In the night preceding the 15th of March, 1804, two or three hundred men invested the dwelling of the Duke of Enghien at Ettenheim, in the Margraviate of Baden. Roused by the tumult, the prince leaped from his bed, still in his nightshirt, and seized a fowling-piece. One of his valets caught up another. The agents of the public force were already at the threshold. The duke was warned that resistance would be futile; he dressed in all haste, without even the leisure to draw on his boots, and quitted Ettenheim under escort.
Champagnac’s relation dates the inception of the affair long prior to that night, tracing it to intelligence whose circulation he attributes to the government of the First Consul. Two grocers of Le Tréport, Querelle and Philippe, were said to have denounced a clandestine correspondence between the Bourbon princes and agents in Paris, alongside designs for their return. Pichegru and the Dukes of Polignac figured among the names brought forward. The authorities, according to the chronicler, hoped to discover in the duke’s private papers intelligence of a more precise nature. It was by no means an indifferent circumstance that the expedition should thus be directed against a man established across the Rhine, whose seizure might serve the dual purpose of submitting him to interrogation and holding him up as the palpable sign of a dynastic menace.
The duke had resided at Ettenheim ever since the disbandment of the Army of Condé in 1801. He had established himself in that town with the sanction of the Margrave of Baden, leading there the existence of a private gentleman, devoted, in the pages of the chronicle, to his flowers and the chase. His attachment to Mademoiselle de Rohan-Rochefort had drawn him to that retreat. The distance separating him from France did not place him beyond reach: men dispatched from Strasbourg came to reconnoiter the house and examine its defenses.
Among their number, Champagnac names Charlot, a disguised gendarmerie officer, and Pferdsdorff, a quartermaster. Their presence awakened mistrust. Schmidt, a former officer in the Army of Condé, was charged with penetrating their designs; but Pferdsdorff succeeded in blinding him, and Schmidt concluded that these strangers warranted no alarm. Even as this reassuring report was circulated, a field officer of the Consular Guard was likewise making his way to Ettenheim. The prince, who had spent the day hunting, resolved to leave the town on the morrow, the 15th of March. It was already too late.
The irruption commenced in deep darkness. Two or three hundred men surrounded the residence—such is the number recorded by the chronicle. Put upon his guard, the duke prepared to defend himself, but Schmidt lowered his piece and told him that all resistance would be in vain. Pferdsdorff entered, pistol in hand, and demanded which among those present was the duke. The prince replied that those who had come to arrest him must needs possess his description, and had only to look for him. The gendarmes retorted that they possessed no such description, and that every soul present must march since he refused to declare himself.
The duke set forth with several officers of his household, under close escort. The Princess of Rohan beheld her captive lord pass beneath her windows, conducted in this grim array. Champagnac writes that she was never to look upon him again. The prisoners crossed the Rhine near Rheinau by boat; for want of carriages, they marched on foot until wretched carts could be procured to convey them to Strasbourg. The journey stripped the prince of the security of an asylum he had chosen, transporting him from one country to another without leaving him master of his destination.
At the citadel of Strasbourg, he distributed a portion of his money among his servants. The papers seized at Ettenheim were duly inventoried. It was proposed that he should affix his paraph to the official report; he refused, desiring to sign only in the presence of the Chevalier Jacques, his secretary and friend, who had voluntarily come forward to share his captivity. This refusal was one of the few determinations the procedure permitted him to make. His secretary was at his side; his valet Joseph, however, he would not be suffered to take with him.
On the 18th of March, at daybreak, gendarmes entered his cell and ordered him to dress with all speed. He begged leave to take Joseph; they answered that he would have no need of him. He inquired how much linen he might carry. “One or two shirts,” was the reply, according to Champagnac. The duke took two hundred ducats, handing one hundred to the Chevalier Jacques that he might defray the prisoners’ charges. He embraced his servants and bade them farewell, then mounted into a carriage which traveled day and night without intermission.
On the 20th of March, at half-past four in the afternoon, the carriage reached the gates of Paris, near the Barrière de Pantin. A courier was waiting there with orders to skirt the walls as far as Vincennes. The duke entered the fortress at five o’clock. Worn out with hunger and exhaustion, he partook of a light repast and fell asleep upon a wretched pallet on the entresol. He had traversed a frontier, a citadel, and a long highway; the coming night reserved for him neither prolonged inquiry nor prepared defense.
Toward eleven o’clock, he was roughly awakened and conducted into a chamber of the pavilion facing the woods. Eight field officers were assembled there, designated by Murat, the Governor of Paris. A criminal examination was drawn up in all haste. Interrogated as to whether he had borne arms against his country, the duke replied that he had fought alongside his family to reclaim the heritage of his ancestors, but that following the peace he had laid down his sword and recognized that there were no longer kings in Europe. Champagnac records that his composure and intrepidity struck the judges with awe.
They hesitated, and dispatched their report to Bonaparte. The chronicler relates that the report was returned bearing but three words: “Condemned to death.” The sentence was pronounced at four o’clock in the morning. The entire night now shrank to a brief exchange of words: the question regarding the bearing of arms, the prince’s answer, the hesitation of the officers, and the report posted to Paris. When the order came back, it bore but a single determination.
At half-past four, the duke was led down into the moat. He requested the services of an ecclesiastic; one of the men present answered him with contempt that the priests were asleep. The prince made no reply, collected his thoughts for a moment, and then stepped toward the place of execution. Shortly before he died, he begged that a tress of his hair, a letter, and a ring be conveyed to the Princess of Rohan. A soldier undertook the charge; an aide-de-camp perceived it, snatched the tokens away, and declared that no man should do the bidding of a traitor. The last private word sought by the condemned man was thus denied him.
The prince was shot in the eastern part of the moat, near the entrance to a small garden. The night was pitch-black; a lantern had been fastened over his heart to guide the soldiers’ aim. A grave had been dug on the eve, while he was at supper. A forester had lent a spade and pickaxe; his body was cast into the earth fully clothed. He was thirty-two years of age. The expedition had begun with the search for papers and ended in a ditch, before the capital had even learned of the prisoner’s journey.
Champagnac asserts that among the seized papers not a single document relating to the Pichegru conspiracy was discovered. The chapter also records, citing an earlier historian, that the Parisians learned on the following day of the arrest, trial, and death of the duke in a single breath. These circumstances assign the capture its place within a broader political crisis; but the chronicler’s tone ventures further: he accuses Bonaparte of having done the prince to death to serve his own elevation, comparing the scene to Banquo’s ghost coming to take his seat beside Macbeth.
This moral condemnation belongs to the author of 1833. It must not be confounded with the interrogatories addressed to the duke by the military commission, nor with the brief answers preserved by Champagnac. What his narrative brings forcefully to light is the inexorable sequence of decisions: emissaries reconnoiter Ettenheim, the house is surrounded, the captive is hurried through Strasbourg and Paris, a commission is convened at Vincennes in the dead of night, a report returns, sentence is passed before dawn, and execution follows less than an hour later. The duke never lived to see the light of day break upon his trial.
Thus ended, in this relation, the journey that carried a prince from a foreign retreat to the moats of Vincennes. The tokens he left behind were confiscated before leaving the precinct; the sentence itself was executed without delay. After his death, Royalists and Republicans interpreted the event through the fears and allegiances of their day. The text frames the execution as an indictment of the First Consul; yet the prisoner’s history also resides in the simpler gestures he was still permitted to perform: dividing his purse, bidding his household farewell, asking for a priest, and seeking to dispatch a letter and a ring to her whom he would never see again.