Louis Antoine, Duke of Enghien

• 1. Introduction

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  Louis Antoine de Bourbon, Duke of Enghien, spoke his final words to a French firing platoon. 'I must die then at the hands of Frenchmen!' He was a member of the House of Bourbon, and history remembers him more for that death than for anything he did in life. Napoleon Bonaparte, then First Consul of France, ordered his execution over claims that he had aided Britain and conspired against him. What tied a young French prince, raised in exile, to a conspiracy he had no part in? And why would his death alarm the crowned heads of Europe more than a decade of revolutionary violence had?

• 2. A Prince Born To Inherit

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  He was born at the Château de Chantilly, the country residence of the Princes of Condé, on the 2nd of August 1772. He carried the title duc d'Enghien from birth. His father, Louis Henri de Bourbon, was already Duke of Bourbon and heir to the Prince of Condé, making the newborn a prince du sang. His mother, Louise Marie Thérèse Bathilde d'Orléans, was the only surviving daughter of Louis Philippe d'Orléans, himself grandson of the Regent Philippe d'Orléans. Through her, he was doubly descended from Louis XIV, through the king's legitimated daughters Mademoiselle de Blois and Mademoiselle de Nantes. His uncle was the future Philippe Égalité, making him a first cousin of the future Louis-Philippe I, King of the French.

  Marguerite Catherine Michelot, a Paris Opera singer, had a romantic involvement with his father that ended his parents' marriage in 1778. Blame at the time fell on his mother rather than on her husband. He remained an only child of that marriage, though Michelot bore his father two illegitimate daughters, giving him two half sisters. The Abbé Millot oversaw his private education, while Commodore de Vinieux instructed him in military matters. He showed the combative spirit long tied to the House of Condé and entered military service in 1788. Only days after the Storming of the Bastille, he left France alongside his father and grandfather, beginning a life in exile.

• 3. The Army Of Condé

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  In 1792, at the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars, he held a command in the corps of émigrés. His grandfather, the Prince of Condé, had organized and led that force. This Army of Condé took part in the Duke of Brunswick's failed invasion of France that year. Serving alongside his father and grandfather, the young duke distinguished himself more than once for bravery and eagerness in the vanguard.

  The peace of Lunéville, signed in February 1801, brought about the dissolution of the Condé force. Around this time, he married Princess Charlotte de Rohan in a private ceremony; she was a niece of the Cardinal de Rohan. The couple settled at Ettenheim, a town in Baden near the Rhine, where he would spend his final years of freedom. That quiet stretch of the Rhine border would soon draw Bonaparte's attention.

• 4. The Cadoudal Affair

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  Early in 1804, Napoleon received reports linking the duke to the Cadoudal Affair. French police were already tracking that royalist conspiracy. The plot involved Georges Cadoudal and Jean-Charles Pichegru, who aimed to overthrow Bonaparte's government and restore the monarchy. Reports claimed the duke had been seen with Charles François Dumouriez and had slipped secretly into France. No evidence ever tied him to Cadoudal or Pichegru. He had, however, already been condemned in absentia years earlier for bearing arms against the French Republic in the Armée des Émigrés. On the strength of the false reports, Napoleon ordered his seizure. The charge of his earlier service against the Republic, already ruled on once, would be revived to justify what came next.

• 5. Seizure And A Hasty Trial

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  Dragoons from the French army slipped across the Rhine under cover of secrecy and surrounded his house at Ettenheim. They seized him and marched him to Strasbourg on the 15th of March 1804. From there he was taken to the Château de Vincennes near Paris. There, colonels drawn from the French army sat as a hastily assembled tribunal, chaired by General Pierre-Augustin Hulin. The tribunal's core charge held that he had fought against France in the war just past, and that he intended to join a fresh coalition against the country. Anne Jean Marie René Savary arrived carrying orders to see the duke killed. It was Savary's pressure that pushed the commission to draw up its act of condemnation. Savary also made sure the First Consul never had the chance to speak with the condemned man directly.

  On the 21st of March, soldiers led him into the castle moat and shot him there, near a grave dug in advance. A platoon of the Gendarmes d'élite carried out the execution. Not until 1816 were his remains exhumed and finally laid to rest in the Holy Chapel of the Château de Vincennes.

• 6. Royal Alarm And Blame

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  Tsar Alexander I of Russia reacted to the execution with particular alarm, and it pushed him toward curbing Napoleon's power. As one account put it, 'Baden was the territory of the tsar's father-in-law, and the German principalities were part of the Holy Roman Empire of which Russia was a guarantor.' The killing left royal courts throughout Europe shaken and appalled. Enghien was the last descendant of the House of Condé; his father and grandfather outlived him but produced no further heirs. Both Joséphine and Madame de Rémusat asked Bonaparte directly to spare him, yet he would not be swayed.

  Responsibility for the seizure remains disputed among Talleyrand, Fouché, and Savary. Napoleon himself gave conflicting accounts, at times blaming Talleyrand for the idea and at other times claiming full responsibility. Later, on the way to St. Helena and while at Longwood, he insisted he would act the same way again given the same circumstances. He also wrote a similar declaration into his will. There he stated it had been necessary for the safety, interest, and honour of the French people. The Comte d'Artois, by his own admission, had been supporting sixty assassins in Paris.

  The killing shocked a European aristocracy that still remembered the bloodletting of the Revolution. Either Antoine Boulay, comte de la Meurthe, or Napoleon's police chief Fouché is said to have remarked, 'C'est pire qu'un crime, c'est une faute.' In English the line is often rendered as 'It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder.' Some also attribute it to Talleyrand, and in an 1844 essay titled 'Experience', Ralph Waldo Emerson mistakenly credited the line to Napoleon himself.

  Inside France, though, the execution had the opposite effect, quieting domestic resistance to Bonaparte. He moved quickly afterward, crowning himself Emperor of the French and building a government backed by the army. Cadoudal, hearing news of the coronation, reportedly said, 'We wanted to make a king, but we made an emperor.'

• 7. Enghien In Fiction

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  Leo Tolstoy dramatized the killing in the opening book of War and Peace. There, the vicomte de Mortemart, a French émigré said to have known the duke personally, raises the subject at Anna Pavlovna Sherer's gathering. In Tolstoy's account, the group debates whether the duke's death cost Napoleon his standing as a hero. One guest in the scene calls it a moment when, in his words, 'there was one martyr more in heaven and one hero less on earth.' The novel also repeats an anecdote claiming the duke once secretly visited the actress Mademoiselle George in Paris. In the story, he found Napoleon there in the midst of one of his fainting fits and spared his rival's life. Bonaparte, the anecdote goes, repaid that mercy with an execution. The actress, whose real name was Marguerite-Joséphine Wiemer, was indeed one of Napoleon's mistresses. No evidence supports any connection between her and Enghien; the tale appears to have been gossip that circulated in Europe at the time.

  Alexandre Dumas also returned to the killing in The Knight of Sainte-Hermine. In it, Bonaparte tells Cambacérès, 'It's simple. We shall kidnap the Duc d'Enghien and be done with it.' Dumas mentioned the death again in The Count of Monte Cristo. There, a character remarks that treaties mattered little when it came to shooting 'the poor Duc d'Enghien.'

  Albert Capellani directed a one-reel silent film titled La mort du duc d'Enghien en 1804, released in 1909. More than a century later, the director's cut of Ridley Scott's Napoleon, released in 2023, depicted the execution with Ed Eales White in the role. That version breaks from the historical record, placing the killing in the woods, carried out at once by firing squad with no trial at all.