A Definitive List of Some of History's Most Awful People and Events

1. This Tyrant Might Have Been a Clown, But He Was Also a Terrible Monster

Jean-Bedel Bokassa’s rule featured many terrible atrocities. The best known was the arrest of hundreds of schoolchildren in 1979 for refusing to buy school uniforms from a company owned by one of his wives. Bokassa personally oversaw the murder of more than 100 children by his imperial guard. That caused an uproar, and soon thereafter, the self-styled Emperor Bokassa I was deposed by French paratroopers. He had a soft landing, however, and went into a comfortable exile in France, financed by millions of dollars embezzled and stashed in Swiss bank accounts.

Bokassa’s exile did not stay comfortable for long: he blew through his millions within a few years, and was reduced to poverty. Things got so bad that he made a brief reappearance in international news in the 1980s, when one of his children was arrested for shoplifting food. Bokassa returned to Central Africa in 1986, where he was tried and convicted of murder and treason, and sentenced to death. However, the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, and he was released in 1993. He lived another three years, before dying in 1996.

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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading

John Fiske, James Grant Wilson – Appleton’s Cyclopedia of American Biography (2002)

Atkin, Nicholas – Petain (1997)

Biography – Idi Amin

Cordingly, David – Under the Black Flag: The Romance and Reality of Life Among the Pirates (1996)

Encyclopedia Britannica – Jean-Bedel Bokassa

Encyclopedia Britannica – Sicarii

Heritage Daily – Matthew Hopkins, the Real Witch Hunter

History Collection – Lesser-Known Horrible Criminals

Indiana Genealogy Trail – Jackson County Indiana: The Legend of the Reno Gang

Johnson, Captain Charles – A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates (1998)