A Window on the Procession
The King rode on. Behind him, on the Boulevard du Temple, horsemen had been thrown from their saddles and spectators lay motionless upon the stones; yet Louis-Philippe, having just cheated death, proceeded with the review. This composure, so dear to painters of battle scenes, left to others the grim task of counting those for whom the festivities had abruptly ended. The 28th of July 1835 was meant to celebrate a revolution; instead, it had yielded a massacre.
The sovereign had been targeted amidst a military retinue, in the thick of a crowd. Marshal Mortier was numbered among the dead. The official toll preserved by the Senate’s historical records stands at eighteen dead and twenty-two wounded: illustrious names and ordinary lives violently brought together by a volley incapable of discerning rank, political opinion, or the age of those it struck down. The King survived; others died merely for having stood in his path.
At a window overhead, a contrivance remained, its frame disemboweled by its own discharge. A battery of musket barrels had been bound together to fire in unison. Several had burst, wounding the very man who set them off. Thus, rather than abandoning an empty chamber to the gendarmes, the author of the outrage carried upon his face and hands the indelible marks of his handiwork. He attempted to descend by a rope, only to be seized, bloodied and disfigured, before his flight could deepen into another mystery.
He gave a false name: Girard. A man who had just thrown Paris into turmoil began by hoping that none would ever learn what he was called.
The Trunk and the Assumed Name
An act of recognition restored the prisoner’s identity. Summoned to his bedside, Lavocat discerned Giuseppe Fieschi beneath the wounds and the borrowed alias. A former soldier, once imprisoned for theft and forgery, Fieschi had subsisted upon sundry trades, solicited patronage, and disputed certificates. Historians of the following century would depict him with such an avalanche of invective that one might fancy the dictionary itself called to the witness stand. The judicial inquiry, however, stood in need of connections, addresses, and coin.
A trunk provided the thread.
Prior to the outrage, Fieschi’s luggage had been deposited with a marble-cutter; it was subsequently to be conveyed to Pierre Morey, a harness-maker of his acquaintance. After the explosion, Nina Lassave, the prisoner’s mistress, had sought refuge with Morey. The harness-maker procured her shelter, then had the trunk brought to her. The item passed from hand to hand without shedding every witness along the way. Commissionaires had carried out the errands; upon interrogation, their statements allowed the authorities to trace the luggage back to the young woman.
On the 3rd of August, the police discovered her retreat. Her admissions pointed directly to Morey. Arrested, questioned, and initially set at liberty, the elderly harness-maker was soon taken into custody once more. He gave his interrogators no spectacle of panic. This self-possession was to strike chroniclers quite as forcibly as Fieschi’s frantic agitation, liable, according to the sympathies of the narrator, to be construed either as a mark of fortitude or as proof of cold, calculated villainy.
A third man eluded capture for a time: Théodore Pépin, a grocer. He had slipped away under cover of a search. He was ultimately run to earth at Magny, concealed in a cramped recess fashioned behind the semblance of a wardrobe. The hiding place had shielded his body from view; it could no longer shield his confederates from the inquest.
The Value of a Confession
Fieschi had pulled the lanyard. The difficulty now lay in establishing who had willed, financed, and prepared the crime alongside him. His depositions bore heavily upon Morey and Pépin: to the former he ascribed the original design of turning his engine against the King; to the latter, the funds disbursed for the undertaking. The police held the assassin, but the assassin had also become their chief accuser.
He had to be heard, yet without surrendering the trial into his hands.
The intervention of Lavocat, toward whom Fieschi displayed an effusive gratitude, played no small part in extracting these admissions. Writing some years after the event, Louis Blanc decried the courtesies lavished upon the prisoner and the vain expectations he had been allowed to conceive. The royalist historian Thureau-Dangin, writing much later, insisted instead upon the culpability of revolutionary factions. These two opposing chronicles concur as to Fieschi’s spectacular vanity; they scarcely agree upon the measure of guilt to be laid upon those who surrounded him.
A question reverberated all the way into the prison cell: had the barrels ruptured by misadventure, or had Morey sought to destroy his accomplice along with the sovereign? The hypothesis was wielded during the preliminary investigation to goad Fieschi into speech. To convert it after the fact into mechanical certainty would be to bestow upon mere insinuations the weight of material exhibits. What remains beyond doubt is that the wounded marksman accused his fellows, and that his fellows contested his accusations.
The Prisoner Who Longed to Command the Court
The trial opened before the Court of Peers on the 30th of January 1836. Five accused men appeared at the bar: Fieschi, Morey, Pépin, Boireau, and Bescher. The infernal machine and various seized articles had been arranged within the chamber. This physical presence prevented the proceedings from degenerating entirely into a political tournament; amidst the rhetoric stood the very instrument that had reaped its harvest along the boulevard.
Yet Fieschi strove to draw every eye unto himself. He seized the floor, leveled accusations, jested, and gave himself grand airs. Contemporary accounts describe an audience at times all too willing to indulge the performance. Nothing proves more disquieting to justice than an entertaining culprit: one risks heeding his wit when one should be weighing his assertions.
Morey denied everything with steadfast constancy. Pépin protested his innocence with an agitation that stood in stark contrast to the harness-maker’s composure. Then Boireau delivered a decisive disclosure: on the eve of the outrage, he had ridden on horseback past the window to assist Fieschi in training the trajectory of his muskets, swearing he had done so at Pépin’s behest. This testimony afforded the prosecution against the grocer an anchor independent of the marksman’s uncorroborated word.
The advocates did not lay down their arms. Morey’s counsel, Dupont, laid bare Fieschi’s contradictions, contending that his client was merely being substituted in the denunciation for some hidden, unknown confederate. Pépin’s defense labored to distinguish between the acts alleged, the coercion he might have suffered, and any deliberate intent to kill. One could hold the butchery in absolute abhorrence without deeming the guilt of five men to be interchangeable.
The Court acquitted Bescher. It sentenced Boireau to twenty years’ imprisonment. Fieschi, Morey, and Pépin were condemned to die.
Beyond the Three Carriages
In February 1836, three carriages bore the condemned men toward the Barrière Saint-Jacques. Down to the final preparations, Fieschi had clung to the hope of some reprieve. The chronicles depict him still looking for Lavocat, as though private patronage could undo what the decree of the Court had just ordained. No salvation arrived. Pépin, then Morey, and finally Fieschi were put to death.
The marksman’s demise did not halt the trade in his name. Louis Blanc and Thureau-Dangin both record that a Parisian establishment subsequently drew the curious by placing Nina Lassave on public display. The scandal had merely moved to a different counter. Meanwhile, the outrage had already served the government’s purpose, smoothing the passage of the September Laws, which tightened the shackles upon the press.
The engine had missed the King. It had struck down families, altered the statutes of the realm, delivered three men to the scaffold, and offered Paris a fresh diversion. To lay bare the crime beneath all these consequences, one must return to the boulevard at the instant the procession moved on: those who remained upon the ground had asked for neither the role of martyrs, nor that of political arguments.