At 4:40 AM on September 10, 1977, Hamida Djandoubi was led from his cell at Baumettes Prison in Marseille. He was strapped to a bascule, a wooden board that tilted forward, positioning his neck beneath the lunette, the two-part collar that held it in place. The blade, a weighted steel triangle, dropped. Djandoubi, a Tunisian immigrant convicted of the torture and murder of his former girlfriend, Élisabeth Bousquet, became the last person executed by guillotine in France. The device, introduced during the Revolution as a humane, egalitarian method of death, had claimed its final victim.
This execution was not a major news event. France had elected a president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, who personally opposed the death penalty, yet he had denied clemency in this case. Djandoubi’s crime was particularly brutal, involving kidnapping, prolonged torture with cigarettes and a lit torch, and strangulation. Public opinion still favored capital punishment. The execution was carried out with clinical efficiency, witnessed by the required officials, a doctor, and a few journalists. It was a bureaucratic act.
Its historical weight comes entirely from its position as an endpoint. The guillotine had been the sole legal method of civil execution in France since 1792. For 185 years, it served as the ultimate instrument of state power, used on kings, revolutionaries, and common murderers. Djandoubi’s death ended that continuity. The machinery was quietly placed in storage. Four years later, in 1981, the new president François Mitterrand pushed through abolition. The last executioner, Marcel Chevalier, retired with his title.
The event matters not for the man but for the machine. The guillotine was a symbol of the French Republic itself, promising a death both swift and equal. Its final use highlighted the contradiction between a modernizing state and a medieval punishment. Djandoubi’s death closed a chapter of legal history, rendering an iconic apparatus a museum piece. The state had not yet renounced killing, but it had retired its most famous tool.