ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the Paris line of executioners, described in detail in the Sanson family memoirs. Most of the available data about the Sansons, together with the very subject of execution by decapitation, lends itself to oedipal, rather than pre-oedipal, interpretation. The chapter deals primarily with that stage of development, its later derivative expressions and metaphorical transformations. It considers historical aspects of capital punishment, torture, and their psychological implications. Although the Sansons occasionally feared that their position would be endangered by political events and/or their own royalist views, such worries always proved groundless. French society treated the family as a single unit, the members of which became taboo. The Sansons responded to society’s ambivalent attitude by instituting a reversal of the taboo. For example, they likened their own position to that of royalty; at first glance an unusual response but psychologically appropriate when one considers that the king in many primitive cultures is, indeed, taboo.
