How long did the guillotine’s blade hang over the heads of French criminals? Was it abandoned in the late 1800s? Did French citizens of the early days of the twentieth century decry its brutality? No. The blade was allowed to do its work well into our own time. In 1974, Hamida Djandoubi brutally tortured 22 year-old Elisabeth Bousquet in an apartment in Marseille, putting cigarettes out on her body and lighting her on fire, finally strangling her to death in the Provencal countryside where he left her body to rot. In 1977, he became the last person executed by guillotine in France in a multifaceted case as mesmerizing for its senseless violence as it is though-provoking for its depiction of a France both in love with and afraid of The Foreigner. In a thrilling and enlightening account of a horrendous murder paired with the history of the guillotine and the history of capital punishment, Jeremy Mercer, a writer well known for his view of the underbelly of French life, considers the case of Hamida Djandoubi in the vast flow of blood that France's guillotine has produced. In his hands, France never looked so bloody... Praise for Jeremy Mercer’s "Time Was Soft There": "Ably captures a romanticized version of the bum's life."-- The New Yorker "Jeremy Mercer's tale of George Whitman and his beloved bookstore is a book of revelations, for it tells the hard-to-discover true story of George's life and of the twenty-thousand-and-one nights of this enchanted place that continues to be for its habitées as well as for its creator, a way of life."-- Lawrence Ferlinghetti "[Mercer] has fashioned a colorful de facto biography of Whitman . . . with an unblinking gaze at his own sometimes unsavory qualities in a tightly written, insightful memoir of Left Bank literary radicalism. A great read, both funny and quietly moving."-- San Francisco Chronicle "Mercer writes with flair . . . and the milieu he evokes, while a long way from that of the Lost Generation, has its own charm."-- The Wall Street Journal "The memoir is more than an entertaining romp through Parisian literary bohemia at the turn of the millennium. Time Was Soft There will likely be the last firsthand account of an aging legend."-- Newsweek JEREMY MERCER is the author of Time Was Soft There , two crime books, and a former writer for the Ottawa Citizen . He lives in Marseille, France. When the Guillotine Fell 1 October 1971 THE FIRST THING PEOPLE noticed about Hamida Djandoubi was his looks. He was dead handsome: dark eyes, thick hair, and a smile that danced between playfulness and seduction. Women would actually turn and stare after him when he passed on the street. One writer even compared him to Harry Belafonte.Hamida was Tunisian by birth, the eldest of seven children. The family was raised in Carthage, the city so famously razed by the Romans, which by the mid-twentieth century had become just another poor suburb of Tunis. His father, Hédi, worked odd construction jobs and ran a black market veterinary clinic. He didn't have a license, but he did have a knack for healing cattle.As a teenager, Hamida dreamed of Europe. The adventure, the money, and, yes, the women with such liberal reputations. When he finished high school, he took a job selling advertisements for a local business magazine. It took him almost a year, but he saved enough to make the voyage.France was the obvious destination. Like Algeria and Morocco, Tunisia was a former French colony. Although it had gained its official independence in 1956, the two countries maintained close diplomatic ties, including a guest worker program. Hamida qualified for a visa and received his passport shortly before his nineteenth birthday. In September 1968 he booked his passage from Tunis to Marseille, the major port on the Mediterranean Sea and main entry point to France for North Africans.    MARSEILLE IS THE anti-Paris. Lodged among the rocky cliffs on France's southern coast, it is a brash and sun-scoured city. Instead ofthe refined culture and polished façades of the capital, this sweaty port exudes a raw humanity difficult to find in the north. There is little of the wealth of Paris and none of the rush; in Marseille, it is still custom to take a siesta in the afternoon and to spend the early evening sipping apéros under the cooling sky.For centuries, Marseille was the most important port on the Mediterranean and, at one point in the nineteenth century, the fourth-largest port in the world after London, Liverpool, and New York. At the height of the French Empire it was also one of the most prosperous cities in Europe as colonial riches poured in from Indochina, the Caribbean, and Africa. In The Count of Monte Cristo , Alexandre Dumas describes the city's main street, La Canebière, as so luxurious that even Parisians were jealous.1 And when Mark Twain visited Marseille in 1867, he too was awed and recounted the event in his travel diaries: "On every hand were bright colors, flashing constellations