Horror stories about ISIS have brought back into our collective consciousness the practice of beheading, a custom that seemed to have all but vanished from the world. But as in so many other things, the French distinguished themselves here too: after all, they invented the guillotine.
The executioner was considered one of the most important people in Paris, and to this day two streets in the city carry his name. The first is Rue de l’Arbre-Sec (literally, “the dry tree street”), located east of the Louvre Museum, which most likely marks the spot where an executioner once lived (a “dry tree” was a term for the gallows). But while the Rue de l’Arbre-Sec commemorates an anonymous executioner, the Rue de Paris, once located north of the Conciergerie prison, was named after the Sanson family, the most famous family of executioners in the history of France.
The Executioners of Paris: A Family Business
Like many trades passed down through generations, beheading, too, was a family business. In 1688, Charles Sanson (1658-1695) secured the position of chief executioner of Paris, and from then on the role passed through the Sanson family from father to son until 1840. The founder’s great-grandson, Charles-Henri Sanson (1739-1807), who was destined to go down in history, studied medicine, of all things.
But after his father was struck by paralysis in 1778, Charles-Henri was forced to take over the family business, receiving from King Louis XVI the executioner’s red robe and the title Monsieur de Paris (which is where the name of the street near the Conciergerie comes from). Despite his profession, Charles-Henri was a rather likeable man, and in his free time, when he wasn’t beheading people, he loved to play the cello and the violin (Tobias Schmidt, who built his musical instruments, would later build his guillotine as well).
In 1787, after Charles-Henri pleaded with the king that he didn’t have enough money to maintain his scaffold, he was granted a raise and a one-time payment of about 16,000 livres for its upkeep. One wonders whether Louis XVI would have agreed to this had he known that within a few years he himself would become one of Monsieur de Paris’s “clients”…
Truth be told, Charles-Henri held royalist views and had no desire whatsoever to carry out the execution of Louis XVI. In August 1792 he was even arrested by the revolutionaries for his views and nearly executed himself. But the number of executions ordered by the Revolution kept growing, and the revolutionary government needed a professional.
That is how Sanson’s life was spared: he was forced to come out of retirement to behead the king on January 21, 1793. Shortly afterward, Charles-Henri decided to retire for good and hand the role to his eldest son, Henri (the position was actually meant for his younger son, Gabriel, but Gabriel died in a bizarre accident after slipping and falling off the scaffold while showing the crowd the severed head of one of his victims).
After retiring, he lived a quiet family life until his death in 1807. Supposedly, he once met Napoleon, who asked him how he managed to sleep at night after killing so many people. The retired executioner replied, “If emperors, kings, and dictators can sleep at night, why shouldn’t a mere executioner be able to do the same?”
Henri continued working in his father’s business until his death at age 73 in 1840, which apparently makes him the longest-serving executioner in history. His son, Henri-Clément, despised the profession but was forced to carry on the family tradition. To cope with the psychological strain, he lived an extravagant lifestyle, until in 1847 he was forced to pawn his guillotine. As a result, he showed up to his next execution with an axe…
When the king heard about this, he ordered the finance minister to buy the guillotine back, and once Henri-Clément had carried out his duty, he ordered him fired and handed the role to Charles-André Férey. Being a man of letters, the retired executioner decided to spend his time writing memoirs, and wrote a family biography titled “Seven Generations of Executioners, 1688-1847.”
After losing his fortune, he was forced to sell his guillotine once again, this time to Madame Tussauds museum in London, where it remains to this day.
A short video on the history of the guillotine.
And to finish, a short anecdote. The father of the painter Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), who worked as a tailor, knew one of Charles-Henri Sanson’s assistants. The painter’s son recounted hearing that the two men became good friends, because even though one sewed clothes and the other cut off heads, both knew how to appreciate a job well done…
Related reading
