Georgette Thomas and her husband - the parricides guillotined.

Georgette Thomas and her husband - the parricides guillotined.

Georgette Thomas (aged 25) and her husband, Sylvain Henri Thomas, (aged 30) were guillotined in public at 7.30 a.m. on the 24th of January 1887, at the Place d’Armes in Romorantin near Blois, 100 miles south of Paris, before some 2,000 people.

The couple had burned to death Georgette’s mother, Marie Lebon, on the 29th of July, 1886 on the family farm in Selles-Saint-Denis in front of their three children.  

The old lady was doused in oil and then forced into the fireplace and set on fire.  

They thought the mother was a witch and blamed her for poor harvests that they had been experiencing.

At their trial on the 22nd of November 1886, the star witness was their eight year old daughter, Eugenie, who told the court everything that she had seen her parents do to her grandmother.

Alexander and Alexis Lebon, Georgette’s brothers and accomplices received life sentences for their parts in the crime.

A large number of reporters travelled from Paris to cover the almost unique execution of a woman. Both Georgette and Sylvian wore “blacks veils to denote they had been convicted of parricide”.  That it was a joint husband a wife execution heightened the public interest. 

Georgette disrupted the performance by proceeding to remove her clothes, trying to distract the executioners from their duties.  Louis Deibler was so upset that he vowed never to execute another woman - even if it cost him his job. 

Sylvain Henri was executed a few minutes later.  Georgette was the last woman to be publicly guillotined in France.

Death sentences on women in France were very rare and were almost always commuted in the 20th century. 

From 1887 to 1939 no women was executed in France.  However there were nine female executions in the decade 1940 and 1949.

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