On January 1, 1930, Yves Floch raped and strangled a mother and her daughter. For this double murder, he was sentenced to the death penalty and guillotined on August 5, 1930 in Quimper. This was the last public execution in Finistère. Warning: sensitive and shocking content.
The death penalty was abolished on June 9, 1981 in France at the start of the first term of President of the Republic François Mitterand (1916-1996), following the bill carried by Robert Badinter (1928-2024) then Minister of Justice. justice. However, the last condemned man to have had his head cut off in the Finistère is the Plouhinecois Yves Flochon August 5, 1930 at 5:30 a.m. It took place in front of the Mesgloaguen prison in Quimper and under the eyes of dozens of curious people who came to witness the execution.
Yves Floch was born on April 13, 1896 in Kerfendal, commune of Plouhinec in Finistère. He is the second of five children in a family of uneducated and illiterate farmers. Yves Floch is a child with a delay in his intellectual development. Brutal and irascible in character, he learned nothing at school which he rarely attended, going to work on his parents' land.
On February 19, 1911, Yves Floch, then aged fifteen, dragged eight-year-old Daniel Vigoureux into a field under the pretext of setting hare snares with him. In reality, he puts the wire collar around the young boy's neck, tightens it and stabs him five times in the back. The reason: an old grudge that he maintains, where there was talk of buttons and small change! Already weakened by tuberculosis, Daniel Vigoureux died from his injuries. Yves Floch is arrested by the Gendarmes of Pont-Croix (29) then imprisoned at the Mesgloaguen remand center in Quimper (29). The accused sinks into silence, having no empathy for the victim. A psychiatric expertise recognizes his full responsibility. Yves Floch appears before the Criminal Court. He is condemned to be locked up in the children's penal colony of Belle-Île-en-Mer (56) until he reaches the age of majority. In the event of a breach of discipline, the punishments are: dry bread diet, kneeling, dungeon, etc. Mistreatment is numerous. Surprisingly, Yves Floch seems to mend his ways and his intelligence seems to awaken during the years spent at the Belle-Île-en-Mer penal colony. He is even a good student, likely to make a good commercial sailor. He is admitted to the maritime section of the colony.
When the Great War broke out, Yves Floch joined the army: he became a soldier, without wounds and without glory, who limited himself to cleaning the trenches of corpses. Upon his demobilization, he worked on liners of the Compagnie Transatlantique or on trawlers from Dieppe and Le Havre, in Seine-Maritime.
In January 1929, Yves Floch, 33, returned to Plouhinec and lived with his brother Corentin and his wife Marie-Louise, farmers. He works on the farm and buys a boat to fish at sea. Yves Floch is solitary, does not seek company. The inhabitants of Plouhinec find him sneaky and dangerous, are wary of him and call him “the man with the knife”…
On January 1, 1930, late in the afternoon, Yves Floch goes to Au biniou breton in Plouhinec, a café run by the Gueguen couple. The owner is absent, but his wife serves the many customers. Yves Floch is enterprising towards her. Luckily, two fishermen intervene, calm tensions and Yves Floch leaves the bar. But at nightfall, on the way to Kerfendal, Yves Floch sees the house of Marianne Colin, née Le Berre. A widow, she lives alone with her daughter Marie-Anne, aged four. Seized by an impulse, Yves Floch enters the widow's house to find with her what the owner of the café has just refused him. He climbs the wall, approaches the window and discovers the mother and her daughter asleep in their bed. When he enters the room, the little girl sees him and begins to cry, which wakes her mother who tries to escape, but Yves Floch grabs her and hits her head against the wall. He grabbed a pair of scissors from the bedside table and hammered the mother's face before squeezing her neck to death and desecrating her body, with the little girl hidden under the sheets. The murderer not wanting to leave any witnesses alive, he strangled her before raping her in turn.
-Before leaving the house, he grabbed the 930 francs he found on a shelf, then set fire to the mattress to burn down the house. Yves Floch hides the stolen money in an abandoned mill and goes home to bed.
The bodies of the two occupants were found charred the next evening. Although the incident appears accidental, the Pont-Croix Gendarmerie is responsible for investigating by the Quimper Public Prosecutor's Office. Chief Marshal Kerrien and Gendarme Labous found pieces of bedding stained with blood. As they continue their investigations, they also discover a gold coin under the bed and footprints in the garden. For them, it is no longer an accidental fire, but a double murder. Yves Floch is suspected, but he denies it despite the blood stains on his clothes and the scratches on his neck. He ends up confessing, specifying: “ I have no regrets, but write it down in your report anyway, it will always be in my favor “. Yves Floch was sentenced to death on April 12, 1930… (source Serge Cariou)
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As for the last one sentenced to the sentence of died in Brittanyhe executed the June 29, 1951 in the courtyard of the Saint-Brieuc prison in Côtes d'Armor. It was about Gustave Maillot domiciled in Prat (22), nicknamed “the wolf of the moor”, found guilty of having killed a farmer, his servant and his son.
On February 24, 1950 in the early morning, Auguste Irène, François Geoffroy, his farm worker, and his fifteen-year-old son were brutally murdered in the stables of the farm, while the worker was preparing to give oats to the two horses and that the farmer was trying to help him. The three victims lie in a pool of blood with their skulls smashed and their throats perforated by stab wounds: carnage! Suspicions quickly fell on Gustave Maillot, 29 years old, married, former Breton wrestling champion. He works as a fairground merchant who sells fabrics and linen, but he is riddled with debt! His wife quickly filed for divorce denouncing her husband's violence…
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