Guillotine Death Day
October 7, 2011This month marks the 30th anniversary of the abolition of the death penalty in France. And, since the media adores a good anniversary, this means there’s been a lot of talk about the case of the last man guillotined.
Now, as readers of this space know, I spent three years of my life working on When the Guillotine Fell, a book that examined both the last execution in France and the history of the death penalty. In fact, I was so caught up in the subject that I also translated Robert Badinter’s L’Abolition, a memoir of his fight to abolish the death penalty.
As part of the anniversary brouhaha, I’ve had a few calls from journalists. Notably, I appeared on camera in a documentary about the Hamida Djandoubi case that was put together by Kilaohm Productions and will be broadcast on October 9th on the Planet Justice channel.
Movie poster for the documentary on the last execution in France
Now, there’s a curious story behind this documentary. The author, Jean-Yves Le Naour, ended up writing a quickie book (six weeks!) about the case in order to capitalize on the media frenzy that he anticipated would accompany the anniversary. And, sure enough, he got a fair amount of press out of it, press that might have otherwise gone to me. Was I perturbed? Not really. I went to the plate with this book in 2008 and my performance greatly resembled that of the Boston Red Sox this past September. I’ve put my ambitions to bed with this book.
Besides, I did get one really juicy hit. VSD (for Vendredi, Samedi, Dimanche) is a juicy glossy tabloid, kind of a low-market Paris-Match. And they proclaimed my book the ‘reference’ on the case. A little tabloid love goes a long way.
(If you want to read the article, click on the image and then click again to get a decent font size.)
With so much to love about France, the persistence of the guillotine almost into the 1980s remains a permanent stain on her honour. It’s a disquieting thought that at the very time of the films of the “nouvelle vague”, or the chansons of Jacques Brel and Serge Gainsbourg, the guillotine was still in fairly regular use and would remain so for several years to come. Robert Badinter is owed an immense debt of gratitude by humanitarians of all nations. Murder always has been, and will always remain, a serious problem in any society; we have long needed to arrive at a better solution than replicating it by judicial means.