The Butcher of Châteauguay

For more than thirty years, from the end of the Great War until after the Occupation, Gaston Meyssonnier was the town executioner of Châteauguay in Provence. Governments came and went, especially in the dying days of the Third Republic, but Meyssonnier always operated the guillotine as the town bourreau. He carried out his duties with a detached air. When someone was lead up to guillotine to meet his destiny, Meyssonnier merely released the blade without emotion. During his years as le bourreau de Châteauguay, he probably executed twenty-five or thirty people, roughly one per year.

Meyssonnier was without friends. Though people were polite when greeting him, they rarely talked with him for very long when he entered Le Coq d'Or, the café where he took his lunch every day. Rather, they kept their distance. They rarely talked about him, perhaps because they thought that it was bad luck to talk about the le bourreau. If they spoke of him at all, they spoke almost in reverent whispers, even when he wasn’t present. When strangers, usually tourists, asked of him, the response was invariably, “That’s Gaston Meyssonnier. He’s the executioner...”

At first glance, Meyssonnier was no more repulsive than other people, but ordinary in appearance, but tall and muscular, with chiselled features and a black beret on his balding head. He wore a grey serge sweater during what passed for winter in Provence, and black pants and black patent leather shoes. Though he was in his late fifties or early sixties when the Occupation started, he still stood tall and straight, time having failed to render him bent and crooked as an old man. It was only when you asked him what he did in life that his bearing changed, at least in the mind of the beholder. Without emotion, he would say, “I operate the guillotine, monsieur. I am the executioner of Châteauguay.”

At the beginning of the War of 1939, Meyssonnier was still executioner of Châteauguay. After the fall of France, when Châteauguay came under the jurisdiction of the the Vichy Regime, Meyssonnier continued as executioner of Châteauguay. His job changed little, if at all, during the Occupation. That’s to say, the number of executions remained about the same. Those executed in Châteauguay were executed for the crimes for which they were normally executed: rape and murder. Because rapes and murders continued to be rare even under Marshall Pétain and Pierre Laval,

Meyssonnier executed three people during the Occupation. All were convicted murderers whose victims were people who lived near Châteauguay.

Without doubt, Meyssonnier was aware of the Nazi occupation of northern France. He was also aware that Jews in the South were being deported to Auschwitz. He knew the collabos in the Vichy Regime that aided the Nazis in their deportations, and that people denounced their Jewish friends and neighbours right and left. Châteauguay lost almost its entire Jewish population, about thirty or forty families, during the summer of 1943. Somebody denounced them, and the Nazis sent them to Auschwitz. None of them returned after France was liberated and Germany was defeated.

One Jew in Châteauguay survived the terrible years of the Occupaton: Gaston Meyssonnier. Possibly, nobody knew that he was born a Jew because he and his family were practicing Catholics, not observant Jews.

How Meyssonnier felt about all this, he didn’t say. He never revealed his feelings even to his wife, Yvonne. He didn’t “talk politics,” as he would say during and after the Occupation. He merely minded his business and discharged his duties as the executioner of Châteauguay.

On days when there wasn’t any executions, he took extended lunches at Le Coq d’Or. Since there were rarely any executions in Châteauguay, he took extended lunches most of the time, about two hours being the norm.

During the summer of 1943, on Bastille Day, a woman named Mathilde Sévigny was arrested for the murder of her husband. The people of Châteauguay couldn’t believe it. She was a skinny little thing, seemingly incapable of hurting a fly. Who would have thought that she would do such a thing? However, Mme. Sévigny confessed to having poisoned her husband when the police questioned her. By her own account, she gave her husband infintessimal amounts of arsenic over time until the arsenic did its work. Because her husband was the owner of the apothecary in town, acquiring the arsenic was easy.

“Why did you murder him,” Inspector Claude Massu of the police asked, stunned.

“He was cruel to me,” the woman replied, without tears. “He always said that I was stupid and lazy. When I served him his dinner, he was always critical and often sarcastic. Finally, it was my idea to poison him when he said, ‘What are you trying to do, poison me?’”

After a brief trial, Mme. Sévigny was convicted of murder with premeditation and sentenced to death by the guillotine. Even though this was during the height of the deportation of Provence’s Jews, people only talked about the murder of the druggist in Châteauguay. The town was polarized not over the deaths and deportations of the Jews, whose number was in the thousands all over France, but over the ultimate fate of Mme. Sévigny. There were people who believed passionately that Mme. Sévigny should receive mercy, that’s to say, spending the rest of her life in prison. But there were people who believe with an equal and a singular passion that she should receive the death penalty. The magistrate agreed with those who wanted the death penalty; he sentenced her to death.

According to his custom, Meyssonnier never talked about it even to his wife. However, the execution of Mme. Sévigny had an affect on him, it seems. As the condemned woman mounted the guillotine in the prison, he was struck by how ordinary she was in appearance. She was in her sixties, tall and thin with a crooked posture and a long neck. She was dressed in her prison clothes, wearing her black hair, habitually dyed black but now showing traces of grey, in a chignon.

“How like a bird she is!” Meyssonnier thought to himself as the guard laid the woman’s head under the blade, which was suspended about four or five metres above the block. “How like a bird…”

Meyssonnier would have never thought that Mme. Sévigny was capable of murder. If she was suddenly to receive a pardon, he doubted that she would ever commit another crime again.

When the prison governor gave the signal, Meyssonnier released the blade of the guillotine from its height of four or five metres. The blade severed Mme. Sévigny’s head cleanly from her body, the head, falling into the basket placed underneath to catch it. As it happens sometimes, when someone has been executed by guillotine, Mme. Sévigny’s lips moved for a few moments, her eyes, flickering wide open in bewilderment and terror. Then her lips stopped moving, and the expression that she wore in death was that of somebody in a panic, her mouth wide open in terror, like someone about to be murdered in the night by an intruder.

The Liberation of France came less than a year after Mme. Sévigny’s execution. In the days that immediately followed the Liberation, the country went on a frenzy of violence that hadn’t been seen since the Commune of Paris. People used this period of disorder to settle old scores, denouncing as collabos people who may or may not have really been collabos but were people that they held grudges against. Women known to have slept with German soldiers had their heads shaved as they were paraded in the squares of the cities or villages in which they lived. Pierre Laval, the prime minister of the Vichy Regime, was sentenced to death and guillotined, while old Marshall Pétain was sentenced to death but granted a commutation by President de Gaulle. Police and government functionaries were sometimes lynched by mobs who suddenly felt brave and patriotic after four years of grovelling before the Nazis.

When somebody started a rumour that there was still some Maquis in the prison awaiting execution for resisting against the Nazis and their collaborators, some of the people of Châteauguay stormed the prison. "Please go home," the governor of the prison, Maurice Duclos urged the crowd, some of whom he recognized as his neighbours. "We have no Maquis here in this prison. We have never had any Maquis in this prison!"

Of course, the crowd didn't believe him. All the prisoners were frankly criminals, but the mob freed them anyway. Then somebody garroted Maurice Duclos.

One of the people that they missed was Gaston Meyssonnier, the executioner of Châteauguay. Technically, Meyssonnier was a collabo, having worked for the Vichy Regime as an executioner throughout the war, but the people of Châteauguay left him alone like they always had, though they loved him no less nor no more.

Until his retirement a few years later, Meyssonier continued in the same manner as he always had, having an extended lunch at Le Coq d’Or when there were no executions at the prison.