On this date in 1722, the younger brother of the great French outlaw Cartouche was punished with a bizarre non-fatal hanging in Paris’s Place de Greve.

At least, it was supposed to be non-fatal.

Little Louison was a whelp of 15 years and already condemned to hard labor in the months-long smashing-up of the gang that followed the ringleader’s 1721 execution. “Nothing but hangings and breakings on the wheel!” one diarist scribbled in July 1722. “Every day some Cartouchian executed.”

As a sort of piece de resistance for the month, a judge named Arnould de Boueix, sore about the murder of a gendarme in his family, ordered the young Louison “hanged” under the armpits (the rope about his chest) for two hours as an additional punishment/humiliation. Judge de Boueix apparently devised this thing without any sort of precedent or anatomical expertise that would actually confirm the safety of the procedure.

[Louison] cried out very loudly at first, and begged that he might be put out of pain at once, as the weight of his body seemed to force every drop of blood down to his feet. “Ce-qui” (adds Barbier) “est la souffrance des pendus.” [“Such is the suffering of the hanged” -ed.]

Later, his tongue protruded, and he spoke no more. Without waiting for the ordained two hours to expire, the lad was taken down and placed in medical care; but it was too late. He was already dead. “He was very wicked for his years,” says Barbier, “and had been an accomplice of his brother from a very early age.”

On this day..

• 1909: Sheikh Fazlollah Noori, anti-constitutionalist martyr
• 1849: Maximilian Dortu, republican martyr
• 1940: Udham Singh, Jallianwala Bagh massacre avenger
• 1934: Otto Planetta and Franz Holzweber, for the Juliputsch
• 1767: Obadiah Greenage, colonial gangster
• 1701: Esther Rodgers, repentant
• 1868: Stefan Karadzha, Bulgarian national hero
• 1812: Hölzerlips, Blood Court prey
• 1602: Charles de Gontaut, duc de Biron
• 1903: Hilario Hidalgo and Francisco Renteria
• 1959: Cho Pong-am, Presidential runner-up
• 1963: 21 Iraqi Communists