Charles-Henri Sanson, full title Chevalier Charles-Henri Sanson de Longval (French pronunciation: [ʃaʁl ɑ̃ʁi sɑ̃sɔ̃]; 15 February 1739 – 4 July 1806), was the royal executioner of France during the reign of King Louis XVI, as well as high executioner of the First French Republic. He administered capital punishment in Paris for over 40 years (Exécuteur des arrêts criminels de Paris). He is credited with carrying out nearly 3,000 executions, including Robert-François Damiens who attempted to assassinate King Louis XV and during the French Revolution the executioner of Louis XVI, Marie-Antoinette and Robespierre.

Life and family

Sanson was born in Paris to Charles Jean-Baptiste Sanson and his first wife Madeleine Tronson. His great-grandfather, Charles Sanson (1658–1695) of Abbeville, was a soldier in the French royal army and was appointed as executioner of Paris in 1688.[1] Upon his death he passed the office to his son named Charles (1681–1726). When this second Charles died, an interim appointment held the position until his young son, Charles Jean-Baptiste Sanson (1719–1778), reached maturity. The third Sanson served all his life as high executioner.

Sanson was first raised in the convent school at Rouen until in 1753 a father of another student recognised his father as the executioner, and he had to leave the school in order to avoid the school's reputation. He was then privately educated. Charles-Henri had six younger half-brothers—later executioners in different parts of France—and two sisters.[2] As the eldest son, he trained under his father for about twenty years before succeeding him and was sworn into the office on 26 December 1778.[3]

Career

The "bourreau" under Louis XVI
Execution of Louis XVI
Execution of Robespierre July 28, 1794; Sanson is figure # 4
Headstone of the Sanson family at Montmartre Cemetery: tomb of Charles-Henri Sanson, his son Henri Sanson, with his wife, Marie-Louise Damidot and grandson Henri-Clément Sanson, with his wife Virginie-Emilie Lefébure

His father's paralysis and the insistence of his paternal grandmother, Anne-Marthe Sanson, led Charles-Henri to leave his study of medicine and to assume the job of executioner in order to guarantee the livelihood of his family. As executioner (bourreau), he came to be known as "Monsieur de Paris"—"Gentleman of Paris". In 1757 Sanson assisted his uncle Nicolas-Charles-Gabriel Sanson (1721–1795, executioner of Reims) with the extremely gruesome execution of the king's attempted assassin Robert-François Damiens. His uncle quit his position as executioner after this event. On January 10, 1765, he married his second wife, Marie-Anne Jugier. They had two sons: Gabriel (1767–1792) and Henri (1769–1830).[citation needed][4]

In 1778 Charles-Henri officially received the blood-red coat, the sign of the master executioner, from his father. He held this position for 17 years, being succeeded by his son Henri in 1795 after he showed serious signs of illness. Most of the executions were performed by Sanson and up to six assistants.[5]

Sanson was the first executioner to use the guillotine, and he led the initial inspection and testing of its prototype on 17 April 1792, at Bicêtre Hospital in Paris. Swift and efficient decapitations of straw bales were followed by live sheep and finally human corpses, and by the end, the inspectors declared the machine suitable for use.[6] Within the week, the Legislative Assembly had approved its use and on 25 April, Sanson inaugurated the era of the guillotine by executing Nicolas Jacques Pelletier at the Place de Grève for robbery and assault.[7][8] Under the revolutionary legal order, the guillotine contributed to changing the social and legal status of executioner from outcast to citizen, equal in rights and civil duties.[5]

Execution of Louis XVI

Sanson was initially reluctant to execute Louis XVI but ultimately accepted the duty. As David P. Jordan observes, "No Monsieur de Paris had ever had the honor of executing a king, and Sanson wanted precise instructions."[9] As the hereditary head of a family of executioners, refusing the office would have endangered both his family and its reputation. During the Revolution he found himself carrying out the sentences of successive governments against those who had only recently held power.

Before the execution, Sanson reportedly received warnings that an attempt would be made to rescue the king and that his own life was in danger.[10] On 21 January 1793, the route from the Temple prison to the Place de la Révolution was heavily guarded by troops and National Guards as Louis XVI's carriage took about two hours to reach the scaffold.[11] Sanson was assisted by his brothers Charlemagne and Martin, François Le Gros, and Barré.

