Anatole Deibler

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Anatole François Joseph Deibler (born November 29, 1863 in Rennes , † February 2, 1939 in Paris ) was an executioner in France from 1899 to 1939 . Deibler took part in the execution of 395 people, including 299 executions as the chief executioner.

The years up to 1899

Anatole Deibler was the son of Louis Deibler , who had become an executioner in Brittany in 1863 , and Zoé, née Rasseneux, whose father was an executioner in Algeria . With effect from January 1, 1871, a law introduced by Justice Minister Adolphe Crémieux ("la loi Crémieux") came into force, which abolished all regional executioners (with the exception of Corsica and Algeria and the colonies ) and all decapitations into the hands of an "exécuteur" en chef des arrêts criminels ”. He worked with two first-class assistants and three second-class assistants, and the team traveled with the guillotine to enforcement throughout France. In addition to the executioner himself, a first-class assistant and two second-class assistants participated in an execution . At the age of twelve, Anatole, whose father had been an assistant executioner since 1871, took up a job as a clothing seller in Paris. In 1879 Louis Deibler became exécuteur en chef , and on March 31, 1882, he let his son Anatole watch the beheading of the murderer Pierre Lantz in Versailles in view of a possible assistantship .

Anatole Deibler did his military service from 1882 to 1885 , after which he worked in Algeria from September 1885 as an assistant to his maternal grandfather. Until Rasseneux's death in the fall of 1890, he participated in 18 executions. On November 1, 1890, his father appointed him second class assistant to Paris. There he assisted for the first time in the beheading of the murderer Michel Eyraud on January 3, 1891.

On April 5, 1898, he married Rosalie Rogis, who also came from a renowned executioner dynasty. He later appointed two of her brothers to be his assistants.

1899 to 1939

After his father's resignation, Anatole Deibler became exécuteur en chef des arrêts criminels on January 1, 1899 . His first delinquent, the 65-year-old former mayor Pierre-François Demoiseau, who had murdered his son-in-law and tried to murder his daughter because of an inheritance dispute, he beheaded on January 14 this year in Troyes .

After the two-month-old son of the Deibler couple died in November 1899, Anatole developed a father-like relationship with little André Obrecht , whose mother, who also died a little later, was a sister of Rosalie Deibler.

In 1899, Émile Loubet became a moderate skeptic of the death penalty in France . In the seven years of his tenure, he had only 13 death sentences carried out. In the years and decades before, however, the average was roughly ten to twenty executions per year. At the end of 1905, some politicians and members of parliament brought up the possibility of abolishing the death penalty. Armand Fallières , himself an opponent of the death penalty, replaced Loubet as president in the spring of 1906. By the end of 1908, Fallières converted all death sentences without exception to imprisonment. Deibler had no orders as an executioner for a full three calendar years (1906 to 1908). During this time he worked as a sales representative for champagne . When, on December 8, 1908, a bill submitted by Justice Minister Aristide Briand to abolish the death penalty was rejected by the Chamber of Deputies, Fallières bowed to the decision and had executions carried out again from the beginning of 1909. At this time Anatole Deibler appointed his future successor Jules-Henri Desfourneaux , who married a niece of Deibler's wife, as assistant. On February 25, 1922 Deibler beheaded the notorious serial killer Henri Désiré Landru , in the same year he appointed André Obrecht to his team.

Anatole Deibler was hired twice for beheadings outside of France, namely in 1918 in Belgium and in 1923 in the Saar area, which was then under French administration . No death sentence had been carried out in Belgium since 1863. When King Albert I surprisingly rejected the commutation of the death sentence against Emile Ferfaille, who had murdered his pregnant fiancée, Deibler traveled to Veurne with the guillotine on March 26, 1918 for execution . On June 15, 1923, he beheaded the four-time murderer August Weibel in Saarbrücken .

On September 14, 1932, he executed Pavel Timofejewitsch Gorgulow , the murderer of French President Paul Doumer, in Paris .

On the way to an execution planned for February 3, 1939 in Rennes, Deibler entered the Port de Saint-Cloud Métro station in Paris on the morning of February 2 , from where he wanted to continue to Gare Montparnasse , where his assistants were on him waited to take the train to Rennes. He suffered a heart attack in the metro station and died shortly afterwards in a hospital. The execution in Rennes was postponed for a day and carried out by Desfourneaux, who also became Deibler's successor.

Of the seven executioners who held the office of exécuteur en chef from 1871 to 1981 , Anatole Deibler had the longest term of office at 40. In total, he was involved in 395 beheadings, 96 as an assistant and 299 as an executioner. In France he achieved a not inconsiderable prominence . In the 1911 novel Fantômas by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, he appears by name as an executioner.

See also

literature

  • François Foucart: Anatole Deibler. Profession bourreau. 1863-1939. Plon, Paris 1992. ISBN 2-259-02494-7 .
  • Gérard Jaeger: Anatole Deibler (1863-1939). L'homme qui trancha 400 têtes. Éditions du Félin, Paris 2001. ISBN 2-7028-4768-4 .
  • Christian Siméon: Landru et fantaisies. Une petite conversation entre Anatole Deibler, bourreau français, et Henri-Désiré Landru, homme du monde. L'avant-scène théâtre, Paris 2004. ISBN 2-7498-0923-1
  • Anatole Deibler / Gérard Jaeger [eds.]: Carnets d'exécutions (1885–1939) . L'Archipel, Paris 2004. ISBN 2-84187-537-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Deibler, Anatole at guillotine.dk, accessed on October 27, 2011.
predecessor Office successor
Louis Deibler Executioner of France
1899–1939
Jules-Henri Desfourneaux