Eugen weidmann biography template
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The Last Public Execution in France
By Paul Friedland
73 years ago today, Eugène Weidmann became the last person to be executed before a crowd of spectators in France, marking the end of a tradition of public punishment that had existed for a thousand years. Weidmann had been convicted of having murdered, among others, a young American socialite whom he had lured to a deserted villa on the outskirts of Paris. Throughout his trial, pictures of the handsome “Teutonic Vampire” had been splashed across the pages of French tabloids, playing upon the fear of all things German in that tense summer of 1939. When it came time for Weidmann to face the guillotine, in the early morning hours of 17 June, several hundred spectators had gathered, eager to watch him die.
Why was this to become the last public execution in France? In the days following Weidmann’s death, the press expressed a growing indignation at the way the crowd had behaved. A report in Paris-Soir, published the day after the execution but seemingly drafted in the heat of the moment, characterized the spectators as a “disgusting” and “unruly” crowd which was “devouring sandwiches” and “jostling, clamoring, whistling.” Before long, the government decreed the end of public executions, expressing its regret that such
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Eugen Weidmann, the last victim of the French guillotine, under arrest for murder. Wikimedia Commons
The guillotine is the ultimate expression of Law… He who sees it shudders with an inexplicable dismay. All social questions achieve their finality around that blade.
—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I
shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe which has already occurred.
Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.
—Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Pierre Vaillat celebrated Christmas by murdering his two eldest siblings. Apprehended days after his crime, he welcomed the arrival of a new year in a squalid prison cell while awaiting his trial. 1897 was surely a banner year for Vaillat: in March he was convicted of the double homicide, in April he perhaps enjoyed a breath of spring air as he was dragged from his cell to the awaiting guillotine.
Vaillat would, no doubt, have been long forgotten—an unremarkable criminal who, like thousands of others in the nineteenth century, expired at the end of the guillotine’s egalitarian blade—if not for a single photograph. There is a grainy, black and white photograph of Vaillat
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File:Eugène Weidmann - photos d'identité judiciaire.jpg
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