On 23 January 1793, two days after the execution, Sanson publicly denied rumours that he or members of his household had sold locks of Louis XVI's hair, declaring that he had not allowed anyone "to take or remove even the slightest trace" of the king's remains.[12]

A month after the execution, Sanson published his own account in Le Thermomètre du jour (21 February 1793) in response to rumours surrounding the king's final moments. He wrote that Louis initially resisted removing his coat and having his hands bound, asked whether the drums were still beating, attempted to step forward to address the crowd, and finally submitted calmly to the execution. Sanson concluded that the king had borne his final moments "with a composure and a firmness" which he attributed to the sincerity of his religious convictions.[13]

Modern historians broadly agree with the general course of events described by Sanson. According to Simon Schama, Louis attempted to address the crowd before being drowned out by a roll of drums, after which he was guillotined and one of Sanson's assistants displayed the severed head to the assembled crowd.[14] David Andress notes that one contemporary account suggests the blade did not completely sever the king's neck at the first stroke, although he considers it unlikely that Louis could have uttered the "terrible cry" reported by another witness because his spine had already been severed.[15]

On 17 July 1793 Sanson executed assassin Charlotte Corday. After Corday's decapitation, his assistant LeGros lifted her head from the basket and slapped it on the cheek. Sanson indignantly rejected published reports that LeGros was one of his assistants. Sanson stated in his diary that Legros was in fact a carpenter who had been hired to make repairs to the guillotine.[16] Witnesses report an expression of "unequivocal indignation" on her face when her cheek was slapped. The oft-repeated anecdote has served to suggest that victims of the guillotine may in fact retain consciousness for a short while, including by Albert Camus in his Reflections on the Guillotine. ("Charlotte Corday's severed head blushed, it is said, under the executioner's slap."[17]) This offense against a woman executed moments before was considered unacceptable, and LeGros was imprisoned for three months because of his outburst.[18]

On 31 October 1793, Sanson, assisted by ten men, including his son Henri, executed twenty-one leading Girondins. According to the nineteenth-century Mémoires, Henri supervised the removal of the bodies behind the scaffold, where they were placed in pairs in the baskets awaiting transport. In the following months Sanson and his assistants carried out the executions of successive waves of prominent revolutionaries, including Hébert, Danton, Desmoulins, Saint-Just and Robespierre. Less well known is the execution of Cécile Renault, together with three members of her family and fifty other prisoners, including Madame de Sainte-Amaranthe and Charles François de Virot de Sombreuil, on 17 June 1794. According to the Mémoires, Sanson left the scaffold ill before the executions had been completed.[19][20][21][22][23]

According to Henri-Clément Sanson's Sept Générations d'Exécuteurs, Henri did not participate in the execution of Robespierre on 10 Thermidor but later carried out the executions of Jean-Baptiste Carrier, Fouquier-Tinville and Martial Herman. Every morning, before judgment was pronounced, Fouquier-Tinville gave him verbal orders to set up the guillotine.

Over the course of his career Sanson is credited with 2,918 executions, including the execution of Louis XVI. According to the Sanson family’s diary, 2,548 took place between 14 July 1789, and 1 October 1,1796. Among them, 370 were women, 22 were under the age of 18, and nine were over 80.

Guillotine proponent

After the French Revolution, Sanson was instrumental in the adoption of the guillotine as the standard form of execution. After Joseph-Ignace Guillotin publicly proposed Antoine Louis's new execution machine, Sanson delivered a memorandum of unique weight and insight to the French Assembly.[24] Sanson, who owned and maintained all his own equipment, argued persuasively that multiple executions were too demanding for the old methods.

The relatively lightweight tools of his trade broke down under heavy usage, and the repair and replacement costs were prohibitive, unreasonably burdening the executioner. Even worse, the physical exertion required to use them was too taxing and likely to result in accidents, and the victims themselves were likely to resort to acts of desperation during the lengthy, unpredictable procedures.[25]

According to Reising, Charles-Henri Sanson’s criticisms of the Reign of Terror differed from those of Revolutionary leaders because he did not see it as influenced by Enlightenment penal reformers. Instead, Sanson himself was directly influenced by Cesare Beccaria.[26]

Final years and posthumous legacy

In 1755 Parliament allowed Charles-Henri Sanson to substitute for his ailing father but refused to grant him formal investiture. The exact date on which he first assisted in executions is uncertain, possibly around 1763. Following his father's death in August 1778, he became the official executioner of Paris. In 1789 the journalist Camille Desmoulins denounced Sanson in his magazine as a royalist.[27] He began by addressing the issue of citizenship, noting that although executioners were not legally recognized as citizens in France, they were still obliged to pay taxes like any other. In September 1790, according to Seven Generations of Executioners he proposed retiring in favour of his eldest son Henri, but the National Assembly did not accept this proposal and Charles-Henri remained in office for 43 years.[28] On 12 August 1792, during the reorganisation of the National Guard, Charles-Henri Sanson and his son Henri were appointed sergeants. These appointments obliged them to assume a more active role in public affairs than they would otherwise have wished.[29] During the September MassacresSanson, together with two of his half-brothers, Charlemagne and Louis-Martin, was arrested.[citation needed] He offered his resignation to the revolutionary authorities, but it was refused.[30] Alexandre Dumas mistakenly believed that Charles-Henri Sanson had died in 1793 of grief after the execution of the King.[31] Even in 1911 the Encyclopædia Britannica noted that no official record of his death was known.

