Louis Antoine of Bourbon-Cop

Louis Antoine Henri de Bourbon-Cop, duke of Enghien (born in 1772 with Chantilly - died the March 21st 1804 with Vincennes) was a Prince of blood French.

Only sons of Louis, last prince de Condé, it was the last one going down from the house of Cop. As of 1789, in front of the revolutionary disorders, the young duke of Enghien joined the Army of the Emigrants which is formed beyond the rhine under the command of his/her grandfather, the prince de Condé and of his father, the duke of Bourbon.

It settles then with Ettenheim, in the Grand Duchy of Bade, where it secretly marries the princess Charlotte of Rohan-Rochefort. It is there that having had wind of a new royalist plot fomented by Cadoudal and Pichegru, and suspecting the duke of Enghien of being the heart about it, Napoleon Bonaparte made it remove by its secret police.

Stopped in the night of the 15 to the March 16th 1804, the prince was almost immediately translated in front of a council of war (chaired by Pierre-Augustin Hulin). Condemned to death, he was shot the March 21st in the ditches of the Château of Vincennes, and its body is thrown in a pit with the foot of the House of the Queen.

This execution, almost without political interest, raised waves of indignation in the courses European. The royalists thus showed Napoleon to be themselves loosely removed from the last kid of a famous house resulting from kings de France. What did not prevent many of those which had been moved by died by the duke of Enghien to join in Napoleon, since it firmly appeared installed on its imperial throne, lately set up.

Later, the Restauration did of the duke of Enghien one of the martyrs of the royalty, with the image of the Vendean generals: its memory remains long-lived today in the royalist mediums, and the bicentenary of its death was the occasion of conferences and debates. In its Mémoires of In addition to-Fall , Chateaubriand wrote admirable pages on the execution of the duke of Enghien, which according to the comment of the deputy of the Meurthe Antoine Boulay, was for the Empire not only one “crime”, but also a “fault”, which was quite worse with its direction.

The duke of Enghien is buried today in the Ste Chapelle of Vincennes, where Louis XVIII made deposit his remainders in 1816, under a monument of Lenoir.

Reference in the literature

The history of the duke of Enghien is discussed by a group of aristocrats in the first part of the War and Peace of Tolstoï. Pierre Bézoukhov is the only one to defend the act of Napoleon while explaining: " … the Bourbons fled the revolution, delivering the people to the Anarchie; Napoleon alone knew to include/understand the revolution and to overcome it, and since it was about the general good, he could not move back in front of the death of only one homme."

Random links: