He had announced to his family that he was departing for work in Oran. The voyage was meant to bring order to his life; he was furnished with the means to make it. Juan Oliva Moncusí took instead the road to Madrid. He carried with him a purpose he had not confided to those whose money paid his fare: to kill the King of Spain.
By 15 October 1878, he was in the capital. Ten days remained to him before Alfonso XII was to pass along the Calle Mayor. The judgment that would send him to the garrote retraces these preparations without lending them the dimensions of an extensive secret society. Oliva acknowledged his federal republican convictions and a former membership in the International; he maintained that he had associated no one with his design. The magistrates possessed a man, a weapon, and papers. The conspiracy, for its part, required other proofs.
According to the facts established by the judges, the scheme dated back to the King’s return to Spain. In Tarragona, Oliva had already shadowed him in a boat as the monarch prepared to disembark. He had likewise contemplated striking him in the cathedral. This latter occasion was lost for a singularly ordinary reason: in his haste, he had forgotten his weapon. Forgetfulness had spared a king; it had not cured an obsession.
In Madrid, this time, he prepared his post. On the day of the royal passage, he walked the route, stepped into a café, and penned the final lines of a journal in which he declared his deed. He selected a narrow stretch of the thoroughfare. The spot was chosen to bring closer to him the man whom the procession exposed to the gaze of all. Every onlooker sought a vantage point from which to see; Oliva sought one from which to shoot.
He posted himself before the establishment known as the Pharmacy of the Queen Mother, between the Plaza de San Miguel and the Plaza de la Villa. Clad in the dress of a workman, mingled with the waiting crowd, he did not yet stand apart from the throng. The King drew near with his escort. At a distance of a few paces, Oliva fired.
Alfonso XII was not struck. The projectile ended its flight spent and misshapen; a soldier gathered it up after it had grazed his uniform without wounding him. Witnesses saw Oliva cast the pistol aside. The man was seized. In the very instant that eyes turned from the King to seek the origin of the detonation, the premeditated regicide turned into a failed attempt.
The outcome appeared simple: no one had been killed. It remained necessary, however, to determine what this failure altered in the eyes of the law. For the judiciary, the absence of death obliterated neither the intent nor the act accomplished. It had to be established whether Oliva had genuinely employed a means capable of inflicting death, and whether the King owed his survival to some cause independent of the assassin’s will.
The investigators took possession of the pistol, the remaining ammunition, the papers written in pencil, and the depositions. Gunsmiths examined the projectiles. Their opinion was that the weapon could indeed prove fatal at the range in question. The façades of the street were likewise inspected; several marks were visible, yet none could be attributed with certainty to the discharge. The street yielded no complete trajectory. It had furnished the ball and the witnesses, which was not the same as an exact diagram of the shot.
Oliva admitted that he had intended to kill. He stated that he bore no personal hatred toward Alfonso XII, but toward the tyranny he believed the sovereign embodied. This distinction, momentous in his own eyes, did not displace the body aimed at. The living monarch had been targeted in the name of an idea; the court was trying the man who had fired upon a human being.
The defense sought an issue elsewhere. Was Oliva responsible for his actions? His kin were questioned; asylums were consulted regarding any past confinement. Four physicians examined him, two appointed by the defense and two by the judge. Three discerned no disorder abolishing his faculties. The fourth did not affirm madness either, but reserved the question of a “monomania” and requested specialized observation before any definitive conclusion was reached.
This divergence was not converted into a doubt beneficial to the accused. The court held that alienation of mind was not established. It classified the outrage as an attempted regicide and retained the aggravating circumstances of premeditation and an attack concerted to prevent any defense by the victim. The sentence of death was confirmed by the Audiencia of Madrid on 27 November.
Counsel for the defense lodged an appeal. They reproached the judge, in particular, with having refused further time to produce evidence and with having dismissed a petition concerning another institution. They contested as well the legal characterization of the crime and its circumstances. A long-standing desire to kill, they pleaded in substance, ought not to be weighed twice, first as an element of the design and subsequently as an automatic aggravation. Lastly, they invoked passion, obsession, and their client’s state of mind.
At the beginning of December, the advocates had been granted five days to formalize their appeals. They had contested this term, then renewed their petitions, without obtaining satisfaction. The public prosecutor thereupon moved that the appeals be declared abandoned; the defense protested that it was being hindered in its office. The hearing took place nonetheless, and the grounds of law were argued orally by leave of the Court. Beneath the formal language of the dossier, the contention turned upon time: that which the defenders demanded was the final margin wherein further inquiry might still alter the issue.
The Supreme Court answered point by point on 27 December. It deemed the delays granted and the inquiries already conducted to be sufficient. It recalled that the appeal, wherever capital punishment was pronounced, had to be examined as of right: even a default by the defense did not relieve the court of this review. This guarantee endured; it did not lead to the quashing of the decree.
In the eyes of the magistrates, premeditation was not inseparable from every act of regicide. Such a crime might be conceived and executed without this prolonged persistence; yet the journeys, the prior opportunities, and the post chosen demonstrated its existence in this case. The press of the crowd, which appeared to expose the marksman to certain capture, had also concealed his motion from the King. The impossibility of flight did not, therefore, efface the advantage secured over the victim.
Thus every avenue essayed by counsel closed once more. The misdirection of the shot was not construed as a renunciation; the reservation of a single physician did not become irresponsibility; procedural objections provoked no new trial. Oliva was executed on 4 January 1879.
He had deceived his family as to the destination of his journey, but he had concealed from his judges nothing of the destination of his deed. His journal, his movements, and his confessions converged against him. The bullet had missed the King; all that he had done beforehand struck the condemned man true.