The horror stories about ISIS bring back to mind the custom of beheading, which seemed to have almost disappeared from the world. Of course, as in other fields, the French excelled in this field, as is well known, in which they invented the guillotine.
The executioner is considered one of the most important people in Paris and two streets are named after him to this day. The first is Arbre sec (literally dry tree), located east of the museum. The Louvre and probably indicates the hangman's house, which once stood there (a dry tree indicates the gallows). However, while the "Dry Tree" street indicates the location of an unknown hangman, the rue de Paris, which was once north ofThe Concierge Prison Named after the Sanson family, the most famous family of executioners in French history.
Paris Hangmen Family Business
As with the Ashdod Electric Company and Port, beheading was a family business. In 1688, Charles Sanson (1658-1695) succeeded in gaining the position of chief executioner of Paris And since then, the position was passed down in the Sanson family from father to son until 1840. The great-grandson of the founder of the dynasty, Charles Henry (1739-1807), who was to go down in history, ironically studied at a medical school.
However, as a result of paralysis that seized his father in 1778, he was forced to take over the family business and received from King Louis XVI the red executioner's cloak and the title Monsieur de Paris (hence the name of the street near the Conciergerie). Despite his profession, Charles-Henri was a rather nice person and in his free time, when he was not beheading, he loved to play the cello and violin (Tobias Schmidt, who built the instrument for him, later also built the guillotine for him).
In 1787, after Charles Henry appealed to the king that he did not have enough money to maintain his gallows, he received a raise in salary and a lump sum of about 16,000 livres for shared maintenance. I wonder if Louis XVI would have done this if he had known that within a few years he would become one of the “clients” of the Lord de Paris…
In truth, Charles Henry was a royalist in his views and had no desire to carry out the task of executing Louis XVI. In August 16, he was even arrested by the revolutionaries for his views and was almost executed himself. However, the number of executions of the revolution only increased and the revolutionary government needed their profession.
This saved Sanson's life, who was forced to return from retirement to behead the king on January 21, 1793. Shortly thereafter, Charles Henry decided to retire for good and pass the role on to his eldest son Henri (in truth, the role was intended for his younger son Gabriel, but the latter died in a bizarre accident after slipping and falling from the gallows while showing the audience the severed head of one of his victims).
After retiring, he lived a peaceful family life until his death in 1807. It is said that he once met Napoleon and the latter asked him if he could sleep at night after killing so many people. To this, the retired executioner replied, “If emperors, kings and dictators can sleep at night, then why can’t an executioner simply do the same?”
Henri continued to work in his father's business until his death at the age of 73 in 1840, making him, apparently, the longest-serving executioner in history. His son Henri-Clement abhorred the profession but was forced to continue the family tradition. To cope with his mental distress, he led a lavish lifestyle, until in 1847 he was forced to pawn his guillotine. As a result, he arrived at his next execution with an axe…
The king, hearing of this, ordered the Minister of Finance to buy back the guillotine and, after Henri-Clément had done his job, ordered him to be fired and the position transferred to Charles-André Férey. Being a bookworm, the retired executioner decided to spend his time writing memoirs and wrote a family biography called “7 Generations of Executions 1688-1847”).
After losing his money, he was forced to sell his guillotine again to Madame Tussauds in London, where it remains to this day.
A short video describing the history of the guillotine
And finally, a short anecdote. The father of the painter Auguste Renoir (1841-1919), who was a tailor by trade, knew one of Charles-Henri Sanson's assistants. The painter's son says that he heard that the two men became good friends because, although one sewed clothes and the other cut off heads, both knew how to appreciate good work...
