Posted on 03/15/2008 12:16:38 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
It is the internet site that contains dark family secrets, unspeakable truths and appalling injustice. The French log on to it in trepidation and in private.
Les Guillotinés offers the most complete online list yet established of the French Revolution’s victims and invites users to discover the answer to a terrible question: “Do you have an ancestor who was decapitated?” Hundreds of thousands of people have consulted the death base, created by Raymond Combes, a computer programmer and amateur genealogist.
Many more are likely to follow suit. According to one estimate, up to five million French people are descended from victims of La Révolution.
Take, for instance, Denis Sarazin-Charpentier, a 54-year-old civil servant from Boissy-Le-Châtel outside Paris. Like all his compatriots, he was taught as a child that the guillotine fell on evil aristocrats. Then he found out that Claude Louis Deligny, his own ancestor, had lost his head in 1794 when revolutionaries discovered a cache of coins stamped with the King’s head in the family grange.
“He was condemned for plotting against the Revolution, but he was just a poor farmer and there was no plot at all,” said Mr Sarazin-Charpentier. “He only wanted to keep his money safe.”
Mr Sarazin-Charpentier, an amateur historian, said that the site – les. guillotines.free.fr – showed “they didn’t just guillotine the nobility. There were farmers, peasants and commoners who were decapitated as well.” More than two centuries later the subject remains highly sensitive in a country that sees the Revolution as its political bedrock.
“Personally, I don’t mind talking about my ancestor who was guillotined but I know families descended from the aristocracy who still can’t bear to mention it.” He added that France had tried to ignore the Terror in order to preserve the reputation of its revolutionaries “because it was the Revolution that created our Republic and no one really wants to call all of that into question”.
However, Mr Combes’s work may force historians to reappraise the period. According to the official figure 17,500 people were guillotined between 1792 and 1795. But Mr Combes already has more than 18,000 names on his site, which is based on lists compiled for the bicentenary of the Revolution in 1989 and from documents sent in by users.
“A lot of those guillotined were never registered in official records,” he said. “I’m adding names all the time. But I don’t put anyone down unless they are accompanied by documentary evidence.”
Nor has he included the tens of thousands of people massacred as violence swept across France at the end of the ancien régime. “It was an important part of our history,” said Mr Combes, 50. “But I’m not sure all that violence really served a purpose.”
Slice of life
— The Halifax Gibbet and the Scottish Maiden, forerunners of the guillotine, were used in the British Isles from the 13th century
— The machine takes its name from Dr Joseph Guillotine, who pressed for a decapitation machine in France to make execution quicker and more humane
— Many doctors have suggested that beheaded victims could remain conscious for up to 30 seconds after the blade fell
— The blade weighed just over 40kg (88lbs) and dropped 2.3m on to the neck of the victim, at a speed of 7 metres/second
— The last man to be executed by guillotine in France was Hamida Djandoubi – who tortured and murdered his former girlfriend, Elizabeth Bousquet – on September 10, 1977
Sources: napoleonguide.com; Oxford History of the French Revolution; BMJ; Book of Firsts, Patrick Robertson
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how did he begat your great grandfather?
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Railroad worker: "You shifty revolutionary! They said you was hung!"
Great Grand-dad: "And they was right!" (grins)
(with apologies to Mel Brooks)
In the second half of the 18th century half of my family was in danger of being killed by the reign of terror in France because they put their Church ahead of Robespierre et al. The other half was endangered by the English genocide of French Catholics in Acadia.
Both sides figured that despite Vermont’s long winters and poor farming it was still a better place to live. We’ve been here 210 years, slightly longer than the liberal flatlanders.
Check your e-mail, and “share” the joy with me. :-)
Nothin in any of my e-mail accounts ?!?!?!
Depending on which century your French ancestor arrived the same name could be spelled many different ways.
There was no second genocide of Acadians ~ in Acadia. The Brits took them elsewhere and let them die of disease on boats. The Governor of Virginia (PBUH) refused to let them land ~ the Brits forgot to cut him in on the deal.
Which means that when you discuss Acadians and genocide, you have to specify which genocide, and then specify where the Acadians involved in it died.
That's very important to folks who have gotten into the minutia of Acadian geneology.
The problem is that the govt might react violently to a parallel economy in private gold and silver plus barter, in much the same way the French did in 1795. By making lurid examples of "greedy rich gold hoarders," and sentencing them to long jail terms for "economic sabotage" or whatever the crime will be, they will try to render private gold and silver unuseable. They don't care about your private gold being a threat to their "New Dollars," if you are too terrified to offer your coins in trade, for fear of a govt sting.
Do you have kin in Louisiana among the Arcadians/Cajuns?
Yeah, the French peasants in 1795 were basically defenseless. A “committee of security” or whatever they called their revolutionary thugs in those days would just arrive in a village with about 20 goons and a mobile guillotine, and grab whomever they wanted, based on anonymous snitches and old grudges. That would be a tough proposition today in hte USA, even for our modern SWAT teams.
Still nothing? I’ll post photos for you. :-)
Yep. I think you’re correct. But that’s a risk with any blackmarket. We’ve got a fairly good network of “closed mouthed” people who buy/sell/trade and SHUT-UP. A lot of people have started operating this way in more rural areas.
That was what ... four Republics ago in France? Who cares??
No revolution in history was spared by crime and murder of innocents, including the american war of independence.
Not everyone applies value to a chicken. I live in the suburbs and someones chicken got loose in my neighborhjood. Every morning that bastard wakes me up! If he doesn’t do it, the dog goes nuts trying to get me to let him out and at the chicken. My dog Jesse applies a value to the chicken, buy not I. Were it not for my probation status, I would shoot the damn thing myself.
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