The feminists of revolutionary France were not the only persons hoping that the current paroxysm of social change would bring about improvement of their state. A most singular category of men, the public executioners, had thought that the advent of a new regime would transform that peculiar disdain in which society held them. For hundreds of years, the post of Master of the High Works in France's major cities was held by men from ten or so dynastic families, members of an abominable elite that had developed as a consequence of social prejudice: Anyone who had ever been a bourreau could never hope to find another job, nor could he aspire to marry any woman not herself the daughter of a colleague. In this way the dreadful dynasties developed. The best known recipients of this peculiar distinction were the Sanson family, who operated in Paris and Versailles from 1688 to 1847; the diary kept by Charles Henri Sanson, executioner of Paris during the Terror, provides details of the deaths of many illustrious victims.
Several passages in the Sanson diary suggest that professional executioners did not particularly like having to kill women.
This chivalrous repugnance later spread through the Court d'Assizes; while women were regularly condemned to death in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in fact they were almost always reprieved. A roughly contemporaneous reluctance to execute women in the United States has been explained by recent American feminists as evidence of women,s almost nonexistent socia status at that time; to compensate for legal inegality the men who were women's judges, prosecutors, and jurors adopted a "protective" stance, frequently acquitting women who, in modern retrospect, seem guilty. In France the egalitarian practices of earlier centuries were ultimately reinstated, which guillotined five women. This temporary preservation of execution as an exclusively male domain—a thing too necessary and revolting to be inflicted on or endured by half the population—apparently did not strike legislators as being intolerably illogical, or as being rather a back-handed sort of compliment to men. Proper equality would have involved either equal rights and equal punishment for men and women, or else abolition. However, arguments against the death penalty tend rather to develop from general humanitarian principles, and less from the putative equality of women.
Chivalry, indeed, would seem to have been the nineteenth century's solution to the problems posed to the authorities by "female” executions. But more importantly, chivalry enabled society to observe a version of that logic set forth in 1791 by Olympe de Gouges, a logic echoed later in the United States by Wendell Phillips, who bluntly declared, "You have granted that women may be hung; therefore you must grant that woman may vote." In not executing women, the judiciary body was able to sidestep these irritating formulations: If women did not receive equal punishment under law, perhaps they need not be assured of equal rights.
Several passages in the Sanson diary suggest that professional executioners did not particularly like having to kill women.
This chivalrous repugnance later spread through the Court d'Assizes; while women were regularly condemned to death in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in fact they were almost always reprieved. A roughly contemporaneous reluctance to execute women in the United States has been explained by recent American feminists as evidence of women,s almost nonexistent socia status at that time; to compensate for legal inegality the men who were women's judges, prosecutors, and jurors adopted a "protective" stance, frequently acquitting women who, in modern retrospect, seem guilty. In France the egalitarian practices of earlier centuries were ultimately reinstated, which guillotined five women. This temporary preservation of execution as an exclusively male domain—a thing too necessary and revolting to be inflicted on or endured by half the population—apparently did not strike legislators as being intolerably illogical, or as being rather a back-handed sort of compliment to men. Proper equality would have involved either equal rights and equal punishment for men and women, or else abolition. However, arguments against the death penalty tend rather to develop from general humanitarian principles, and less from the putative equality of women.
Chivalry, indeed, would seem to have been the nineteenth century's solution to the problems posed to the authorities by "female” executions. But more importantly, chivalry enabled society to observe a version of that logic set forth in 1791 by Olympe de Gouges, a logic echoed later in the United States by Wendell Phillips, who bluntly declared, "You have granted that women may be hung; therefore you must grant that woman may vote." In not executing women, the judiciary body was able to sidestep these irritating formulations: If women did not receive equal punishment under law, perhaps they need not be assured of equal rights.