1. Charles-Henri Sanson administered capital punishment in Paris for over 40 years.
18 Facts About Charles-Henri Sanson
1. 2.
Charles-Henri Sanson was the fourth in a six-generation family dynasty of executioners.
3.
Charles-Henri Sanson's great-grandfather, Charles Sanson of Abbeville, was a soldier in the French royal army and was appointed as executioner of Paris in 1688.
4.
The third Charles-Henri Sanson served all his life as high executioner and in his time fathered 16 children, 10 of whom survived to adulthood.
5.
Charles-Henri Sanson was first raised in the convent school at Rouen until in 1753 a father of another student recognised his father as the executioner, and he had to leave the school in order to not ruin the school's reputation.
6.
In 1757 Charles-Henri Sanson assisted his uncle Nicolas-Charles-Gabriel Charles-Henri Sanson with the extremely gruesome execution of the king's attempted assassin Robert-Francois Damiens.
7.
Charles-Henri Sanson's uncle quit his position as executioner after this event.
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Louis XVI 8.
In 1778 Charles-Henri Sanson officially received the blood-red coat, the sign of the master executioner, from his father Charles-Jean-Baptiste.
9.
Charles-Henri Sanson held this position for 17 years, being succeeded by his son Henri in 1795 after he showed serious signs of illness.
10.
Swift and efficient decapitations of straw bales were followed by live sheep and finally human corpses, and by the end, Charles-Henri Sanson led the inspectors in pronouncing the new device a resounding success.
11.
Charles-Henri Sanson performed 2,918 executions, including the execution of Louis XVI.
12.
Charles-Henri Sanson had the duty to execute Louis XVI under the power of the sitting provisional government.
13.
Charles-Henri Sanson experienced the stress of having to execute not only the king but successive waves of ousted officials as those in power shifted rapidly in a time of revolutionary change.
14.
Charles-Henri Sanson indignantly rejected published reports that Legros was one of his assistants.
15.
Charles-Henri Sanson stated in his diary that Legros was in fact a carpenter who had been hired to make repairs to the guillotine.
16.
Charles-Henri Sanson, who owned and maintained all his own equipment, argued persuasively that multiple executions were too demanding for the old methods.
17.
The Memories of Charles-Henri Sanson are the apocryphal memoirs attributed to Charles-Henri Sanson.
18.
Charles-Henri Sanson worked as an assistant from the 1830s and held the official position from 1840 to 1847, at which point the 159-year Sanson legacy of executioners came to an end.