The gunsmith recognized his customer among the men who had just seized him. A few months earlier, the young man had entered his shop bearing the easy manners of a commercial traveler. He had asked to examine firearms; he had been taken on trust. Now, the royal carriage was rolling away, a gunshot had just rung out, and the customer bore a name that all of France was about to learn: Louis Alibaud.
Devisme was on duty that day with the National Guard. The encounter was purely fortuitous; yet the inquiry was bound to scrutinize even this coincidence. When a shot has just been fired at a sovereign, any tradesman is instantly transformed into a prospective conspirator. A loan, a visit, a word of recommendation—all are laid out upon the selfsame table. The most ordinary dealings demand extraordinary justifications.
On June 25, 1836, Louis-Philippe was departing the Tuileries alongside the Queen and Madame Adélaïde. Alibaud fired, yet failed to strike any occupant of the carriage. Seized upon the spot, he denied neither his deed nor the design he had pursued. The crime had miscarried; its perpetrator was nonetheless determined to invest it with meaning. He held the King to be the enemy of the people, laid the blame for his own misfortunes at the government’s door, and claimed to strike, in the person of the ruler, the prime cause of all that bore him down.
He was twenty-six years of age. Prior to this day on which he narrowed his life to a solitary resolve, his path had known departures enough for one to discern in it, above all, an incapacity to abide. Born in Nîmes, reared in part at Narbonne, he had received some schooling, worked as a copyist, tried his fortune in the navy, and then enlisted in the army. Each calling had offered him a beginning; none had afforded him the station he deemed himself capable of holding.
The Three Glorious Days of 1830 were the first grand event to which he anchored his political convictions. As a soldier, he claimed he had refused to fire upon the insurgents; he maintained, too, that he had been loath to combat his former comrades. This stance, which he expounded before the magistrates, did not yet place him at the far end of the road leading to the regicide. It provided him, however, with a personal chronicle to interweave with that of the new reign. The monarch enthroned behind the barricades could thus be weighed and judged in the name of the very hopes those barricades had brought to life.
The bloody repression at the Cloître Saint-Merry, in June 1832, occupied a cardinal place in his declarations. Alibaud had taken no part in it: he had been garrisoned elsewhere with his regiment. Distance, however, proved no bar to his identification. The dead he had never beheld became those whose vengeance he purported to exact. Across the years, this brooding indignation would merge with his private grievances, until the two could no longer be told apart.
Discharged from the service in 1834, he went in quest of employment. He passed through the telegraph offices, lingered beneath his parents’ roof, mastered Spanish, and set out for Barcelona. He had hoped to find there both a cause and a situation; he returned without having settled the former or secured the latter. Paris was the venture that followed. In the autumn of 1835, he arrived with little coin and a confidence that the passing months would wear down far more swiftly than his garments.
A former comrade from Narbonne, Léonce Fraisse, came to his aid. One finds running through the judicial dossier those simple gestures that a political inquest never knows, at first glance, whether to account as kindness or as complicity: procuring lodgings, assuring a warm meal, providing a reference for work. Fraisse discussed politics with him, but their debates threw their differences into relief as well. The preliminary examination probed their relations; it could not transmute companionship into participation in the regicide.
Alibaud worked for a manufacturer of embroidery, then as a bookkeeper for a wine merchant. This latter post provided a wage, board, and lodging. It might well have stemmed the onward march of his destitution. Yet the clerk proved negligent, was dismissed, and found himself forced to assume once more all the trifling expenses from which a master’s house had hitherto shielded him. Bed, dinner, and candlelight became so many creditors anew.
He took a modest chamber, paying but a fraction of the rent. He took his meals upon credit, promising payment from an imminent salary. In his final days of liberty, the sale of a Spanish dictionary yielded him a few copper sous. That volume belonged to one of the lives he had attempted to begin; he now drew from it nothing more than the means to endure a single day. Destitution is here an established circumstance, not an excuse that would permit one to look away from the other persons seated inside the royal carriage.
The firearm had come from Devisme’s establishment. Alibaud had obtained it under commercial pretenses and had failed to return it, alleging thereafter that it had vanished. The tradesman, the friend who had served as an intermediary for certain returns, and the shopmen who had watched the young man come and go were all compelled to reconstruct this sequence of visits. The contrivance of the outrage had assumed the guise of an ordinary piece of business. It was precisely this semblance that rendered so many verifications indispensable, though the assailant had been seized red-handed upon the cobbles.
On June 25, Alibaud perused the gazettes, went about his errands, and played at billiards. The testimony of his partner introduced into the official depositions a singular scene: a man still observing the tranquil conventions of a pastime, then declining a second match upon the plea that he was obliged to depart. A few hours later, these slender recollections served to chart the exact chronology of an assassination attempt. The witnesses had not crossed paths with a figure of history; they had met a patron, a neighbor, a billiard player.
Before the Court of Peers, the identity of the marksman was beyond dispute. What remained was the defense of a prisoner whose unabashed confessions threatened to make every procedural safeguard appear an idle delay. His advocate, Charles Ledru, petitioned for a postponement of the pleadings, so that he might command the time requisite for their preparation. The Court dismissed this petition on July 8: it deemed the allotted interval sufficient, given the flagrant nature of the crime and the interrogatories already conducted. The hearings proceeded without pause.
On the morrow, following the depositions and the pleadings, Alibaud stood by his deed once more. He invoked the precedents of classical antiquity and claimed to deduce, from the utter impossibility of obtaining justice, the right to take a life. His judges sat before a prisoner who sought not merely to be understood, but strove to establish as a righteous principle the very act for which he was arraigned. No rhetorical contrivance could bridge this chasm: he spoke of political deliverance; the Court was trying an attempted assassination.
On July 9, the Court condemned him to the penalty of parricide, as the law then designated an attempt upon the life of the King. The statutory term extended to the monarchy the archetype of a family, vesting the sovereign with the sanctity of a father. Alibaud was executed on July 11, 1836. He had slain no one within the carriage; the attempt nonetheless brought its author to the scaffold.
Devisme was at liberty to return to his firearms, Fraisse to his affairs, the witnesses to their trades. All had dealt with the same young man, yet each had known but scattered fragments of him. The inquest had gathered them together: the former soldier, the traveler returned from Spain, the shiftless clerk, the debtor, the billiard player. Between these disparate portraits there endured the solitary choice that had abruptly bound their lives together. The King pursued his reign. Those who had reached out to aid Alibaud were left to resume an existence wherein the memory of a kindly service had turned into an exhibit for the prosecution.