The man’s wife was also sentenced to a suspended three-year jail term for her failure to intervene to protect the infant.

“The baby ended up dying as a result of the violence of his father and the indifference of his mother,” the prosecutor in the case said, according to a French-language report from  AFP.

The sentence comes more than three years after the child died.

On November 10th 2009, a couple of friends of the mother came to visit her and her husband at the hotel room where they lived in Evry, a suburb south of Paris.

In a bedroom they discovered the baby, inert and covered in bruises.

They sought explanations in vain from the parents and later alerted police who arrived only to find that the baby was dead.

An autopsy showed the baby had suffered from traumatic brain injuries and burst eardrums.

The baby’s face was covered in bruises.

An archived report from Le Parisien showed the father, who had repeatedly been in trouble with the law in his youth, had beaten the child whenever it cried.

He acknowledged giving the baby a “great slap” three days before he died.

Despite the baby’s signs of tiredness and loss of appetite, the parents failed to seek medical help.

“It was an appalling thing that occurred behind closed doors in this hotel room,” the prosecutor said, according to the AFP report.

The infant suffered “a slow agony in the presence of his two parents, who were supposed to be protecting him”.