It was on the fifth of January, 1757, at six o’clock in the evening, on a cold and dark day, that he stepped out of the doorway of the palace of Versailles and went up to a carriage waiting for him to take him to Trianon. All at once he felt that somebody had run against him, and at the same time that he was bleeding from a wound in the side. He uttered a cry of pain and alarm, and when the torch-bearers drew near and surrounded him, the King noticed a man who alone among all those present had kept his hat on. “This man has assaulted and wounded me!” exclaimed the King, pointing to the man whose head remained covered. “Arrest him, but do not harm him!” It makes almost a painful impression to find that an embodiment of vice and debauchery like Louis the Fifteenth should at such a moment have been inspired with feelings of mercy toward his assassin, and should have used almost the identical words which fell from the lips of the pure and high-minded President McKinley after Czolgosz had fatally wounded him! But history records them, and we must give even the devil his due.
The attempt on the King’s life caused a tremendous sensation in Paris, where immediately the most exaggerated reports concerning the fatal wounding of the King and the discovery of a widespread conspiracy to assassinate him were circulated. Damiens was treated with the greatest severity. As though the crime which he had tried to commit had been really committed, and as though the stab he had given to the King had had fatal effect, the criminal was treated as a regicide, and the terrible machinery of the law provided for in such cases, and in France not employed since the trial of Ravaillac, was put in operation. Even during his transportation from Versailles to Paris measures of precaution were used, as if a state prisoner of the most dangerous character and of the greatest importance were to be guarded. Regiments of soldiers surrounded his carriage, and six sergeants with drawn swords marched on each side. Strict orders had been issued to the citizens of Paris not to go out on the streets or appear at the front windows of their houses. Everything had been done to create the impression of a conspiracy against the government which counted many influential men among its members and of which the assassin was merely the tool, while those who were directing him and using his arm against the King, had to be sought in the highest classes of the aristocracy, and especially among the enemies of Madame de Pompadour. Great efforts were made to get a full confession from Damiens. Who was he? How had he formed the plan to assassinate the King? Who had instigated him to commit the act? Who were his accomplices? These were the questions to be solved by the French police authorities, and for whose solution they did not hesitate to apply the most cruel measures known to them. But the result of their painstaking investigation was far from realizing their expectations. It was found that Damiens belonged to the lower classes of the people. He had learned the trade of a locksmith, but had preferred to enter the service of rich lords and ladies as a domestic. Being of a very restless and quarrelsome disposition, he had changed his positions as often as Gil Blas had changed his masters. He had been in the houses of parliamentarians, clergymen, noblemen, orthodox Catholics, Jansenists, Molinists, Protestants, free thinkers. Often he had served at the table of the great lords and ladies of the kingdom and had listened to the conversation of the guests; and invariably the subject of the conversation had turned on the disgraceful conduct of the King, on his excesses, on the shameful orgies of the court, on the mysteries of the “deer park,” where not only the virtue of young girls of the people was ruthlessly sacrificed, but also the money extorted from the sweat of the people criminally squandered. Wherever he had gone he had heard the same story, and it had made a deep impression upon him. Damiens had always been of an eccentric turn of mind; he had even had spells of religious exaltation, and for three years he had seriously meditated on the possibility of rescuing the King from his sinful excesses and debauches.
He finally had come to the conclusion that the only possibility of turning the King’s mind away from his vicious habits and arousing his soul to sentiments of honor and duty might come through fear, by placing him in the immediate presence of death. This thought preyed so incessantly and so strongly on his mind that he resolved to become the instrument of the King’s redemption, by attacking and wounding, but not killing him. The attempt on the King’s life was therefore the result of a psychological process which was, perhaps, based on wrong and extravagant premises, but which, if all the circumstances are taken into consideration, was rather meritorious than criminal in its aim. The assassin had acted strictly in accord with his preconceived theory. He had in his possession a knife with two blades, one of which was very long, sharp and pointed like a dagger, while the other was quite short and sharp. It seemed to be impossible to inflict a mortal wound with the short blade, and Damiens had used it in wounding the King. He had no accomplices. At first, very likely to mitigate his punishment, he had hinted at the existence of a widespread conspiracy, contemplating the assassination of the King, the Dauphin, and others, but he soon retracted these statements, and even the most severe application of the torture could not elicit from him any other declaration than this: that he had no accomplices, that nobody, not even his wife and his young daughter, had known anything of his intention; that he did not intend to kill the King, though he could easily have done so; that he had only intended to wound him for the purpose of frightening and warning him; that his act had been inspired by the wish of saving France and the dynasty.
But all these statements, which could not be controverted by conflicting evidence, made no impression upon judges who had fully made up their minds beforehand, and who looked upon the man that wanted to touch even the King’s finger with the same horror as upon a regicide who might have stabbed him through the heart and killed him. The sentence passed upon Damiens was therefore in conformity with their preconceived opinion, and cruel in the extreme. It was based upon the sentence carried out against Ravaillac for having killed the greatest of kings and one of the benefactors of mankind. Though Damiens was an eccentric ponderer, a foolish dreamer, who had but slightly wounded a heartless voluptuary that had deserved death a hundred times, his sentence was terrible beyond description, and was actually carried out in the presence of an immense multitude. At first his right hand, in which was placed the knife with which he had struck the King, was burned to the bone. Thereupon his arms, his legs, his breast, his back and his feet were lacerated with burning tongs; molten lead, boiling oil, burning sulphur, rosin, and wax were poured into the open wounds; and finally, while he was still suffering unimaginable pain, four strong horses, hitched to his arms and legs, tried for half an hour with all their might to tear out his limbs. After that time only one arm remained in the body, and it took another five minutes’ work to pull it out of its socket. The body of the unfortunate man had been pulled to almost double its length and width, and its power of resistance amazed all the spectators. When at last the cruel execution was over, the bleeding trunk and the arms and legs were thrown upon a pile of wood near the scaffold and destroyed by fire. The spectacle had struck terror into the hearts of the beholders.
But even with this terrible act of revenge the criminal justice of France was not satisfied; it reached out for the innocent family of the criminal. His father, his wife, and his daughter were banished from France for life, not to return there on penalty of death, while his brothers, sisters, and other relatives had to change their names. The house in which he was born was burned to the ground, and any other trace which he might have left was carefully obliterated. The crime of Damiens was not one of the famous assassinations in history, but it caused such a sensation in Europe, and it was punished so cruelly, that we thought his attempt on the life of Louis the Fifteenth might very properly be recorded in this book.