The assassination of King Louis Philippe I…
July 1835 CE
The assassination of King Louis Philippe I of France is attempted by one Giuseppe Marco Fieschi, using a home-made volley gun, on July 28, 1835, in Paris.
Ten are killed, but the King escapes with a minor wound.
Fieschi had met his later-to-be co-conspirator Pierre Morey, a neighbor, in 1831.
Morey, a sixty-one-year-old saddler who had been involved in Republican politics, had been arrested but released in 1816, after falling under suspicion of plotting the assassination of the Bourbons.
He was later tried, and acquitted of the murder of an Austrian soldier.
In 1830, he had taken part in the July Revolution that put King Louis-Phillipe in power.
The two had contrived the plan for an "infernal machine", a volley gun with twenty-five gun-barrels that can be fired simultaneously.
Morey had taken the plan to Theodore Pepin, chief of the Society of the Rights of Man Section Rome.
After a meeting they decided to build the weapon, splitting the cost of five hundred francs between Pepin and Morey, with the penniless Fieschi building it and being paid for it.
The gun was built in the place it was intended to be used: a four-room apartment on the third floor of n° 50 Boulevard du Temple.
This is on the expected route the King and his entourage would take during the annual review of the Paris National Guard.
The annual review, which commemorates the 1830 July revolution, takes place on July 28, 1835.
At around noon, Louis-Philippe is passing along the Boulevard du Temple, which connects Place de la République to the Bastille.
He is accompanied by three of his sons, the Duke of Orleans, the Duke of Nemours, and the Prince de Joinville, and a large number of staff and senior officers.
Fieschi is waiting for them, twenty-four barrels of his gun are each loaded with eight bullets and fifteen to twenty buckshot. When the royal party passes in the street below, he fires the gun.
Not all the barrels fire, but the gun still produces a volley of around four hundred projectiles.
Eighteen people are killed, including Lieutenant Colonel Rieussec together with eight other officers of the 8th Legion, Marshal Mortier, and Colonel Raffet, General Girard, Captain Villate and General La Chasse de Vérigny.
A further twenty-two people are injured.
The King is one of the injured, but the wound is minor: a bullet or buckshot had only grazed his forehead; he continues with the day's events and reviews the National Guard as planned.
Four of the gun's twenty-five barrels had burst when fired, four others did not fire, and a further one was not loaded as it lacked a touch hole.
This meant the number of deaths and injuries was lower than might have been the case had all components functioned.
Fieschi himself has been wounded by the gun barrels that burst and is quickly captured.
He has received severe head and facial wounds and two of his fingers will later have to be amputated.