France's last public execution
The guillotine's final day in the sun
Alex Q. Arbuckle
1939
Born in Germany in 1908, Eugen Weidmann began stealing at a young age, and grew into a career criminal. He served five years in jail for robbery, where he met his future partners in crime, Roger Million and Jean Blanc. Upon release, the three men began working together to kidnap and rob tourists in the area around Paris. They robbed and killed a young dancer from New York, a chauffeur, a nurse, a theatrical producer, an anti-Nazi activist, and a real estate agent.Police eventually tracked down Weidmann’s home address and confronted him. Weismann fired at the officers with a pistol, wounding them, but was wrestled to the ground and arrested.
After a sensational and much-covered trial, Weidmann and Million were sentenced to death, and Blanc to 20 months in prison. Million’s sentence was later commuted to life in prison.On the morning of June 17, 1939, Weidmann was taken out in front of the Prison Saint-Pierre, where a guillotine and a clamoring, whistling crowd awaited him. Among the attendees was future acting legend Christopher Lee, then 17 years old.Weidmann was placed into the guillotine, and France’s chief executioner Jules-Henri Desfourneaux let the blade fall without delay.Rather then react with solemn observance, the crowd behaved rowdily, using handkerchiefs to dab up Weidmann’s blood as souvenirs. The scene was so appalling that President Albert Lebrun banned public executions altogether, finding that rather than serving as a deterrent to crime, they awakened people’s baser instincts.The guillotine, originally invented as a swift and relatively humane method of killing, continued to be used in private executions until 1977. Capital punishment in France was abolished in 1981.
