Guernsey execution broadside.- Execution de M.J.F. Beasse Pour le Crime d'Infanticide, execution broadside in French, double column, woodcut vignette at head and at end, some light browning, hole affecting title and some tears, mounted, folio (325 x 210mm.), Guernsey, Barbet, Imprimeur, 1830.

⁂ Extremely rare with a copy traced in the Priaulx Library but none at auction. Marie Joseph Francois Beasse was the penultimate person executed on Guernsey, John Charles Tapner being the last in 1854. Victor Hugo was violently opposed to capital punishment. and while in exile in Jersey he protested in 1854 against Tapner's execution. Hugo moved to Guernsey in 1855 and one of his first actions was to visit the prison and to learn details about Tapner’s last days. After visiting the prison Hugo was taken to a warehouse and there saw the gibbet that had been used to hang Béasse in 1830. Hugo wrote an essay about Tapner, in which he also discussed Beasse, and it was published in Choses Vues.

The case related to the new-born child of Beasse's servant, Sara Elliot. On being confronted by suspicious constables, Beasse rushed to a corner of his garden and began digging whereupon the body of the baby was discovered with injuries from a larding-pin or skewer to the throat and anus. Beasse was convicted and sentenced to death but the hangman, Beasse's gardener, did not wish to undertake the execution and fled the island; a substitute was found in an English prisoner who was offered a pardon in exchange for carrying out the execution. In a letter to Sara Elliot written on the eve of his execution, Beasse, asks her to consider whether he could truly be guilty of the crime - "In my ignorance I was far from supposing that I was going to dig my own grave when I dug that of
the poor child, already a victim. May the person who was prepared to sacrifice us be forgiven for his and my deaths, whoever that person may be. Besides, my conscience is clear; I may have been imprudent but I have the consolation of not being a criminal..."