For forty years he was “the testamentary executor of the high works of the Republic”. Or rather low jobs because his task, to say the least singular, consisted in handling the guillotine to cut off heads. And heads, Anatole Deibler has cut many in his career, 395 in fact, including those of notorious criminals like Landru or Joseph Vacher, nicknamed “the killer of the shepherds”, and anarchist thieves of the Bonnot gang. 83 years after his death, one of the most famous and prolific French executioners re-emerges today for the occasion of an exhibition dedicated to him until 4 November at the Parliament of Brittany in Rennes and the release of the graphic novel In the skin of the executioner (Locus Solus), signed Olivier Keraval and Luc Monnerais. “We wanted to highlight this character who is somewhat lost in the maze of history,” emphasizes Rennes author Olivier Keraval.
It was in the Breton capital that Anatole Deibler was born on November 28, 1863. His childhood was not the happiest, the young student being bullied by his classmates. And for good reason, Anatole Deibler does not come from an ordinary family, his father and grandfather worked as an executioner. “He saw his father die crazy and then he dreamed of something else,” says Olivier Keraval. But he couldn’t escape his fate.
Adored by the press of the time
It is from his grandfather that Anatole Deibler learned his trade in Algeria, witnessing 19 executions which he painstakingly recounts in small notebooks. A rite that he will perpetuate when he becomes his father’s assistant in Paris before succeeding him on his death as chief executor of the Republic. Soon, the press of the time became passionate about this young executioner when he lashed out at his father, considered slow and clumsy. Quite the opposite of Anatole Deibler, acclaimed for the precision of his cut.
At each of his trips to the province, the executioner dries up the crowd, as in Béthune where several thousand people gathered at the foot of the gallows to watch the execution of the Pollet brothers, “the bandits of Hazebrouck”, who did not hesitate to kill their victims. “The media made him a star and continued to follow him in his private life,” emphasizes Olivier Keraval. It is true that Anatole Deibler also stands out in the landscape. With his dandy aspect, he embodies the modern executioner, a thousand miles from the image of the brutal bloodthirsty.
“He hated the spectacular side of executions”
During his career, he also tries to show a respectable image of the profession. “He hated the spectacular side of executions and campaigned for them to take place inside prisons and not in public squares,” says the author. In addition, he was always trying to improve his cutting speed. ”To make his work easier, some inmates did not hesitate to have a dashed line marked“ For Deibler ”engraved on their necks.
The career of the executioner, both admired and feared, will finally end on a pavement of the Paris metro, Deibler will die of stroke on February 2, 1939 at the age of 76. The chief executor will therefore never reach his hometown where he was supposed to guillotine Maurice Pilorgé, a criminal who had killed his Mexican lover a year earlier in Dinard. But the criminal’s respite will ultimately be short-lived as he will be guillotined two days later in Rennes.
