W
hen I first arrived at Meyssonnier’s home, he introduced me to Tama and Michel, two green parrots that can sing the Marseillaise. A model reproduction of a guillotine, built by Meyssonnier when he was fourteen, stood enclosed in a glass case in the living room.For much of my visit, Meyssonnier’s wife remained invisible, a disembodied voice shouting down from an upstairs bedroom. She’s been living common-law with Meyssonnier since the two met forty-three years ago in Tahiti. Their forty-two-year-old daughter Taina still lives there, where she works for the tourism board.
Meyssonnier is disappointed that his daughter hasn’t shown much interest in his former career. It was different in Algeria, he says. There, the work of an executioner was appreciated and respected by both the French and Algerians alike.
“In France, being an executioner is like being a printer or a hair stylist,” he says. “Whereas in Algeria, an executioner had power. People didn’t do it to earn a living. My father would have continued doing the job for free if they’d stopped paying him.”
When Meyssonnier’s father wasn’t executing people, he was running a bar in the capital, Algiers. Because the work of an executioner is often passed down from one generation to the next, it was Maurice Meyssonnier who invited his son to join him at the guillotine.
Leading me to an office on the second floor of his house, Meyssonnier begins sifting through records that he keeps in brown cardboard boxes. The papers have faded to the colour of the naked Hawaiian women posing in pictures on the wall, but the patriotic tri-colour embossments still stand out.
Meyssonnier picks up one binder and turns to five pages of hypnotically fluid script. It’s his father’s execution log from 1956 to 1959.
Zahane Amed Algiers 19 June 1956
Ferradj Abdelkader Algiers 19 June 1956
Belkhairia Mahmed Constantine 7 August 1956
“They admitted their crimes,” he says, flipping through the pages. “Even as they were taken to the guillotine, they were bragging about what they had done. You give a bomb to a terrorist, it’s not to celebrate July Fourth, eh”
