Charles-Henri Sanson (1739–1806): A Working Paper
Early Life, Judicial Training, and Early Career
The early upbringing of Charles-Henri Sanson initially took place within the walls of a convent school in Rouen. This secluded existence came to an abrupt end in 1753, when another student discovered his identity as the son of the executioner of Paris, Charles-Jean-Baptiste Sanson. To protect the school’s social standing and reputation, the young Sanson was compelled to leave, subsequently continuing his education under the guidance of private tutors. Shortly after this disruptive change, in 1754, his father suffered a paralyzing stroke, which forced him to relocate to the countryside of Brie-Comte-Robert. At the strict and unyielding insistence of his paternal grandmother, Anne-Marthe Sanson, Charles-Henri was forced to abandon his early medical studies. He had to accept training as an executioner in order to provide financial support for the family, which, besides himself, consisted of six younger brothers and two sisters.
Although his paralyzed father officially retained the royal title of executioner, the actual execution of the judicial work soon rested on the shoulders of the teenager. The exact chronology of his first steps on the scaffold remains surrounded by archival uncertainty. This debut likely took place in 1754, immediately following his father’s illness, or at the latest in 1756 at the age of seventeen (Reising, 2024, p. 62). During these formative years of transition, the young Charles-Henri was extensively supported and assisted by his step-grandfather, François Prudhomme. Although the Paris Parlement officially granted permission in 1755 for Charles-Henri to act as a legal substitute for his father, the court categorically refused to grant him formal royal investiture at that time. By 1755, he had already been acting as the de facto executioner of the capital for about two years, operating under the shadow of his father’s name.
The Execution of Damiens (1757)
In March 1757, the eighteen-year-old Sanson was summoned for a baptism of fire that would deeply scar his professional life. He was called to assist his uncle, Nicolas-Charles-Gabriel Sanson — the executioner of Reims — during the exceptionally brutal public execution of Robert-François Damiens, who had attempted to assassinate King Louis XV. In his Tableau de Paris, the contemporary chronicler and journalist Louis Sébastien Mercier noted that executioners from all the surrounding towns had been legally requisitioned and registered to assist with these repulsive judicial acts. The hours-long execution, which involved severe torture and the eventual drawing and quartering of the victim, left deep psychological scars on the young assistant. According to later family memoirs, the sheer horror of the spectacle was the direct reason for his uncle Nicolas-Charles-Gabriel to permanently abandon the profession immediately after. This historic execution also entered the records as the last quartering ever carried out on French soil.
Professional Challenges and the Case of Lally (1766)
The decades that followed were marked by ongoing professional pressure and social exclusion. A low point in his early career occurred in 1766, an episode that brought Sanson lasting professional shame and public mockery. During the execution of the Comte de Lally, ironically a former friend of his paralyzed father, Sanson failed to decapitate the condemned man with a single stroke of the sword. This resulted in a horrific and unnecessary prolongation of the count’s suffering, a tragic blunder that was documented in vivid detail.[Mémoires (1879), pp. 228-232]. During these turbulent years, Charles-Henri continued to manage the heavy executioner duties and administrative burdens under his father’s name. It was only after his father’s death in August 1778 that the formal finalization of his status took place; on 26 December 1778, Charles-Henri Sanson was officially sworn into the royal office as the executioner of the Court of Versailles and Paris.[Memoirs of the Sansons: From Private Notes and Documents (1688-1847), p. 184]
Marriage, Family Structure, and Status
On a personal level, Sanson sought stability within the tight dynastic networks of the executioner’s trade and the bourgeoisie. On 10 January 1765, he married Marie-Anne Jugier [Mémoires (1879), pp. 334]. From this union, at least one son was born whose archival records stand beyond doubt: Henri Sanson (1767–1840), who would later succeed his father during the bloodiest days of the French Revolution. A second son, Gabriel, is frequently mentioned in modern historiographical literature, but his existence remains insufficiently documented to this day and lacks definitive confirmation in the parochial and notarial archives.
As the eldest among seven boys, Charles-Henri retained absolute patriarchal leadership over the family. His six younger half-brothers would all later be appointed as executioners in different departments of France, giving the Sanson dynasty unprecedented national coverage. To distinguish himself from his brothers, Charles-Henri held the prestigious title Monsieur de Paris. He settled in the Marais district, near the church of Saint-Laurent and close to today’s Gare de l’Est (Reising, 2024, p. 62). During this period, Sanson became noted in the streets of Paris for his very specific and conscious choice of clothing. Initially, he dressed in blue, but after sharp criticism from contemporaries — who pointed out to him that blue was considered the exclusive color of the nobility — he switched to a striking green habit, a color that would remain permanently associated with his public appearance.
Cultural Pursuits and Early Revolutionary Accusations
Educated and musically gifted, Sanson played the violin and the cello in his leisure time. He frequently met with his close friend Tobias Schmidt, a respected German instrument maker. Together they performed works by Christoph Willibald Gluck.[Mémoires des Sanson (1879), p. 372]—an ironic artistic partnership, as Schmidt would later build the mechanical prototype of the guillotine.
