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Moments that People Who Lived Through the 1970s Will Never Forget

Khalid Elhassan July 25, 2022 39 min

1970s Facts - Texas Rangers take on a drunk fan who invaded the diamond — Texas Rangers take on a drunk fan who invaded the diamond. YouTube

17. The “National Razor’s” Final Shave

Hamida Djandoubi, the last person to be guillotined in France. The Sun

Hamida Djandoubi was born in Tunis in 1949, and moved to Marseilles in 1968. There, he worked a series of menial jobs. One of them, a stint as a landscaper, ended when a workplace accident resulted in the amputation of one of his legs. So he switched careers, and became a pimp. He earned a date with “The National Razor” after he kidnapped, tortured, and strangled to death a former girlfriend in 1974, after she filed a complaint that accused him of trying to force her into prostitution.

Star Wars overlapped with France’s last use of the guillotine. Odyssey

Djandoubi was arrested and went to trial in February of 1974. He was duly convicted and sentenced to death. After he exhausted his appeals and failed to win a reprieve from France’s president, Djandoubi’s went under the guillotine in a Marseilles prison at 4:40AM, September 10^th, 1977. The guillotine remained France’s official instrument of execution throughout the end of the 1970s, and into the early 1980s. The French did not abolish the guillotine and capital punishment until 1981 – the same year MS-DOS 1.0 was released, and Indiana Jones premiered in the US.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.