Beheaded in Bordeaux

printers & booksellers were potentially dangerous people

Bordeaux, the guillotine

Arnaud-Antoine Pallandre (1750–1794), bookseller, was executed by guillotine in Bordeaux¹, France in 1794.²

Men like Pallandre who believed that the French Revolution had gone too far by January 1790 found sanctuary and comradeship at his bookshop, and their ideas were represented in the pamphlets he sold.  During the Revolution, both for the government and in the public mind, printers and booksellers became prominent players—highly influential and potentially dangerous people whose views mattered. ³

In the Terror, Pallandre’s personal views were put on trial. He allowed those into his shop who criticized the Revolution.

Texts were just part of the evidence of his crime. He himself posed a danger to the Revolution. In 1794, he was put on trial for selling libelles (libelles were defiant of authority, and spoke out against prominent individuals).⁴ He was found guilty, loaded onto a cart that made its way to the guillotine at place de la Révolution and executed.⁵ 

1. Auerbach, Stephen ( 2009). Politics, Protest, and Violence in Revolutionary Bordeaux, 1789–1794. Journal of the Western Society for French History.

2. Histoire de la Terreur à Bordeaux (Bordeaux, 1877).

3. C. Walton, Policing Public Opinion in the French Revolution (New York, 2009).

4. Jane McLeod, Renée Girard (2020). Policing printers and booksellers before and after 1789: a case study in Bordeaux, French History, Volume 34 (March):22–42. J. McLeod, ‘Evolving Loyalties: A Provincial Printer in Revolutionary Bordeaux’, Mémoires du Livre/Studies in Book Culture, 2 (2010).

5. Mirassoux, Dominique (May 25,2018). The guillotine in Bordeaux, history. Bordeaux Gazette. In 167 years in Bordeaux, the guillotine occupied five different locations. 369 were executed in Bordeaux, 321 men and 48 women, the vast majority during the Revolutionary Terror.