On 26 December 1789 Charles-Henri Sanson requested: “… to accept his resignation in advance should you decree that executioners are deprived of their rights as citizens. All his fellow executioners will follow his example.”[Mémoires (1879), pp. 398]
The final days of 1789 thrust Sanson into political turmoil when Antoine-Joseph Gorsas accused him in the Courrier de Paris of harboring a clandestine royalist printing press in his home. On 27 January 1790, Sanson was tried before the police tribunal at the Hôtel de Ville and acquitted, after which Gorsas withdrew the charge. The defense speech was published as Plaidoyer prononcé au tribunal de police de l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris… (Paris, 1790; Bibliothèque nationale de France). Simultaneously, Sanson was denounced as a royalist from the radical left by Camille Desmoulins in his Révolutions de France et de Brabant (no. 7, pp. 306–307). According to Charles-Henri himself, the Sanson family was not yet regarded as citoyens actifs (active citizens).
A contemporary source from the era summarized the paradox of Sanson’s social position:
“They pay, they say, like the other subjects of the king: the vingtièmes, the capitation, the city and police charges, the tax for the poor. They distribute the blessed bread in their parishes; they are registered in the National Guard of their districts. Why then should they be prevented from sharing in the other advantages enjoyed by other citizens?”
Though he never joined the Jacobin Club, Sanson continuously sought formal recognition as an active citizen. Under the law of 14 October 1791, all active citizens and their sons over the age of eighteen were required to enlist in the National Guard to maintain public order and defend the territory in wartime.
The Guillotine and the National Guard
On 25 April 1792, the National Assembly authorized the first use of the guillotine on a living person. According to the family memoirs, King Louis XVI himself had been consulted during the development of the machine and had given his architectural opinion on the shape of the blade, famously suggesting a sloping, triangular edge instead of a convex design (Mémoires, vol. III, p. 403; Mémoires (1879), p. 374-377]
Following the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792, Charles-Henri Sanson and two of his brothers were reportedly arrested on the orders of the Paris Commune, allegedly to prevent them from executing revolutionaries should the royalists regain power. Sanson was temporarily released from the Conciergerie to carry out executions, including that of Louis-David Collenot d’Angremont on 21 August. His definitive release appears to have occurred later that month.
While the royal family was transferred to the Temple on 12 August, the shifting political environment rapidly forced the executioner dynasty into civic roles they heavily wished to avoid. During the internal National Guard elections and military reorganizations that same day, Charles-Henri and his son Henri were appointed sergeants, while his half-brother Louis-Cyr-Charlemagne Sanson was made a corporal (Mémoires, vol. III, p. 462; Mémoires (1879), p. 391). These civic duties unexpectedly tied their family directly to the administrative apparatus of the revolutionary state.
This internal military integration coincided with a major restructuring of Parisian military defense. By 13 August 1792, the commissioners of the sections restored the direct alignment between the geographic sections and the battalions of the National Guard—a localized military layout previously abolished by the law of 21 May 1790. The law of 19–21 August 1792 subsequently legalized the reduction of the sixty Parisian battalions down to forty-eight, forcing them to correspond exactly to the boundaries of the forty-eight administrative sections of the newly radicalized Paris Commune (Devenne, 1990).
During the chaotic September Massacres of 1792, Sanson faced renewed political suspicion. He was arrested once again, alongside two of his half-brothers—Charlemagne, who served as an executioner in Versailles, and Louis-Martin, who operated in Tours and Auxerre. Distressed by the escalating violence and the instability of his position, Charles-Henri formally offered his resignation to the revolutionary authorities, but the Commune flatly refused to accept it, viewing his specialized services as indispensable during the political crisis.
The Reorganization of the National Guard
This period of personal confinement coincided with a sweeping institutional overhaul of the forces tasked with maintaining public order in the capital. As early as 13 August 1792, the commissioners of the Parisian sections dismantled the previous military framework by restoring a direct alignment between the geographic sections and the battalions of the National Guard—a structural connection that the older law of 21 May 1790 had broken.
Furthermore, the democratic and hierarchical nature of the National Guard command underwent a radical shifts. Previously, the high-ranking staff officers (l’état-major) were chosen through a complex three-tier electoral system. The captains, lieutenants, sub-lieutenants, and sergeants of individual companies within a specific battalion would vote to elect their commander-in-chief, his second-in-command, and the battalion’s adjutant. Once selected, these battalion officers would then convene with their counterparts from other units to elect the overall commander, adjutant, and sub-adjutant of each overarching legion (Braesch, p. 93).
This intricate corporate voting hierarchy was drastically streamlined by the revolutionary decree of the Paris Commune on 16 August 1792 (Affiches de la Commune de Paris), which completely reorganized the Guard to ensure tighter, more politically compliant municipal control over the armed citizens—the very ranks in which Sanson and his close relatives had been forced to serve.
The Execution of Louis XVI and the Balzac Myth
On 20 January 1793, on the eve of the execution of Louis XVI, Charles-Henri Sanson reportedly hesitated. He had received a threatening message warning him that a royalist plot was in place to rescue the king on his way to the scaffold, putting his own life in grave danger (Mémoires des Sanson, vol. III, p. 468). On the morning of January 21st, Sanson was assisted on the platform by his heavily armed half-brothers, Charlemagne and Louis-Martin, alongside assistants Le Gros and Barré.[Mémoires (1879), p. 394-395]
A persistent legend asserts that in the evening following the execution, Sanson secretly organized a requiem mass for the soul of the dead king in La Villette (Mémoires, vol. IV). However, historical research offers no proof that this mass was ever held (Goulard, 1950, pp. 479–480). This poignant rumor caught the attention of the famous writer Honoré de Balzac, who later sought to confirm the details. Balzac’s conversation with Sanson’s son, Henri, provided the dramatic material for a narrative that was subsequently used as the famous introduction to the spurious family memoirs published in 1830.
