Infernal Machine: The Story of a Radicalized Criminal Who Tried to Assassinate the King of France with a Homemade Supergun in 1835

 As King Louis Philippe I of France, led by his entourage of hundreds of troops and officials, rides down the Boulevard du Temple in Paris, past a throng of thousands of adoring citizens, a loud ear-splitting explosion rends the air.

It is the sound of twenty-five rifled muskets being fired simultaneously.  In an instant, eighteen people are killed, dozens are wounded and King Louis Philippe is grazed on the forehead by a bullet.  All of Paris is thrown into an uproar.

Mere seconds after the great explosion, before the smoke has even cleared along the Boulevard du Temple, a crazed man with blood streaming down his face and his hands burnt black by fire, leaps from the third story window of his tiny one room apartment at Number 50 Boulevard du Temple.  He attempts to flee by sprinting into the confused and shocked crowd that has gathered around the dead and dying as a result of his bizarre assasination attempt.

Before Giuseppe Marco Fieschi can even reach the street he is tackled and captured by National Guardsmen and police.  As Fieschi is wrestled to the ground he declares, “I fear no one!” (An Historical and Biographical Sketch of Fieschi 1835 A. Bouveiron, 33)

Later, after receiving medical attention for his self-inflicted wounds, Fieschi will boast, “If I had not been wounded you should not have held me here.  I had something to rid me of a whole brigade of you police officers.” (Bouveiron, 34)

Photo of the Boulevard du Temple take in 1838

But despite all of his bravado, on July 28, 1835, only minutes after having tried to assassinate the King of France with what he dubbed his own homemade “Supergun” from the window of his third floor apartment, Corsican convicted felon and former decorated soldier in Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Armee` Giuseppe Marco Fieschi is dragged off bloodied, burnt and barely conscious to the nearest hospital by French police officers.

Fieschi, along with two accomplices, will be tried, convicted of the crime of attempted regicide and executed by guillotine less than seven months later on February 19, 1836.

The outside world first learned of the assassination attempt on King Louis Philippe through a letter dispatched to London by the English ambassador to France who was present in Paris that day.  His letter stated:

An atrocious act was attempted this morning.  The King was not touched though his horse was killed and nine Princes were wounded.  The Duke of Treviso was killed.  Several guards, aide-de-camps and National Guardsmen were killed or wounded.  The deed was committed by means of an “Infernal Machine” placed behind a window.

Giuseppe Marco Fieschi

         An Infernal Machine.

The name Infernal Machine for the firearm that Fieschi had invented and called his “Supergun '' stuck and soon the attempt on King Louis Philippe’s life was known across Europe as the Infernal Machine Assasination Plot.

The Infernal Machine was a homemade volley gun made of 25 rifle barrels lashed together atop a wooden platform.  Fieschi purchased 25 gun barrels from a French government arsenal, tied them all together, mounted them atop a wooden platform similar in design to the base of a dining table and then rigged touch holes to each barrel connected to a single fuse.

He loaded each barrel with 6 to 8 lead balls and lit the fuse as King Louis Phillipe’s entourage passed beneath his apartment window.  There was a tremendous BANG! And though Louis Phillippe himself was barely touched, Fieschi’s homemade “Supergun” did create terror and wreak havoc below.  17 people were killed in an instant, and many wounded, but most were innocent bystanders.

Among the most seriously wounded was Fieschi himself.  Little did he realize, but the gun barrels he purchased (from the French government ironically enough) had been taken out of service, and were being sold to the public for scrap metal, because the army had deemed them defective.

When Fieschi set off his homemade volley gun, at least four of the barrels backfired and literally exploded inside his apartment, lighting both his hands and clothing on fire and leaving third degree burns over most of his body.  Fieschi’s homemade volley  gun may have been deadly but there certainly was nothing super about its design or effectiveness.

Volley guns were a primitive precursor to the modern day machine gun.  Designed to fire several rifle rounds at one time, novel in concept but crude in design, various types of volley guns were employed by western armies throughout the 18th and 19th centuries but rarely used with any success on the battlefield.  With the introduction of Hiram Maxim’s fully automatic water-cooled machine gun in the 1880’s volley guns instantly became a unique and arcane technology of the past.

Only Giuseppe Fieschi ever attempted to assassinate a world leader, not only with a volley gun, but with a homemade one at that!  

Earlier in the century, also in France, another political radical had attempted to assassinate Napoleon Bonaparte with a crude homemade explosive device (almost like a Napoleonic Era IED) but had obviously failed.  Fieschi, who was serving in Napoleon’s army at that time, had closely studied this previous assasination, and supposedly learned from it when he devised his plot to build the Infernal Machine and use it to kill King Louis Philippe I in 1835.

The Infernal Machine of Giuseppe Marco Fieschi

Who was Giuseppi Marco Fieschi the inventor of the Infernal Machine and the madman who tried to kill the King of France with a homemade “Supergun” in 1835?

