FRANCE: The notebooks of a 20th century French executioner who sliced off the heads of almost 400 people fetched €85,000, more than five times its expected sale price, at an auction yesterday.
In pencil and in ink, Anatole Deibler noted places, dates, the weather, the names and crimes of the condemned and details of their trials, charting his work on some 2,000 pages.
In choosing his profession, Deibler followed in the footsteps of his father and grandfather.
Deibler brought down the guillotine on 395 men and women - from petty thieves to presidential assassins - during a career that spanned 40 years in the early 20th century.
Deibler died of a heart attack on an underground platform in 1939, on his way to another execution. Six months later France banned public executions, confining them to a prison courtyard, where they continued until 1977. France abolished the death penalty in 1981. -(Reuters)