During the execution, Charles-Henri’s son, Henri-Nicolas-Charles Sanson (1767–1840), served in a National Guard battalion assigned to secure the square. He was positioned close to, but not on, the scaffold itself (Mémoires, vol. III, p. 472; Mémoires (1879), p. 395). In total, around one thousand guardsmen blanketed the Place de la Révolution (Lenotre, 1893).
A month later, seeking to clear his name amid widespread rumors of cowardice and cruelty, Sanson sent a clarifying letter to the revolutionary journal Le Thermomètre du Jour. He sought to restore the historical truth regarding the king’s final moments:
“When the King stepped out of the carriage for the execution, we told him we had to remove his clothes. He resisted, saying we could execute him as he was, and even offered to cut his own hair.”
According to Sanson’s testimony, the condemned monarch was required to mount the scaffold barefoot, dressed only in a white shirt. Soon afterward, reports circulated that lucrative relics of the execution were flooding the market. Sanson wrote an indignant public rebuttal to clear his household of any involvement:
“I have just learned that there is a rumor circulating that I am selling or arranging the sale of Louis Capet’s hair. If any has been sold, this vile trade could only have been carried out by scoundrels. The truth is that I did not allow anyone from my household to take or remove even the slightest trace.”
Chronological Corrections and the Execution Diary
For decades, the final years of Charles-Henri Sanson were obscured by literary embellishments. Alexandre Dumas famously claimed that Sanson had died of grief shortly after beheading the king in 1793. Even the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica noted that no official record of his death was known, incorrectly presenting his son Henri as his immediate successor from 1793 onward.
In reality, unpublished administrative documents leave no doubt that Sanson remained firmly in office throughout the height of the Revolution, formally resigning only on 13 Fructidor, Year III (30 August 1795), after which his son Henri officially assumed the role on September 4th. Charles-Henri lived out his retirement and died on 4 July 1806, after which he was buried in Montmartre Cemetery (Lenotre, p. 148). Around 1800, suffering from a severe nephritic disease, he had written a petition reflecting on his long service:
“It has been forty-three years that I have served in this office. I am suffering from nephritic disease and can no longer continue my duties.”
The Mémoires indicate that Sanson kept a meticulous diary recording not only the rising daily body count of the Terror but also his private reflections. While he maintained this journal regularly only from late Brumaire, Year II (November 1793), he also left a vivid, unpolished account of the execution of Charlotte Corday on 17 July 1793—an elaborate text whose disjointed simplicity holds immense historical value.
Into the Shadow of the Grand Terror
Following the Jacobin insurrection of May–June 1793, the National Convention decreed on June 13th that each French department should appoint its own localized executioner to handle judicial sentences. Charles-Henri Sanson remained the High Executioner of Paris and personally supervised the execution of Charlotte Corday on July 17th.
During this execution, a major breach of professional decorum occurred when the carpenter François Legros—acting as a temporary assistant—lifted Corday’s severed head and struck it on the cheek. Sanson, furious at this violation of his professional code, immediately reported the insult to the public prosecutor Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, resulting in Legros’s immediate imprisonment (Mémoires (1830), p. 25; Mémoires (1879), p. 440).
As the shadow of the Grand Terror lengthened, administrative survival required absolute proof of political loyalty. On 27 September 1793, Sanson’s half-brother Charlemagne received a formal certificat de civisme (certificate of good citizenship) from the surveillance committee of the Faubourg du Nord.
In the bloody months that followed, Charles-Henri, heavily assisted by his son Henri and his deputy Fermin, carried out the high-profile executions of Marie-Antoinette, Philippe Égalité, and the prominent Girondin deputies on 31 October 1793. Yet, illustrating the paranoia of the era, on the very evening of the Girondins’ execution, Fouquier-Tinville turned on Sanson himself, accusing him of incivisme—a dangerous charge that the executioner indignantly rejected (Mémoires (1879), p. 474).
Technical Detail: Blood on the Scaffold
The logistical reality of the automated executions quickly overwhelmed the apparatus. In a gruesome detail preserved in the Mémoires, Henri Sanson described the physical management of the bodies, which were thrown in pairs into massive wicker baskets waiting directly behind the guillotine structure. After just six heads had fallen, the fallboard and the collection baskets became so heavily flooded with coagulated blood that the physical touch and sight of the platform became more terrifying for the subsequent condemned prisoners than death itself. To manage this psychological horror, Charles-Henri Sanson ordered his assistants to pour multiple buckets of water over the apparatus and actively wash off the wooden tracks with a sponge after each individual execution.
Commentary. These details correct several persistent errors in the historiography. Contrary to claims that Sanson resigned or withdrew earlier, the sources show that he remained active well into the autumn of 1793, directly involved in some of the Revolution’s most significant executions.