Fieschi once said of himself that, “I have the cunning and the patience necessary for success, and as I fear no one, I always carry in my pocket something to defend myself.” (Beauviron 34)

That statement alone sums up the rather bizarre and contradictory nature of the would-be assassin Giuseppe Marco Fieschi.  After all: Why would a person who feared no one feel the need to always carry a weapon out of fear?

As it was, Giuseppe Marco Fieschi was a lifelong petty criminal from the island of Corsica.  Swept up in a patriotic frenzy, it is believed that the thief Fieschi enlisted in Napoleon’s army sometime around the year 1810.  It is known that Fieschi served bravely and seemed to enjoy his time in the army.

However, after the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815 Fieschi returned to his native Corsica where he quickly fell back into his criminal ways and within a few years found himself on the wrong side of the law. 

In her 2002 book Barricades: The War in the Streets of Revolutionary Paris 1830-1848 author Jill Harsin states that, “Like Napoleon, Fieschi had found himself adrift when the wars were over.  He returned home without possessions or prospects and he stole a mule and sold it.”

 Around 1820 Fieschi was sentenced to ten years hard labor and imprisonment by Corsican authorities for horse thieving, but it appears that he stole only a lowly mule.

Whatever he stole, a mule or a horse, by 1831 Fieschi was out of prison in Corsica and wandering around the streets of Paris under assumed names that allowed him to claim he was a political prisoner in exile (similar to what Napoleon Bonaparte had become after losing the Battle of Waterloo in 1815) rather than the simple petty criminal and horse thief that he truly was.

In 1831, in Paris, Fieschi joined a radical group called “The Society for the Rights of Man” a group that had been formed after an unsuccessful attempt at Revolution in Paris in July of the previous year.  The Society for the Rights of Man claimed to be Republican in nature, and had strong connections with the populist elements of French society that harkened back to the French Revolution of 1789.  Though the Society for the Rights of Man had a veneer of respectability it was, nonetheless, a violent group, largely anarchist in nature, that tended to attract all manner of rogues, criminals and radicals like Giuseppe Marco Fieschi.  The Society for the Rights of Man was somewhat akin to a leftwing French terrorist group of its day.

At the same time, interestingly enough, as Fieschi was joining “The Society for the Rights of Man” he was also carrying on an illicit affair with his own stepdaughter and working for the French government of King Louis Philippe I as a civil servant!

If nothing else, Fieschi certainly liked to keep busy.

However, sometime in the early 1830’s Fieschi lost his civil service post within the French government once it was discovered that he had acquired his post under an assumed name and used fraudulent papers to obtain his position.

Losing both his job and his government pension may have served to further radicalize Giuseppe Marco Fieschi and caused him to concoct his homemade volley gun assasination attempt on King Louis Philippe on July 28, 1835.  We also know that at about the same time as Fieschi was first plotting to kill King Louis Philippe, his wife caught him fooling around with her daughter and his marriage ended abruptly in disgrace.

Unemployed, divorced, desperate and radicalized Fieschi told Theodore Pepin the head of the Society for the Rights of Man his plan to create his own homemade “Supergun” and use it to assassinate the King on July 28, 1835 when Louis Philippe and his Royal Procession were set to ride through Paris on a review of the French Army to commemorate the fifth anniversary of the abortive July Revolution attempt of 1830.

Rather than dismiss the idea out of hand and label it as lunacy, Theodore Pepin loved the idea, and along with another accomplice from the Society of the Rights of Man, a saddlemaker named Pierre Morey, agreed to give Fieschi the equivalent of $500 to purchase the parts that he needed to build the Infernal Machine.

After his arrest by police, despite his false bravado, ever a criminal to the very end, Fieschi gave the authorities a fake name claiming that he was Jacques Girard and that he hailed from the Occitane region of southern France.  Though this would be somewhat like telling the police that your name was John Smith and that you came from Florida after you had just been caught attempting to assassinate the President of the United States, it did take French authorities several days to figure out who Fieschi actually was.

At trial Fieschi didn’t hold back in naming both Pepin and Morey as willing accomplices in the construction of the Infernal Machine.  He also did all he could to turn his trial into a farce and a spectacle, and he constantly shouted out in court that he not only deserved, but fully expected to receive, a full pardon from the French government for his past service in the army of Napoleon.

The Execution of Giuseppe Marco Fieschi

Giuseppe Marco Fieschi, the madman who tried to assassinate King Louis Philippe I of France, with a homemade volley gun was sentenced to death and, along with his two accomplices Pepin and Morey, was executed by guillotine for the crime of regicide on February 19, 1836.

His body was donated to science, where doctors studied his brain for signs of some kind of structural defect, and his head was put on display, along with the Infernal Machine itself for all to see.

Today, the Infernal Machine that Fieschi created is still on display at the Musee des Archives Nationales in Paris.