In memory of the collateral damage On the evening of 14 January 1858, as the Emperor and Empress were on their way to the theatre to see Rossinis William Tell, Felice Orsini and his accomplices, Giuseppe Pieri, Antonio Gomez and Carlo di Rudio (later changed to Charles DeRudio) threw three bombs at the imperial carriage. The first bomb landed among the horsemen in front of the carriage. The second bomb wounded the animals and smashed the carriage glass. The third bomb landed under the carriage and seriously wounded a policeman who was hurrying to protect the occupants. Eight people were killed and 142 wounded, though the emperor and empress were unhurt. Napoleon, the first modern European politician, realized that he and Eugénie de Montijo had to proceed to the performance and appear in their box. Orsini himself was wounded on the right temple and stunned. He tended his wounds and returned to his lodgings, where police found him the next day. Orsini became convinced that Napoleon III was the chief obstacle to Italian independence and the principal cause of the anti-liberal reaction throughout Europe. He plotted his assassination with the logic that after the emperors death, France would rise in revolt and the Italians could exploit the situation to revolt themselves. He went to Paris in 1857 to conspire against the emperor. The attempted assassination actually increased Napoleon IIIs popularity. Because the bombs had been made and tested in England, it caused a brief anti-British furor in France because of suspicion of British involvement. The Emperor refused to escalate the situation and the indignation eventually died down. On 11 February Orsini wrote his famous letter to Napoleon, in which he exhorted him to take up the cause of Italian independence — a cause Napoleon III had already supported in his youth. Modern historians have even suspected that Napoleon wrote some of the letter himself. He addressed another letter to the youth of Italy and condemned political assassination. His biographer, the Englishman Michael St. John Packe, describes him: According to the prosecutors in his trial, Felice Orsini was born a conspirator. Whether that can be believed or not, quite certainly his mother had no notion of it. She was a gentle, cultivated girl of twenty, Florentine, graceful, kind and true. She suckled him and crooned at him in the usual manner. She treated him as, a year or so before, she had treated his elder sister Rosina, as she would likewise treat, in three years’ time, his younger brother, Leonidas, all with the best results. She did not realize that his infant thoughts were of a repressed and furtive trend; that when he waved his wooden spoon and gurgled, he was marshalling secret armies in craggy places, or that his wondering unfathomable eyes, jet black and shining, screened from her view a world of incipient revolution, wherein already he was blowing up Emperors and dethroning Popes. Yet such, maintained the prosecution, was the case. Orsini was sentenced to death and went calmly to the guillotine on 13 March 1858. His accomplices were also sentenced; Pieri was executed and Gomez was condemned to hard labour for life. Di Rudio was sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment on Devils Island, from where he escaped and later went to America; he became an officer in the United States Army, was appointed to the U.S. 7th Cavalry, and participated in — and survived — the 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn. https://youtube/watch?v=DBYeYjPwpIE
Posted on: Wed, 14 Jan 2015 20:19:04 +0000
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