Louis Pierre Louvel

The assassination of the duke of Berry

This evening, the duke of Berry, wire junior by the count d' Artois - future Charles X -, was with the Opera with its wife. To the interval, has just taken back the latter with her car, the prince, without hat nor coat, was turned over from there to foot towards the entry of the Opera, when a man, appeared " like a flèche" in front of the royal car, planted a knife in full heart to him.

The anguish of the duke of Berry, under the eyes of the Court assembled with its bedside, lasted all during the night and marked the royalist spirits deeply. Not having lost consciousness, the prince, who from the start had felt the wound mortal, complained that death is " if slow with venir" , or alternatively, asked in a repeated way " grace, grace for the homme" who had carried the fatal blow to him.

Personality and motivation of the regicide

As of its achieved gesture, Louvel was stopped; he was questioned during this same night.

Without showing much emotion, he only stated to have acted, by conviction antimonarchist, in a project conceived and contemplated since several years. He underlined not to have any personal enmity against his victim, but to have had for goal of " to destroy the souche" Bourbons. Indeed, the dynasty legitimates did not have any heir in hot line then.

Louvel formerly revealed moreover to have carried out, with a similar aim, the voyage until Calais in 1814, when Louis XVIII was to unload in France after the abdication of Napoleon.

For the remainder, the personality of Louvel remains mainly a mystery. According to the account of Chateaubriand in its Mémoires of in addition to-fall, " Louvel was an young man with dirty figure and chafouine, as one sees thousands of them on the paving stone of Paris. It held of the roquet; it had the aggressive and solitary air. It is probable that Louvel did not belong to any company; it was of a sect, not of a plot; it belonged to the one of these conspiracies of ideas, whose members can sometimes join together, but act generally one by one, according to their individual impulse. Its brain nourished only one thought, as a heart is watered of only one passion. Its action was consequent with its principles: he had wanted to kill the whole race of only one blow ".

The irony wants that Louvel, although having made a success of the assassination which it projected, its true goal had missed: September 29th, 1820, came in the world the duke from Bordeaux , child posthumous of the duke of Berry, called at once by the royalists " the child of the miracle" and future Henri V.

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