“Aim for the heart, but spare the face”
The 4th and final part of my narrative of Murat’s last days.
(Part 1: Murat’s Fateful Decision) (Part 2: The Capture of Murat) (Part 3: Prelude to a Show Trial)
The commission chosen to enact the farcical trial of Murat convened on the 13th of October. A Sicilian named Captain Starace was to selected to serve as Murat’s advocate, and pleaded with Murat to change his mind about appearing in front of his judges to defend himself. Murat replied that the members of the court were not judges, but executioners; he ordered Starace to say nothing in his defense. Shortly after, the commission sent in a rapporteur to interrogate Murat, asking him his name, age, and homeland. Murat angrily declared: “I am Joachim, King of the Two Sicilies; get out, Monsieur!”
The trial concluded around four o’clock in the afternoon. He was unanimously found guilty, ironically on the basis of a law regarding insurrection which he had enacted himself in June of 1810. Murat received the news of his death sentence with, writes the Marquis de Sassenay, “a disdainful calm.” The sentence was to be carried out, he was told, in a quarter of an hour. He was permitted to write a final letter to his wife and children.
My last hour has come; in a few moments I shall have ceased to exist; you will no longer have a husband, and my children will have no father. Never forget me; my life has not been tainted by any injustice. Farewell my Achille, farewell my Letitia, farewell my Lucien, farewell my Louise; show yourselves to the world worthy of me. I leave you without kingdom and without property, in the midst of my numerous enemies; be constantly united, show yourselves superior to misfortune, think of what you are and of what you have been, and God will bless you. Do not curse my memory. Know that my greatest pain, in the last moments of my life, is to die far away from my children.
Receive my paternal blessing; receive my kisses and my tears. Always have present in your memory your unfortunate father.
[Murat writes his final letter, by Jacques Onfroy de Bréville]
Into the envelope along with the letter, he placed several locks of his hair.
Completing this final task, he was met by Canon Masdea, the septuagenarian priest to whom Murat had bequeathed some money for the San Giorgio church two years prior. The priest prevailed upon Murat to sign a written declaration stating that he was dying as a Christian. He also managed to persuade Murat to make confession, standing firm on the matter when the officer on guard attempted to object due to a lack of time.
“Let us go,” Murat declared after receiving absolution, “and God’s will be done!”
At six o’clock in the evening, he was led out to the narrow courtyard of the castle. He coldly refused both the blindfold and the stool that were offered him. Scarcely ten feet separated him from the twelve-man firing squad. In his hand he held the miniature likenesses of his wife and children, which he now pressed to his chest.
“Soldiers,” he addressed the firing squad calmly, “do your duty. Aim for the heart, but spare the face.”
He gave the order to fire himself.
Details of the aftermath of the execution vary, with one account claiming three pistol shots were discharged into Murat’s head after he fell, which, if true, is excessive enough to appear as more an act of malice than a standard coup-de-grâce. There seems to be no doubt that he was killed instantly by the firing squad’s volley, fired at such a close range that his body was described as “mutilated.” His body was placed into a plain coffin and buried without ceremony in the yard of the church that had benefitted from his kindness two years earlier. Today a marker lies within the church, commemorating the spot where Murat’s remains are said to rest.
[Plaque marking Murat’s final resting place in San Giorgio church in Pizzo]
Caroline Murat had received no news of her husband’s whereabouts or well-being in months. Eight days after his execution, she wrote to Catherine, wife of her brother Jerome, that “this uncertainty is becoming unbearable.” Her older sister Elisa learned that Murat had ended up being apprehended in Calabria. Both sisters expressed the hope that he would be allowed to continue his journey from there to Trieste, but Caroline remained riddled with anxiety. “Oh, my dear Elisa,” she wrote, “loss of fortune seems nothing beside the agonies which oppress me and I would be happier completely destitute if I could thereby spare my husband and myself the cruel sufferings… until the hour when he can arrive and I can know him safe.”
The same day that Caroline wrote the letter above—November 2—news of her husband’s execution was printed in the Wiener Zeitung, the newspaper she had taken to reading daily since arriving in Trieste. Her servants endeavored to hide the paper, substituting another in its place; but she insisted on receiving it. It was yielded to her with reluctance. Catherine Davies, an Englishwoman who had served the Murats since 1804, describes the ensuing scene: “Upon reading the account of her husband’s melancholy death, she was attacked with violent fits which lasted until morning. The dear children were asleep, and knew nothing of their mother’s grief, nor of their own loss, till the following day, when seeing every one looking sad around them, Prince Lucien said to my late English companion, ‘Mimie, what is the matter, that you all wear such sorrowful faces: is papa dead?’ She replied she feared he was. At this moment, they all wept bitterly, for they were tenderly attached to their father, and he equally to them.”
While the Bourbon courts in France and Naples rejoiced at the news of Murat’s death, there were many who responded with horror, grief, and anger. General Guglielmo Pépé, who had come to love and admire Murat even in spite of his political differences with his former king, fell into this latter camp. “The tragical death of Joachim,” he writes, “plunged me into the deepest grief, which I only mastered after a long lapse of time: the whole country was horror-stricken by this sad event. Even to this day, when the inhabitants of Pizzo have occasion to travel the kingdom, they carefully conceal the place of their nativity, so great is the stigma it casts upon them.” Lord Byron, who had, years earlier, written a poem about Murat, likewise lamented the legendary cavalier’s sad fate. “Poor, dear Murat, what an end! …. His white plume used to be a rallying point in battle, like Henry IV’s. He refused a confessor and a bandage; so would neither suffer his soul or body to be bandaged.”
