Capital punishment in France
[1] Major French death penalty abolitionists across time have included philosopher Voltaire; poet Victor Hugo; politicians Léon Gambetta, Jean Jaurès and Aristide Briand; and writers Alphonse de Lamartine and Albert Camus.
However, they did abolish torture, and also declared that there would now be only one method of execution: 'Tout condamné à mort aura la tête tranchée' (All condemned to death will have their heads cut off).
Beheading had previously been reserved only for nobles and carried out manually by handheld axes or blades; commoners would usually be hanged or subjected to more brutal methods.
Therefore, the adoption of the guillotine for all criminals regardless of social status not only made executions more efficient and less painful, but it also removed the class divisions in capital punishment altogether.
On October 6, 1791, the Penal Code of 1791 was enacted, which abolished capital punishment in the Kingdom of France for bestiality, blasphemy, heresy, pederasty, sacrilege, sodomy, and witchcraft.
Executions had been carried out in large central public spaces such as market squares but gradually moved towards the local prison.
Following the law, the first to be guillotined inside a prison was Jean Dehaene, who had murdered his estranged wife and father-in-law, executed on 19 July 1939 at St-Brieuc.
[citation needed] In the 1950s to the 1970s, the number of executions steadily decreased, with for example President Georges Pompidou, between 1969 and 1974, giving clemency to all but three people out of the fifteen sentenced to death.
During his term of office, 35 people were guillotined, 4 others executed by firing squad for crimes against the security of the state, while 3 other were reprieved by amnesty in 1968.
In 1848, the provisional government of the French Second Republic, established by the February Revolution, decreed the abolition of the death penalty for political crimes.
In 1906 the Commission of the Budget of the Chamber of Deputies voted for withdrawing funding for the guillotine, with the aim of stopping the execution procedure.
On 3 July 1908 the Keeper of the Seals, Aristide Briand, submitted a draft law to the Deputies, dated November 1906, on the abolition of the death penalty.
[17]) On 20 December 1985, France ratified Additional Protocol number 6 to the European Convention to Safeguard Human Rights and fundamental liberties.
Despite these efforts, in 2004, a law proposition (number 1521[18]) was placed before the French National Assembly, suggesting re-establishment of the death penalty for terrorist acts.
On 19 February 2007, the Congress of the French Parliament (the National Assembly and the Senate, reunited for the day) voted overwhelmingly for a modification of the Constitution stating that "no one can be sentenced to the death penalty."
During the 20th century, French opinion on the death penalty has greatly changed, as many polls have showed large differences from one time to another.
