On this date in 1917 — with the parting cry, “Je demande pardon à la France! Vive la France!” — 18-year-old Grenoble seamstress Marguerite Francillard was shot at Paris’s St. Lazare prison as a German spy.
Her lover, a German agent posing as a traveling silk salesman, had induced the naive young woman to act as his courier and in this capacity she shuttled his messages treasonably between Paris and Geneva. Eventually, German intelligence sacrificed her: a nothing loss for an empire at war.
The cell Marguerite Francillard inhabited while awaiting execution was subsequently occupied by a more famous (albeit similarly marginal) German asset, Mata Hari.
On this day..
- 1848: Thomas Sale, game
- 1868: Heli Freymond, the last beheaded by sword in Switzerland
- 1870: John Gregson, drunk and disorderly
- 1946: Laszlo Bardossy, former Prime Minister
- 1430: Ten men beheaded, and an eleventh man married
- 2013: Zhang Yongming, cannibal corpse
- 1879: Benjamin Hunter, in the Hunter-Armstrong Tragedy
- 1937: Martemyan Ryutin, for his affair
- 2010: An al Shabaab rebel commander
- 1645: William Laud, given to the devil
- 1934: Marinus van der Lubbe, for the Reichstag fire
- 1775: Yemelyan Pugachev