Behind the Scenes Minis: Guillotine

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello and Happy Friday. Am Holly Fry and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. Listen. I'm sorry about all the murder. Um. I'm drawn to very dark stuff right now. I'm fine. Just in case anyone's worried about my mental state, I just I don't know's It's been interesting this one. This story has always been interesting to me because I will tell you the way I came across it, which is very strange, Okay, and then um, and then I'll talk about some of the other things about it that came up as I have read about it over the years that I really wanted to touch on. They didn't all make it into the episode. But the way I learned about this is because there's an interesting bit of trivia, and I don't remember where I read it. During the trial, there was a handwriting expert that was called in for the case by the court. I do not know that handwriting expert's name, but I know that she was yours Saul's granddaughter, which I saw in some like history trivia thing, which is how I learned about this um that would have been her granddaughter through her son Maurice, because her daughter, though she had two children of her own, they did not survive childhood, I don't believe, So that was just an interesting way to intro it. There were a few other things I wanted to talk about. One is actually the executioner Jus, because this is one of those weird things. There is a write up his obituary when he died, which I believe was ninety one. The one that appeared in American in papers in the US and English language papers abroad, paints an interesting picture that um I had certainly not considered before I started researching this, which is that he was publicly known as the executioner of Paris, and that inherently came with stigma and it was literally like something that had been in his family for a long time. And then, uh, and we'll get into this in a moment. You know, this was right before World War two, of course, and then there were some very objectionable instances where he was called to have to do his job that he did not love. And he is described by the few people that were good friends with him as really struggling with this and knowing that people whispered about him like he was a monster when he thought he you know again, this was kind of a family job that he inherited, UM, and he eventually had problems later in life with misuse of alcohol. But what's really interesting is that even though people tended to scorn him and want to keep away from him, after he died, he was lauded by a lot of those same people. It's like, you know, this really amazing, great man, and isn't it incredible that he did this very difficult and sometimes horrible job with a great deal of dignity. And it's like this weird dissonance that people can't manage to find kindness in their hearts for a person who is alive, but have a very comfortable time eulogizing him in very kind ways. And it just was one of those things that, um makes you think about the way people behave and I even, you know, question my own behavior and I'm like, am I doing that thing where I take the easy path? Because that's but UM, I don't know any executioners that part of it. But the same kind of thing will come up in life periodically. UM. It was just an interesting story. And he, you know, is a person who bore a lot of moral burden for an entire country essentially, and doesn't get talked about very often, so I wanted to make sure we at least mentioned him. I just mentioned that this was happening right before World War Two, which we mentioned in the podcast, But I think that helps give a little bit of uh an informative lens on why this was a case that was globally fixated on. It was like, it's kind of like we talked about poverty voyeurism when we were talking about the Stork Derby and Millar's will, and it's kind of the same. I think this is a horrible, terrible thing at a time when the whole globe is recognizing that it is on the precipice of horrible terrible things. But this is is tiny and something that people could process and be like, no, but it was terrible. But he is caught, and he is in prison, and they're putting more guards on it in case he gets out, And so I think it just became a way to focus stress and that unrest and make it about this thing instead of having to constantly be under the strain and cloud of the impending global conflict. And then the last thing I want to talk about is the press because as voyeurism, Um, you know, we mentioned that the French government was very angry that all of these things had been photographed and and taken out and what was really interesting and I didn't ever find any commentary on it, but like, there is a Life magazine article that I found from the nineties that is full of the most graphic images of like the bodies being exhumed of and I don't know how they got all of the police photographs of when they were examining his house, and like just photo after photo after photos. It's like a basically a picture book of the whole thing as it played out, which is very horrifying. In addition to all of this, you could, if you wanted to right now, go look at a video of this guillotine name, because someone filmed it and it is all over online, um, which is very weird to me and troubling. Um especially I didn't know. I knew about the video because it had come up when we did the Christopher Lee episode, which, as I had mentioned before, he was also at this guillotining. Uh, he was a teenager at the time. I think he was seventeen, and so I had known the video existed because of when I was doing that research, and in one of the articles I had read, it was there was like an in bed. And I have not watched this video. I don't feel like I need to, um, but I had not read that statement from the French cabinet about being upset that there was so