the execution and its message ishment other than to start to work as an executioner when he had reached adulthood.110 A game in Seville in the early seventeenth century also ended with the hanged six year old boy dead.111 One can wonder how many such cases there were? The vast majority of such games would have passed off without incident. Jean-Marie-Joseph Aimé Boisaymé describes, disgustedly, how in Grenoble, probably around 1820, he saw the executioner and his assistant preparing the guillotine. They were telling jokes, and the children and a few others who were gathered around the scaffolds laughed.112 In Antwerp in 1837, the mayor Gérard Le Grelle complained that the guillotine was assembled ready for an execution but was left unguarded, and children were allowed to use the scaffold to play, for example executions, on it.113 The attendance at executions, at least up to the later part of the eighteenth century, by many was seen as a useful part of the education of children and therefore their presence was welcomed rather than viewed as a problem. A gruesome, but not unusual, example is told by the Swedish count Carl Axel Löwenhielm who as an eight year old was sent to a pension in Strasbourg where the boys were taken to the hanging of a servant condemned for theft. This was to serve them as a warning. Later he saw other executions among them a burning alive and someone broken alive on the wheel.114 Richard Evans have noted the presence of schoolboys, singing hymns or expected to watch, as a ”striking feature” at executions in Germany until the mid-nineteenth century.115 During the nineteenth century, however, children increasingly were unwelcomed guests at the executions and therefore when the first execution was to take place on the Esplanade in Antwerp in 1856, the mayor Jean François 110 Motraye 1723 p 361, see also Sandén 2016 p 102 sqq where Annika Sandén raises some doubt against the story, like the ability of a child to be that skilled in wielding an axe. 111 Perry 1980 p 205. 112 Boisaymé 1863 p 48 sq. 113 Draft of letter from the mayor Gérard Le Grelle of Antwerp to the Procureur du Roi 26 August 1837 731#1478FAA. 114 Löwenhielm 1923 p 24 sqq, see also Banner 2002 p 28. 115 Evans 1997 p 75 sq (his examples are from the 1680’s until 1843), see also Bessler 1997 p 24. 55
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