On this date in 1799, a nobleman turned republican was turned into a martyr.
Fruit of the distinguished Carafa family, Ettore Carafa (English Wikipedia entry | Italian) was the Count of Ruvo but preferred the ennoblement of all mankind.
After a youthful trip to Paris on the verge of the French Revolution, Carafa returned to make himself the scandal of the Neapolitan aristocracy by such behaviors as translating the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and wearing the republican tricolor to the opera. Carafa was eventually obliged to break out of prison and take sanctuary in the Cisalpine Republic but he returned in glory (and no little satisfaction) with the 1799 Parthenopean Republic, when Naples briefly went republican, too. Commissioned an officer in revolutionary Naples’s army, he besieged his hometown of Andria.
Alas, this democratic interlude did not even live out the year, and many of its leading lights paid the forfeit to a violent reaction. Naples’s briefly-exiled queen was Marie Antoinette‘s sister and nowise forgiving when it came to Jacobin types and certainly not “such a man as Carafa, fit match as he was to Caracciolo, and held in almost equal terror by the Court.”
Carafa was one of its last holdouts, defending Pescara from siege well after Naples itself had fallen.
On September 4, 1799, Carafa mounted the guillotine with aplomb, his last words a command to the executioner Tommaso Paradiso, “You will tell your queen how a Carafa can die!” Then he slid himself under the knife on his back, boldly looking up at the instrument of death as it crashed through him.
On this day..
- 1574: Charles de Mornay, sword dance regicide
- 2013: Sushmita Banerjee, Escape from the Taliban author
- 1964: James Coburn, George Wallace's first death warrant
- 1821: Jose Miguel Carrera, Chilean patriot
- 1946: Leon Rupnik, Erwin Rosener, and Lovro Hacin, for the occupation of Slovenia
- 1822: Francisco Javier de Elio
- 1951: King Abdullah's assassins
- 1778: Patrick McMullen, repeat deserter
- 1953: Miss Earle Dennison, the first white woman electrocuted in Alabama
- 1896: Chief Chingaira Makoni, Rhodesian rebel
- 1942: Bishop Gorazd of Prague
- 1638: Three (of four) English colonists for murdering a Native American
Queen-Consort Marie-Caroline was okay and a rather intelligent woman. But her husband, King Ferdinand de Bourbon was a slowwitted individual so she was forced to make most of his decisions herself. Among the aristocrats the Queen was not very popular because she turned her back on too conservative Spain and made the Kingdom fully independent of Spain. Among the common people the royal couple became unusually popular because Ferdinand mimicked their lifesstyle and some Neopolitanian patriots died for the royal pair. Unfortunately the Queen and Marie-Antoinette were as close as sisters can be and her hatred for the Revolution made her go to the other extreme.