They demanded accomplices of him; Louvel replied that he had none. This answer, repeated with an obstinacy that exasperated his judges, vexed the inquiry into the murder far less than it offended the conception held of its significance. A prince had been struck down at the doors of the Opéra. Behind the dagger there must surely be a faction, funds, a foreign cabinet, some design commensurate with the victim. The man under arrest professed that he alone had sufficed.
Louis-Pierre Louvel was a saddler. On the 13th of February, 1820, he had waited for the Duke of Berry, struck him with an edged weapon just as the prince had handed his wife into her carriage, and then attempted to flee. Overtaken nearby, he acknowledged his deed without delay. The magistracy thus possessed the assassin before Paris had even comprehended what had occurred. It did not possess the political explanation it coveted.
A Workman in the King’s Service
Louvel was employed in the Royal Stables. This proximity rendered the crime all the more disquieting: the monarchy had given employment to the very man who meditated depriving it of a future. He could not be conveniently cast out from the world he had just assailed. Within it he stitched leather, spent his days, and performed the ordinary tasks of a craft that demands patience and a steady hand.
His childhood had known the loss of his parents and the succour of an elder sister. The account published in 1832 in the Revue des Deux Mondes portrays him as having received his schooling at Versailles before being apprenticed to the saddler’s trade. It also recounts his travels and his devotion to the Napoleonic memory. These elements do not constitute a fatality. Many workmen had grown up amidst the convulsions of the Revolution and the Empire; they had not derived from them the right to assassinate.
Louvel, for his part, set the origin of his resolve in 1814. At Metz, beholding the return of the Bourbons under cover of French defeat, he was said to have conceived a hatred that he chose to call patriotism. For several years, this idea survived his wanderings, his daily labour, his missed occasions. It narrowed at length upon the Duke of Berry, in whom he discerned the sole prospect of issue for the elder branch.
In his reasoning, the prince ceased to be a man. He became a rootstock to be severed. Murderous doctrines frequently begin with this convenience of language: they strip away a countenance so that they need confront nothing more than an office.
Leaving the Opéra
On that February evening, the duke had escorted the duchess to her carriage. Louvel stepped forward and struck. Rescuers bore the wounded man within; the festival turned to a vigil, and the Opéra, where patrons had gathered to watch a performance, became a place of death. The duke succumbed during the night.
A few streets away, the prisoner was already explaining that he had sought to deliver his country. He was brought before the authorities, who interrogated him at great length, and thence conveyed to the Conciergerie. The violence of a single, fleeting gesture opened months of interrogation. Louvel was compelled to rehearse what he had done, why he had done it, with whom he had contrived it, and to endure that his inquisitors refused to believe the part of his narrative that appeared the least probable: his solitude.
The chronicle of 1832 recounts that he was conducted before the body of the prince and constrained to acknowledge the wound. It then attributes to him a reflection mingling an admission of the horror of the deed with the steadfast maintenance of his political motive. These are reported words, not a direct window into his conscience; yet they delineate a contradiction that the trial could not dispel. He could acknowledge a crime against a person while still professing to have served a nation.
He did not ask the victim to forgive him for having ceased to regard him as a man. He asked only that men understand the idea that had licensed him to do so.
The Affair They Sought to Magnify
The outrage was brought before the Chamber of Peers, which held jurisdiction over crimes directed against a member of the royal house. The records preserved by the Senate attest to the magnitude of the proceedings; the report of the preliminary investigation was accompanied by hundreds of notes. The National Archives likewise preserve the weapon and the seized effects. The murder had generated about itself a world of paper and metal, wherein the court sought to pin down everything that might have preceded the blow.
Acquaintances, journeys, and utterances were sifted. The government suspected foreign and Bonapartist influences. Louvel held fast: he had received neither command nor wages. His constancy was no proof that every influence was alien to him; no man thinks entirely alone in an absolute sense. Yet to share a hatred or a conviction does not establish complicity in an assassination.
The distinction was bound to displease. A conspiracy furnishes adversaries to pursue and a triumph to proclaim; an isolated man compels the admission that a regime cannot watch over every resolution that ripens beneath its own roof. The saddler of the Royal Stables offered the police an added affront by refusing to provide them with an organisation worthy of their inquiry.
Throughout his confinement, his kin suffered the consequences of the name they bore. The contemporary account relates the distress of his sisters, one of whom earned her bread by the labour of her hands and found herself abruptly exposed to public scorn. Louvel showed concern for them. This affection did not absolve him; it demonstrated merely that a man capable of reserving tenderness for his own could deny that same humanity to another.
The Sentence and the Unmade Future
On the 6th of June, 1820, the Chamber of Peers condemned Louvel to death. A secret session had notably examined the question of which votes ought to be admitted in view of the familial ties uniting certain peers to the deceased. On the morrow, Louvel was executed. He had acknowledged the deed and owned his purpose; the judgment put an end to his life, though not to the political use that others would make of his crime.
The death of the duke contributed to hardening the divisions of the Restoration. Men sought among liberal ideas, the press, or the presumed indulgences of the ministry for the culprits that an obstinate prisoner had declined to name. The preserved dagger would in turn become an object of history, sundered from the hand that had gripped it, yet freighted with the narratives that men continued to attach to it.
A few months after the assassination, the posthumous son of the Duke of Berry—the future Count of Chambord—was born. Louvel’s dynastic aim had therefore miscarried. This reversal must not be turned into a witticism dispensing us from regarding the dead: the prince was not restored to his wife because an heir had entered the world.
Louvel had sought to master the future by extinguishing a life. He left behind a widow, children, a family ashamed of its name, and a nation yet more inclined to view its neighbours with suspicion. The lineage he believed he had severed endured; the wound he claimed to heal gaped wider still. The saddler had accomplished the deed he had meditated for years, and almost nothing of what he had promised himself came of it.