André Obrecht

André Albert Obrecht (9 August 1899 – 30 July 1985) was a French executioner who served as the 6th Monsieur de Paris from 1951 until 1976. He participated in a total of 322 executions.

Early life Obrecht was born in the 16th arrondissement of Paris to Jean-Baptiste Léon Obrecht, who worked at La Samaritaine department store and Juliette Rogis, a waistcoat maker descended from a prominent executioner family. Obrecht's mother died of tuberculosis on 29 January 1900, aged 27, when her son was five months old. He was briefly cared for by neighbors, the Durieux couple. In 1903, Obrecht's widowed father later married the couple's daughter, 30-year-old Louise Durieux, subsequently giving birth to Obrecht's four younger siblings.

Through his aunt Rosalie, Obrecht was the nephew of the chief executioner Anatole Deibler. He learned of his uncle's job at ten, when a series of postcards, depicting the executions of the Chauffeurs de la Drôme, were published in September 1909. Following the death of Deibler's own son, who was born only one month after Obrecht, Deibler had a fatherlike relationship with young André, and the affection between the two men never ceased. Four years later, reporter Jean Ker, who interviewed him many times, released a book called Le Carnet Noir du Bourreau (The Executioners' Black Diary), a biography. Obrecht left an image of himself as a normal man albeit a womaniser, quite authoritative at work and, more than anything else, lonely because of his job.