The last execution for homosexuality
Two ordinary working men, a doorway, an example made: the last execution for homosexuality in France.
On 6 July 1750, two men were strangled and then burned on the Place de Grève in Paris. It was the last execution for same-sex acts in French history.
Their story began on the night of 4 January 1750. On the Rue Montorgueil, an officer of the city's night watch caught the forty-year-old Jean Diot, who worked in a charcuterie, and the twenty-three-year-old Bruno Lenoir, a young craftsman from the neighbourhood, having sex in a doorway. Both were arrested. The charge stated only that they had behaved indecently; one judge spoke of a crime that decency forbade describing in writing.
The trial began on 11 April, and the death sentence was handed down on 27 May. Its severity was striking: at that time most proceedings against so-called sodomites ended in warnings or short spells in prison, and death sentences were almost exclusively reserved for cases linked to other crimes such as murder. The chronicler Edmond Barbier noted that the two had no connections whatsoever to influential circles. It was precisely because they were ordinary workers with no one to speak for them that an example was made of them.
On 6 July they were taken to the Place de Grève, the usual place of execution. They were killed at around five o'clock. The sentence itself was not read out to the crowd; Barbier at first assumed they had been pardoned. Some authorities feared that public punishments would only put ideas into young people's heads that they knew nothing about.
In 1791, same-sex love disappeared from French criminal law. Only in 2014 did Mayor Anne Hidalgo have a commemorative plaque put up on the Rue Montorgueil in memory of the last couple executed in France for loving each other. It has since been defaced several times.