathing of the French public because he killed an innocent eight-year-old girl, Cathy Devimeux. To add insult to injury, Cathy was the daughter of a woman who had had been kind enough to give him credit in a cafe. As it transpired, the killing of the girl was the final episode in Carrein’s miserable life story.

  Shortly after his birth, Carrein was abandoned by his father, leaving his mother to cope on her own. He left school at fourteen with no qualifications. By the age of nineteen, he was married to a sixteen-year-old girl, with whom he fathered five children. Family life was anything but harmonious; the penniless couple fought and drank, while their offspring struggled to survive as best they could. An aggressive drunk, after many scenes of domestic violence, Carrier was finally convicted of beating his wife with a chair, and received an eight-month prison sentence.

  Madame Devimaux, the patronne of the bistro, had numerous children, one of whom, a pretty eight-year-old girl called Cathy, caught Carrein’s eye. On 27 October 1975, Carrein waited for her outside her school, and asked her if she’d like to go fishing with him. Cathy agreed, and he led her down a country road towards the river. A passer-by from the village was surprised to see a beggar accompanied by such a young child, and followed the pair of them, but then lost sight of them. Cathy’s chance of being saved was lost for ever, and her young life was about to come to an end.

  Carrein led the child to a deserted spot and tried to undress her. When Cathy tried to fight him off, threatening to tell her mother what had happened, Carrein strangled her. Unbelievably, he then returned to the village and decided to go for a drink at Madame Devimaux’s bistro. The distraught woman was desperately worried about her child. Carrien told her that he had seen Cathy early but left the child to return home on her own. However, he was not believed, and the police were called. The following day, Cathy’s body was recovered and Carrein con­fessed everything. He was tried, convicted of murder and sentenced to death on 12 July 1976.

  The execution of Jerome Carrein was carried out by Chevalier on 23 June 1977 at the prison of Douai. Like most French executions, it took place in the early hours of the morning, in this case at 4.30 a.m. On the very same day, the National Assembly of France announced the findings of the Peyreffite Commission, which advocated the abolition of the death penalty. However, it would be another four years before this became a reality.

  Last Execution

  Hamida Djandoubi, the last man ever to be guillo­tined in France, at Baumettes Prison in Marseille, was perhaps one of the most memorable victims of a system of capital punishment that had lasted so long. Born in Tunisia, Djandoubi was an immigrant to France, who had moved to Marseille to find work. By 1968, he was working in the city as a packer. However, disaster then struck. An accident at his workplace resulted in the loss of two-thirds of his right leg and he could no longer find work as a result. He then appears to have started working as a pimp, surrounding himself with young women whom he badly mistreated. This continued until one of his girlfriends, Elisabeth Bousquet, filed a complaint to the police against her former lover, claiming that he had treated her cruelly, kept her captive and tried to force her into prostitution. Djandoubi was taken into custody but later released, whereupon he decided to take his revenge on Bousquet.

  On July 1974, in front of two other young women, he beat his former lover, burnt her body with lit cigarettes, and then took her by car to a suburb of Marseille, where he strangled her until she was dead. Too frightened to report what they had witnessed, the two girls remained silent until Bousquet’s body was discovered in a shed by some children on 7 July 1974. At this point, the two witnesses decided to come forward and give evidence against Djandoubi, and he was duly arrested.

  Djandoubi was tried at the court of Aix-en-Provence on 24 February 1977, charged with murder, torture, rape and premeditated violence. His defence tried to claim that the loss of his leg had driven him to become a violent alcoholic and altered his person­ality. However, the jury were not convinced, and on 25 February he was given the death penalty. He appealed, but the appeal was rejected.

  The execution took place on 10 September 1977. Early that morning, Djandoubi was told that the president had not offered him a reprieve. Not long afterwards, at 4.40 a.m., Djandoubi was executed by the Chief Executioner of France, Marcel Chevalier. Four years later, capital punishment was abolished in France under President Mitterand and Justice Minister Robert Badinter, making Djandoubi the last person ever to be executed in the country.

  The End of an Era

  When his career as Chief Executioner came to an end, Chevalier became a printer. He gave several interviews about his experiences as an executioner, but when he found that the newspapers sensation­alised what he told them, he gave up talking to the press.