much coverage and candid photographs. And I'm like, I can't imagine what happened when they discovered that someone had filmed it and then scared that film around. I have no idea how anybody officially in any government feels about it now, but it's sure is easy to find if you have a taste for such things. It's very weird. Yeah I did that. So I have some go to places that I look for imagery to go on our social media or whatever. Uh, And interestingly none of them had photos of this particular Like I would not have chosen of gruesome beheading picture, but it had there been a crowd, like a shot of the crowd or the guillotine being set up or something like that like that I probably would have been comfortable with. But just like the places that I normally go to to look for pictures. None of them seemed to have anything, and I was like, that's weird, and I guess it's just that the pictures have not made it to any of those particular sources. Yeah, there are. It's it becomes really interesting. There are lots of photographs of for example, and you know, photographs of her later in her career, but all of them that I saw that I stumbled across mentioned where it's like in the caption, it's like, here's Renee d in her office in nineteen so thirty years later, and they're like, she was one of the defense attorneys in the vin case, and it's like, thirty years later, that is still the thing she is most well known for, which is kind of fascinating. Um. Yeah, like invite man, it's so strange that he was in it for the money and so sloppy about money, you know what I mean. Like there wasn't ever any sense that he planned like, oh okay, if we rob this wealthy person will be set for. It's more like you've got like, in some cases, just chump change. In some of them, they weren't carrying much cash and so it's super weird. There's a disconnect there, which I think is also part of why he became such a as we called him a mythic boogeyman to people, right, Like, there's an aspect of it that none of it makes even though he was very very smart, really articulate when he talked about, you know, the things he was willing to talk about, he could never articulate really what was going on, and then saying, well, we just wanted the money. I'm like sometimes like and if you if the money is what you're after, Like, there are many ways to con money out of people that don't involve murdering a huge assortment of different people, which becomes a big speculation. Right. It's it's pretty widely accepted that gene to Covin was the first murder he committed, and then you'll read very sensationalized versions of like and then he had a taste for it, and it's like, I don't know that that's the case. He didn't ever indicate that, like he had a compulsion or an urge, So it's a little it's still a little strange where he then just started to adopt that as his functioning criminal mode rather than just robberies, which he had done his entire life up to that point. Well, and because the Internet is the place of like taking the least generous, most reductive read on anything anybody said. I'm not saying I'm not advocating robbing people for their money, right, Like somebody's gonna send me an email saying likes to calm people. That's not No, she's saying, you don't have to take the most violent course. Yeah, it's it. It doesn't you know. We were doing it from the for the money just seems like a questionable defense to me, when like there's lots of crimes that people could get money from that aren't murders. Well, and I always have the very this is probably the most vanilla thought on it ever. To me. It seems like so much more work to commit a murder, hide the evidence, worry forever about getting caught than just like doing a job, like a regular job job. I'm gonna have a heist, right, I don't have the energy for that. I'm just gonna have a hist where nobody gets are and an insurance company. I'm just gonna have a job. That's fine. I couldn't live with that kind of stress obviously, So again, sorry about all the murder, but it is it's a case that you see sensationalized a lot, and I really didn't want to pick it apart a little bit to really look a little bit more at the nuance and how you know, we didn't even talk about like the French police being like Americans don't understand how we do things, and they're acting like we're imbeciles and we were not bothering and they had the whole like frustration That was interesting to me. And I completely understand the family feeling like they had been kind of ignored and not really um and that Jean's case wasn't taken seriously. Like there are so many psychological profiles within this that all, I mean, every one of these people is a person who you know, comes with the package of hopes and fears and desires and you know, whatever part of the story they're in worth considering. We we lose that when we talk about like the statistics of crimes. I think so anyway, that was my moment to have a soapbox about the way criminal behavior is covered, in the way way things are handled historically when stories are sensationalized. Thank you for hanging out with us and hanging in through all of this gruesomeness. Um, if your weekend is what is ahead and that means time off, I hope that it's really really good and relaxing and that you can put all these unpleasant thoughts behind you. Uh. If you have obligations that make this not really your weekend in terms of time off, I hope that everything that you have to do goes as smoothly as it possibly can, and that you have as good a time doing it as you possibly can, and that everyone is kind to one another. We will be right back here tomorrow with a classic, and then on Monday we will have another episode, which I don't think is going to be as dark. We'll see stuff you missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the i heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,