On this date in 1943, French abortionist Désiré Pioge was guillotined in Paris by the family-values Vichy regime.

Very much overshadowed by the like fate shared by Marie-Louise Giraud a few weeks before, Pioge doesn’t even boast his own French Wikipedia entry — just a passing mention on Giraud’s. (Many other Giraud posts aver that she was the last or only abortionist executed by Vichy France, glossing over Pioge entirely.)

According to the scanty available notes collected by this site, this 46-year-old horse-gelder from Saint-Ouen-en-Belin already had two prewar convictions for abortion, in 1935 and 1939. He’d served 18 months for manslaughter in the latter case, when his services caused the death of the mother.

Abortion had been criminalized in some form in France since the Napoleonic era (after being legalized during the French Revolution), but the wartime Vichy government escalated it to a capital crime. As best I can determine, Giraud and Pioge appear to be the only people who actually suffered the full extent of the law.

On this day..

• 1979: Jesse Bishop
• 1847: Peder Ringeneie
• 1943: Piotr Jarzyna, Polish Resistance
• 1829: Matej Tatarka, outlaw
• 1773: Four convict labor escapees in Maryland
• 1584: Anders Bengtsson, unchristian man and tyrant
• 1875: Henry Brown, Skinker assassin
• 1865: Johnson Speed, arson bystander
• 1941: Forty-eight French hostages
• 2008: Wang Zhendong, ant profiteer
• 1789: The murderers of the baker Francois
• 1858: Marion Ira Stout, for loving his sister
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