Marie André Cantillon

Marie André Nicolas Cantillon (1781/82 – July 1869) was a French soldier in the army of Napoleon. After the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars he attempted to assassinate the Duke of Wellington on 11 February 1818. Wellington was in Paris as commander of the allied occupation of France. Cantillon missed his shot and escaped, but was captured by the Parisian police shortly afterwards. Brought to trial in May 1819, he was acquitted after his pistol ball could not be found at the scene and his lawyer told the jury that a conviction would be a stain upon the honour of the nation. Cantillon was granted a bequest in the will of Napoleon I, though he only received part of the 10,000 francs. In his later life, he ran a grocery in Brussels, Belgium. His wife petitioned for the remainder of the bequest and may have received it from a commission established by Napoleon III.

Early life Cantillon was a distant relative of the French-Irish economist Richard Cantillon (d. 1734) and descended from the same Ballyheigue, County Kerry, branch of the family. Cantillon was born in Paris, to a model maker, in 1781/82 and worked in the jewellery trade. He was conscripted into the cavalry of the French Army and rose to become a non-commissioned officer and then sous-lieutenant (sub-lieutenant) in the hussars. Cantillon had raised the suspicions of the Parisian police when he arrived in the city from Brussels a few days before and he was arrested shortly after the assassination attempt, in company with an accomplice named Marinet. Item 10,000f. to the sub-officer Cantillon, who has undergone a prosecution as accused of having assassinated Lord Wellington, of which he has been declared innocent. Cantillon had as much right to assassinate this oligarch as he had to send me to perish on the rock of St. Helena. Wellington, who proposed this outrage, sought to justify it by the interest of Great Britain. Cantillon, if he had actually assassinated this Lord, would have sheltered himself, and would have been justified by the same motives—the interest of France in ridding herself of a general who had, moreover, violated the capitulation of Paris, and thereby become responsible for the blood of the martyrs, Ney, Labédoyère, &c, and for the crime of having plundered the museums, contrary to the text of treaties

The French former emperor Napoleon I left Cantillon 10,000 francs (around £500 at the time and ) in a codicil added to his will on 24 April 1821, just 11 days before Napoleon's death. This codicil of Napoleon's will caused outrage when it became known in England, where it was common knowledge that Wellington had expressly forbidden his men from targeting Napoleon on the field of Waterloo. The reported payment was the subject of a 12 February 1858 question from the Scottish member of parliament William Stirling-Maxwell to the prime minister Henry John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston. Palmerston stated that he thought it was in poor taste for Stirling-Maxwell to imply that Napoleon III had anything to do with a payment being made and noted that a portion of the bequest had been paid in the 1820s, when the Bourbon monarchy was in power.