The last execution by guillotine

On 10 September 1977, France carried out the last execution by guillotine in history.

That is how the murderer of a young woman, a native of Tunisia, was beheaded.
Although the guillotine seems like an instrument from a distant past, it was still used in France in the twentieth century. This is often associated with the Second World War. The guillotine (from the French guillotine) is an execution machine used mainly during the French Revolution. An iron blade with an oblique edge severs the condemned man’s head. The weight of the blade, loaded with about 70 kilograms, delivered a powerful blow. Because of its speed and reliability it was considered far more humane than execution by sword. It took its name from its advocate, the French physician Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738–1814).

He was not, however, its direct inventor: machines operating on a similar principle were already used before 1300 in Germany, Britain and Italy.

On 10 September 1977, at 4:40 a.m. in the courtyard of Les Baumettes prison in Marseille, Hamida Djandoubi was guillotined. It was the last guillotine execution in France, in Western Europe, and the last official execution by that method anywhere in the world.

Hamida Djandoubi was born on 22 September 1949 in Tunis. In 1968 he came to France, lived in Marseille and worked as a labourer. After an industrial accident (he lost a leg) he walked with a prosthesis. He engaged in pimping. In 1973 he forced his then girlfriend, Élisabeth Bousquet, aged 21, into prostitution. She went to the police. In revenge, in July 1974 Djandoubi abducted her, held her captive, tortured and raped her in front of other girls he was “running,” then took her outside the city to Lançon-de-Provence and strangled her.
He was arrested on 11 August 1974.

On 25 February 1977 a jury sentenced him to death for murder with aggravating circumstances, torture, barbarity and rape. The appeal in cassation was dismissed on 9 June. President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing refused clemency (as he had earlier in the cases of Christian Ranucci and Jérôme Carrein).

The executioner was Marcel Chevalier.
Djandoubi was woken around 4 a.m. He put on his leg prosthesis, drank rum, smoked two cigarettes; the executioner refused him a third. His shirt was cut at the collar and shoulders, his hands were bound, the prosthesis was removed. The guillotine had been set up in the inner courtyard of the prison.
About forty minutes passed from the time he left his cell to the execution.

The witness was Judge Monique Mabelly. She described the scene: a dull sound, a great deal of bright red blood, the body falling into the basket. “In one second a life was cut off.”

After Djandoubi, death sentences were still handed down (some 15 to 18 people), but no one else was executed.
On 9 October 1981, under François Mitterrand and Justice Minister Robert Badinter, capital punishment was abolished in France. The guillotine was never again used anywhere in the world as an official instrument of execution.

The event took place almost 185 years after the first guillotine execution in France (1792).

The role of Justice Minister Robert Badinter
Robert Badinter (1928–2024) did not defend Hamida Djandoubi and had no direct connection with his 1977 case. Djandoubi’s lawyer was Émile Pollak. Yet it was Badinter who, four years later, became the principal architect of the abolition of the death penalty in France and the symbol of the entire struggle against the guillotine.

The turning point was the execution of his client Roger Bontems in 1972. Bontems was an accomplice to a murder at Clairvaux prison but had not himself killed anyone. Badinter was present at the guillotining and moved from intellectual opposition to the death penalty to active campaigning. He said: “To execute is to cut a living man in two.”

In 1977 (the same year Djandoubi was executed) Badinter defended Patrick Henry, who had kidnapped and murdered a seven-year-old child. He turned the trial into a trial of the death penalty itself and persuaded the jury not to impose a death sentence. He later saved several other condemned men. In all, as a lawyer, he helped six people escape the guillotine.

Badinter mentioned Djandoubi in his famous 1981 speech as an example: a one-legged man showing signs of mental disturbance who was “carried to the scaffold after his prosthesis had been removed.” He later also gave Le Monde Judge Monique Mabelly’s account of Djandoubi’s last minutes.

After François Mitterrand’s victory in 1981, Badinter was appointed Minister of Justice (Keeper of the Seals). One of the new government’s first measures was the abolition of the death penalty — against public opinion (about 63 percent of the French then favoured keeping it).

On 17 September 1981 Badinter delivered a historic speech to the National Assembly:

“Tomorrow, thanks to you, French justice will no longer be a justice that kills. Tomorrow, thanks to you, there will no longer be, to our common shame, furtive executions at dawn under the black canopy in the prisons of France.”

The law was passed on 18 September in the lower house (363 to 117) and on 30 September in the Senate. It was promulgated on 9 October 1981. France became the last country in Western Europe to abolish capital punishment.

Afterwards about fifteen people already sentenced to death were spared execution: their sentences were commuted to life imprisonment.

Badinter remained minister until 1986 and later headed the Constitutional Council. In 2007 the ban on the death penalty was written into the Constitution. He died on 9 February 2024 at the age of 95; in October 2025 he was symbolically honoured at the Panthéon on the anniversary of the law.

His role was not to save Djandoubi in particular, but, after the last execution of 1977, to carry the political and legal struggle through to a complete ban. The guillotine was never used again.

France’s last executioner: Marcel Chevalier
Marcel Charles Chevalier (28 February 1921 – 8 October 2008) was France’s last chief executioner (“enforcer of criminal sentences,” officially exécuteur en chef des arrêts criminels, unofficially “Monsieur de Paris”). It was he who dropped the guillotine blade on Hamida Djandoubi on 10 September 1977 at Les Baumettes prison in Marseille.

By trade Chevalier was a compositor-typographer in Montrouge, a suburb of Paris, and even held the title of Best Craftsman of France in that speciality. He worked as executioner on the side.
In 1948 he married Marcelle Obrecht, niece of the previous chief executioner, André Obrecht. In France the office of executioner was traditionally passed down within families.

In 1958 his wife’s uncle took him on as an assistant. Until 1976 Chevalier took part in about 40 executions: he prepared the condemned man, bound him and placed him under the guillotine.
On 1 October 1976, after Obrecht stepped down because of Parkinson’s disease, he himself became chief executioner.

In that office he carried out only two executions — both in 1977, the last in France:

• 23 June 1977: Jérôme Carrein at Douai prison (rape and murder of an eight-year-old girl);
• 10 September 1977: Hamida Djandoubi in Marseille.

He took his son Éric to both executions in order to prepare him for a possible succession. After the abolition of the death penalty in 1981 the dynasty ended.

The abolition law put him into early retirement (the notice came by letter, which he did not like). He received compensation of 30,000 francs. He returned to typography, lived quietly in Charray (Eure-et-Loir) and died in 2008 in Vendôme at the age of 87. He is buried beside his wife and son.

Chevalier was the last person in France legally authorised to operate the guillotine. After him the office ceased to exist.