Nicolas-Jacques Pelletier was to die. Upon this point, the tribunal had brought its work to a close. There remained to the authorities a difficulty with which no condemned man would ever have dreamed of reproaching them: they did not yet know precisely how to carry out their sentence. The law had altered; the apparatus lagged behind. While letters were exchanged, while an estimate was drawn up, only to be deemed exorbitant, Pelletier remained among the living.
This reprieve sprang neither from a newly discovered witness, nor from any sudden scruple troubling the conscience of the magistrates. It was bound to the construction of a machine. Before becoming the first name attached to the guillotine, Pelletier was thus that singular man whose days hung for a time upon the hesitations of the administration and the price demanded by a master carpenter.
The Pocketbook of the Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve
The affair had begun in the night of the 14th of October, 1791. In the Rue Bourbon-Villeneuve, in Paris, a passerby was assaulted and struck down. His pocketbook contained eight hundred livres in assignats. Pelletier, to whom the assault was imputed alongside an accomplice who remained unknown, failed to make good his escape. Cries for help had drawn the watch; they apprehended a fleeing man and found the victim severely battered.
These particulars, recorded by Hector Fleischmann in his study of 1908, suffice to distinguish the crime from the several accounts that subsequently disfigured it. It was a theft accompanied by violence. The documentary record we follow allows no assertion that the passerby died. Nor does it furnish the rape later appended to the case by certain chroniclers. A man is already burdened heavily enough when an execution is prepared for him; posterity may well spare him those crimes for which it possesses no proof.
On the 24th of January, 1792, the second criminal tribunal of Paris condemned Pelletier to death. The nocturnal assault had found its culprit, its verdict, and its legal resolution. Yet the material means were wanting. The new statute prescribed that every person condemned to capital punishment should have his head severed. It substituted a uniform penalty for a disparate variety of torments. But a formula inscribed upon the pages of the Code had yet to become an operation that the executioner could perform without magnifying its horror.
Between the judgment of January and the day of April, nearly three months were to elapse. The interval warrants our pause: the tribunal had pronounced an irrevocable penalty, whilst the authority charged with its infliction had yet to determine its method. This breach between the decree and its execution lent the dossier a second history, whose principal actors knew Pelletier merely as the condemned man who waited.
The prisoner remained in ward. During this time, those preparing the execution exchanged letters, solicited estimates, and debated the means of bringing this delay to an end. Every missive demanded a reply; every practical obstacle opened a fresh deliberation. From prison to bureau, Pelletier’s condemnation assumed by turns the guise of a consultation, a blueprint, and an expenditure, without any of these transactions yet furnishing the instrument to dispatch him.
The Price of the Final Instant
The surgeon Antoine Louis was consulted. In his opinion of March 1792, he dwelt upon the perils of manual decapitation. The strength and dexterity of a man are variable; a misdirected blow transforms an execution into torture. He recalled in particular the death of the Comte de Lally. For these uncertainties, he proposed to substitute a mechanical apparatus whose effect would be invariable.
Louis was likewise concerned for Sanson. Should the operation turn to butchery through clumsiness or some defect in the instrument, the populace might turn upon the executioner. In these exchanges, compassion and the preservation of public order mingle without embarrassment: the aim was to spare the condemned unnecessary torment, and to prevent an incensed rabble from maltreating the man who put him to death.
Roederer, procureur-général-syndic of the Department of Paris, instructed Louis to come to terms with Guidon, carpenter to the Crown Estates. Guidon came, accompanied by a colleague. The surgeon expounded the project. The craftsman understood the work, calculated the charges, and submitted an estimate of five thousand six hundred and sixty livres. This figure arrested the course of justice far more effectively than any moral argument upon capital punishment.
The price was not without justification. Guidon was obliged to employ workmen upon whom such labor brought lasting dishonor. According to Louis’s letter of the 1st of April, they ran the hazard of finding no further employment in other workshops. The carpenter also cited the maintenance of the gear required to erect and strike down the scaffolds. A commonwealth may order an engine of death, and straightway recoil from the hands that fashioned it; the purveyor reckoned this hypocrisy among his overheads.
Clavière refused the expenditure. Recourse was then had to Tobias Schmidt, a maker of musical instruments. His estimate, amounting to eight hundred and twenty-four livres, was accepted. The difference was vast. Schmidt set to work; Louis arranged the trials. In the deferential correspondence that passed between them, much was said of celerity, efficiency, and the public good. At the far end of this paper trail lay always the selfsame prisoner.
Three Corpses Before a Living Man
On the 17th of April, the engine was tested at Bicêtre upon three corpses. The report addressed by Louis to Roederer announced that the decapitations had been clean and swift. Sanson was present, alongside members of his family. Those destined to operate the apparatus in public reported no insurmountable difficulty.
Moreau, a judge of the second criminal tribunal, had dispatched a clerk to ascertain when a genuine execution might proceed. The messenger returned with an answer almost entirely favorable. It remained only to reinforce the scaffold: the timbering had to support the weight of the instrument. Even at the conclusion of the experiments, the hour of death still hung upon a piece of joinery.
At length, on the 25th of April, 1792, Pelletier was led to the Place de Grève, clad in the red shirt. Roederer had foreseen the press of people and requested of Lafayette the measures necessary to maintain order. The multitude assembled in great numbers. They came not merely to witness the punishment of a thief; they came to inspect an innovation of which all Paris had spoken for months.
The execution was swift. On the following morning, the Chronique de Paris noted this first trial, which took place at three of the afternoon. Commentators commended a method they judged less cruel than the torments of the past. Prudhomme even allowed it the virtue of reconciling, so long as capital punishment should endure, the demands of the law with those of humanity.
Pelletier had tasted of this humanity only in its narrowest form: the curtailment of the time required to end his life. His crime, his victim, and his nameless accomplice were soon to fade behind the technical achievement. Posterity would remember him above all for his precedence in a sequence yet to unfold. The pocketbook had opened the affair; the machine confiscated its memory.