Litterateur Barnabé Farmian Durosoy was guillotined in Paris on this date in 1792.
Playwright, poet, and (most problematically) journalist, Durosoy‘s newspaper Gazette de Paris took issue with the French Revolution’s radical and anti-clerical turn — incurring the dangerous denunciation of Marat.
Durosoy had the boldness to denounce in print the 10 August coup whereby Georges Danton and the Paris Commune* toppled the monarchy.
“If these rebels dare to degrade the king then they dare to judge, and if they judge then their verdict is death!” Durosoy thundered.
He would not even live long enough to see his prophecy fulfilled: the Gazette was immediately suppressed and Durosoy brought to trial as “cashier of all the Anti-revolutionists of the interior.” (Carlyle)
He was the first journalist guillotined in revolutionary France — noting that he died as a royalist ought on the feast day of St. Louis.
* No, not that Paris Commune.
On this day..
- 1783: John Grinslade and John Cunningham
- Feast Day of St. Genesius
- 1854: Willis Washam, "I never done it, though, boys"
- 1945: Seven German POWs
- 1743: James Hunt and Thomas Collins, Pepper-Alley sodomists
- 1944: Durga Malla
- 1916: Benjamin De Fehr, fragging driver
- 897: Pope Stephen VII, Cadaver Synod convener
- 1936: Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, Old Bolsheviks
- 1972: Vassilis Lymberis, the last executed in Greece
- 1876: James Murphy, gibbeted
- 1945: John Birch, Society man