À la lanterne

As the revolutionary government became established, lamp posts were no longer needed as execution instruments, being replaced by the guillotine which became infamous in Paris during 1793–1794, though all major French cities had their own.

[6][7] Though the tradition continued in symbolic form up to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, via the ritual hanging in effigy of unpopular political figures during street protests.

[8] The first prominent victim of lynching "à la lanterne" was Joseph Foullon de Doué, an unpopular politician who replaced Jacques Necker as a Controller-General of Finances in 1789.

[3] On 22 July 1789, the mob attempted to hang him on a lamp post, however, after the rope broke, he was beheaded and radicals marched with his head on a pike through the streets.

So hated that he had even staged his own funeral to escape the people's wrath, the 74-year-old Foulon had spent years growing rich at his post while the poor starved.

[9][10] Immediately following the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 two of the invalids (veteran soldiers) forming part of the garrison of the fortress were hanged in the Place de Grève, although it is not recorded whether lanternes were used for the purpose.

[13] In August 1789, journalist and politician Camille Desmoulins wrote his Discours à la lanterne [fr], a defense of lynchings in the streets of Paris.

[17] On 14 December 1790, the crowd hanged barrister Pascalis and chevalier de La Rochette from a lamp post in Aix-en-Provence.

Her lady-in-waiting Jeanne-Louise-Henriette Campan reported that in the crowd "there was a model gallows, to which a dirty doll was suspended bearing the words "Marie-Antoinette a la lanterne" to represent her hanging".