After several years of declining health (nefritis), Charles-Henri Sanson resigned as executioner of Paris on 30 August 1795.[32] [33] His son Henri was formally appointed his successor on 4 September 1795 (18 Fructidor, Year III) and remained chief executioner until his death in 1840, serving for forty-five years. Although Henri assumed responsibility for many executions after 1793, Charles-Henri remained involved in executions after his resignation, and contemporary evidence indicates that father and son continued to work together after the formal succession; both participated in an execution in October 1796 and 1801.[34]

Mémoires de l'exécuteur des hautes-œuvres and Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la Révolution française, published in 1830 and 1831, are the apocryphal memoirs attributed to Henri Sanson. The project was initiated during the Bourbon Restoration in France by Louis-François L'Héritier, who received the commission in 1829 and enlisted Honoré de Balzac, who wrote at least part of the opening volume. The first critique appeared in February 1830.[35] Presented as the recollections of Henri Sanson, the memoirs were publicly repudiated by him, who declared that he had neither written nor authorised them and that they bore little resemblance to the papers left by his father.

"These two volumes are moreover a tissue of mendacious allegations and puerile inventions, devoid, I will not say only of truth, but even of plausibility" and "I declare that I have never written anything similar and that the memories that my father left us offer no analogy with this publication, of which all the details are romantic."[citation needed]

Publication was suspended at his request in 1830, although a revised volume appeared in 1831. Henri instructed his son to examine and correct the two publications.[36]

More than thirty years later, Henri-Clément Sanson, the last executioner of the family, published a new work entitled Sept générations d’exécuteurs, 1688–1847 (1862–1863). In an extensive autobiographical introduction he rejected the earlier memoirs as an unauthorised and romanticised account of his family's history and presented his own work as a reconstruction based on family papers, correspondence, private notes, official records and printed historical sources, while explicitly distinguishing it from the earlier memoir project. In 1840 Henri-Clément stated that Balzac had based parts of the opening narrative on information supplied by Henri Sanson, while the fictional conclusion was devised to provide an origin story for the apocryphal memoirs. An English translation, Memoirs of the Sansons; or, Seven Generations of Executioners, was published in 1876 and introduced the work to an English-speaking readership.[37]

