French Revolutionary Claude Javogues was shot on this date in 1796.

The son of an ancien regime royal castellan, the barrister Javogues would have the opportunity in the revolutionary Convention to vote the death of the old man’s boss, and he did not miss his chance.

Pour préserver les âmes pusillanimes de l’amour de la tyrannie, je vote pour la mort dans les vingt-quatre heures. (“To preserve pusillanimous souls from the love of tyranny, I vote for death within twenty-four hours.”)

The guy wasn’t above getting his own hands dirty in the bloody work of revolution, either, and ran his own local revolutionary terror in his home town of Feurs. (A Chapel of the Martyrs in Feurs pays homage to the 80 victims of Javogues’s Terror.) Even so, he had his own brush with the Committee of Public Safety and stood in some danger for a time of being one of the children devoured by the revolution.

Instead, it was the subsequent Thermidorean Reaction that did for Javogues when he was suspected of complicity in the radicals’ Conspiracy of Equals.

He had the distinction in parting to be shot by a firing detail commanded by one Leopold Hugo — eventually (come 1802) the father of novelist Victor Hugo.

On this day..

• 1614: Magdalena Weixler, "my innocence will come to light"
• 1983: Waldemar Krakos, Dekalog inspiration
• 1989: Jimmy Chua and his Pudu Prison siege accomplices
• 1783: Jacques Francois Paschal, rapist monk
• 1867: Not Santa Anna
• 1932: Lee Bong-chang, would-be Hirohito assassin
• Corpses Strewn: The Streltsy
• 1698: The Streltsy executions begin
• 1987: Eshan Nayeck, the last executed in Mauritius
• 1707: Johann Patkul, schemer
• 1800: Prosser's Gabriel, slave rebel
• 1923: Susan Newell, the last woman hanged in Scotland
• 1911: Several revolutionaries on Double Ten Day