The Industrialization of Death and the Influence of Beccaria
By the spring of 1794, the mechanism of the Terror shifted into an industrial phase. The number of daily executions in Paris grew exponentially, rising from a handful of cases to tens, dozens, and occasionally more than sixty beheadings in a single day. To cope with this massive logistical burden, Sanson expanded his staff. In April 1794, he reportedly appointed Charles-Constant Desmorest, to assist with the daily operations on the scaffold (Le Figaro, 28 March 1891; Mémoires, vol. V, p. 3; Mémoires (1879), p. 530, 593, 600).
This escalation of state-sanctioned violence deeply troubled Sanson, who viewed the slaughter through a specific philosophical lens. According to recent historical analysis, Sanson’s critiques of the Reign of Terror differed fundamentally from those of the revolutionary leadership because he did not see the automated slaughter as a reflection of Enlightenment penal reform. Instead, Sanson himself was deeply and directly influenced by the Italian criminologist Cesare Beccaria (Reising, 2024, p. 64).
This intellectual connection influenced how Sanson viewed both his craft and his social standing. He had long addressed the paradox of his own citizenship, noting that although executioners were not legally recognized as full citizens in France, they were still strictly obliged to pay taxes like any other subject.
He began by addressing the fundamental issue of citizenship, drawing directly from the landmark National Assembly debates of December 1789. During these sessions, Maximilien Robespierre had frequently championed the ideals of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, notably drawing attention to marginalized groups—including Protestants, Jews, people of African descent, domestic servants, and actors—arguing that they should not be denied active civil rights. However, while the Assembly’s subsequent decree of 24 December 1789 extended citizenship to non-Catholics and actors, it intentionally failed to mention executioners due to fierce conservative opposition that still branded the headsman’s trade as inherently “infamous.”
Sanson noted that this deliberate omission left executioners in a legal vacuum, reinforcing the deep-seated public prejudice that they remained unfit for election or for holding civil or military office. He argued that despite paying regular municipal taxes like any other subject, they were systematically barred from the rights enjoyed by other active citizens (citoyens actifs), such as enlisting in the National Guard, distributing blessed bread in their parishes, or fully participating in the advantages of the new constitutional order (Reising, 2024, p. 70).
The revolutionary leadership and Sanson interpreted Beccaria in completely opposing ways:
- The Jacobin Interpretation: Revolutionary leaders seized upon Beccaria’s specific concession that traitors to their country could be executed. They cited this single principle to morally and philosophically justify the systemic elimination of anyone accused of counterrevolutionary activity (Reising, 2024, pp. 76–77).
- Sanson’s Interpretation: Sanson read Beccaria as a call for moderation and proportional justice. In his private diary entry of 2 February 1794, Sanson expressed his growing aversion to the political purge, sharply criticizing the revolutionary judges and jurors for the sheer volume of victims they sent to the machine. Executioners, Sanson stubbornly insisted, were historically meant to punish murderers and thieves—not ordinary citizens condemned merely for speaking out against their government.
Despite Sanson’s moral objections, the Jacobin leaders continued to claim Beccaria’s authority, utilizing his treatise as an intellectual shield to justify the ever-expanding machinery of the Terror (Reising, 2024, pp. 79–85).
Henri Sanson and the Prelude to 9 Thermidor
The political paranoia of the era inevitably dragged the executioner family deeper into the armed factions of the capital. Charles-Henri, his half-brother Pierre-Claude (who served as a lieutenant), and his son Henri Sanson became directly entangled in the military escalations leading up to the fall of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor, Year II (27 July 1794).
Henri Sanson’s military career within the municipal forces was complex and highly volatile. He served as a captain in the National Guard of Paris, and later within the Gendarmerie tasked with securing the Tribunals. Originally a member of the infantry, Henri had transferred into the artillery branch following the tense political events of 31 October 1793 (Mémoires, vol. V, p. 257; vol. VI, p. 143).
This military positioning frequently removed him from Paris on state business. In December 1793, the National Convention dispatched commissioners to several agricultural regions surrounding the capital to combat economic resistance (Journal des débats et des décrets, 17 December 1793). In these rural districts, farmers and merchants, heavily supported by local refractory priests, openly refused to accept payment in assignats, which were rapidly losing their value. Henri Sanson was deployed to enforce order at Coulommiers, serving there until March 1794 rather than May, as some apocryphal accounts claim, before being recalled to his duties in Paris (Mémoires, vol. V, p. 274; Mémoires (1879), p. 612).
The Fall of Robespierre and the Chaos of 9 Thermidor
The political convulsions of 9 Thermidor, Year II (27 July 1794) dragged the Sanson family directly into the center of the municipal uprising. Henri Sanson became deeply entangled in the political fallout when he opposed the initial arrest of the radical Jacobin commander François Henriot. During the chaotic mobilization around the Hôtel de Ville, only the working-class suburbs (faubourgs) of Saint-Marceau, Saint-Antoine, and Saint-Martin managed to dispatch armed crews and artillery to the surrounding square.
