Product details
- ISBN 9780099572664
- Weight: 281g
- Dimensions: 129 x 197mm
- Publication Date: 01 May 2014
- Publisher: Vintage Publishing
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
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Meet Frantz Schmidt: executioner, torturer and, most unusually for his times, diarist.
Following in his father’s footsteps, Frantz entered the executioner’s trade as an Apprentice. 394 executions and forty-five years later, he retired to focus his attentions on running the large medical practice that he had always viewed as his true vocation.
Through examination of Frantz’s exceptional and often overlooked record, Joel F. Harrington delves deep into a world of human cruelty, tragedy and injustice. At the same time, he poses a fascinating question: could a man who routinely practiced such cruelty also be insightful, compassionate – even progressive?
The Faithful Executioner is the biography of an ordinary man struggling to overcome an unjust family curse; it is also a remarkable panorama of a Europe poised on the cusp of modernity, a world with startling parallels to our own.
