Everything about Executioner totally explained
» For other meanings of the term, see executioner (disambiguation). Headsman redirects here; see The Headsman (2005 film) for the movie.
A
judicial executioner (not to be confused with
executor) is a person who carries out a
death sentence ordered by the
state or other
legal authority, which was known in feudal terminology as
high justice.
Scope and job
The executioner was usually presented with a warrant authorizing or ordering him to
execute the sentence. The warrant protects the executioner from the charge of
murder. Common terms for executioners derived from forms of capital punishment -though they often also performed other physical punishments- include
hangman (hanging) and
headsman (beheading). In the military the role of executioner was usually performed by a soldier, such as the
provost. A common
stereotype of an executioner is a
hooded
medieval or absolutist executioner.
While this task can be an occasional one, it can be carried out in the line of more general duty by an officer of the court, the
police,
prison staff, or even the
military. A special case is the tradition of the Roman
fustuarium, continued in forms of
running the gauntlet, where the culprit receives his punishment from the hands of the comrades his crime has gravely harmed, for example for failing in vital sentinel duty or stealing from a ship's limited food supply.
Many executioners were professional specialists, who usually traveled a whole area since executions would rarely be very numerous. Still, especially if a resident, he'd often also administer
non-lethal physical punishments, or apply
torture.
The term is also extended to administrators of a severe physical punishment that isn't prescribed to kill, but which may result in death.
Since executions in France (using the
guillotine since the
French Revolution) persisted until
1977, the French Republic had an official executioner,
Marcel Chevalier, until the formal abolition in
1981.
Executioners in society
In
Europe and its colonies,
executioners have often been shunned by their neighbours. This attitude can be observed in numerous novels and films, for instance in
Alexandre Dumas, père's
The Three Musketeers or in the film
La veuve de Saint-Pierre (
The Widow of Saint-Pierre) in which executioners, who are minor characters, were
ostracized by villagers. The profession of executioner sometimes ran through a family, especially in France where the Sanson family provided six executioners between 1688 and 1847, and the Deibler dynasty provided five between 1879 and abolition in 1981 (Louis Deibler, his son Anatole, Anatole's nephew Jules-Henri Desfourneaux, another nephew of Anatole,
André Obrecht, and finally André's nephew,
Marcel Chevalier). In Britain, the most notable dynasty was the Pierrepoints, who provided three executioners between 1902 and 1956 - Henry, his brother Thomas, and Henry's son
Albert.
Native societies in
Asia,
Africa,
The Americas, and the
Pacific seem rarely to display such prejudice towards executioners, even when, as in
North America, there's significant and vocal opposition to the death penalty itself.
In "Memories of Silk and Straw", by Junichi Saga, one of the families surveyed in the Japanese village of Tsuchiura is that of an executioner family ("The Last Executioner", P. 54). This family does suffer social isolation, even though the family is somewhat well-off financially. Where the paragraph above cites little social shunning for executioners in places like North America, one needs to bear in mind the infrequency of executions in modern times and the ease of a prison official not telling his family what his actual job at the prison is, something that wasn't possible when most executions were carried out in view of the general public.
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