The inner confusion of the day was immense; surviving family manuscripts indicate that many National Guardsmen and citizens had been taken entirely by surprise, completely unaware that their military presence was supporting an active municipal insurrection against the National Convention. Following the defeat of the Robespierrist faction, Henri Sanson and his uncle Pierre-Claude were arrested, but their political detention was brief, and they were released on 1 September 1794.
Historical evidence suggests that Henri Sanson, his son, was not personally involved in the mass execution of Maximilien Robespierre, Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, and their twenty accomplices on 10 Thermidor. Instead, his later prominent role as deputy executioner saw him execute subsequent high-profile revolutionary figures, including Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the dreaded public prosecutor Antoine-Quentin Fouquier-Tinville, and the former president of the Revolutionary Tribunal, Martial Herman (Mémoires (1879), pp. 667–668).
The Mystery of Robespierre’s Wound: Suicide or Assassination?
The exact circumstances surrounding the horrific jaw wound Robespierre sustained in the consulting room of the Commune have long divided historians. François-Emmanuel Toulongeon, a former member of the Constituent Assembly writing in 1812, confirmed that Robespierre received a direct pistol shot that shattered his chin and cheek. This contemporary account strongly challenged the official Jacobin narrative that Robespierre had attempted suicide.
The nineteenth-century historian Louis Blanc later illustrated this historical divide in meticulous detail (History of the French Revolution, vol. X, ch. 7). According to Louis Blanc’s research, the gendarme Charles-André Méda entered the council chamber of the Commune long before the conventional forces under Léonard Bourdon. Upon recognizing Robespierre, Méda reportedly fired his pistol, severely wounding the Jacobin leader. Amid the subsequent panic, Méda allegedly fired a second shot down a dark staircase, striking the shoulder of a man who was desperately carrying away the paralyzed Georges Couthon.
This succinct account by Louis Blanc is heavily supported by the internal traditions of the executioner dynasty. Méda belonged to the specialized gendarmerie unit guarding the Revolutionary Tribunal, bringing him into daily contact with Charles-Henri Sanson through regular judicial service. Within the executioner’s household, it was a well-known fact that Méda had fired the shot; Charles-Henri frequently recounted the immediate promotion Méda received as a reward, and noted the immense anger this elevation caused among his fellow gendarmes, most of whom were covertly staunch, militant Robespierrists.
The Grim Scene at the Hôtel de Ville
Regardless of who fired the fateful shot, within fifteen minutes of Léonard Bourdon’s entry into the meetinghouse, the grim reality at the Hôtel de Ville closely mirrored the official report later delivered by Bertrand Barère to the National Convention. Maximilien Robespierre lay severely wounded and covered in blood on the floor. His younger brother, Augustin Robespierre, had taken off his shoes and managed to walk a distance along the wide exterior cornices of the first floor before throwing himself off the ledge onto the tips of the waiting bayonets below.
The paralyzed Couthon, only slightly bruised from his initial flight, was carried by a few loyal friends toward the nearby quay, where he was ultimately abandoned in the dark. François Henriot fared no better than his accomplices. Outraged by Henriot’s perceived military cowardice, his fellow insurgent Jean-Baptiste Coffinhal reportedly confronted him near a balcony. Coffinhal famously shouted, “Coward! You answered to me for your troops!” and utilizing his vigorous physical strength, dragged Henriot toward the ledge and threw him out of a window leading into an inner courtyard. Henriot fell onto a pile of broken glass and filth, fracturing his body. Stunned and heavily injured, he managed to drag himself into a secluded alleyway, where patrolling forces discovered him alive a few hours later. Antoine Saint-Just, Claude-François Payan, René François Dumas, and Mayor Jean-Baptist Fleuriot-Lescot were swiftly arrested on the scene.[Mémoires (1879), p. 632].
Succession and the Final Meeting with Napoleon
After seventeen years of serving de facto as the principal High Executioner of Paris since 1788, Charles-Henri Sanson formally stepped down from his onerous public office on 30 August 1795. His son, Henri Sanson, was officially appointed as his de jure successor on 4 September 1795 (18 Fructidor, Year III) (Goulard, 1951, p. 266; Lenotre, 1893).
Despite his formal retirement, the elder Sanson occasionally remained involved in the family craft. Family records indicate that both Henri and his father Charles-Henri participated together in a complex execution as late as October 1796 (Mémoires, 1879, p. 722). Even the elderly patriarch of the family—Henri’s grandfather—remained tangentially involved in supervising the family network until 1801 (Mémoires (1879), p. 698).
Sanson’s extraordinary life concluded with a final, historic encounter during the First French Empire. Sometime between 1804 and 1806, Charles-Henri Sanson was walking near the church of La Madeleine, which was then actively under construction. He was approached by Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, who bluntly asked him if he was indeed the man who had executed King Louis XVI in January 1793. Sanson calmly confirmed his identity to the Emperor (Goulard, 1951, p. 267; Mémoires (1879), p. 699).
Charles-Henri Sanson died shortly after this encounter, on 4 July 1806, after which Henri assumed the role completely uncontested. The family dynasty continued deep into the nineteenth century; Henri’s son, Henri-Clément Sanson, began actively assisting his father on the scaffold from 1820 onward, representing the final generation of the hereditary Sanson executioners.
