The first spectators began arriving shortly after midnight.
The mood was boisterous.
The execution of Eugen Weidmann.
His hands were tied behind his back.
Ten seconds later, he was dead.
Among those watching was actor Christopher Lee, who would later gain recognition playing the role of Dracula.
Lee was then 17.
He was attending with a friend of his family who was a journalist.
Lee said he could not bring himself to watch Weidmanns execution.
“I turned my head, but I heard,” he told a documentary in 1998.
Eugen Weidmann being led to the guillotine.
Photo: France National Archives
The blade falls.
The guillotine was quickly dismantled, and the pavement washed with water.
A few lingered on to discuss what they had just witnessed.
The spectacle of bloodlust and the unruly behavior of the savage crowd horrified the public.
The government was embarrassed.
A crowd watched the execution of Eugen Weidmann.
They came from all over France, and even from Belgium and Germany.
The taverns remained open throughout the night by special permission of the police.
As the executioner assembled the guillotine, crowds pushed past barriers.
Hundreds of cavalry and infantry, together with gendarmes, held the crowd at bay with difficulty.
They shouted Vengeance and Death!
and cheered when the blade came down.
The crowds unbridled emotions and their misdirected curiosity scandalized the public.
They had little to say about the violence of capital punishment as such.
The problem that haunted them was the crowd that gathered around the guillotine.
Who was this crowd?
What emotions did its participants feel at the spectacle of punishment?
The crowd on the Place de la Roquette, in Paris, waits for the execution of Troppmann.
Photo: Bibliotheque Nationale de France.
However, the government did not do away with execution and the particularly violent method of carrying it out.
Rather, guillotining was hidden away behind prison walls.
The guillotine remained the official method of execution in France until the death penalty was abolished in 1981.
Djandoubi’s death was the last time that the guillotine was used for an execution by any government.