References

  1. ↑ Sargent, Lucius Manlius (1855); Dealings with the Dead, Vol. II, Dutton & Wentworth, MA, USA; p.635.
  2. ↑ Willa Carlyle Reising (2024) Beccaria, the Executioner, and the French Revolution, p. 62
  3. ↑ Croker, John Wilson (1857); Essays on the early period of the French Revolution, John Murray, London; p.570 ff. with enumerated list of all six generations of Sansons.
  4. ↑ The oft-repeated account that Gabriel Sanson died after falling from the scaffold in 1792 is widespread in modern literature, but contemporary newspaper evidence has proved elusive. Henri-Clément Sanson's own narrative describes the death of an unnamed young assistant without identifying him as Gabriel.
  5. 1 2 Arasse, Daniel (1989). The Guillotine and the Terror. London: Penguin. pp. 120–21.
  6. ↑ D. Gerould (1992) Guillotine. Its Legend and Lore, pp.23–24: "The guillotine was first tested on April 17, 1792, at the famous Bicêtre Hospital... Accompanied by his two brothers and son, Sanson supervised the proceedings."
  7. ↑ Arasse, Daniel (1989). The Guillotine and the Terror. London: Penguin. p. 26.
  8. ↑ National Museum of Crime and Punishment Archived 2009-02-01 at the Wayback Machine, Washington, DC. Retrieved August 2010: "...[I]n 1792, Nicholas-Jacques Pelletier became the first person to be put to death with a guillotine."
  9. ↑ Jordan, David P. (2004). The King's Trial: The French Revolution vs. Louis XVI. Los Angeles: University of California Press. p. 215.
  10. ↑ Vol. III, p. 468.
  11. ↑ Gazette nationale ou le Moniteur universel, 21 January 1793; G. Lenotre.
  12. ↑ Annales patriotiques et littéraires de la France, et affaires politiques de l'Europe, 28 janv. 1793, p. 3/4
  13. ↑ Le Thermomètre du jour, 21 February 1793.
  14. ↑ Schama, Simon (1989). Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. New York: Vintage. pp. 668–69.
  15. ↑ Andress, David (2005). The Terror: The Merciless War for Freedom in Revolutionary France. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. p. 147.
  16. ↑ La Révolution française vue par son bourreau : Journal de Charles-Henri Sanson, Documents (in French), Monique Lebailly, preface, Le Cherche Midi, 2007, p. 65, ISBN 978-2-7491-0930-5{{citation}}: CS1 maint: others (link); idem, Griffures, Paris: Éditions de l'Instant, 1988, ISBN 978-2-86929-128-7
  17. ↑ Reflexions sur la peine Capitale, a symposium by Arthur Koestler and Albert Camus, Calmann-Levy, p. 139.
  18. ↑ Mignet, François (1824), History of the French Revolution from 1789 to 1814
  19. ↑ Sanson, Henri (12 March 1876). "Memoirs of the Sansons: From Private Notes and Documents (1688–1847)". Chatto and Windus. pp. 173–174 – via Google Books.
  20. ↑ Naish, Camille (2013). Death Comes to the Maiden: Sex and Execution 1431–1933. Routledge. ISBN 978-1136247620 – via Google Books.
  21. ↑ "The Edinburgh Review". A. and C. Black. 12 March 1809 – via Google Books.
  22. ↑ Marie Joseph L. Adolphe. The history of the French Revolution, p. 397 Oxford University, 1838
  23. ↑ The Edinburgh Review, Band 14, p. 242
  24. ↑ Croker (1857); p.534 ff. Croker includes the full text of Sanson's "Memorandum of Observations on the Execution of Criminals by Beheading".
  25. ↑ Gerould, Daniel (1992); Guillotine: Its Legend and Lore; Blast, NY; ISBN 0-922233-02-0. See p.14. |"[I]n March, 1792... he [Sanson] explained the need for a new instrument. His sword grew blunt after each decapitation, (etc.)". See also Croker (1857), p.534: "It is to be considered [wrote Sanson] that when there shall be several criminals to execute at the same time, the terror that such an execution presents... [would be] an invincible obstacle...."
  26. ↑ Reising, 2024, p. 64
  27. ↑ Révolutions de France et de Brabant, no. 7 (pp. 306–307)
  28. ↑ G. Lenotre (1951), pp. 148–149
  29. ↑ H.C. Sanson (1862) Mémoires des Sanson, vol. III, p. 462
  30. ↑ Charles-Henri Sanson: The Royal Executioner Of 18th-Century France
  31. ↑ La Presse littéraire, 14 June 1857.
  32. ↑ R. Goulard (1951) Charles-Henri Sanson, exécuteur des arrets criminels a Paris, sa vie privee et publique. In: Mercure de France, 1 février 1951, p. 266]
  33. ↑ Lenotre, G. (1893) La guillotine et les exécuteurs des arrêts criminels pendant la révolution : d’après des documents inédits tirés des archives de l’Etat.
  34. ↑ H.C. Sanson (1879) Sept générations d'executeurs, p. 698, 722.
  35. ↑ La France nouvelle, 27 février 1830, p. 3
  36. ↑ Sanson, Charles-Henri (1830) Mémoires de l’exécuteur des hautes-oeuvres, pour servir à l’histoire de Paris pendant le règne de la Terreur. Chapitre II, p. 19, 25]
  37. ↑ "Memoirs of the Sansons; or, Seven generations of executioners". Library of Congress. 1876.

Further reading

  • Geoffrey Abbott. Family of Death: Six Generations of Executioners. Robert Hale, London 1995.
  • Honoré de Balzac. Un épisode sous la Terreur (fiction)
  • Robert Christophe. Les Sanson, bourreaux de père en fils, pendant deux siècles. Arthème Fayard, Paris 1960.
  • Daniel Gerould (1992) Guillotine. Its Legend and Lore.
  • Guy Lenôtre. Die Guillotine und die Scharfrichter zur Zeit der französischen Revolution. Kulturverlag Kadmos, Berlin 1996. ISBN 3-931659-03-8
  • Barbara Levy. Legacy of Death. Saxon House, 1973.
  • Hans-Eberhard Lex. Der Henker von Paris. Charles-Henri Sanson, die Guillotine, die Opfer. Rasch u. Röhring, Hamburg 1989. ISBN 3-89136-242-0
  • Chris E. Paschold, Albert Gier (Hrsg.) Der Scharfrichter - Das Tagebuch des Charles-Henri Sanson (Aus der Zeit des Schreckens 1793-1794). Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 1989; ISBN 3-458-16048-5
  • Henri Sanson (ed.) Executioners All: Memoirs of the Sanson Family from Private Notes and Documents 1688-1847. Neville Spearman, London 1962.
  • Henri Sanson. Tagebücher der Henker von Paris. 1685-1847. Erster und zweiter Band in einer Ausgabe, hrsg. v. Eberhard Wesemann u. Knut-Hannes Wettig. Nikol, Hamburg 2004. ISBN 3-933203-93-7
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles-Henri_Sanson