On this date in the pregnant year of 1789, the former boulevard actor Francois Bordier hanged for a bit of revolutionary overexuberance.
He’d gained his fame in the 1780s for his portrayals of both Harlequin (on stage) and a besotted gambler (in Parisian society); “police records bulge with accounts of his gambling debts and spats with actresses.”
The summer of 1789, after the Bastille was stormed in Paris, was in the countryside la Grande Peur, the Great Fear: bread shortages and political upheaval put many a manor to the sack.
One such facility was Rouen’s Hotel de l’Intendance, assailed on August 3 by a mob led by Bordier, along with another fellow named Jourdain. Jourdain would perish at the gallows with Bordier but then as now the actor was all anyone wanted to talk about. The horror or heroism of Bordier moved purple pamphlets by the kiloquire, and even put Bordier on the other side of the playbill as a character in the next season’s pantomimes.*
At the news of the imprisonment of their harlequin, rumours were heard in Paris that thirty thousand Parisians, with Saint-Huruge at their head, would march to the rescue; but the authorities at Rouen, nothing daunted by the threat, put the two ringleaders on their trial. Both were condemned to death, and in spite of the intercession of Bailly and Lafayette on behalf of Bordier, both were hanged at Rouen on August 21.
His preserved head can still be gawked at the musée Flaubert et d’Histoire de la Médecine.
* See Political Actors: Representative Bodies and Theatricality in the Age of the French Revolution by Executed Today interviewee Paul Friedland. Bordier, Friedland observes elsewhere, “personified the mixing of theatrical and political forms, the profane and the sacred, that so suddenly upset the established order in 1789. And post-mortem characterizations of Bordier reflected that peculiar combination of amusement and horror that politico-theatrical hybrids seemed to inspire.”
On this day..
- 1497: Lorenzo Tornabuoni, Florentine nobleman
- 1647: Thomas Boulle and the remains of Mathurin Picard, for the Louviers possession
- 1650: Four condemned and one reprieved on appeal from the Wiltshire Assizes
- 2016: 36 for ISIS's Camp Speicher massacre
- 1811: Barbara Zdunk, the last witch (sort of)
- 1851: John McCaffary, the last hanged by Wisconsin
- 509 B.C.E.: The Sons of Brutus
- 1887: Israel Lipski
- 2010: Four in Equatorial Guinea
- 1938: Margarita Arsenieva, the explorer's widow
- 1915: Eleven Arab nationalists
- 2007: Frank Duane Welch, a cold case CSI caught