  There had been moves towards abolishing the death penalty in France for over 200 years, beginning in 1791 when a bill was presented aimed at abolishing it. It was supported by Robespierre, but did not succeed. During Napoleon’s reign it continued to be in force, and was upheld during the nineteenth century despite campaigns by such leading lights as Aristide Briand and Jean Jaures to abolish it. In the twentieth century, during World War II, Marshal Petain supported the system of capital punishment by guillotine, refusing to pardon eight women due to be guillotined, but was lucky himself to escape execution at the end of the war. Charles De Gaulle, the new head of state, issued Petain with a reprieve, committing him instead to life imprisonment on the grounds of ill health.

  The eventual abolition of the death penalty came about in 1981, largely as a result of campaigns by Robert Badinter, a staunch opponent of capital punishment and a lawyer who had tried to defend some of the last victims of the system. When Badinter became Minister of Justice, it became clear that the days of the guillotine were numbered, and in 1981 a bill to abolish the death penalty was finally pushed through the National Assembly, under the leadership of the newly elected President Francois Mitterand. The days of the guillotine had at last come to an end.

  The Guillotine gets the Chop

  Marcel Chevalier’s last job as Chief Executioner also marked the end of the guillotine as a method of capital punishment. There had been no public executions since 1939, when Eugene Weidmann, a man convicted of six murders, was beheaded outside the prison at Versailles, in what is now the Palais de Justice. This was a shameful occasion, in which the guillotine was badly assembled, the executioner Jules-Henri was alleged to be drunk and members of the crowd behaved in a disrespectful way. Desfourneaux, the Chief Executioner, was later reported to have argued with his cousin, Andre Obrecht, which in­volved a fist fight after an execution. Obrecht later took over as Chief Executioner, and when he retired, Marcel Chevalier took over his post. It was Chevalier who was in office when the death penalty was abolished in France in 1981.

  The guillotine had been an eblem of progress since the days of the French Revolution – albeit a gruesome, violent type of progress. As compared to the hideously cruel tortures of the medieval period, this decapitation machine was at least more humane than the methods of capital punish­ment that had gone before – punishments that included burning at the stake, drawing and quartering, and many other horrific forms of killing.

  n previous eras, methods of killing had varied according to the social standing of the victim: often, peasants and ordinary townspeople were tortured to death overmany days, for example onthe wheel, while higher-born individuals were beheaded by sword. Beheading often went wrong, however; a slip of the blade, and the victim might have to suffer several more blows before the head was finally severed.

  In contrast to these primitive forms of capital punishment, the guillotine was – relatively speaking – a humanitarian device, a product of the Enlightenment ideas of the age. For more than two centuries, it became the method for carrying out the death penalty in France, and improvements were made to the machine over the years. For example, wheels were added to the inner grooves so that the blade descended quickly, and a shield was put up so that the beheading scene was hidden from sight. Later, the authorities dropped the habit of erecting a scaffold so that crowds could see the event, and finally banned public executions altogether.

  PART EIGHT: HUNG, DRAWN & QUARTERED

  Hanging, Drawing, Quartering

  This horrific punishment was a product of the Dark Ages, when short life and brutal death were commonplace. Children died young, deadly diseases were rife and major criminals were sum­marily put to death for their crimes. The authorities believed that the worst offences were treasonable ones. Treason was not just confined to plotting the assassination of a sovereign, and in fact its definition varied depending on the monarchy ruling of the time. One could find oneself subjected to the noose followed by the knife for as little as forgery.

  It was thought that the punishment should fit the crime and with treason being at the top of the Crown’s list, ahead of such crimes as rape and murder, a suitably harsh penalty was required. During the unenlightened, unruly thirteenth century, a solu­tion was finally found: that of hanging, drawing and quartering. This punishment was deemed so cruel that two sections of society were instantly exempt from it. Those traitors that bore title normally escaped the full penalty and were divided into only two parts, having their head separated from their body by axe before the general public. Female traitors also escaped this particular punishment and instead found themselves tied to a stake and burnt. The threefold punishment was deemed too immodest for them.

