The Last Public Execution in France: A Young Christopher Lee's Witness to History
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Just before dawn on June 17, 1939, a guillotine went up outside a prison in Versailles for the last time anyone would ever be allowed to watch. The man about to die was Eugen Weidmann, a German drifter the French press had nicknamed the killer with velvet eyes, and the crowd that gathered to see him lose his head behaved so badly that the French government banned public executions within a week. Somewhere in that crowd, a seventeen year old English boy named Christopher Lee stood close enough to hear the blade fall, decades before he'd become one of horror cinema's most iconic faces. It's a strange collision of true crime, showbusiness history and the tail end of an execution method France had used since the Revolution, and there's a lot more to it than the postcard version most retellings settle for.
Quick answers
Who was Eugen Weidmann?
A German career criminal who moved to Paris in 1937 and, with two accomplices, killed six people in a string of kidnap-and-robbery schemes targeting wealthy tourists and acquaintances. He was guillotined on June 17, 1939, in the last public execution France ever held.
Did Christopher Lee really watch someone get executed?
He was there, seventeen years old and staying in Paris, but by his own account he turned his head away at the last second and only heard the blade fall. He wrote about the experience decades later in his autobiography, Lord of Misrule.
Why was this the last public execution in France?
The crowd's behavior, cheering, jeering and dipping handkerchiefs in Weidmann's blood as souvenirs, was captured on illicit film and splashed across newspaper front pages. The spectacle embarrassed the government badly enough that President Albert Lebrun banned public executions by decree within the week.
Did France stop using the guillotine after this?
No, only public ones. Executions continued behind prison walls for nearly forty more years. The guillotine's last victim, Hamida Djandoubi, was executed in Marseille in 1977, and France abolished capital punishment entirely in 1981.
The killer the papers called velvet eyes
Eugen Weidmann was born in Frankfurt in 1908 with a juvenile record for theft behind him before he'd even left Germany. A stint in Canada and a spell in French prisons for burglary didn't straighten him out, and by 1937 he'd drifted to Paris and fallen in with a small circle of fellow small time crooks, most importantly a Frenchman named Roger Million. Together they rented a villa in Saint-Cloud, just outside Paris, and began targeting people with money: tourists, professionals, anyone who might be lured somewhere private with the promise of a deal, a room to rent or simple friendliness. Over five months in 1937 the scheme escalated from robbery into murder, six times over.
What made Weidmann a press sensation wasn't just the body count. Journalists and the public alike became fixated on his physical appearance, and Paris-Soir dubbed him l'assassin aux yeux de velours, the killer with velvet eyes. The writer Jean Genet, never one to resist a provocative line, wrote that Weidmann's handsome face revealed to saddened members of the bourgeoisie that their own lives had been brushed by an enchanting assassin. Some of that charm had a fairly mundane origin: during an earlier stretch in a German prison, Weidmann spent long hours in the prison library working through Wagner and opera, which left him able to hold his own in cultured conversation in a way that put wealthy strangers at ease. It's an uncomfortable detail to sit with, a country becoming half infatuated with a man who'd strangled a young woman and shot four other people, but it explains a great deal about why his trial turned into the media circus it did.
Six victims, and a villa that hid two of them
Weidmann's first victim was Jean de Koven, an American dance instructor in her early twenties from New York who'd been staying with her aunt, Ida Sackheim, in Paris. Weidmann hadn't even given her his real name. In a letter to a friend shortly before she died, De Koven wrote that she'd just met a charming German of keen intelligence who calls himself Siegfried, and mentioned plans to visit his villa near the grounds of Malmaison, the estate Napoleon had once given Josephine. On July 23, 1937, she left to see him, telling her aunt she'd be back in time for the opera that evening. She never returned. Her aunt received a ransom note demanding $500, written in the kind of garbled English that gave away its author's hand: remind the least sign we have of the police, and we don't send nobody to get the money. French police couldn't locate her at all. Her body wasn't discovered until December, buried beneath the front steps of the Saint-Cloud villa, where Weidmann had strangled her and taken roughly $430 in traveler's cheques along with what cash she was carrying.
