Luigi Lucheni

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Luigi Lucheni (1898)

Luigi Lucheni (born April 22, 1873 in Paris , † October 19, 1910 in Geneva ), also Louis Lucheni , was an Italian laborer and the murderer of the Austrian Empress Elisabeth (Sisi) . Lucheni saw himself as an "individual anarchist ", as a supporter of Bakunin and as a representative of " propaganda of action ".

Life

Childhood and youth

Lucheni was born in France to a single worker of Italian descent and grew up in an orphanage. Then he came to live with different foster parents, first in Parma , later in the small town of Varano near Parma, where he went to school for two years. According to his own statement, the foster parents were only interested in the care allowance they received from the state for him. Even as a schoolboy he had to work, as a gardener and as a servant to the pastor of a neighboring parish. He had to hand over the money to the foster parents. He left school when he was ten and worked as a stonemason's assistant . In 1889, at the age of 16, he dragged heavy sleepers and rails for railway construction on the Parma– Spezia line . In the fall of 1889 he left his last foster parents.

Working in Switzerland

Lucheni went to Genoa and found work for the day in the port. In the spring of 1890 he emigrated to Switzerland . In Ticino he worked in road construction for two years, first in Chiasso and later in Airolo . In spring 1892 he hiked with a comrade over the Gotthard Pass , Andermatt and the Furka Pass to the Rhone Valley and on to Lake Geneva . Lucheni later claimed during his interrogation that he walked “most of the way” without shoes: “The feet were wrapped in rags or on bare soles.” The two workers came to Versoix near Geneva via Lausanne and Nyon . There they found employment in road construction. Lucheni stayed in Versoix for about ten months and from there also visited Geneva. In early 1893 he moved further north. He worked on construction sites in Uetikon on Lake Zurich and on a large bridge in Sonnenberg.

In the spring of 1894 Lucheni finally emigrated to Budapest , with a two-day stay in Vienna . However, he did not find work in Budapest and therefore only stayed two weeks. Together with a comrade, he asked for help at the Italian consulate. The consul filled out a voucher that they could exchange for a train ticket to Fiume . From Fiume Lucheni marched on to Trieste alone . The Austrian police picked him up there and, after a few days in custody, deported him across the border to Italy.

military service

Lucheni joined the military in July 1894 and served for three and a half years. In 1896 he took part in the Italian cavalry in the Abyssinian campaign. He was also awarded a medal - although he did not take part in the Battle of Adua , for which he was awarded. His years in the military were a bright spot in his life, as he was given decent clothing and regular food, even if he was bullied by the instructors because of his insubordination.

Lucheni's military service ended in December 1897. Then the captain of his squadron , a nobleman from the house of Aragon, employed him privately for three and a half months as a servant in his households in Naples and Palermo .

Second emigration to Switzerland

Beginning of April 1898 took Lucheni with a glider to Genoa. From there he walked to Turin via Ventimiglia and Monte Carlo . After looking in vain for work there, he returned to Switzerland. He crossed the Great Saint Bernard , arrived in Martigny and worked as a mason in Salvan for five weeks . In May he marched on to Lausanne. There he was busy building the new post office.

The assassination attempt on Empress Elisabeth
Luigi Lucheni is taken for interrogation by the police

Anarchism and assassination plans

The poverty of the lower classes and his own life on the subsistence level made Lucheni hatred of the authorities. He began to open up to anarchism and study the works of relevant theorists. Although he was not in contact with other anarchists, he referred to himself as such. Soon he saw only annoying parasites in monarchs and princes .

When the Italian King Umberto I had a workers' uprising in Milan bloodily suppressed in May 1898 , Lucheni swore revenge and made plans for assassination, but had no money to travel to Italy. His plan to murder Prince Henri Philippe Marie d'Orléans also failed because his stay in Geneva was canceled at short notice .

The assassination

When Lucheni finally found out about the visit of the Austrian Empress to Geneva, he changed his assassination plan and decided to murder her. On September 10, 1898, he waited patiently in front of the luxury hotel Beau-Rivage . When Elisabeth was on the way to a steamer on Lake Geneva with her lady-in-waiting, Countess Irma Sztáray , he stabbed her with a file an 85 mm deep stab wound in the pericardium. After the wound initially went unnoticed, the Empress died after several fainting spells that same afternoon. Lucheni had achieved his goal of murdering a member of the aristocracy he hated and shocking the public.