The Literary Invention of the Executioner: The 1830 Mémoires
The publication history of the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution française—printed in two volumes in 1829 by Hippolyte Tilliard and published in 1830 by M.A. Grégoire—is a complex tangle of commercial exploitation and ghostwriting. In the final months of 1829, Louis-François L’Héritier de l’Ain, riding high on the massive financial success of his ghostwritten Mémoires de Vidocq, proposed a similar project regarding the Sanson dynasty to the bookseller and publisher Mame (and later Auguste Sautelet).
The deal was quickly struck. Henri-Clément Sanson—the last executioner of the family—signed a contract allowing the publishers to use his grandfather Charles-Henri’s name on the volumes. In exchange, he committed to providing original family notes and documents to the “teinturiers” (literary hacks) hired for the project (La Gazette, 25 November 1905).
The actual writing was outsourced to a trio of compilers, chief among them a young Honoré de Balzac, who was then struggling beneath a mountain of debt after several disastrous printing ventures. By April 1828, Balzac owed 50,000 francs to his mother. To survive, he cranked out historical and commercial prose. Although the prominent writer Paul Lacroix refused to cooperate, L’Héritier de l’Ain and Balzac forged ahead. L’Héritier worked slowly on the opening chapters, prompting the involvement of Balzac, who eventually wrote almost the entire first volume, including the highly romanticized opening chapter that traced the executioner dynasty back to the 13th century (Normand, 1912). The exact role of Émile Marco de Saint-Hilaire in this early compilation remains unclear.
Critiques, Playwright Structure, and the Family Veto
The first critical review of the Mémoires appeared in La France nouvelle on 27 February 1730, quickly identifying the text’s apocryphal nature. Volume II famously opened with an elaborate dialogue between father and son, reading more like a theatrical script than an authentic historical diary.
The enterprise was short-lived. In July 1830, following intense social pressure and complaints regarding accuracy, the legal executioner Henri Sanson formally requested that the publication be halted. Henri eventually allowed his son, Henri-Clément, to review and correct the family materials, but the 1830 edition was already stamped as an unreliable, apocryphal text.
However, a strict methodological line must be drawn here: the later 1862–1863 edition of the memoirs, edited by Duchesne, deserves a separate evaluation. It cannot automatically be dismissed based on the valid criticisms leveled against the earlier 1830 Balzac compilation.
Dumas, Hugo, and the Remorse Myth
The romantic myth surrounding Sanson was further fueled by major literary figures of the nineteenth century. In his Causerie III (1860), Alexandre Dumas referred to a meeting around 1833 with Henri Sanson. Dumas’s narrative, however, lacks credibility: he confidently claimed that Charles-Henri Sanson had died of pure sorrow in 1793 immediately after executing Louis XVI, and he failed to provide the correct family address in the Rue des Marais—locating them at no. 71 instead of the actual no. 31. Like Victor Hugo, who recorded his own Visite à la Conciergerie in 1846 (Choses Vues), Dumas was deeply fascinated by the executioner’s macabre collection of historical relics, perpetuating the picturesque image of a dynasty consumed by guilt and remorse.
Modern scholarly deconstruction of these texts began in earnest in 1988, when Monique Lebailly published La Révolution française vue par son bourreau: journal de Charles-Henri Sanson. While copies of this study remain exceptionally rare, it marks the first systematic attempt to question how much of the journal relies on the 1830 apocryphal version and how much can be traced to the later Henri-Clément materials.
Balzac’s Ideology and Un épisode sous la Terreur
Balzac’s deep involvement in the Sanson papers was not merely financial; it was deeply ideological. As a staunch Catholic and a passionate royalist during the turbulent Bourbon Restoration—a period when France hovered close to civil war over the future of the constitutional monarchy—Balzac viewed the execution of Louis XVI as a catastrophic moral turning point. For Balzac, the Catholic Church and the Monarchy were the twin stabilizing pillars required to hold back the chaotic tides of democratic change, a nostalgic conservatism that heavily saturated his magnum opus, La Comédie Humaine.
In 1830, alongside the Mémoires, Balzac published his famous spin-off story, Un épisode sous la Terreur (followed by Le Réquisitionnaire in 1831). This moving account, beginning in the immediate shadow of Louis XVI’s execution, was deeply tied to the Sanson lore. In December 1842, the narrative achieved its near-definitive shape under the new title Une messe en 1793. Published under the signature “de Balzac”, it was intentionally stripped of any direct, explicit connection to Sanson’s Mémoires, and featured a newly altered, highly dramatic epilogue.
In 1845, Balzac reverted to the original title, Un épisode sous la Terreur, yet the text remained a fluid canvas. Following his death in 1850, Balzac was widely praised for this moving historical vignette. The commercial exploitation of his name and the Sanson papers continued posthumously: on 15 June 1853, after the publisher Dutacq was reassured by Marco de Saint-Hilaire regarding authenticity, a forgotten fragment of the Sanson papers was published in Le Pays under Balzac’s name, entitled Une exécution militaire, Scène de la vie militaire (Goulard, 1950).
The Downfall of Henri-Clément and the End of the Dynasty
On 1 December 1840, Henri-Clément Sanson (27 May 1799 – 25 January 1889) succeeded his father, Henri Sanson, who had passed away on August 18th of that year. The hereditary tenure of the Sanson family as the executioners of Paris came to a dramatic and ignominious end in 1846. Burdened by massive gambling debts and extravagant living expenses, Henri-Clément was imprisoned for debt.