The killings that followed read like a grim inventory of anyone Weidmann and Million judged worth robbing. Jean Couffy, a chauffeur, was shot in the back of the neck while driving and relieved of 2,500 francs. Janine Keller, a thirty-six year old governess from Strasbourg lured with a fake job offer, was shot and buried in a cave in the Fontainebleau forest for her diamond ring and a postal order worth barely a hundred francs, a killing so widely reported at the time that a vendor was reportedly selling postcards of the crime scene while the investigation was still ongoing. Roger Le Blond, a theatrical producer, was murdered at the villa and his body dumped in his own car in a Paris suburb. Fritz Frommer, a German political exile Weidmann had known as a cellmate years earlier, was shot and buried beneath the villa's own floor for barely 200 francs. The last victim, an estate agent named Raymond Lesobre, was struck with a hammer and shot inside an empty property the gang was supposedly showing him, then buried in the cellar. Police suspected there may have been more victims still unaccounted for, but never found the evidence to prove it. Weidmann also kept small trophies from several of his victims, reportedly holding onto Keller's wig, Le Blond's suspenders and a light of his, and Lesobre's shoes, a detail that sits uneasily alongside the whole robbery narrative once you notice it. Add together everything the gang actually stole across all six killings and the total comes to roughly 15,700 francs plus the $500 or so taken from Jean de Koven, a small return for six lives, whatever else was driving Weidmann.
The case broke open through two separate threads investigators pulled at the same time. Twenty-four of Jean de Koven's stolen traveler's cheques had been forged and cashed at banks and shops across Paris, all with signatures that only loosely matched hers, and tracing those forgeries slowly built a paper trail. Separately, a business card left behind near Raymond Lesobre's murder led police to a man named Arthur Schott, and from Schott to his nephew, Fritz Frommer, and from Frommer's own known criminal associations straight to the villa in Saint-Cloud. On December 8, 1937, two police inspectors, Primborgne and Bourquin, visited the villa posing as tax officials. Weidmann opened fire on both men, wounding them, before being subdued with a blow from a hammer. Million and a third accomplice, Jean Blanc, were arrested soon after, along with Million's girlfriend Colette Tricot, who'd cashed some of the stolen traveler's cheques. Tricot was ultimately acquitted.
A trial the whole country tuned into
The Versailles Assize Court trial in March 1939 turned into a full scale media event, something France hadn't really seen since the Landru murder case nearly two decades earlier. Paris-Soir alone claimed a quarter of the courtroom's press seats, and the postal service installed ten telephone booths and forty separate phone lines at the courthouse just to keep up with the volume of reporters filing copy. The novelist Colette was personally commissioned to cover the proceedings, lending the whole affair a strange literary prestige most murder trials never get anywhere near.
Weidmann's defense was handled by four lawyers pulling in different directions. Jean Raoult argued on general abolitionist grounds against the death penalty itself. Roger Planty tried to sow doubt over one specific killing. Renée Jardin worked to humanize her client through his personal correspondence. And lead counsel Vincent de Moro-Giafferri, one of the most famous defense advocates in France at the time, made the most forceful appeal of all, telling the jury directly, ne le tuez pas, c'est ce que je vous demande (don't kill him, that's what I'm asking of you), while attacking the psychiatric evaluation as inadequate to the case. That evaluation was an easy target, since the court-appointed psychiatrists couldn't agree among themselves what was actually wrong with Weidmann: one doctor, Genil-Perrin, leaned toward psychopathy, another, Allendy, described a kind of moral perversion affecting his emotions, and Jardin herself argued hysteria played a role, with Raoult settling for calling his own client simply enigmatic and confusing. None of it worked. Throughout the trial, witnesses described Weidmann as calm, polite and largely indifferent to the fate of his victims, with one telling exception: pressed about why he'd lured Jean de Koven to the villa, he could only manage, je ne peux pas, monsieur le président, je ne peux pas (I cannot, sir, I cannot), and the one regret he expressed clearly throughout the entire trial was the shame he'd brought on his own mother. During one heated exchange with Million over the Le Blond killing, Weidmann snapped, come on, face the facts, I have admitted to four murders, you were to blame for the other two. The jury convicted him on all six counts on March 31, 1939. Million's death sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, Blanc received twenty months, and Weidmann alone was left to face the guillotine.
