Last Guillotine Falls: France Ends Execution by Blade

Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant convicted of the torture and murder of his former girlfriend, was executed by guillotine at Baumettes Prison in Marseille on September 10, 1977, becoming the last person in France and in all of Western Europe to die by this method. The execution was carried out before dawn, following the tradition of guillotine executions being performed in the early morning hours, and the blade that fell on Djandoubi closed a chapter in French justice that had lasted 188 years, from the Terror of the Revolution to the final drop in a Marseille prison yard. Djandoubi had kidnapped, tortured, and murdered Elisabeth Bousquet, a 21-year-old woman, in 1974. After a relationship that Bousquet had ended, Djandoubi abducted her and subjected her to prolonged physical abuse before strangling her and burning her body. His trial was straightforward, and the jury sentenced him to death after brief deliberation. President Valery Giscard d'Estaing declined to exercise his right of clemency, allowing the sentence to proceed. The guillotine had been introduced in 1792 as a humanitarian reform. Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin, a physician and member of the National Assembly, proposed the device to ensure that execution was instantaneous, painless, and identical for all citizens regardless of class, replacing the varied and often gruesome methods of the ancien regime. The blade became inseparable from the Terror that followed, executing an estimated 17,000 people between 1793 and 1794, including King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The machine remained France's sole legal method of execution for nearly two centuries. France abolished the death penalty entirely on October 9, 1981, under President Francois Mitterrand, who had campaigned explicitly on the issue. Justice Minister Robert Badinter presented the abolition bill to the National Assembly with an impassioned speech declaring that the death penalty was incompatible with the values of a civilized democracy. France became one of the last Western European nations to abolish capital punishment, joining a continental consensus against state killing that now extends across the entire European Union as a condition of membership.