The Shot That Turned on the Marksman
The royal carriage was able to proceed. On the Quai des Tuileries, on October 15, 1840, a man's carbine had burst apart at the very moment he attempted to assassinate Louis-Philippe. The regicide had failed; the shattered remains of the weapon and its owner were left at the disposal of justice. There would be no protracted pursuit, no description dispatched from one frontier to another. The culprit was in hand. It remained to be seen how many others they would seek to place behind him.
His name was Darmès. Judicial records style him Ennemond Marius; posterity has often retained the second given name. Arrested on the spot, he acknowledged his intention to strike down the sovereign. When he appeared before the Court of Peers several months later, he admitted once more having waited upon the quay, near the Place de la Concorde, armed with a carbine, and having fired upon the king. The fragments of his weapon were shown to him. He recognized them as well.
This brevity of confession satisfied no one. An attempt against the monarch opened an investigation that reached far beyond the material act: the shooter's calls, his readings, his associates, the price of a luncheon, and the cut of a frock coat were all to enter into the record. Darmès had sought to make a target of a man. The prosecution sought to make a map of a conspiracy out of his days.
The Unbuttoned Coat
He claimed to have purchased the carbine from a dealer in the Place de la Bourse. The merchant contested the sale; his ledgers, when examined, bore no entry corresponding to the seized weapon. Other arms were brought into the discussions, among them pistols he admitted to having stolen. His successive answers did little to advance the inquiries: on several points, he insisted he had already explained what was asked of him and refused to begin again.
The Court, however, wished to hear him afresh. Written interrogatories existed; they did not dispense with the necessity of public debate.
The most pressing question concerned his movements on October 15. Whence had the carbine come at the moment of the shot? Darmès asserted he had kept it at home. Yet witnesses testified to having seen him go out without it. His frock coat had been open, they said; his waistcoat was in plain view. Conversely, when carrying his weapon concealed, he was obliged to hold his arm in a peculiar posture. The garment thus became potential evidence, scrutinized less for its color than for what it might have hidden.
The prosecution reconstructed his afternoon: a search for Considère in the Rue Laffitte, followed by an ascent toward Montmartre, where that man's wife kept a public house. Darmès had long denied this visit before finally conceding it. He explained that he had gone to settle a trifling debt—twenty-five sous—and had eaten a meal there. To the magistrates, so many detours only hours before an assassination seemed to have another purpose.
A considerable distance remained, however, between this suspicion and legal proof. Having lunched in a tavern did not prove that the tavern-keeper had supplied a weapon. If Darmès had lied about his meal, that falsehood might weigh against Darmès; it could not suffice, of itself, to convict Considère.
The Men He Knew
Valentin Duclos, a cabriolet driver, was likewise committed for trial before the peers. He knew the shooter, had spoken with him, had conveyed him on occasion, and had shared drinks with him. At the hearing, his account of these dealings drew an affair—which the prosecution wished to locate within secret societies—back to the cab stands. Darmès would pause, light his pipe, and chat with the coachmen; Duclos stated he had made his acquaintance in this manner.
His interrogators confronted him with meetings and conversations. Witnesses claimed to have seen Darmès accompanied near the scene of the crime. Others reported confidences that seemed to implicate Duclos. The turnkeys themselves had gathered the prisoner's words. A remark dropped during the night, concerning the men held in custody for his affair and the cold they must be suffering, became an additional piece of evidence: Darmès had allegedly intimated that he could ruin Duclos if he spoke.
He disputed the construction placed upon his words. He acknowledged an affection for the man; he did not attribute the preparation of the crime to him. When pressed further, the marksman maintained that were he to name his acquaintances, he would expose them all to suspicion. This explanation does not absolve his falsehoods; it illustrates the snare of the proceedings, in which every reservation could be taken for the shielding of an accomplice, and every name surrendered might provide another suspect.
At Considère’s, the political gatherings and the presence of Darmès appeared damning to the framers of the indictment. At Duclos’s, there was also talk of discovered cartridges and past political commitments. Both men might well harbor opinions hostile to the regime. It remained nonetheless necessary to establish their participation in that specific shot, upon that specific quay, on the fifteenth of October.
The Pamphlets upon the Table
The papers belonging to Darmès were subjected to examination in their turn. Pamphlets, the regulations of a society, and a speech he admitted having composed were laid before the court. Had he attended a communist banquet? Had he belonged to an illicit association? Why did he possess these printed sheets? Darmès admitted certain gatherings, denied certain allegiances, and struggled to distinguish between what he had read, what he had penned, and what he had sought to organize.
The bill of indictment invested this meager library with an almost wholly criminal power. It recounted a moral degradation wrought by popular societies and treated radical convictions as the slippery slope leading directly to regicide. Here, the reader must heed the voice of the prosecution, with all its political certitudes. The pamphlets were seized material objects; their supposed power to convert every reader inevitably into an assassin remained a prosecutorial thesis.
The Court did not follow this expansion of the crime to its ultimate limits. On May 29, 1841, it found Darmès guilty of the attempt and sentenced him to death. Considère was acquitted, to be set at liberty unless detained on some other charge. Duclos was likewise acquitted of participation in the attempt; his position regarding other matters remained distinct. Three men had occupied the dock. Only one was delivered over to the executioner by this decree.
The Black Veil
On May 31, a carriage conveyed Darmès to the Barrière Saint-Jacques. The Gazette des tribunaux depicts a condemned man whose strength waned during the journey, attended by a priest who strove to revive his spirits. Around the scaffold, the troops maintained an open cordon; beyond it, spectators had gathered, some having hired a window to secure a clearer view.
Darmès arrived barefoot, his head covered by a black veil, in accordance with the ceremonial prescribed for his sentence. He knelt, then had to be supported as he mounted the steps. An usher read the judgment. His final words, imperfectly caught by the reporter, still mingled France, her enemies, and emancipation. Then the execution was carried out.
The broken carbine had rested upon a table. To explain its discharge, the inquiry had unfurled streets, meals, friendships, papers, and prison-house whispers. At the conclusion of this vast dossier there endured a fragile but essential distinction: Darmès had intended to slay the king; yet knowing Darmès had not sufficed to make every one of his companions a regicide.