A few minutes after the attack, which was initially believed to be an attack by a hooligan, he was arrested by passers-by and handed over to the police. When he was first questioned, he immediately confessed to the act with pride. When Elizabeth's death was announced at around 2:50 p.m., he shouted triumphantly: “Long live anarchy! Long live the anarchists! "

Sentencing and imprisonment

On November 10th, Lucheni was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of the empress. He himself had demanded the death penalty for himself - with the double-edged argument, also directed against the nobility, that whoever doesn't work shouldn't eat either - possibly also in order to have one last public appearance under the guillotine and to join the anarchist movement as a martyr . Therefore, the assassin had requested his extradition to Italy, where the death penalty had not been abolished, as in the canton of Geneva. However, this was not complied with. His act, though committed as a loner, led to the Rome International Conference on Social Defense against Anarchists that same year .

While in detention, Lucheni behaved aggressively, especially after his memoirs were taken away. He repeatedly attacked prison guards and the prison director. He tried to stab the latter with an awl he worked with while weaving slippers in his cell. He was placed in solitary confinement several times. Lucheni hanged himself with a belt on October 19, 1910 in a dark cell. The official suicide version has been questioned. Rumor has it that some help was given to Lucheni's “suicide”.

The murder weapon

Lucheni's murder weapon

Lucheni did not have the means to acquire a revolver . He didn't have enough money for a dagger either, only for a file that was sharpened on three sides and that was just long enough that a fatal hit could be struck with a precise stab straight into the heart. An acquaintance of Lucheni's, Martinelli, put a firm grip on the file for him. The original murder weapon is exhibited in the Sisi Museum in the Vienna Hofburg .

Examination of the brain

After Lucheni's suicide, the head was severed from the body. The brain was removed and examined phrenologically , and no abnormalities were found. The head was then stored in a glass container filled with formalin in the Forensic Medicine Institute of the University of Geneva. At the request of Austria , the preparation came to Vienna in 1985 to the Federal Pathological-Anatomical Museum, the so-called Narrenturm . The head was not on public display and was not examined further. In 2000 the skull was quietly buried in the so-called anatomy graves in Vienna's central cemetery.

literature

  • Maria Matray, Answald Krüger: The assassination attempt. The death of Empress Elisabeth and the act of the anarchist Lucheni . Langen Müller, Munich 1998², ISBN 3-7844-2694-8 .
  • Santo Cappon (Ed.): I have no regrets !. The Sisi Murderer's Notes. Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 1998, ISBN 3-552-04913-4 .

Web links

Commons : Luigi Lucheni  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), pp. 40, 48.
  2. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 23 f.
  3. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 40 f.
  4. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), pp. 41–43.
  5. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 43.
  6. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 45 f.
  7. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 46 f.
  8. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 64.
  9. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 46 f .; see. Letters pp. 51–53, 81–83.
  10. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 47 f.
  11. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 14.
  12. a b Michael Newton: Famous Assassinations in World History: An Encyclopedia (2 volumes), p. 134
  13. Lucheni made false statements during the interrogations regarding the question of how he learned of Elisabeth's presence in Geneva. He said that he had already observed the empress the day before the murder, which was confirmed by a testimony ( texts from the Lucheni file , pp. 20, 36). He found out about the Empress's stay "from the newspapers" (p. 24). The visit of the empress was not mentioned in the press until the day of the murder (p. 74).
  14. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 59.
  15. Marc Tribelhorn: "I would commit the act again!" In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung from September 11, 2017
  16. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), pp. 13-16.
  17. Sigrid-Maria Großering : Murder in the Habsburg house
  18. Wolfgang Regal / Michael Nanut, Der Kopf des Mörders (Narrenturm 22) ( Memento of the original from August 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . SpringerMedizin, Doctors Week 30/2005, December 5, 2005. Retrieved April 12, 2017. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.springermedizin.at
  19. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 37.
  20. ^ Protocols of the interrogations in the Lucheni file, archives of the Geneva Public Prosecutor's Office. Quoted in: Textsammlung (PDF), p. 58.
  21. Photo: Showcase with the murder weapon in the exhibition room “Das Attentat” ( memento of the original from January 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. hofburg-wien.at, accessed on August 18, 2016 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hofburg-wien.at
  22. Wolfgang Regal, Michael Nanut: The Murderer's Head ( Memento of the original from August 27, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. SpringerMedizin.at, December 5, 2005 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.springermedizin.at
  23. ^ Roland Sedivy: Memento historiae 2008: von Gall, Landsteiner, Virchow, Laborpest and Kaiserin Sissy; Editorial in: Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift, Volume 158 / 11-12, 2008, p. 312 f.