A guillotine assembled by lantern light
Executions in France weren't improvised affairs, and Weidmann's was no exception, even if the outcome was chaotic. France's chief executioner, Jules-Henri Desfourneaux, and his team began assembling the guillotine outside Saint-Pierre prison in Versailles at around 2 a.m., working by lantern light. The machine arrived disassembled in sections, two upright wooden beams, metal runners, the angled blade, a hinged bascule the condemned would be strapped face down onto, and a wooden lunette that closed around the neck, and it took the crew roughly two and a half hours to put it all together, meaning the execution itself didn't actually happen until shortly after 4:30 that morning, well behind the discreet pre-dawn schedule these events were supposed to keep.
That delay mattered more than anyone realized at the time, because it pushed the execution past sunrise. What was meant to happen in near darkness, screened from easy view, instead unfolded in clear summer daylight, which is a large part of why photographers and one hidden filmmaker were able to capture it in such sharp, unmistakable detail. The mechanism itself didn't cooperate either. Accounts describe the hinged bascule failing to pivot properly when Weidmann was strapped to it, forcing an assistant to physically shove him forward to get his neck positioned correctly under the blade, a detail that undercuts any image of the guillotine as a swift, clinical piece of machinery and makes clear just how improvised the final moments actually were.
A teenage Christopher Lee in the crowd
Christopher Lee was seventeen that summer, staying in Paris with family friends before what should have been an unremarkable trip onward. One of those family friends was Webb Miller, a war correspondent for United Press already well known for his 1930 eyewitness dispatch on British police beating unarmed protesters at the Dharasana salt works during Gandhi's Indian independence campaign, a report that had made headlines around the world. Miller decided the teenage Lee should see the execution for himself, apparently believing it was the kind of thing a young man ought to witness with Europe sliding toward war that same summer.
Lee wrote about the morning decades later in his autobiography, Lord of Misrule, in vivid, uncomfortable detail: they rushed Weidmann to that extraordinary structure, so that his feet came off the ground, his hands were tied behind him and his head was held back, they set him down by the plank and punched him in the stomach so that he fell forwards on to it, a strap went over his back, the plank tilted forward and the man they called the Photographer adjusted his head. Lee couldn't bring himself to watch the actual fall of the blade. In that instant the knife fell, he wrote, and I thought I would die myself. Asked about it decades later in a 1998 television interview, he put it more simply: I turned my head, but I heard.
Lee never turned the experience into some grand origin story for his later career playing monsters and villains, and it's worth resisting that temptation on his behalf too. But there's an odd symmetry worth noting anyway: half a century later, in 1989, he played the real historical French executioner Charles-Henri Sanson, guillotine operator during the Revolution itself, in the film La Révolution française. Whatever that morning in Versailles left him with, it apparently didn't stop him from returning to the subject on screen.
A crowd that embarrassed a government
Crowd estimates for that morning vary depending on the source, some put the number pressed right up against the barriers at a few hundred, others describe thousands packed into the surrounding streets, with only around a hundred people close enough, through connections or credentials, to actually see the platform clearly. Whatever the true count, people had been arriving since well before midnight to stake out a position, and nearby cafés stayed open through the night to serve them; vendors reportedly did a brisk trade in sausage sandwiches to a crowd that had, by most contemporary accounts, come for something closer to entertainment than solemn civic duty.
