François Mitterrand, the Justice Minister Who Sent 45 Men to the Guillotine

The socialist president celebrated for abolishing the death penalty in France sent 45 condemned men to the guillotine when he was Minister of Justice.

In French political history, François Mitterrand is the father of the historic victory of May 1981.

He remains associated with one of the greatest moral laws of the Fifth Republic: the definitive end of capital executions, carried through with Robert Badinter in the autumn of 1981.

But 25 years before elevating abolition to a great republican principle, the same man had the guillotine operating at a relentless pace.

In January 1956, the Republican Front government led by the socialist Guy Mollet came to power. François Mitterrand was appointed garde des Sceaux (Keeper of the Seals), Minister of Justice.

The Algerian War was raging. Military courts were handing down dozens of death sentences against FLN independence activists.

As Minister of Justice, Mitterrand held a key position within the High Council of the Judiciary. It was he who prepared each clemency appeal file before the final decision of President René Coty.

Between February 1956 and May 1957, in just sixteen months in office, 45 Algerian nationalists were beheaded in the courtyards of the prisons of Algiers, Oran, and Constantine.

These facts are documented by the official archives of the High Council of the Judiciary, studied in particular by historians Benjamin Stora and Sylvie Thénault.

The minutes of the sessions reveal the inflexibility of the garde des Sceaux. Of all the Algerian death-row cases examined under his tenure, François Mitterrand rejected the appeal for clemency in more than 80% of cases and gave a favorable opinion for execution.

The first political execution of the war took place under his authority on 19 June 1956 at Barberousse prison in Algiers.

That morning, Ahmed Zabana, thirty years old, and Abdelkader Ferradj, 35 years old, walked to the scaffold.

For Zabana, the guillotine jammed and stuck twice before killing him on the third attempt.

A few months later, on 11 February 1957, Mitterrand approved another symbolic execution: that of Fernand Iveton, the only European of Algeria to be guillotined during the conflict.

This communist worker had planted a bomb in his gas plant, set to explode after the staff had left. The device had been defused in time and caused neither death nor injury.

Despite the total absence of victims and the appeals for clemency, the Minister of Justice refused a pardon in order to set a political example and appease the supporters of French Algeria.

The statesman celebrated by the left for abolishing the death penalty in peacetime had previously used the guillotine as an instrument of colonial authority, sending dozens of men to the scaffold out of pure political calculation.

Source: DPN, Staff, X, October 26, 2026

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde

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