Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 12.pdf/150

 Executions and Executioners. was flayed alive, for betraying Laon into the hands of the English. Francis I invented a death punishment known as Estrapade, which consisted in letting the culprit fall from such a height as to break all his limbs. At the time of the revolution there were five forms of capital punishment in France. Traitors and regicides were quartered, sor cerers and heretics were burned; for ordin ary criminals there were the gibbet and wheel for men of low degree, and the axe for the noble, for decapitation involved no loss of rank and no dishonor to the family. The last execution by breaking on the wheel took place in France in 1789, though several have suffered the torture and death in Germany during the present century. Thecriminal was placed on a carriage wheel, with his legs and arms extended along the spokes, and the wheel being turned round, the executioner fractured his limbs by suc cessive blows with an iron bar, which were repeated till death ensued. Sometimes the executioner was permitted to terminate the sufferings of the condemned by dealing two or three severe blows on the chest or stomach, known as coup dc grace, and occa sionally, in France, the sentence contained a provision that the criminal was to be strangled after the first or second blow. In France, regicides and traitors were subjected to the greatest torture. An eye witness describes the death of Robert Fran çois Damiens, on March 28, 1757, his crime being that of slightly wounding Louis XV with a knife. " A sort of thrill running through the assembled thousands, a sudden silence, preceded the appearance on the square of a pale, slender man, who ad vanced surrounded by guards and officers of justice," writes the eye-witness. The lugubrious procession stopped near the centre of the square now known as the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville. " The prisoner, for such he was, was stripped, bound, ironed, and laid upon a scaffold in the centre of the palisades. Then followed the most hor

127

rible scene the imagination can conceive. The right hand of the prisoner, which held a knife, was burned. He uttered a terrible cry as the member crackled in the blaze, and was then silent and looked at the charred stump with mournful attention. Then the

EXECUTION AT TANGIERS. (From painting by Regnault.)

executioner tore out pieces of flesh from his breast, arms, and legs, and poured into the flesh a mixture of melted lead, boiling oil, hot pitch, wax and sulphur, at which the criminal cried out at several intervals : ' My God! Strength, strength! ' ' О Lord, my God, have pity on me! ' ' О Lord, my