The police had laid hands upon one of the conspirators before ever the bombs burst. This detail belongs, seemingly, to those tales wherein chance, having pointed out the proper door, neglects to deliver the key. On the fourteenth of January, 1858, in the immediate approaches to the Opera in the Rue Le Peletier, an officer recognized Pieri, an Italian forbidden from residing on French soil. He was apprehended. A few fleeting minutes, and the impending catastrophe would invest this encounter with a vastly graver significance.
Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie were arriving at the theatre. Three explosions tore through the vicinity of their carriage. In that narrow street, choked by the crowd awaiting the cortege, the flying iron had no need to distinguish rank: guards, onlookers, and opera-goers found themselves within the selfsame perimeter of ruin. Glass shattered, the wounded fell. The imperial couple survived; several persons perished, and more than a hundred were maimed. An outrage devised to strike down a monarch had distributed its carnage amongst those who had merely assembled to watch him pass.
Orsini himself was wounded. The destruction he had prepared had shown no deference to its architect. Yet neither his injury nor the ensuing tumult permitted him to vanish for long. The man whom forged papers styled under a British name was soon, before the bar of French justice, to recover his true Italian identity: Felice Orsini, conspirator, champion of his country’s independence, accused of having sought to open a path toward that liberation by means of the Emperor’s assassination.
The January Travellers
The judicial inquiry brought together four men: Orsini, Pieri, Carlo de Rudio, and Antonio Gomez. Their itineraries led back to England, where several among them had lived in exile. The rented lodgings, the passports, the journeys from town to town traced an geography far less dazzling than that of the explosion itself, yet vastly more useful to the examining magistrates. It was necessary to bind intent to preparation, and preparation to the deeds enacted before the Opera house.
At trial, the witnesses arrived to restore each fragment of the journey to its proper place. A woman encountered in Brussels, Rosine Hartmann, recounted a conversation with Pieri. Remarks regarding the perils he courted assumed, after the fact, a sinister hue. Pieri disputed their construction. That which the prosecution tendered as conscious awareness of a deadly enterprise, the prisoner endeavoured to reduce to mere anxieties over papers or residence permits. Words overheard in a private chamber, long detached from any matter of public moment, were transformed in Paris into the fabric of a capital indictment.
The days of January were retraced, one by one. The arrivals in Paris, the clandestine meetings, the final preparations had drawn together men who had certainly not gathered for the seasonal pleasures of the capital. The conspiracy possessed foreign ramifications; one Bernard, who had remained beyond the French frontier, featured throughout the dossier without ever appearing in the dock beside the four accused. There was no need to cast every Italian exile in the role of conspirator to perceive that this particular undertaking had traversed several borders.
Pieri, having been arrested prior to the detonation, could maintain that he had hurled no bomb. That circumstance, however, did not extinguish the question of his complicity in the design. As to the others, the arguments descended into the precise distribution of their physical acts. Orsini suggested that an unknown Italian had cast one of the missiles. The Procureur Général countered this invention by reciting the strict chronology of their meetings and the conspicuous absence of any such mysterious phantom during the crucial minutes when the conspirators took up their stations. The stranger appeared only too opportunely in the prisoner's narrative; the prosecution refused to grant him any quarter in the realm of fact.
Italy Within the Courtroom
The proceedings of the twenty-fifth and twenty-sixth of February were by no means a mere reckoning of itineraries and depositions. Italy herself entered the hall in the person of Orsini. National independence was his professed cause, and the French intervention of 1849 against the Roman Republic stood at the core of his political grievance. He imputed to Napoleon III a personal responsibility for the crushing of a hope to which he had consecrated his life.
In the eyes of the prosecution, this motive afforded no extenuation whatsoever. The Procureur Général repudiated the claim that an individual might arrogate to himself the right to decree the death of another in the name of the future felicity of nations. If every man, he argued in substance, derived from his own conviction the warrant to kill, what security would remain to any human being? His closing address celebrated both the sovereign delivered from peril and the enduring stability of the regime. Yet, beneath this official eloquence, an inescapable objection defied all political pretexts: the casualties in the street had consented to no sacrifice on behalf of Italy.
Jules Favre appeared for Orsini. He could not wipe away the dead, nor did he attempt to portray the blast as a mischance. Instead, he strove to distinguish his client from the common herd of men swayed by gain or vulgar ambition. He evoked the familial devotion to the Italian cause, the vows taken, the long sequence of defeats; he pleaded that the jury should comprehend the fatal momentum before striking down him who had succumbed to it. In that courtroom, such comprehension was already no small concession.
Then the advocate read aloud a letter penned at Mazas prison on the eleventh of February. In it, Orsini addressed the very Emperor whose death he had plotted. He did not sue primarily for his own life: he implored the monarch to deliver Italy into independence. He invoked the Italians who had fought under Napoleon I, binding the tranquility of Europe to the destiny of his native soil. In this manner, the letter inverted the relation between the two men. He whom Orsini had deemed an obstacle was now solicited as a deliverer.
There was nothing of simple reconciliation in this appeal. The prison walls divided the author from his fate; the Emperor retained the sovereign prerogative of mercy and the conduct of high policy. Orsini possessed only his voice, transmitted through his counsel, wherewith to intervene once more in the affairs of the world. Italy remained his ultimate auditor, even as his pen moved in Paris.
Two Names at La Roquette
The verdict condemned Orsini, Pieri, and de Rudio to death. Gomez, for whom extenuating circumstances were admitted, was sentenced to hard labour for life. The three condemned to the scaffold carried their appeals to the Court of Cassation, which examined the petitions in March. The law continued to distinguish individual conditions where public outrage would gladly have confounded all four beneath a single execration.
De Rudio ultimately obtained a commutation of his sentence. Orsini and Pieri were executed on the thirteenth of March, 1858, in the Place de la Roquette. For them, the drama had closed; for the Empire, it inaugurated an era of heightened repression, whilst the Italian Question pursued its course through the cabinets of Europe. The bombs had neither slain Napoleon III nor instantly bestowed a unified homeland upon the Italians.
There remained the letters, the court reports, and presently the engravings depicting the catastrophe. In these illustrations, the eye is drawn inevitably toward the imperial carriage. Surrounding it, the prostrate figures occupy far less space. Yet it was there that Orsini’s design encountered its most irrefutable reality: in a street where utter strangers had paid with their flesh for a decree pronounced in the name of a people.