Forty years ago in a democratic country of Western Europe, France, the death penalty still existed. Indeed, just 40 years ago, on 9 October 1981, the law was promulgated which definitively abolished it from the French penal code. The norm was strongly desired by President François Mitterrand, at the time just elected for his first term at the Elysium, which had centered part of his electoral campaign, a few months earlier, precisely on the issue of capital punishment. At that moment, however, in France there were still some sentenced to be executed, with sentences from the end of 1980: some of these trials were quashed and canceled already before the fateful 9 October, or immediately after the new law, while it was still in progress the appeal process.
The last sentenced to death was a certain Philippe Maurice, later pardoned on 28 October 1980. But what is surprising, almost two centuries after the French Revolution, is that still until 1977 in France there were executions and these up to the last were done in the old fashioned way, that is, with the very same guillotine that cut off the heads of kings and aristocrats from 1789 onwards. The last sentenced to death and actually guillotined was Hamida Djandoubi, a Tunisian citizen on charges of murder and torture of his ex-girlfriend Élisabeth Bousquet. Djandoubi was definitively condemned on February 25, 1977 and precisely executed on September 10 of the same year: for the very last time, on that date, the guillotine was used in France.
From 1959 to 1981, i.e. in the phase of the Fifth Republic, 20 people were sentenced to death and then executed (almost all by guillotine or alternatively by firing squad) in France. The socialist leader Mitterrand therefore pledged to put an end to this barbarism and kept his promise a few months after his election. In Italy, however, the death penalty was abolished by the penal code as early as 1889, only to be reintroduced during the Fascist regime. It remained in force until 1994 only in the Military Penal Code of War, and in 2007 it was also definitively canceled from the Constitution. In Germany it was only removed in 1987 (in the GDR), while the last European country ever to abolish the death penalty was the United Kingdom in 1998. Although the last execution is precisely that of 1977 in France.
