When the Guillotine Fell: The Bloody Beginning and Horrifying End to France's River of Blood, 1791--1977 [Hardcover]

Jeremy Mercer (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0312357915 | ISBN-13: 978-0312357917 | Publication Date: June 24, 2008 | Edition: First Edition

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...

Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for Jeremy Mercer’s "Time Was Soft There":

"Ably captures a romanticized version of the bum's life."--The New Yorker

"Jeremy Mercer's tale of George Whitman and his beloved bookstore is a book of revelations, for it tells the hard-to-discover true story of George's life and of the twenty-thousand-and-one nights of this enchanted place that continues to be for its habitées as well as for its creator, a way of life."--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"[Mercer] has fashioned a colorful de facto biography of Whitman . . . with an unblinking gaze at his own sometimes unsavory qualities in a tightly written, insightful memoir of Left Bank literary radicalism. A great read, both funny and quietly moving."--San Francisco Chronicle

"Mercer writes with flair . . . and the milieu he evokes, while a long way from that of the Lost Generation, has its own charm."--The Wall Street Journal 

"The memoir is more than an entertaining romp through Parisian literary bohemia at the turn of the millennium. Time Was Soft There will likely be the last firsthand account of an aging legend."--Newsweek

About the Author

JEREMY MERCER is the author of Time Was Soft There, two crime books, and a former writer for the Ottawa Citizen. He lives in Marseille, France.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press; First Edition edition (June 24, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312357915
• ISBN-13: 978-0312357917
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,167,847 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars fascinating, July 16, 2008

By 

Harriet Klausner - See all my reviews
(#1 Hall OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: When the Guillotine Fell: The Bloody Beginning and Horrifying End to France's River of Blood, 1791--1977 (Hardcover)

This is a fascinating look at one of the most notorious execution devices made infamous in A Tale of two Cities. However, the best passages are the stories of those who danced with Madame Guillotine, but these are disjointed with sudden switches to other poignant segues. Interestingly, the inventor Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin created the device during the French Revolution as a cleaner way to conduct an execution (much faster than conventional methods so less pain for the mob of observers - think of Dickens' Madam DeFarge; and as a humanitarian reason to those who are being killed - think of the Supreme Court's lethal injection decision). The last victim was Tunisian expatriate Hamida Djandoubi who with the help of two underage girlfriends killed one of his Marseille prostitutes in 1974 and was dispatched in 1977 just before France outlawed capital punishment. A section on the history of state legal executions adds depth to an overall fascinating in a macabre way historical account of WHEN THE GUILLOTINE FELL, but overall the tome suffers from a disjointed execution.

Harriet Klausner