Louis Deibler

Louis Antoine Stanislas Deibler (born February 12, 1823 in Dijon , † September 6, 1904 in Paris ) was the regional executioner responsible for Brittany in Rennes from 1863 to 1870 and from 1879 to 1898 executioner for all of France ( exécuteur en chef ).

ancestry

Louis Deibler came from a German family whose members had been executioners in Württemberg since 1694 . His father, Josef Anton Deubler (* 1789), came to France from Germany in 1815. He Gallized his name to Joseph Antoine Deibler , opened a coffee house in the Ain department and married a French woman. The Dijon executioner responsible for Burgundy , Louis Antoine Stanislas Desmourest, hired him as an assistant. Joseph Deibler gave his superior's three first names to his first-born son in 1823. Joseph Deibler later became an executioner in Saintes , Saint-Flour and finally in 1853 in Rennes, where he was succeeded by his son in 1863 and died in 1874.

The years up to 1879

Louis Deibler began at an early age to assist his father with beheadings with the guillotine . In 1853 he went to Algeria as an assistant executioner , where he married Zoé Rasseneux, the daughter of his boss, in 1858. Of the couple's five children, only two survived childhood, including his later successor Anatole Deibler . In 1863 Louis Deibler succeeded his father Joseph as an executioner in Rennes.

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 beheadings into the hands of an “exécuteur” en chef des arrêts criminels ”. He worked with two first class assistants and three second class assistants. The team traveled with the guillotine to the enforcements all over France. In addition to the executioner himself, a first-class assistant and two second-class assistants participated in an execution. Deibler lost his office as executioner in Brittany on January 1, 1871. On July 24 of the same year, however, the exécuteur en chef Jean-François Heidenreich hired him as a second class assistant. Under Nicolas Roch , who had been in office since 1872, Deibler became a first-class assistant.

“Exécuteur en chef” since 1879

Public decapitation of the murderer Pierre Vaillat by Louis Deibler; Photograph from 1897

After Nicolas Roch's death, Louis Deibler himself was appointed exécuteur en chef on May 15, 1879 . He carried out his first execution four days later in Agen against Pierre Laprade, who had murdered his parents and grandmother. On January 24, 1887, in Romorantin , he beheaded the young married couple Henri and Georgette Thomas, who had burned their widow Lebon, Georgette's mother, alive. Immediately before the public execution, Georgette Thomas tore her clothes off in front of the executioner. There is a contemporary drawing of the execution. It shows Louis Deibler, with a top hat, between the delinquent and the priest, behind them two second class assistants, behind the guillotine the first class assistant. This was the final guillotination of a woman for more than 50 years. It was not until 1941 that a woman was beheaded again in France.

In 1890, Louis Deibler appointed his son Anatole, who had previously worked as an assistant executioner with his grandfather Rasseneux in Algeria, as a second class assistant. Another assistant was Alphonse Berger , executioner in Corsica until 1872 and designer of an improved form of the guillotine that was in use until the last execution on French soil of Hamida Djandoubi in 1977.

In 1892, among others, the notorious anarchist Ravachol died at the hands of Louis Deibler. On August 16, 1894, in Lyon , he executed the anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio , who had murdered the French President Marie François Sadi Carnot a few weeks earlier .

Due to the mishap of an assistant, Deibler was splattered by the blood of the executed man during a decapitation in 1897. From that day on he suffered from haematophobia (anxiety at the sight of blood), which got worse and worse. Therefore, on December 28, 1898, he submitted his resignation. On December 31, he carried out his last execution of the notorious “French ripper” Joseph Vacher in Bourg-en-Bresse . In total, Louis Deibler carried out 154 executions as exécuteur en chef . On January 1, 1899, his son Anatole Deibler succeeded him as executioner for France.

literature

• My life, my loved ones, my sufferings, my unfortunate fates and the terrible secrets of my terrible profession. Wilhelm Deibler, executioner , volume 2 (Colportage novel). The Kolportag novel Kosch / Nagel No. 849

Web links

• Biography of Louis Deibler on site.voila.fr (French)

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Cf. Nowosadtko, Jutta: Executioner and Skinner - The Everyday Life of Two “Dishonest Professions” in the Early Modern Age, Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, Paderborn 1994, pp. 216, 271, 370, ISBN 978-3506761156 .
2. ↑ www.richard.clark32.btinternet.co.uk, accessed December 3, 2007 ( October 4, 2006 memento in the Internet Archive ).
3. ↑ http://guillotine.site.voila.fr, accessed December 3, 2007 .

predecessor	Office	successor
Nicolas Roch	Executioner of France 1879–1898	Anatole Deibler