Felice Orsini, a nationalist revolutionary who had…

Felice Orsini, a nationalist revolutionary who had participated in the uprisings in Rome in 1848-49, thereafter serving as Mazzini's agent in Switzerland, Hungary, and England, had broken with Mazzini in 1857.

Emotionally disturbed, he had begun to plot the assassination of Napoleon III, impelled by the notion that the emperor's death would trigger in France a revolution that would spread to Italy.

On the night of January 14, 1858, he and two accomplices throw bombs at the carriage of Napoleon and Empress Eugénie as they are going to the opera in Paris; although several persons are killed, the intended victims are unhurt.

Orsini is arrested; he will be executed in March.

Ironically, Orsini's attack reminds Napoleon, who remembers the pro-Italian sympathies of his youth, of his wish “to do something for Italy”.