When the Guillotine Fell: The Bloody Beginning and Horrifying End to France's River of Blood, 1791-1977

The true story of the last criminal to be executed by the device notoriously associated with the French Revolution's Reign of Terror.

How long did the guillotine's blade hang over the heads of French criminals? Was it abandoned in the late 1800s? Did French citizens of the early days of the twentieth century decry its brutality? No. The blade was allowed to do its work.

In 1974, Hamida Djandoubi brutally tortured twenty-two-year-old Elisabeth Bousquet in an apartment in Marseille, putting cig...