In February 1847, facing complete financial ruin, he took the desperate and unprecedented step of pawning the state’s official guillotine to settle his private creditors. On 18 March 1847, the scandal resulted in his immediate revocation by the Ministry of Justice. Stripped of his ancestral office, Henri-Clément initially intended to emigrate to the United States but ultimately remained in France, spending his final years in retirement (Bourdin, 2004).
The Definitive Edition of the Mémoires (1862–1863)
To salvage his finances and rescue his family’s historical legacy, Henri-Clément turned to literature. Described by historians as a deeply studious, methodical, and organized enthusiast of theater, painting, and letters, he set out to publish a comprehensive family history (Le Petit Parisien, 1886). The result was the definitive six-volume edition of the Mémoires des Sanson, published sequentially in 1862 (Volumes I–III) and 1863 (Volumes IV–VI), followed by an abridged English translation in 1876.
For this massive undertaking, Henri-Clément received crucial editorial assistance from a mysterious publicist known as “d’Olbreuse,” who visited Sanson at his fourth-floor apartment at 31 bis Rue des Marais in 1860. While virtually nothing is known about d’Olbreuse on the internet—suggesting it may have been a pseudonym or a contemporary misspelling—historiographical research indicates he played a significant role. According to G. Lenôtre, d’Olbreuse authored the first three of the four introductory chapters of Volume I, and likely edited about one-third of the total text. While the taciturn Henri-Clément reportedly kept “as quiet as a fish” during the marketing of the book, the commercial venture proved to be an immense success, selling over 80,000 copies. Financially, d’Olbreuse received 5,000 francs for his labor, while Sanson secured a substantial sum of 30,000 francs.
Henri-Clément utilized the opening 200 pages of the first volume to build a sophisticated historical and philosophical defense against the death penalty, exploring medieval torture and the mechanics of the guillotine before issuing a direct challenge to the accuracy of the older, apocryphal 1830 Balzac edition. In Volume I, he explicitly denounced the earlier literary fraud:
“These two volumes are moreover a tissue of mendacious allegations and puerile inventions, devoid, I will not say only of truth, but even of plausibility. Here is the version that the authors had imagined to place in the mouth of the executioner about the origins of our family.”
To permanently prevent future historians from confusing the two works, Henri-Clément published a discovered draft written by his father, Henri Sanson, which repudiated the 1830 text:
“Several respectable people, who are willing to honor me with their esteem, have seemed to believe that I was the author of the Memoirs of Sanson… I declare that I have never written anything similar and that the memories that my father left us offer no analogy with this publication, of which all the details are romantic.”
Structural Analysis of the Six Volumes
The definitive memoirs map the alignment of the Sanson family genealogy onto the grim criminal history of France:
- Volume I (Pages 205–432): Traces the true, authenticated origins of the family in Abbeville and their relocation to Paris in 1685.
- Volume II: Details the high-profile Old Regime executions of the royal assassin Robert-François Damiens, the Comte de Lally-Tollendal, and the young Chevalier de la Barre.
- Volume III:
Focuses on Charles-Henri Sanson, his 1790 libel case against the press, his efforts to secure civil rights for executioners, and the introduction of the guillotine. The account of August 1792 includes an uncorroborated anecdote about a young spectator who was allowed to operate the guillotine and allegedly died shortly afterwards.1 However, the volume makes no mention of the reported death of Sanson’s son Gabriel, described in other accounts. It concludes with the execution of Louis XVI in January 1793.
Volumes IV, V, and VI (1863): Dive deep into the Reign of Terror. These books chronicle the secret mass at La Villette, Charlotte Corday, General Custine, Marie-Antoinette, the Girondin deputies, Madame Roland, and Mayor Jean-Sylvain Bailly.
- Volume IV captures the intimate, non-documentary details of the executions—rather than the trials—of Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins, followed by Madame Élisabeth, the coup of 9 Thermidor, and the final moments of Robespierre. To describe the macro-political events inside the National Convention, the text relies heavily on verbatim citations from Le Moniteur. Throughout these final volumes, Charles-Henri Sanson’s original registers are utilized to list the names of several thousand individuals put to death during the Grand Terreur, during which the clerk Desmorets served as his primary head assistant.
The Mutilation of the Intellectual Framework (1876 and 1879 Editions)
A critical historiographical shift occurred with the subsequent publications of the memoirs. In both the 1876 abridged English translation published by Chatto & Windus and the single-volume 1879 French edition issued by S. Lambert, the extensive, two-hundred-page philosophical and historical introduction written by Henri-Clément was drastically abridged and stripped of its core philosophical arguments.
This aggressive commercial editing had major consequences for the text’s scholarly evaluation: it did not merely reduce Henri-Clément’s personal validation and defensive arguments against the apocryphal 1830 fraud, but effectively erased the broader intellectual framework of the work. By condensing this comprehensive overview of medieval penal evolution and Enlightened torture reform into a brief introductory note, the publishers removed the original ideological context, reducing a sophisticated anti-death-penalty treatise to a more commercial, episodic chronicle of executions.