  The Procedure

  The three-in-one death penalty succeeded in ensur­ing that no stone was left unturned when it came to physical and mental punishment. To begin with, the victim was taken from their respective prison cell, often placed upon a hurdle which resembled a wooden sledge. The hurdle was a far from comfort­able mode of transport considering the bumpy cobbles of medieval towns, but far better than the original practice of tying the prisoner to the tail of a horse and dragging them to the scaffold without any protection against the ground. Provided the victim survived this humiliating journey through the pelting throng of onlookers, he was hung from the scaffold by a half-penny halter until half dead. This undoubt­edly damaged the throat enough to reduce any screams of agony to that of a whisper.

  The executioner then cut the traitor down from the scaffold and carried him to a raised trestle table, where he was brought back to his senses with cold water so as to not deprive the crowd of their entertainment. This ensured that the condemned felt the full force of the law. As the victim fought for air against asphyxia, the executioner turned to the cache of weapons from which he would select the appropriate device for phase two.

  The pain of this half-hanging would soon be superseded by what came next. The victim saw the executioner return holding a sharp cutting knife, which would be unceremoniously drawn across his stomach. Without any anaesthetic, this operation would have been excruciatingly painful, and would have surely had the ‘patient’ pleading for death’s swift arrival. Unfortu­nately for some, it would not be forthcoming. For those that had not been granted the mercy of death or, at the very least, unconsciousness, arguably the worst part of this deplorable punishment would occur.

  The executioner then selected a second instrument from his collection and extracted the intestines from the fresh wound at the stomach. The executioner preferred this method to using his hands, as the innards often proved too slippery to control. The victim’s entrails would then be brought before his very eyes before being placed on a nearby fire. If the condemned remained conscious, then he would wit­ness the executioner enter his chest to pluck out his heart, which soon followed the viscera onto the flames. This, then, would guarantee the death of the traitor.

  Many experienced the ignominy of castration before the disembowellment took place. While this added to the agony and humiliation of the con­demned, it did have a further if irrational purpose. The removal of the sexual organs represented the symbolic withdrawal of any opportunity for producing future offspring. Saying this, there is no account in existence that tells of a victim having been hanged, disembowelled and divided into five pieces having the opportunity to procreate!

  The neck choked, the stomach torn and organs drawn, and yet still the punishment was not complete. Mercifully, the prisoner – now nothing but a mutilated corpse – would have left the land of the living, however, the crowd chose to stay put for the final acts. At this point, it was customary for the executioner to step aside, possibly to take a much-needed breather from the quite literally gut-wrenching work and allow someone else to deal with the beheading. This was because rather than using an axe to hack the head from the body, it was usual to use a surgical knife and so it required a more skilled hand than that of the executioner. The body would be placed in the coffin with the head rai
sed on a block at the top edge of the wooden box and once the head was freed from the body it was passed to the execu­tioner who would raise it up for all to see, holding it high at the four corners of the scaffold, before declaring, ‘Behold the head of a traitor! So die all traitors!’ This was met with undoubted cheers from the satisfied crowd who, without the technology to capture the affair, acted as official witnesses to the event. After the show had ended, the head made the return journey back to Newgate (or similar gaol), where it was parboiled in a concoction of salt water and cumin seed, and then placed on its own stake upon London Bridge to serve as a reminder of the comeuppance for all convicted traitors. This vile process ensured the head would be left alone by the circling gulls that were keen to feast upon rotting flesh.

  This leaves the last step: quartering the body of the condemned traitor. Rather than a purely gratuitous act of deformation, this procedure was not without reason. The main purpose of the entire process, aside from punishing the convicted, was to act as a deterrent to any citizen of the land entertaining thoughts of betrayal in any guise. This division of the body created five sections including the head – to serve as promotional material for the Crown. The lack of a national newspaper or other media such as radio or television meant that these five pieces were needed to advertise the severity of the crime and remind people of the severity of the punishment. In effect, the traitor himself would be made to tour the kingdom, spreading the word that it was unwise to cross the king. Depending on the status of the individual, his quartered parts would travel across the county or even the entire country to locations chosen by the monarchy.