Martin Antonenko
A Fixture
- Joined
- Jul 11, 2008
- Messages
- 8,997
The First One...
On the night of October 14, 1791, a robbery takes place at Paris (which was quite common at the time).
The professional mugger Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier...
..ambushes a passer-by at night in Paris' Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve with a friend who has remained unknown to this day (because Pelletier never betrayed him!), beats him with a club and robbs him of his wallet, which isn't money but only contains securities.
The victim's cries for help alert a patrol of the Paris city guard who happens to be nearby - and Peletier is arrested at the scene of the crime.
Pelletier is brought before the court, but his assigned public defender, Guyot de Sainte-Hélène, does not appear at the hearing despite repeated requests - and is also absent from the verdict.
And the verdict is harsh!
Judge Jacob-Augustin Moreau...
... imposes a death sentence, which is also confirmed in the second instance - in which the defense lawyer is again missing. And a third instance also confirmed the verdict on January 24, 1792!
This could be the end of the story - but it isn't, because now the history comes into play...:
There is revolution in France, they want to do everything better and more humanely than the hated Ancien Regime, including executions, of course!
And so one remembers a completely new type of killing instrument that the doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin...
...invented and is supposed to save the delinquent from long agony: the Guillotine!
On April 25, 1792, at 3:30 p.m., the execution of Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier was carried out by the executioner Charles Henri Sanson...
...performed publicly on the Place de Grève...:
There is even a newspaper article about it that has survived:
“Yesterday, at half past three in the afternoon, the machine designed to cut off the heads of criminals sentenced to death was used for the first time. The man to be executed was a certain Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier, convicted by the judiciary on several occasions and most recently convicted of hitting a private individual with several blows with a cane and stealing from him a wallet containing assignats worth 800 livres and other effects.
The novelty of the punishment had caused the crowd to swell considerably among those whom barbaric pity leads to such sad spectacles.
This machine has rightly been preferred to other forms of punishment: it does not stain man's hand with the murder of his own kind, and the speed with which it hits the guilty is more in keeping with the spirit of the law, which can often be severe, but never to be cruel."
Because this new method of execution was an important event at the time, there are - apart from the painting above - a number of more or less imaginative drawings of it that appeared in the various newspapers at the time...:
Executioner Charles Henri Sanson will not be able to complain about a lack of work in the future - and on his execution platform he will sever the heads of many celebrities from their torsos, including two crowned heads and those of the two most important leaders of the revolution...
Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier is the one who started it all, the first person ever to be guillotined.
And that's why he has the dubious honor of having his portrait next to the original Place de Greve guillotine from the French Revolution now kept in the museum...:
On the night of October 14, 1791, a robbery takes place at Paris (which was quite common at the time).
The professional mugger Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier...
..ambushes a passer-by at night in Paris' Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve with a friend who has remained unknown to this day (because Pelletier never betrayed him!), beats him with a club and robbs him of his wallet, which isn't money but only contains securities.
The victim's cries for help alert a patrol of the Paris city guard who happens to be nearby - and Peletier is arrested at the scene of the crime.
Pelletier is brought before the court, but his assigned public defender, Guyot de Sainte-Hélène, does not appear at the hearing despite repeated requests - and is also absent from the verdict.
And the verdict is harsh!
Judge Jacob-Augustin Moreau...
... imposes a death sentence, which is also confirmed in the second instance - in which the defense lawyer is again missing. And a third instance also confirmed the verdict on January 24, 1792!
This could be the end of the story - but it isn't, because now the history comes into play...:
There is revolution in France, they want to do everything better and more humanely than the hated Ancien Regime, including executions, of course!
And so one remembers a completely new type of killing instrument that the doctor Joseph-Ignace Guillotin...
...invented and is supposed to save the delinquent from long agony: the Guillotine!
On April 25, 1792, at 3:30 p.m., the execution of Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier was carried out by the executioner Charles Henri Sanson...
...performed publicly on the Place de Grève...:
There is even a newspaper article about it that has survived:
“Yesterday, at half past three in the afternoon, the machine designed to cut off the heads of criminals sentenced to death was used for the first time. The man to be executed was a certain Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier, convicted by the judiciary on several occasions and most recently convicted of hitting a private individual with several blows with a cane and stealing from him a wallet containing assignats worth 800 livres and other effects.
The novelty of the punishment had caused the crowd to swell considerably among those whom barbaric pity leads to such sad spectacles.
This machine has rightly been preferred to other forms of punishment: it does not stain man's hand with the murder of his own kind, and the speed with which it hits the guilty is more in keeping with the spirit of the law, which can often be severe, but never to be cruel."
Because this new method of execution was an important event at the time, there are - apart from the painting above - a number of more or less imaginative drawings of it that appeared in the various newspapers at the time...:
Executioner Charles Henri Sanson will not be able to complain about a lack of work in the future - and on his execution platform he will sever the heads of many celebrities from their torsos, including two crowned heads and those of the two most important leaders of the revolution...
Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier is the one who started it all, the first person ever to be guillotined.
And that's why he has the dubious honor of having his portrait next to the original Place de Greve guillotine from the French Revolution now kept in the museum...:
