Legacy
Sanson's youngest son Gabriel (1769–1792) had been his assistant and heir apparent from 1790, but the young man died after slipping off a scaffold as he displayed a severed head to the crowd. With his death, the hereditary obligation fell to the eldest son, Henri (1767–1840), who was a soldier in the Revolution (sergeant, then captain of the national guard in Paris, later in the artillery and police of the Tribunals), and was married to Marie-Louise Damidot. Henri assumed the family office from Charles-Henri in April, 1793, and he remained the official Executioner of Paris for 47 years. Henri guillotined Marie Antoinette and the chief prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville (1795), among many others.
Charles Henri's grandson, Henry-Clément Sanson, was the sixth and last in the dynasty of executioners, serving until 1847.
In the late 1840s the Tussaud brothers Joseph and Francis, gathering relics for Madame Tussauds wax museum visited the aged Henry-Clément Sanson and secured parts of one of the original guillotines used during the Age of Terror. The executioner had "pawned his guillotine, and got into woeful trouble for alleged trafficking in municipal property".
Charles-Henri Sanson died on July 4, 1806, and is buried in a family plot in Montmartre Cemetery in Paris.
Read more about this topic: Charles Henri Sanson
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“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)