Napoleon, arriving on Saint Helena two days after the execution of his brother-in-law, did not receive news of it until months later. Writes Barry O’Meara, who briefly served as Napoleon’s physician on the island, “Some short time after his arrival at Longwood, I communicated to the Emperor the news of Murat’s death. He heard it with calmness, and immediately inquired if he had perished on the field of battle? At first I hesitated to tell him that his brother-in-law had been executed by military law. On his repeating the question, I informed him of the manner in which Murat had been put to death, to which he listened without any change of countenance.” This sangfroid was typical of Napoleon, who disdained outward displays of emotions (except for anger) in front of his subordinates. But his valet, Marchand, who had been with Napoleon longer and knew how to read him better, remarks in his memoirs that “This news had saddened him, and I heard him talking to Dr. O’Meara, which renewed this pain as he spoke. He said nothing of the King of Naples’ wrongs toward him, adding that to go down to Calabria with fifty men was the action of a madman, but those who had ordered his death were monsters.” General Gourgaud, in his diary, describes Napoleon, later in the evening after learning of Murat’s death, as “sad, preoccupied, plays mechanically with some coins during the reading. He suffers, we see it clearly.” Murat would remain a recurring subject of the Emperor’s conversation during his time on Saint Helena. His reflections on his brother-in-law were as conflicted as his feelings towards him had been throughout their relationship, ranging from fond reminiscences of Murat’s battlefield gallantry, to bitterness over his defection in 1814, to ridicule of his outlandish attire and poor judgment. He never ceased to regret Murat’s absence at Waterloo.
It is impossible to know for certain what Murat’s true intentions were as he began taking the road towards Monteleone prior to his arrest in Pizzo. He was indecisive by nature, but also stubborn. As appalling of a prospect as he found the idea of a life in exile in Austria, his desire to be reunited with his family was genuine; his children were never far from his mind. Yet equally abhorrent to him was the idea of living the rest of his life in a state of dishonor, having relinquished, without a fight, a throne he had never abdicated. The accounts of Galvani and Franceschetti both make it clear that his mind changed throughout the journey between Corsica and Calabria, his natural optimism and faith in himself repeatedly overriding the reality of the hopelessness of his original enterprise. Perhaps he truly had resolved to go on to Trieste by the time his party encountered Trentacapilli; if so, this only renders the outcome all the more tragic.
Some historians have theorized that his voyage to Pizzo was a deliberate act of suicide. This ignores not only his repeated insistences that he intended to join his family in Trieste, but also the resistance and attempt to avoid capture he made prior to his apprehension. If Murat was seeking death, he was not seeking it in the manner of a common criminal. He had been a soldier for his entire adult life, and would have preferred to die like one. Upon his return to Naples from his final defeat at Tolentino, where, like Ney at Waterloo, he appears to have been attempting to get himself killed, Murat dolefully remarked to Caroline that he had been unable to meet death.
“Thus,” writes his former aide-de-camp Macirone, “fortune was again adverse to courage, and the blood of a hero was permitted to be lawlessly, uselessly, and inhumanly shed, by a sovereign who had never been wronged by his victim. His death was ignominious only to his enemies. Those who had been his subjects will revere his memory. France may reproach it for the evils to which he unintentionally contributed… but when the book of truth shall be unfolded, it will appear that the errors of Murat were not errors of the heart.” It is as fitting an epitaph as that of Murat’s childhood friend Agar, the Count of Mosbourg, who devoted to him a monument listing his military exploits and achievements, closing with the declaration: “He knew how to conquer, he knew how to reign, he knew how to die.”
-Atteridge, A. Hilliard. Joachim Murat: Marshal of France and King of Naples, 1911
-Bear, Joan. Caroline Murat, 1972
-Cole, Hubert. The Betrayers, 1972
-Colletta, Pietro, General. Histoire des six derniers mois de la vie de Joachim Murat, 1821
-Davies, Catherine. Eleven Years’ Residence in the Family of Murat, King of Naples, 1841
-Franceschetti, Dominique-César, General. Mémoires sur les événemens qui ont précédé la mort de Joachim Ier, Roi des Deux-Siciles, 1826
-Galvani, Mathieu. Mémoires sur les événemens qui ont précédé la mort de Joachim-Napoléon, Roi de Deux-Siciles, 1843
-Gourgaud, Gaspard, General. Sainte-Hélène - Journal Inedit de 1815 à 1818 en 2 volumes
-Macirone, Francis. Interesting Facts Relating to the Fall and Death of Joachim Murat, 1817
-Marchand, Louis-Joseph. In Napoleon’s Shadow: The Memoirs of Louis-Joseph Marchand, Valet and Friend of the Emperor 1811–1821, 2018
-O’Meara, Barry Edward. Napoleon in exile, or, A voice from St. Helena, Vol 1, 1827
-Pépé, Guglielmo. Memoirs of General Pépé, Vol 2, 1846.
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