Robert Francois Damiens

Early life

Damiens was born on 9 January 1715 in La Thieuloye, a village near Arras in northern France. He enlisted in the army at an early age. After his discharge, he became a domestic servant at the college of the Jesuits in Paris, and was dismissed from this as well as from other employments for misconduct, earning him the epithet of Robert le Diable (Robert the Devil).

Damiens' motivation has always been questionable: historians often describe him as mentally unstable. From his answers under interrogation, Damiens seems to have been excited by the schismatic uproar that followed the refusal of the French Catholic clergy to grant holy sacraments to the Jansenists, a sect which was considered heretical. He appears to have planned a punishment for the king, upon whom he placed ultimate blame.

Assassination attempt

On 5 January 1757, as the King was entering his carriage at the Palace of Versailles, Damiens rushed past the King's bodyguards and stabbed him with a penknife, inflicting only a slight wound. He made no attempt to escape, and was apprehended at once. Louis XV's thick winter clothes were protective, and the knife penetrated less than half an inch into his chest. The writer Voltaire described the wound as "fortunately scarcely more significant than a pinprick".

Nevertheless, Louis was bleeding and called for a confessor to be brought to him, as he feared he might die; when the Queen ran to Louis' side, he asked forgiveness for his numerous affairs.

Damiens was arrested on the spot and taken away to be tortured to force him to divulge the identity of any accomplices or those who had sent him. This effort was unsuccessful. He was tried and condemned as a regicide by the Parlement of Paris, and sentenced to be drawn and quartered by horses at the Place de Greve.

Torture and execution

Fetched from his prison cell on the morning of 28 March 1757, Damiens allegedly said "La journee sera rude" ("The day will be hard"). He was first subjected to a torture in which his legs were painfully compressed by devices called "boots." He was then tortured with red-hot pincers; the hand with which he had held the knife during the attempted assassination was burned using sulphur; molten wax, molten lead, and boiling oil were poured into his wounds. He was then remanded to the royal executioner, Charles Henri Sanson, who harnessed horses to his arms and legs to be dismembered. But Damiens' limbs did not separate easily: the officiants ordered Sanson to cut Damiens' tendons, and once that was done the horses were able to perform the dismemberment. Once Damiens was dismembered, to the applause of the crowd, his reportedly still-living torso was burnt at the stake. (Although some accounts say he died when his last remaining arm was removed.)

Aftermath

After his death, the remains of Damiens' corpse were reduced to ashes and scattered in the wind. His house was razed, his brothers and sisters were forced to change their names, and his father, wife, and daughter were banished from France.

France had not experienced an attempted regicide since the killing of Henry IV in 1610. Damiens' infamy endured. Forty years after his death, the memory of Arras' most notorious citizen was used against another Arras native, Maximilien Robespierre. The polarizing figure of the French Revolution was described frequently by his enemies as the nephew of Damiens. Though untrue, the libel held considerable credibility among royalists and foreign sympathizers.

Legacy

The execution was witnessed by famous 18th-century adventurer Giacomo Casanova, who included an account in his memoirs:

We had the courage to watch the dreadful sight for four hours ... Damiens was a fanatic, who, with the idea of doing a good work and obtaining a heavenly reward, had tried to assassinate Louis XV; and though the attempt was a failure, and he only gave the king a slight wound, he was torn to pieces as if his crime had been consummated. ... I was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half of his body having been torn from him, but the Lambertini and Mme XXX did not budge an inch. Was it because their hearts were hardened? They told me, and I pretended to believe them, that their horror at the wretch's wickedness prevented them feeling that compassion which his unheard-of torments should have excited.

Philosophical and political responses

The philosopher Cesare Beccaria explicitly cited Damiens' fate when he condemned torture and the death penalty in his classic treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764). Damiens's execution is also described and discussed at length in the introduction to Michel Foucault's study of systems of punishment to illustrate the shift in western culture towards punishment within 100 years, Discipline and Punish. Thomas Paine in Rights of Man mentions Damiens' execution as an example of the cruelty of despotic governments; Paine argues that these methods were the reason why the masses dealt with their prisoners in such a cruel manner when the French Revolution occurred.

Literary legacy

Science fiction writer James Morrow draws on the incident for the trial of God in his novel Blameless in Abaddon. There is also a description of the death of Damiens in Peter Weiss' play Marat/Sade. The incident figures prominently in Hanns Heinz Ewers' frame story "The Execution of Damiens". An allusion to Damiens' attack and execution, and Casanova's account of it, are used by Mark Twain to suggest the cruelty and injustice of aristocratic power in chapter XVIII of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Baroness Orczy refers to the incident in Mam'zelle Guillotine (part of the Scarlet Pimpernel series), which features the fictionalised character of his daughter Gabrielle Damiens. The execution is referenced by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, Book the Second, Chapter XV.