The label inside the hat pointed an accusing finger across the Channel. At the trial of Giovanni Pianori, the presiding judge dwelled upon the words designating the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, linking them to the weapons, the attire, and the gold discovered in the prisoner’s pockets. The Italian shoemaker steadfastly maintained that he had acted alone. The prosecution, however, sought to summon behind him an entire shadow world of exiles, conspirators, and pernicious doctrines. The hat possessed a provenance; it was now required, almost by judicial decree, to furnish the name of an instigator.
Nine days earlier, on April 28, 1855, Napoleon III had ridden out on horseback. Along the Champs-Élysées, near the Château-des-Fleurs, a man stepped out from the side avenue and advanced toward him. Police agent Alessandri at first took him for an ordinary petitioner. Citizens frequently sought out the sovereign along his passage to present a humble plea, and the officer’s explicit duty was to keep such suppliants at a distance. Then he saw a pistol drawn from beneath the man’s coat. The nature of the prince’s audience had changed in an instant.
Alessandri lunged forward. A passing carriage blocked his way, forcing him into a detour; during this momentary delay, two shots rang out. The Emperor was untouched. The officer bore Pianori to the ground, the shoemaker suffering a wound in the struggle from the dagger Alessandri held in his hand. Other officers hurried to the spot. They soon had to shield the captured man from bystanders bent on killing him on the pavement. The assassination had failed, yet a second, summary death was already taking shape in the fury of the crowd.
Further weapons were found on his person, along with a cloth cap concealed beneath his garments. He readily admitted having intended to strike down the Emperor. His motive lay in the French expedition against Rome: he held Napoleon accountable for the ruin of his homeland and the sum of his personal misfortunes. The police thus held an assassin caught in the act, the weapon employed, and an openly avowed grievance. The question that was to dominate the trial was not who had fired the shots, but rather what political narrative would be forged around their detonation.
Pianori hailed from the Papal States. His path had wound through the Italian insurgencies, exile, several French provincial towns, and London. He had traveled under the alias of Antonio Liverani. Before the court, he sought to distinguish his service in the war against the Austrians from the sweeping revolutionary label that the authorities affixed to him without distinction. He spoke an imperfect French, groping for words and disputing terms whose definitions the magistrates took as self-evident. When he inquired what was meant by a trottoir, the president was obliged to explain that it was the raised way where pedestrians walked.
The preliminary investigation had proceeded at breakneck speed. By April 30, the case files had already passed from the magistrate’s chambers to the indictment division. On May 7, Pianori stood before the Seine Court of Assizes, presided over by Judge Partarrieu-Lafosse. Procureur Général Rouland led the prosecution; Benoist-Champy appeared for the defense. The courtroom was packed from an early hour. A surviving sovereign and a shooter who had confessed lent the proceedings an air of apparent simplicity, the true cost of which the hearings would soon lay bare.
The presiding judge read aloud two dispatches arrived from Rome. They attributed to Pianori a long criminal record, prior convictions, and a prison escape. The accused contested the allegations. A number of the cited names, he argued, were mere monikers applied to him; other assertions, he maintained, were entirely false. Yet the official character of the intelligence lent it, in the eyes of the court, an authority that mere denials could not shake. These dispatches had traveled faster than any means of verifying their truth. In the dock, the man they described was compelled to answer on the spot to a portrait painted far beyond his reach.
His former employments were reviewed in turn. The master bootmaker Mallet deemed him unpunctual and clumsy, remarking that a single pair of shoes had taken him far too long. His landlady, by contrast, had observed him working diligently prior to his journey to London; the concierge recalled his gentle manners and upright behavior. Upon his return, he had grown taciturn. Pianori attributed this to rheumatism in his arm. The prosecution discerned in this altered demeanor the brooding preparation of the crime. The selfsame silence could thus denote physical pain, private worry, or the secrecy of a conspiracy, depending entirely upon the voice that interpreted it.
The London money raised more persistent doubts. How had a workman of modest earnings been able to purchase an expensive double-barreled pistol, pay for his travels, and still retain a sum in gold coin? He spoke of his honest labor, of an English employer whose name he could not properly pronounce, and of weapons accepted in lieu of wages. His explanations struck the presiding judge as utterly improbable. Rouland derived from them the unshakable conviction of foreign political financing, while carefully declining to name the mastermind who had inspired the deed. It was enough, for the purposes of his closing address, to cast Pianori as the hired arm of a faction.
The most ordinary details were subjected to the same relentless scrutiny. Two women seen visiting his lodgings were transformed into suspicious confederates; Pianori maintained he had merely been awaiting his washerwomen. A glass of absinthe taken before venturing into the street was presented as a deliberate stimulant to murder; his landlord had observed no agitation whatever. The concealed cap might have served for a swift disguise. The hat, for its part, bore the London trade address that the prosecution linked directly to the firearms. Each physical object was authentic; their assembly into a financed plot remained an act of interpretation that the accused steadfastly rejected.
The arresting officers then recounted the apprehension. Several swore that he was already clutching a second pistol; Pianori insisted it had been seized from his pocket. He admitted the principal offense while resisting the accompanying details. Rouland broadened his speech into a grand homily upon the perils of revolution, the maintenance of social order, and the providential preservation of the sovereign. The jury returned a verdict of guilty. The penalty prescribed for an attempt on the life of the Emperor was that reserved for parricides: the sentence of death followed on that same day, May 7.
The appeal to the Court of Cassation turned primarily upon two procedural defects that the trial had left unresolved. Ought the accused to have been granted the assistance of an interpreter? Could dispatches be introduced against him that had not been communicated in time for the defense to prepare a rebuttal? Delaborde argued the appeal. The public prosecutor countered that the prisoner’s answers demonstrated sufficient comprehension, and that the reading of foreign documents fell within the discretionary powers of the bench. The newspaper transcript itself entered the debate, as the official minutes had failed to record all the contentious exchanges that had occurred during the hearing.
The high court dismissed the appeal. Pianori was guillotined in Paris on May 14, 1855. The man who had sought to strike down the Emperor had wounded neither the sovereign’s person nor his regime; the imperial power had answered with a judicial machine that asserted its procedural regularity as vehemently as its dispatch. Yet between the confessed shot and the grand tale of an international conspiracy, there remained a chasm that eloquence could not bridge. At the bar, a foreigner had asked for the meaning of ordinary words. The court had informed him that he understood well enough.