The Methodological Value of the 1879 Feuilleton
Nevertheless, from a research perspective, the 1879 edition possesses a distinct operational advantage. Published in a continuous, single-volume serial layout (feuilleton), it completely eliminated the fragmented structure of the original six separate volumes. For the modern scholar, this compilation brought all the disparate narrative threads into a single, cohesive timeline. This compressed layout transformed the bulky memoirs into a highly functional and easily searchable database, making it an invaluable tool for cross-referencing names, socio-economic records, and specific execution registers from the Reign of Terror.
Historiographical Warnings: When Not to Follow Sanson
While the 1862–1863 edition offers invaluable daily logistical details, modern scholarship warns that there are distinct passages where the Mémoires should absolutely not be followed blindly. As the historian Philippe Bourdin has noted, the text frequently lapses into nineteenth-century melodramatic sentimentality, retroactively painting the executioners as remarkably tender-hearted, deeply pious men to rehabilitate the family’s honor during the Second Empire (Bourdin, 2004).
A glaring example of this narrative manipulation can be found by comparing the various accounts of Louis XVI’s final moments. In his immediate, contemporary letter to Le Thermomètre du jour in February 1793, Charles-Henri Sanson provided a straightforward, professional account that closely mirrored the official record in Le Moniteur, noting that the king ultimately cooperated with his executioners.
However, in the 1862 edition, Henri-Clément drastically rewrote this scene into a dramatic, romanticized tableau where the king stubbornly resists until the final second, while the executioners are depicted as trembling, covert monarchists who are secretly praying for a royalist riot to halt their blades (Bourdin, 2004). A similar literary and romanticized style can be seen in the description of Charlotte Corday [Bourdin, 2004]. For modern researchers, this means that the factual accounts remain useful, but the dramatic dialogues must be approached with skepticism [Bourdin, 2004].
Quantitative Analysis: Victims of the Terror in Paris
The meticulous logs kept in the Sanson family registers provide a distinct, raw demographic window into capital punishment during the Revolution. Between 14 July 1789 and 1 October 1796, the family recorded a total of 2,548 executions.
An economic and social breakdown reveals that the Terror was not exclusively directed at the old aristocracy. In fact, a socioeconomic analysis conducted by modern historians demonstrates that the lower middle class (petite bourgeoisie) bore the heaviest burden of the purges.
| Demographic Category | Number of Victims (Sanson Diary) | Percentage / Context |
|---|---|---|
| Total Executions (1789–1796) | 2,548 | 100% of recorded family log |
| Women | 370 | 14.5% of total victims |
| Minors (Under 18) | 22 | Youth victims of the purges |
| Elderly (Over 80) | 9 | Advanced age victims |
| Lower Middle Class (Petite Bourgeoisie) | 708 | 27% of total Terror victims (Highest socio-economic bracket) |
Note: Minor historical discrepancies exist between these internal family logs and other contemporary records. While Willa Carlyle Reising counts 2,587 total victims in Paris from January 1793 to July 1794, the foundational archival study by Émile Campardon counts exactly 2,791 capital sentences pronounced by the Revolutionary Tribunal between 10 March 1793 and 31 May 1795.
Bibliography & Sources
Primary Sources & Memoirs
- Sanson, Henri-Clément (ed.), Sept générations d’exécuteurs (1688-1847): Mémoires des Sanson, mis en ordre, rédigés et publiés par H. Sanson, 6 volumes, Paris: Duchesne, 1862–1863.
- Sanson, Henri-Clément, Executioners All: Memoirs of the Sanson Family, abridged English translation, London: Neville Spearman Ltd., 1962.
- Sanson, Charles-Henri, Plaidoyer prononcé au tribunal de police de l’Hôtel de Ville de Paris, le mercredi 27 janvier 1790, voor Charles-Henri Sanson… tegen le sieur Prudhomme en le sieur Gorsas, ed. Maton de la Varenne, 2nd edition, Paris, 1790 (Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France).
Historiography & Specialized Studies
- Bourdin, Philippe, « Sept générations d’exécuteurs. Mémoires des bourreaux Sanson (1688-1847) », Annales historiques de la Révolution française, no. 337, 2004, pp. 217–219.
- Goulard, Roger, « Une lignée d’exécuteurs des jugements criminels; les Sanson, 1688-1847 », Mercure de France, 1 February 1951, pp. 262–267.
- Lecherbonnier, Bernard, Bourreaux de père en fils: les Sanson, 1688-1847, Paris: Albin Michel, 1989.
- Lebailly, Monique (ed.), La Révolution française vue par son bourreau: journal de Charles-Henri Sanson, Paris: Le Cherche Midi, 1988.
- Lenôtre, G., La Guillotine et les exécuteurs des arrêts criminels pendant la Révolution, d’après des documents inédits tirés des Archives de l’État, Paris: Perrin, 1893.
- Michaud, Louis-Gabriel, Histoire de la famille des Sanson, exécuteurs des jugements criminels de Paris, Paris: Michaud, 1847.
Academic Dissertations & Digital Research
- Reising, Willa Carlyle, Beccaria, the Executioner, and the French Revolution, Doctoral dissertation, Morgantown: West Virginia University, Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports, 2024. [Available online via WVU Libraries].
See also (Internal Links)
- Mémoires (1879), p. 379 ↩