[1] After completing his military service, he moved to Paris, where he worked as a shoemaker and met and fell in love with Alexandrine Pigeon, a prostitute under the control of his pimp Gaston, who was also a police informer.

On 14 August, he was tried without the presence of his lawyer, who was having lunch in town and had been exonerated by a pneumatic tube,[2] and sentenced to three months' imprisonment, a 100-franc fine and a five-year residence ban for "special vagrancy" (procuring).

On Saturday 8 January 1910, Liabeuf, wearing a strange suit of armour (arms and forearms covered with four leather armbands, bristling with a multitude of nails of his own making, weapons inspired by his readings of English short news items) masked by his cloak, set off on a pub crawl in the Les Halles quarter of Paris.

[5] While the press denounced this criminal act and argued that the fate of this ordinary apache should be decided by death,[6] the insurrectionary and anti-militarist socialist Gustave Hervé broke ranks and caused a scandal by coming to Liabeuf's defence in the newspaper La Guerre Sociale.

His execution took place on the night between 30 June and 1 July, in Boulevard Arago, at the foot of one of the walls of the Santé prison, in a climate of insurrection, with a 10,000-strong demonstration, clashes between 800 police officers and Liabeuf's defenders, and the army kept in reserve.

Numerous rioters were injured, and many were arrested and brought to trial in the following days for rioting or attacking the police, while an anarchist killed a policeman in an attempt to kidnap Liabeuf, which provoked applause from the crowd and prompted prefect Lépine to order the Republican Guard to charge, sabre in hand.