Louis XV Survives Assassination: France Faces Fury

Robert-Francois Damiens pulled a small folding knife and stabbed King Louis XV of France in the right side as the monarch descended the steps of the Trianon at Versailles on January 5, 1757. The blade, just four inches long, barely penetrated the king''s thick winter clothing and fur-lined coat. The wound was superficial. Louis survived. Damiens was seized immediately by the royal guard and did not resist. The motive remains murky. Damiens was a former domestic servant who had been dismissed from several households. Under interrogation, he claimed he wanted only to wound the king, not kill him, and insisted he had acted alone to send a message about the suffering of the common people. The Paris parlement, which had been feuding with the king over tax policy and the authority of the Jesuits, was suspected of involvement. No conspiracy was ever proven. What happened to Damiens was the real story. He became the last person in France executed by drawing and quartering, the traditional punishment reserved for regicides since the Middle Ages. On March 28, 1757, before a crowd estimated at twenty thousand in the Place de Greve, executioners first burned his hand holding the knife, then tore flesh from his chest, arms, and legs with red-hot pincers. Molten lead, boiling oil, and burning resin were poured into the wounds. Four horses were then hitched to his limbs to pull his body apart. The process failed. After an hour of agonized pulling, the executioner had to sever the tendons with a blade before the limbs separated. The spectacle horrified even an era accustomed to public executions. Giacomo Casanova, watching from a rented window, reported that several women in the crowd fainted. The grotesqueness of Damiens''s execution became an argument for judicial reform. Within thirty-two years, France replaced such spectacles with the guillotine, a device designed specifically to make execution instantaneous and, in the language of its proponents, humane.