Robert-François Damiens

Robert-François Damiens (; surname also recorded as Damier ; 9 January 1715 – 28 March 1757) was a French domestic servant whose attempted assassination of King Louis XV in 1757 culminated in his public execution. He was the last person to be executed in France by dismemberment, the traditional form of death penalty reserved for regicides.

Early life Damiens was born on 9 January 1715 in La Thieuloye, a village near Arras in northern France. He enlisted in the army at an early age. After his discharge, he became a domestic servant at the college of the Jesuits in Paris. He was dismissed from there, as well as from other employments, for misconduct, which earned him the moniker ("Robert the Devil").

Assassination attempt

On 5 January 1757 at 4:00 pm, as King Louis XV was entering his carriage at the Palace of Versailles, Damiens rushed past the bodyguards and stabbed him with a penknife. Damiens made no attempt to escape and was apprehended at once. Nevertheless, Louis was bleeding and called for a confessor to be brought to him, as he feared he might die. When Queen Marie ran to Louis' side, he asked forgiveness for his numerous affairs.

Damiens was arrested on the spot and taken away. Despite suspicions of several possible conspiracies being at play, none was ever proven. He was tried and condemned as a regicide by the Parlement of Paris and sentenced to be drawn and quartered by horses at the Place de Grève. He was first subjected to a torture in which his legs were painfully compressed by devices called "boots". Once Damiens was dismembered, to the applause of the crowd, his reportedly still-living torso was burnt at the stake. Some accounts say he died when his last remaining arm was removed. attribute to him "O death, why art thou so long in coming?"; others claim Damiens' last words consisted mainly of various effusions for mercy from God.

Aftermath After his death, the remains of Damiens' corpse were reduced to ashes and scattered in the wind. His house was razed, his brothers and sisters were forced to change their names, and his father, wife, and daughter were banished from France. Damiens's infamy endured. Forty years after his death, the memory of Arras's most notorious citizen was used against another Arras native, Maximilien Robespierre. The polarizing figure of the French Revolution was described frequently by his enemies as the nephew of Damiens. Though untrue, the libel held considerable credibility among royalists and foreign sympathizers. For others, the execution of Damiens became a cause célèbre exemplifying the barbarism of the Ancien Régime.

Legacy

The execution was witnessed by 18th-century adventurer Giacomo Casanova, who had coincidentally arrived the same day of the attack, and he included an account in his memoirs:

Philosophical and political responses The critic Ian Haywood has argued that Edmund Burke alludes to Damiens' torture in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1775), when he writes "When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful" (emphasis added), punning on "press" to refer to Damiens' ordeal. Damiens' execution is also described and discussed at length by Michel Foucault in his treatise Discipline and Punish, in examination of the shift in views on punishment which took place in Western culture in the following century. He cites Alexandre Zévaès' work, Damiens le regicide.

Literary legacy Voltaire includes a thinly veiled account of Damiens' execution in his novella Candide (1759).

An allusion to Damiens' attack and execution, and Casanova's account of it, are used by Mark Twain to suggest the cruelty and injustice of aristocratic power in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889). Baroness Orczy refers to the incident in Mam'zelle Guillotine (1940), part of the Scarlet Pimpernel series, which features the fictionalised character of his daughter Gabrielle Damiens. There is also a description of the death of Damiens in Peter Weiss's play Marat/Sade (1963).