À la lanterne

Slogan used during French Revolution

Lanterne is a French word designating a lantern or lamp post. The word, or the slogan "À la lanterne!" (in English: To the Lamp Post!) gained special meaning and status in Paris and France during the early phase of the French Revolution, from the summer of 1789. Lamp posts served as an instrument to mobs to perform extemporised lynchings and executions in the streets of Paris during the revolution when the people of Paris occasionally hanged officials and aristocrats from the lamp posts. The English equivalent would be "String Them Up!" (British) or "Hang 'Em High! "(American)

La Lanterne became a symbol of popular or street justice in revolutionary France. The slogan "À la lanterne!" is referred to in such emblematic songs as Ça Ira ("les aristocrates à la lanterne!" means "aristocrats to the lamp post!" in this context). Journalist Camille Desmoulins, who had earlier practiced law, designated himself "The Lantern Attorney." He wrote a pamphlet entitled (in translation) "The Lamp Post Speaks to Parisians," in which "la lantèrne" tells the people, "I've always been here. You could have been using me all along!". As the revolutionary government became established, lamp posts were no longer needed as execution instruments, being replaced by the guillotine which became infamous in Paris during 1793–1794, though all major French cities had their own. Hanging people from lamp posts ceased to be a part of Paris rebellions in the nineteenth century. Though the tradition continued in symbolic form up to the twentieth and twenty first centuries, via the ritual hanging in effigy of unpopular political figures during street protests.

The first prominent victim of lynching "à la lanterne" was Joseph Foullon de Doué, an unpopular politician who replaced Jacques Necker as a Controller General of Finances in 1789. Immediately following the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 two of the invalids (veteran soldiers) forming part of the garrison of the fortress were hanged in the Place de Grève, although it is not recorded whether lanternes were used for the purpose. Particularly the lamp post standing at the corner of the Place de Grève and the Rue de la Vannerie served as an improvised gallows. The reason for that was partly symbolic: the lantern was placed opposite the Hôtel de Ville (Paris City Hall), directly under the bust of Louis XIV, so that "popular justice could take place right under the eyes of the king". In August 1789, journalist and politician Camille Desmoulins wrote his Discours à la lanterne [fr], a defense of lynchings in the streets of Paris. Desmoulins was nicknamed Procureur général de la lanterne (Attorney General of the Lamp post). On 21 October 1789, a hungry Parisian mob dragged François the Baker (Denis François) out of his shop and hanged him from a lamp post, apparently because he had no bread to sell. Street lynching, instigated by various factors, gradually became an effective tool for the ends of the Jacobins. On 14 December 1790, the crowd hanged barrister Pascalis and chevalier de La Rochette from a lamp post in Aix en Provence. The advocates of street justice cried "À la lanterne! À la lanterne!" shortly before the lynching. On 20 June 1792, a mob broke into the Tuileries and threatened the queen Marie Antoinette. Her lady in waiting Jeanne Louise Henriette Campan reported that in the crowd "there was a model gallows, to which a dirty doll was suspended bearing the words "Marie Antoinette a la lanterne" to represent her hanging".

In 1919, Max Pechstein, a German expressionist painter, created a poster for the magazine An die Lanterne (À la lanterne). The poster depicts, among other things, a man hanging from a rope on a lamp post.