The International Herald Tribune described catcalls and jests directed at the Mobile Guards on duty, along with cheering and whistling once Weidmann appeared. Lee himself recalled a powerful wave of howling and shrieking sweeping through the crowd at that moment. Once the blade fell, things got worse rather than better: spectators rushed toward the platform and, according to multiple accounts, dipped handkerchiefs and scarves directly into Weidmann's blood on the pavement as souvenirs. Paris-Soir, the same paper that had spent months fascinated by Weidmann's velvet eyes, turned on its own readership afterward, condemning the crowd's behavior as disgusting and unruly. One especially telling detail comes from a witness named Marcel, who was fifteen at the time: he described how quickly the whole scene reverted to ordinary life afterward, the guillotine dismantled, the pavement washed down, the cafés reopening for the day and the trams resuming their normal service, as if nothing unusual had happened there at all just an hour before.
The film that wouldn't let the moment fade
Public executions in France had survived for so long partly because they functioned as a kind of civic theater, a public demonstration of state power that was meant to be witnessed, absorbed and then, crucially, allowed to recede into memory. What made Weidmann's execution different, and arguably what really killed the practice, wasn't just that a crowd behaved badly. It's that someone filmed it. An unknown person shot brief footage from a private apartment overlooking the scene, catching daylight conditions no one had anticipated, and still photographs from that morning ran on the front page of nearly every newspaper in France the next day. Some of that footage survives and can still be tracked down today, which is itself an unusual thing for an event this old.
The historian Paul Friedland has argued that this permanence was the real problem for the French state, more than the crowd's rowdiness itself. A government could absorb one chaotic, embarrassing morning and move on from it. What it couldn't tolerate was that same chaotic morning being available to replay indefinitely, for any audience, at any point in the future, completely outside the state's control. A single bad execution was a scandal that would fade. A film of one was a scandal that would never stop happening.
The last of its kind
The backlash moved fast. On June 24, 1939, exactly a week after Weidmann died, French President Albert Lebrun issued a decree confining all future executions to prison interiors, witnessed only by a small number of officials and magistrates rather than the general public. It was less a moral reckoning with capital punishment itself than damage control over the spectacle it had produced, but the effect was the same either way: France would never hold a public execution again.
The guillotine itself didn't go anywhere. Executions simply moved behind prison walls and continued there for close to another forty years, ending only with the execution of Hamida Djandoubi in Marseille on September 10, 1977, the last person guillotined anywhere in the Western world. France abolished capital punishment entirely in 1981, decades after Weidmann's death had already ended the public spectacle around it, if not the practice itself.
A grim footnote that still gets rediscovered
Weidmann's case still surfaces periodically in true crime retrospectives and French media anniversaries, usually anchored to one of two hooks: the guillotine detail, or the Christopher Lee detail, rarely both at once. It's a reminder of how thoroughly separate audiences, horror film fans and execution history buffs, can circle the same footnote in history for decades without necessarily finding each other. Lee's own path into horror properly began years later, once he'd landed the role that made him famous, and the literary roots of that role go back a good century further than 1939, to a single stormy night on Lake Geneva that gave the world both Frankenstein's creature and the vampire archetype Bram Stoker would later build into Dracula. Weidmann himself is buried at Les Gonards Cemetery in Versailles, not far from where he was executed, having gone to the guillotine reportedly telling his lawyer beforehand, j'ai attendu ce jour pour payer ma dette, I have been waiting for this day to pay my debt.
France's relationship with public executions as spectacle wasn't unique to Weidmann's case, and the broader history of the profession behind the blade is worth its own look. Britain's own state executioner tradition is covered in depth in the life and career of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's most prolific executioner, a man who, unlike Desfourneaux, worked almost entirely out of public view. Weidmann's Paris also wasn't done producing infamous killers hiding behind ordinary front doors: a few years later, in the same city, Dr. Marcel Petiot murdered refugees he'd promised to help escape occupied France, in a case that would eventually eclipse even Weidmann's for sheer body count. And for a very different kind of French criminal legend, the decades-long game of cops and robbers played by Jacques Mesrine, often called France's most audacious criminal, shows how the country's fascination with a charismatic outlaw didn't end with the velvet eyed killer of 1939.
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