When the Guillotine Fell is what the AP describes as: “a history of the device and capital punishment in general, uses Djandoubi's crime — the brutal torture and murder of a 22-year-old woman — to trace the debate and methods of capital punishment.”
Authored by Jeremy Mercer, another point the AP mentions is: “Invented in the late 1700s, the guillotine was actually conceived as a modern, humane way to execute criminals. It replaced far more gruesome methods of torture and death such as drawing and quartering, the wheel and the highly inefficient beheading by sword, each described in the book in excruciating detail.”
The product description states:
“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...”
Click here for the AP review.
Your Talkback on this Story