Meet Frantz Schmidt: executioner, torturer, and, particularly for his time, diarist. Following in his father's footsteps, Frantz entered the executioner profession as an apprentice. With 394 executions and forty-five years later, he retired to focus on managing the large medical practice he always considered his true calling. Through the examination of Frantz's extraordinary and often neglected archive, Joel F. Harrington delves into a world of human brutality, tragedy, and injustice. At the same time, he poses a fascinating question: can a man who practiced such brutality daily also be insightful, compassionate—even progressive? The Faithful Executioner is the biography of an ordinary man trying to overcome an unjust family curse; it is also a remarkable panorama of a Europe on the brink of modernity, a world with unsettling similarities to our own.

• Pages: 320
• Dimensions: 13x13cm