“I see that you have made three spelling mistakes,” muttered Marquis de Favras upon reading his death warrant
Public execution and torture as criminal punishment goes back a long way in European history. Often the sentence was engineered to fit the crime, in some unthinkably gruesome ways. In France, during the period from 1789 to 1799, hundreds of thousands of men and women were arrested and tens of thousands executed in the name of the French Revolution. One prominent episode concerns Thomas de Mahy, Marquis de Favras, a high-profile nobleman who was hanged in 1790 for plotting to rescue King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette. The Marquis de Favras was born in 1744 and was distinguished for his service in the army. His hanging marked an important turning point as he was the first nobleman for whom there was no class distinction in his mode of execution. By tradition, nobles were spared from a drawn-out public humiliation — those sentenced to death would receive a swift beheading by axe or sword. Commoners, in contrast, were made a spectacle of. One of the least brutal, ...