1726: Étienne-Benjamin Deschauffours

ExecutedToday.com ^ | May 24, 2020 | Headsman

[CheshireTheCat]

Etienne-Benjamin Deschauffours (or Duchauffour) was burned at Paris’s Place de Greve on this date in 1726.

Although executed on a sodomy conviction, it wasn’t mere same-sex indulgence but a monstrous, Jeffrey Epstein-like project of elite sexual depravity that cinched his fate, at least if the trial records are to be believed.

“Under a variety of pseudonyms, and in various lodgings, Deschauffours earned a living by spotting ‘likely lads’ and supplying them on payment of commission to wealthy clients, both French and foreign (perhaps some 200 in all),” quoth Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II.

Deschaffours frequently tried out his finds (young and very young), and found his pleasure in their pain (it is difficult not to think forward to the Marquise de Sade, or backward to Gilles de Rais). He castrated a young Italian whose admirer hoped this might render him more compliant.

Reportedly, he procured these semi- or unwilling charges for overmighty magnates who were — as with the previous century’s Affair of the Poisons — far too powerful and numerous to bring to book without inviting systemic crisis. Their vices thus remain mere rumors even down to our remove of posterity, for whom shadowy and redacted documentation yet conceals god knows what monstrosities....

[Sans-Culotte]

In this case the punishment fit the crime(s) (though impalement would have been even more appropriate).

[jacknhoo]

EXCERPT:

Jim Chevallier, in The Old Regime Police Blotter II:

Sodomites, Tribads and “Crimes Against Nature”, notes a 1734 doggerel capturing the scandal-mongering that became as the popular impression of the affair.

Du Chauffour and d’Oswal
are two unparalleled buggers,

There’s the resemblance.

One burned for his crime,
The other was made cardinal,

There’s the difference.

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So, there’s nothing new under the sun!

[FatherofFive]

Jeffrey Epstein-like project of elite sexual depravity

Etienne-Benjamin Deschauffours didn't kill himself, either.

[jacknhoo]

The one made Cardinal:

Henri-Oswald of La Tour d’Auvergne

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri-Oswald_de_La_Tour_d%27Auvergne

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He looks a bit light on his feet, too.

[Red Badger]

... far too powerful and numerous to bring to book without inviting systemic crisis. Their vices thus remain mere rumors even down to our remove of posterity...

Nothing ever changes..................