When the Guillotine Fell: The Bloody Beginning and Horrifying End to France's River of Blood, 1791-1977 by Jeremy Mercer

From the Publisher

How long did the guillotine’s blade hang over the heads of French criminals?  Was it abandoned in the late 1800s?  Did French citizens of the early days of the twentieth century decry its brutality?  No. The blade was allowed to do its work well into our own time.  In 1974, Hamida Djandoubi brutally tortured 22 year-old Elisabeth Bousquet in an apartment in Marseille, putting cigarettes out on her body and lighting her on fire, finally strangling her to death in the Provencal countryside where he left her body to rot.  In 1977, he became the last person executed by guillotine in France in a multifaceted case as mesmerizing for its senseless violence as it is though-provoking for its depiction of a France both in love with and afraid of The Foreigner.  In a thrilling and enlightening account of a horrendous murder paired with the history of the guillotine and the history of capital punishment, Jeremy Mercer, a writer well known for his view of the underbelly of French life, considers the case of Hamida Djandoubi in the vast flow of blood that France's guillotine has produced.  In his hands, France never looked so bloody...

Publishers Weekly

Despite its appealingly gory subject, Mercer's uneven history of the guillotine is too poorly organized to be truly informative. Arriving in rough-and-tumble Marseille in 1968, Tunisian-born Hamida Djandoubi lost his leg in a 1971 tractor accident. During his convalescence the handsome, seductive Djandoubi met Elisabeth Bousquet, a naïve, lonely teenager, and soon forced her into prostitution. By 1974, Djandoubi had acquired two underage girlfriends, whom he made assist in Bouquet's gruesome murder. Executed on September 10, 1977, Djandoubi was the last man to be guillotined before France abolished the death penalty in 1981. But Mercer (Time Was Soft There) continually interrupts the flow of his account of Djandoubi's life and crimes with chapters about the evolution of capital punishment, including Hammurabi's Code, which in 1760 B.C. introduced the "eye for an eye" law of retaliation, and the invention of mechanized decapitation by France's Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin in 1791. The conversational style makes for an entertaining read, but those hoping for an in-depth study of capital punishment in France should look elsewhere. 8 pages of b&w photos. (July)

Kirkus Reviews

A history of capital punishment in France combined with a detailed description of the crime that led to that country's final use of the death penalty. Mercer (Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co., 2005, etc.) does a solid job with these parallel narratives, though overly descriptive passages sometimes drag down the pace. He clearly thinks capital punishment is barbaric and uses both stories to make that point. The history of France's use of the death penalty is informative, and Mercer places past events in context while resisting the temptation to impose modern-day values on them. He also examines the conflicted views French leaders and citizens have voiced about the death penalty over the years. All the usual suspects make appearances, including executed French royals Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI and the guillotine's inventor, Joseph-Ignace Guillotin. In the chapters on Hamida Djandoubi, the last person executed in France, Mercer supplies vivid descriptions of the crime and of its perpetrator's sad, troubled life. Djandoubi tortured and murdered a former girlfriend, forcing two other women he had previously brutalized to watch. The author does not try to make excuses for these acts and dismisses the attempts by Djandoubi's lawyers to use his difficult childhood or the effects of losing his leg in an accident as reasons for acquittal. Nevertheless, Mercer emphasizes the brutality of the September 1977 beheading: "The gush of blood. It was as if somebody had thrown a bucket of water against the wall . . . The head that fell and bounced in the basket. The crimson fountain that spurted from the arteries."A fast-paced, informative take on an important social issue andbrutal crime, though Mercer lacks the storytelling panache of such narrative nonfiction masters as H.G. Bissinger and Erik Larson. Agent: Kristin Lindstrom/Lindstrom Literary Group

Product Details

• ISBN: 0312357915
  
• ISBN-13: 9780312357917
• Format: Hardcover, 320pp
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Pub. Date: June 2008
• Sales Rank: 414,118