1932: Paul Gorguloff, who assassinated the French President
September 14th, 2009 Headsman
On this date in 1932, deranged Russian emigre Paul Gorguloff was guillotined for murdering President Paul Doumer four months before.
The forgettable Paul Doumer — distinguished for reasons quite beyond his control as the penultimate President of the Third Republic — was a week short of his one-year anniversary in office when the nutbar gunned him down at a Parisian book fair.
Disturbed 37-year-old Gorguloff had some impenetrably incoherent justification for the murder having to do with some “Idea” formed in a trance-like state.
From the moment of my arrival in Paris, and even in the train, I had a sort of hypnotic obsession that I must kill the President. I went and prayed in Notre Dame; then I drank heavily, and gradually decided to kill myself, the idea almost supplanting that of assassination. After drinking I conceived the idea of getting arrested to prevent me from committing the crime, so I asked a policeman on the Boulevard Saint-Michel a lot of stupid questions, hoping that he would ask for my papers and, finding them not to be in order, arrest me. All the time the Devil was saying: “Kill yourself, if you like, but only after you have killed the President.” Until 2 o’clock in the afternoon on the day of the crime I drank in a bar, emptying a bottle of cognac in the hope that I would get too drunk to do anything. Nevertheless I finally went to the book exhibition in the Rue Berryer, where the President was expected. After I had spoken with M. Farrere [he was later shot in the arm by Gorguloff] and looked at a few books, the President arrived. I was in a kind of hypnotic sleep, and fired without really knowing what I was doing. (The Times of London, May 18, 1932)
Whatever this daemon may have amounted to in Gorguloff’s mind, he cherished it; the brief trial was punctuated by repeated invocation of the never-explicated “Idea”:
France, listen to me! I am the apostle of my Idea. My crime was a great protest in the name of the miserable ones who wait ‘over there’ [in Russia] … My Idea is more precious than my life. Take my life, but save my Idea. (The Times of London, July 26, 1932)
The “idea” may have been fame. Gorguloff’s defense counsel — understandably pinning its hopes on an insanity defense (French link) — entered into the record a request the assassin had forwarded Czech authorities to be launched in a rocket to the moon; a correspondent for Le Matin discovered that the killer had nursed similarly half-baked plots to do in Hindenburg, Lenin, and Czech President Thomas Masaryk instead/as well.
Gorguloff was beheaded just before 6 a.m. outside La Sante Prison in Paris.
On this day..
- 1812: Juan Jose Crespo y Castillo, Huanuco rebel - 2020
- 2014: Darfur rebels for killing Chinese oil workers - 2019
- 1568: Jan van Casembroot, Lord of Backerzele - 2018
- 1888: Alexander Goldenson, San Francisco obsessive - 2017
- 1979: Nur Muhammad Taraki, grandfather of the Afghan War - 2016
- 258: St. Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage - 2015
- 1814: Not William Beanes, anthem enabler - 2014
- 1459: Pietro di Campofregoso, former Doge of Genoa, stoned to death - 2013
- 1767: Elizabeth Brownrigg - 2012
- 1894: Enoch Davis, like a cur - 2011
- 2000: Cheng Kejie of the National People's Congress - 2010
- 2004: Mamoru Takuma, for the Osaka school massacre - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Assassins,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Crime,Death Penalty,Diminished Capacity,Execution,France,Guillotine,History,Murder,Notable for their Victims,Public Executions
Tags: 1930s, 1932, la sante prison, lenin, paris, paul doumer, paul gorguloff, paul von hindenburg, september 14, thomas masaryk
