1801: Chevalier, bomb plot scapegoat
January 11th, 2012 Headsman
On this date in 1801, a Jacobin chemist was wrongly executed for Royalists’ plot against Napoleon.
Our scene is France, the year following Napoleon’s coup of 18th Brumaire (November 9, 1799 on the stodgy old Gregorian calendar). Marx’s “first time as tragedy”* saw the Corsican achieve monarch-esque power, and the months ensuing saw a plethora of plots against him.
The ranks of aggrieved potential assassins included both Jacobins, incensed at the military dictatorship, and Bourbons, incensed that it wasn’t their dictatorship — in both cases exacerbated by Napoleon’s decisive battlefield triumphs which consolidated his hold on power.
On Christmas Eve 1800, the man on horseback was a man in a carriage, careening through Paris to catch a performance of Haydn’s oratorio The Creation.
When, all of a sudden, a gigantic explosion on the Rue Saint-Nicaise attempted to un-create the First Consul. It failed, exploding after Napoleon had passed and before Josephine’s family followed, “merely” killing and maiming fifty-some miscellaneous Parisian bystanders instead.
Kablamo! The explosion of the Infernal Machine.
“Every one,” wrote Sir Walter Scott,
shocked with the wild atrocity of such a reckless plot, became, while they execrated the perpetrators, attached in proportion to the object of their cruelty. A disappointed conspiracy always adds strength to the government against which it is directed; and Buonaparte did not fail to push this advantage to the uttermost.
This “Infernal Machine” had actually been built by disgruntled monarchists at the instigation of intriguer Georges Cadoudal, as was swiftly discerned by Napoleon’s Minister of Police, the ruthless ex-revolutionary Joseph Fouche.
Realpolitik exigencies — Napoleon was trying (unsuccessfully) to reach political terms with the royalist faction — instead drove a rush to pin the detonation on the Jacobins.
Who, it should be said, made themselves the primary suspects by virtue of the fact that they’d also been trying to blow up Napoleon. Chevalier had been arrested a couple of months before when a bomb of his, evidently an experiment for a similar Jacobin plot, loudly blew up near Salpetriere.
Four other Jacobins followed Chevalier to death later in January (and two royalists actually involved in the bomb got the same treatment). Some 130 other prominent Jacobins (French link) were expelled on Napoleon’s say-so — no legislative consultation — to the empire’s far-flung colonies, pretty much putting the remains of the long-supine revolutionary left permanently out of the picture as a political force.
* See the 18th Brumaire; the “second time as farce” also came with its own history-repeating-itself executions.
On this day..
- 1915: Mewa Singh, Sikh martyr-assassin - 2020
- 1800: Kyra Frosini, Ioannina socialite - 2019
- 1769: John Martin Andrew, John Fielding prey - 2018
- 2017: Christopher Wilkins, straight talker - 2017
- 1957: Jack Gilbert Graham, terror of the skies - 2016
- 1830: William Banks, housebreaker - 2015
- 1909: The Pollet gang, breaking the French moratorium - 2014
- 1951: Harley LaMarr, dutiful son - 2013
- 2010: Salah ibn Rihaidan ibn Hailan Al-Johani, Medina serial rapist - 2011
- 1897: The Thirteen Martyrs of Bagumbayan - 2010
- 2003: Nobody in Illinois - 2009
- 1944: Galeazzo Ciano and four other Italian Fascists - 2008
Entry Filed under: 19th Century,Assassins,Attempted Murder,Capital Punishment,Cycle of Violence,Death Penalty,Execution,France,History,Intellectuals,Murder,Notable for their Victims,Power,Public Executions,Revolutionaries,Shot,Terrorists,Treason,Wrongful Executions
Tags: 1800s, 1801, jacobins, january 11, napoleon, napoleon bonaparte, paris
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