Death Penalty News

The execution of Louis XVI , in application of the death sentence of the former king of France and Navarre and former king of the French pronounced by the Members of the National Convention at the end of his trial, took place on Monday 21 January 1793 at 10:22 a.m., in Paris, on the Place de la Révolution (former Place Louis XV, which became Place de la Concorde in 1795). It is a major event in the French Revolution, and more generally in French history.

Click here  to Google translate the following text into your own language. Le terrible décret qui, pour la seconde fois en moins de deux siècles, allait faire tomber sur l’échafaud une tête couronnée, et affliger la France d’un attentat semblable à celui qui avait effrayé l’Angleterre, était prononcé. Les sollicitations éloquentes des trois défenseurs du roi Louis XVI, condamné à mort, avaient en vain invoqué pour l’auguste proscrit le jugement suprême de la nation. Ce recours à la puissance populaire n’avait pas eu un sort plus heureux que la proposition des Girondins. L’appel au peuple avait été définitivement rejeté. La souveraineté que lui attribuaient ses mandataires n’était plus pour eux qu’un vain mot. Ainsi, par un effrayant abus de pouvoir, ils s’érigeaient à la fois en souverains, en législateurs et en juges, réunissant des fonctions dont la confusion a toujours constitué la plus épouvantable tyrannie. Pour précipiter le supplice, ils osent invoquer l’hum...

Bones fragments were discovered in the walls of the Chapelle Expiatoire, Paris The remains of up to 500 people executed by guillotine in the French Revolution could be buried in the walls of a Paris monument, experts believe.   Bone fragments were discovered in the walls of the Chapelle Expiatoire which is a classified monument in Paris.  Archeologist Philippe Charlier examined the monument's walls with a small camera inserted through the stones, The Guardian reported. He said there was earth mixed with bone fragments.   The monument is dedicated to King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette who were executed at the Place de la Révolution before being formally buried at the Basilica of St Denis .  French authorities called in an archeologist, who inserted a camera through the stones in the walls, so they didn't damage the building's foundations.  The chapel's administrator Aymeric Peniguet de Stoutz had noticed anomalies in the wal...

On 21 September 1792, the fall of the monarchy was officially declared and the National Convention became the governing body of the French Republic. The royal family name was downgraded to the non-royal "Capets".  Preparations began for the trial of the king in a court of law. Charged with undermining the First French Republic, Louis XVI was separated from his family and tried in December. He was found guilty by the Convention, led by the Jacobins who rejected the idea of keeping him as a hostage.  On 15 January 1793, by a majority of one vote, that of Philippe Égalité, he was condemned to death by guillotine and executed on 21 January 1793. Marie-Antoinette in the Temple The queen, now called "Widow Capet", plunged into deep mourning. She still hoped her son Louis XVII, whom the exiled comte de Provence, Louis XVI's brother, had recognised as Louis XVI's successor, would one day rule France.  The royalists and the refractory clerg...

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, ...

PARIS (Reuters) - Henri d’Orleans, Count of Paris and pretender to the defunct French throne, died on Monday - exactly 226 years after his distant cousin Louis XVI was guillotined in Paris. His death, aged 85, was announced on Facebook by his son Jean. Henri was said to harbor royal ambitions, but the movement to restore France’s monarchy has progressively dwindled since the years leading up to World War Two, when it was viewed in some quarters as a credible threat to Republicanism. Henri, the Orleanist pretender, vied for the claim with the Bourbons, based in Spain and headed by the 44-year-old Louis Alphonse, Duke of Anjou. RELATED | 21 janvier 1793 : The Day Louis XVI, King of France, was guillotined France overthrew its monarchy in the revolution of 1789, briefly restoring it after the fall of Napoleon.  The last French king, Louis Philippe, was toppled in 1848. In an opinion piece published in Le Figaro last October, Jean d’Orleans criticized th...

The French Revolution of 1789 was a pivotal event in history, marked by profound social, political, and cultural changes. The revolution aimed to dismantle the existing monarchical system, abolish feudal privileges, and establish principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The upheaval had its roots in widespread discontent with the absolute monarchy, financial crisis, and social inequality. The Estates-General (Etats généraux) was convened in 1789 to address the fiscal problems, but tensions escalated, leading to the formation of the National Assembly. 

The guillotine is one of the most recognizable execution devices in the world. The iconic appearance of the fearsome angled blade ranks up there with the gallows and the cross as the more prominent images of human execution.  The guillotine dominated a gruesome part of European history and continues to engage the imagination to this day. But the guillotine was never supposed to become the killing machine that it did. When the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin advocated for the use of the beheading device as a method of execution, he could not have known that it would be used to kill thousands of his countrymen. The guillotine was initially invented as a mercy device. It was supposed to be a modernization of Medieval execution methods that had grown gory and inhumane. Enlightened people could not bear to kill people in such ways any longer. There had to be a better way. Those condemned to die should not also have to be tortured en-route to their final punishment. A death pena...