FRANCE: The Heirs of the Widow

Like the Bourbons themselves, the heirs of Charles Sanson were long a potent and continuing force in the affairs of France. Their dynasty outlived that of their royal protectors. In time it too was scattered. But, like the government of France itself, the Sansons’ high office and its traditions still persisted, for Charles Sanson was the chief executioner of France.

Charles’s work was rough. He had only a big broadax to work with, and often, when his clients lacked the grace to hold still, his mighty swings resulted in bloody mutilation only. Charles would seize his sword then, and stab with a will until the job was done. In payment he got a fixed fee for each execution and the right to draw on the public markets at will for food for himself, his family and two horses.

Bring Back the Block. Charles Sanson I was succeeded by his son, who was in turn officially succeeded by his seven-year-old son. Young Charles III had already shown an enthusiastic talent for his inherited role by hanging tight to the legs of many unwilling clients while his father whacked away at their necks. A temporary headsman was appointed to act as regent until Charlie’s arms grew strong enough to swing an ax. By the time he reached h’s majority, the Sanson dynasty had become a kind of headsman’s peerage. Brother Nicolas became chief executioner at Rheims and was followed by his son. Sister Anne became the progenitress of a long line of executioners at Soissons.

It was Charles Ill’s eldest son, Charles Henri, who became the Roi Soleil of the dynasty. Progressive as well as dedicated, he was enthusiastic over a new invention described to him by Drs. Antoine Louis and Joseph Guillotin and on April 25 1792, he tried it out. The Parisian crowds cried, “Bring back the block,” but Charles Henri Sanson was well pleased. “Simplicity and absence of noise,” he said happily, after the test.

Decline & Fall. By August of that year, the guillotine, which soon became known to all as “The Widow,” was knifing through the necks of its first aristocrats. One morning two years later, Charles lopped off 44 heads, twelve of them in 20 minutes—a record for the time. He later had the honor of demonstrating his technique personally on his old master, Louis XVI. Charles Henri retired heartbroken when his youngest son fell off a scaffold and broke his neck while triumphantly displaying a severed head to the crowd. His eldest son Henri, executioner of Marie Antoinette, served until 1840 and was succeeded by his son Clément-Henri.

A decadent, sportive wastrel, without tact or any conception of the dignity of his office, Clément disgraced the name of Sanson by establishing a museum of horrors in his home, where for five francs the curious public could watch the family guillotine decapitate a sheep. When he put the guillotine in hock for 3,000 francs and showed up at an execution armed with one of his ancestor’s axes, he was finally deposed. Ugly rumor says he eventually became a butcher in Newark, N.J.

Gloves for the Host. Clément’s downfall carried his family with him. The French government fired all provincial executioners and appointed a single Monsieur de Paris to perform the function. In 1879 the honor fell to one Louis Deibier, heir of a long line of Breton headsmen. Deibler was succeeded by his son Anatole, who ruled the guillotine with honor until 1939. He was succeeded by his nephew, Jules Henri Desfourneaux.

Jules came to office in troublous times. His decapitation of the nightclub slayer Eugene Weidmann was accompanied by such a burst of newsmen’s flashbulbs and sob sisters’ ink that public executions were barred thenceforth. Once he was arrested on suspicion of being a German paratrooper when his portable guillotine got lost. Thanks to the occupying Germans’ zeal for capital punishment, however, he managed to pile up a post-Sanson record of 316 beheadings during his career.

But, unlike his great predecessors, Jules Desfourneaux lacked the grand manner. After each job, he economically removed the cords that bound his victims and stuffed them in his pocket for use on further occasions. His work made him nervous, and he often took roundabout routes to a date for fear of assassins or kidnapers. He was a quiet little man, known to few, but those few always noticed that when he took Communion at church, he pulled on his gloves to receive the host while others took theirs off. In 1934, his only son was drowned. Some say it was in suicidal flight from the prospect of following his father’s profession.

Last week at 73, Jules himself died quietly of a heart attack, alone in his Paris apartment. Now that another guillotine dynasty had ended, his successor would probably be either of his chief assistants, the one who is a butcher by trade or the one who is a barber.