Robert François Damiens
Robert-François Damiens or Damien (born January 9, 1715 in La Thieuloye near Arras , † March 28, 1757 in Paris ) was a French assassin . In 1757 he carried out a failed assassination attempt on the French King Louis XV. and is one of the last convicts to be executed with the traditional cruel punishment for regicide ( quartering ).
Life
Damiens was born in La Thieuloye, a village near Arras, and enlisted in the army at an early age . After his dismissal he was a servant in the Jesuit college in Paris, but dismissed from this and also from other positions due to misconduct. His behavior eventually earned him the name Robert le Diable . During the dispute between Pope Clement XI. and the Paris Parliament (Court of Justice), Damiens seems to have been very upset by the ecclesiastical disorganization that followed the clergy's refusal to administer the sacraments to the Jansenists and convulsionists . He firmly believed that the king's death would restore peace. Damiens stated that he only wanted to frighten the king without seriously harming him.
Assassination attempt and arrest
When on January 5, 1757 King Louis XV. Got into his car, Damiens lunged at him and stabbed him with a knife, only causing him a slight wound. The king ordered that Damiens should be guarded and not killed.
Damiens did not try to flee and was immediately overwhelmed. He was incarcerated in the conciergerie and kept strapped down after a failed suicide attempt . He was severely tortured in order to find out who knew about it, initiators and accomplices , after which he could no longer use his legs. The court found him guilty of insulting divine and human majesty and the reprehensible regicide and sentenced him to repentance , kneeling in front of the Notre Dame cathedral , by renouncing the crime and asking the pardon of God, King and Justice on the Place de Grève to be torn to pieces by horses and burned to ashes after being tortured and burned - the same verdict as for François Ravaillac , the murderer of Henry IV.
The execution and its consequences
The executive executioner was Nicolas-Charles-Gabriel Sanson, assisted by his nephew Charles Henri Sanson , whose first execution this was. Before Damiens was put to death, he was judged to have his Tathand charred with burning sulfur (brûlée de feu de soufre). He was tortured with red-hot tongs. Liquid wax, pitch , lead , sulfur, and boiling oil were poured into his deep wounds. It took six horses to execute him, which only succeeded after Sanson had severed the arm and leg tendons. Damiens' body parts were burned to ashes and scattered to the wind. After his death, in accordance with the law for king assassins, his house was torn down, the square was leveled and a building ban was imposed there. Cottel widowed his siblings Louis, Antoine-Joseph and Catherine Damien, and their relatives were ordered to change their names on pain of death . His direct relatives - his father Pierre-Joseph Damien, his wife Élisabeth Molerienne and his daughter Marie-Élisabeth Damien - were expelled from the kingdom forever, also under threat of the death penalty on return. It was one of the most gruesome executions of modern times and the last of its kind in France - made difficult by the fact that it was not a murder but an attempted homicide. The French regicide law (parricide, régicide) made no difference.
As a result, various conspiracy theories were spread that Damiens' act was actually a Jesuit conspiracy. The reasons given, in addition to his previous work for the order, include his origin from Arras, whose residents were considered to be Jesuit-compliant, or that the order had already been involved in assassination attempts, namely on Henry IV. These rumors contributed to the fact that the order It was banned in France in 1764 .
literature
- Giacomo Casanova was among the spectators of the execution and briefly goes into it in his memoir " Histoire de ma vie " .
- Michel Foucault : Monitoring and Punishing. The birth of the prison (= Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. 184). Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1977, ISBN 3-518-07784-8 .
- Horst Karasek : The division into four. How the royal murderer Damiens was tried in Paris in 1757 (= Wagenbach's pocket library. 230). Wagenbach, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-8031-2230-9 (literary representation based on contemporary documents).
- Dale K. van Kley: The Damiens affair and the unraveling of the Ancien Régime, 1750-1770 . Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1984, ISBN 0-691-05402-9 .
- Henri Sanson: Diaries of the executioners of Paris. 1685–1847 (= library of the 18th century. ) 2 volumes. 3. Edition. Kiepenheuer, Leipzig et al. 1989. ISBN 3-378-00288-3 .
- Marion Sigaut: Mourir à l'ombre des Lumières. L'énigme Damiens. Jacqueline Chambon, Nîmes 2010, ISBN 978-2-7427-9015-9 .
- Voltaire : Histoire du Parlement. Du Fay, Amsterdam 1769, chapter 67: "Assassination de Damiens sur la personne du roi". ( Online ).
Web links
- Literature by and about Robert François Damiens in the catalog of the German National Library
- http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/242/ - verdict (English)
- The execution of the assassin Robert François Damiens March 28, 1757. (MP3; 6.8 MB) Westdeutscher Rundfunk , March 28, 2012, accessed on April 17, 2012 .
- Willibald Alexis : The new Pitaval - Volume 15 in the Gutenberg-DE project
- Original judgment in modern French
Individual evidence
- ^ Geoffrey T. Cubitt: Conspiracy Myths and Conspiracy Theories. In: Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford. Vol. 20, No. 1, 1989, ISSN 0044-8370 , pp. 12-26 , here p. 19.
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Damiens, Robert François |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Damien, Robert-François |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | French assassin |
| DATE OF BIRTH | January 9, 1715 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | La Thieuloye at Arras |
| DATE OF DEATH | March 28, 1757 |
| Place of death | Paris |