He says a few of the convicts, however, were simple criminals taking advantage of the chaos in Algeria to break the law. He could always tell them apart from the mujahedeen at the guillotine. ” Some collapsed or pissed themselves or threw themselves on the ground. But the ones who believed in the ideal of Algerian independence, the guys who died saying, “Long live a free Algeria,’ showed an extreme courage that even the French didn’t have.”

eyssonnier was sixteen when he saw his first execution, in 1947. He nearly didn’t go because he was afraid it would be too gruesome. He ended up standing within two metres of the guillotine. People were whispering. He heard the call to prayer and roosters crowing. Then the prisoner was mounted on the guillotine.

“Was there blood” says Meyssonnier, surprised at the obvious question I ask him. ” But of course! Yes, yes. Five, seven litres empties out. It’s not the electric chair, eh Jets of blood spray out three metres. Like two glasses being emptied.” His hands jettison two imaginary drinks.

“The smell of human blood is unique,” he continues. ” Just like the horse butcher doesn’t smell like the regular butcher. Human blood, you have to wash it off, it smells. We washed the guillotine, but not with soap.”

In slow motion, he mimics holding a heavy hose, like a scene out of a fireman’s pin-up calendar.

“Pwwssshhhhh! That’s what we do. With a jet of water, it’s clean. But the smell—it’s an odd, characteristic smell.”

Meyssonnier’s main job during the execution was keeping a condemned man from retracting his head on the guillotine. Not even the lunette, the wooden brace that secured a person’s head in place, was enough to stop some individuals from trying to withdraw their heads (like turtles retreat into their shells.) If that happened, the blade could miss cutting along the jaw line and leave the head partially attached—requiring either another go with the guillotine or cutting the head off with a knife—a gory ending that no one liked.

Hence, Meyssonnier would hold a convict’s head tight behind the ears. Vas-y, he’d tell his father, and without another word, Maurice Meyssonnier would pull the lever that released the blade.

“The blade weighed forty kilograms, but travelling down 2.35 metres of space, it becomes 700 kilograms,” he says. ” That cuts, eh”

It was dangerous work, least of all because the convicts sometimes tried to bite. It’s amazing that neither Meyssonnier was assassinated during ” les événements,” the French term given to the Algerian War of Independence, which bled on for eight years and claimed at least 300,000 lives. Meyssonnier left Algeria by boat in 1961, a little over a year before the country declared independence. He was thirty years old. His father, who was fifty-nine, made the mistake of staying, and was caught and tortured.