Primo, stando a Wikipedia la ghigliottina è stata inventata proprio durante la rivoluzione francese (confermato anche qui ed altrove)
Secondo, è stato il Terrore giacobino ad essere sanguinario, con almeno trentacinquemila esecuzioni nel giro di pochi mesi. Se trovi statistiche sulle condanne a morte nei secoli precedenti per piacere portacele a conoscenza.

Sorry Eike, I missed your comments!
I am not saying you are wrong, I wrote what it just work for me. I suspect that my way of doing does not mix well with preferences.d.
What’s the content of your preferences.d?

Sorry, third reply here… Did you get my apt transcript? It seems wordpress ate up more than its line breaks?

Sorry, the system ate my line breaks…

One of us is doing something wrong…

Here’s my transcript (shortened by some thousand packages 😉 )…

root@track:/etc/apt# cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian/ bookworm main non-free non-free-firmware contrib
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian-security/ bookworm-security main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian unstable main contrib non-free non-free-firmware
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian experimental main contrib non-free non-free-firmware

root@track:/etc/apt# apt update
OK:1 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm InRelease
OK:2 http://deb.debian.org/debian-security bookworm-security InRelease
OK:3 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-updates InRelease
OK:4 http://deb.debian.org/debian bookworm-backports InRelease
OK:5 https://updates.signal.org/desktop/apt xenial InRelease
OK:6 http://deb.debian.org/debian testing InRelease
OK:7 http://deb.debian.org/debian unstable InRelease
OK:8 http://deb.debian.org/debian experimental InRelease
Paketlisten werden gelesen… Fertig
Abhängigkeitsbaum wird aufgebaut… Fertig
Statusinformationen werden eingelesen… Fertig
Alle Pakete sind aktuell.

root@track:/etc/apt# apt list –upgradable
Auflistung… Fertig

root@track:/etc/apt# mv preferences.d/ preferences.d.bak

root@track:/etc/apt# LANG=C apt upgrade
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Reading state information… Done
Calculating upgrade… Done
[……………]
The following packages will be upgraded:
adduser adwaita-icon-theme alsa-topology-conf anacron apg apper-data apt-config-icons apt-config-icons-hidpi apt-config-icons-large
[……………]
xserver-xorg-video-vesa xserver-xorg-video-vmware xxd xz-utils yelp-xsl yt-dlp zenity-common zip zlib1g zlib1g:i386 zlib1g-dev
1093 upgraded, 52 newly installed, 0 to remove and 1948 not upgraded.
Need to get 855 MB/865 MB of archives.
After this operation, 326 MB of additional disk space will be used.
W: Unable to read /etc/apt/preferences.d/ – DirectoryExists (2: No such file or directory)
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]
[no thanks!]

root@track:/etc/apt# mv preferences.d.bak/ preferences.d

root@track:/etc/apt# LANG=C apt upgrade
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree… Done
Reading state information… Done
Calculating upgrade… Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
linux-headers-6.12.9+bpo-common linux-kbuild-6.12.9+bpo
Use ‘apt autoremove’ to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

It has been working for me on several machines since at least a decade… I just rechecked on the freshly installed machine I’m writing from and worked as I intended.

The order in sources.list decides where to get a package from, not which package version to install.
I just tried it by removing my preferences and having stable first, and it wants to upgrade 3042 packages. After reenabling preferences, it is back to 0.

You can conclude this from the man page you cited, too, by just reading on: ” It is important to list sources in order of preference, with the most preferred source listed first. Typically this will result in sorting by speed from fastest to slowest (CD-ROM followed by hosts on a local network, followed by distant Internet hosts, for example).”