A tale of two regicides
| DOI | 10.1177/1477370813494860 |
| Author | Jayne Mooney |
| Date | 01 March 2014 |
| Published date | 01 March 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
European Journal of Criminology
2014, Vol. 11(2) 228 –250
© The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1477370813494860
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A tale of two regicides
Jayne Mooney
City University of New York, USA
Abstract
This paper examines two attempted 18th century cases of regicide: those of Robert François
Damiens against Louis XV and Margaret Nicholson against George III, which have similar
circumstances yet, on the face of it, strikingly different outcomes. For both assailants were
seemingly unremarkable individuals, employed for much of their working lives as domestic
servants, the attacks were relatively minor and both were diagnosed as ‘mad’. However, Margaret
Nicholson was to be confined for life in Bethlem Royal Hospital for the insane, whereas Robert
François Damiens was tortured and torn apart by horses at the Place de Grève. The name of
Damiens resonates today amongst scholars of criminology through the utilization of his execution
by Michel Foucault in the opening to his seminal work Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison
(1975); Margaret Nicholson is less widely known. By analyzing the considerable amount of media
and literary coverage devoted to these attempted regicides at the time this paper concludes by
locating these crimes as symptomatic of the ‘spirit of the times’.
Keywords
Historical research, regicide, popular resistance
She is fortunate to live in this kingdom, hey? It is not long since a madman tried to stab the
King of France. The wretch was subjected to the most fiendish torments – his limbs burned
with fire, the flesh lacerated with red-hot pincers, until in a merciful conclusion, he was
stretched between four horses and torn asunder.
We have at least outgrown such barbarities.
The Madness of George III by Alan Bennett (1992: 3)
On Wednesday 2nd August, 1786, Margaret Nicholson, a middle-aged woman who had
spent most of her working life in domestic service, approached King George III at St
James’s Palace as he got out of his carriage with what looked like a rolled-up petition. As
the King moved forward to receive it she stabbed him with ‘an old ivory-handled dessert
Corresponding author:
Jayne Mooney, Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the
Graduate Center, CUNY, 524 W 59th St, New York, NY 10019, USA.
Email: jmooney@jjay.cuny.edu
494860EUC11210.1177/1477370813494860European Journal of CriminologyMooney
2013
Article
Mooney 229
knife’ (The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1786, 56: 709). Shocked but not hurt, the knife hav-
ing barely penetrated his clothing, George III turned towards his assailant uttering the
words, “The poor creature is mad! Do not hurt her! She has not hurt me” (Burney, 1890:
357).1 In France, 30 years prior to Nicholson’s assault, another servant, the poor ‘wretch’
in the opening passage of The Madness of George III, Robert-François Damiens,
approached King Louis XV as he went to board his carriage and stabbed him with a pen
knife. This resulted in a ‘small wound’ below his fifth rib. In a gesture similar to that of
George III, the King was reported to have said, “There is the man who struck me. Let him
be seized, and no harm done to him” (The Monthly Review, 1757, 17: 64–65).
The two events received an enormous amount of media attention and, following
Margaret Nicholson’s attack on George III, were frequently compared; the response to
Nicholson being seen as representative of a ‘civilized’, more advanced society. Both
Damiens and Nicholson were widely characterized as ‘mad’. Damiens, it was said,
would “often talk to himself and mutter inwardly” (The Monthly Review, 1757, 17: 59);
Nicholson’s mother and brother declared her state of mind “to be very unsettled” (The
Lady’s Magazine, 1786: 396) and following examination, Drs. John and Thomas Monro,
the most famous psychiatrists of the day, declared Margaret Nicholson “intellectually
damaged” (The Lady’s Magazine, 1786). Nicholson was thus certified ‘insane’ and con-
fined to Bethlem Royal Hospital in London for life; Damiens was repeatedly tortured
before being torn apart by horses in the Place de Grève in Paris.
In this paper I wish to examine the similarities and differences between these two
attempted regicides and to keep in mind the historian EH Carr’s often-cited invocation to
keep the frontiers between the two disciplines of history and sociology “wide open for
two way traffic” (Carr, 1961: 84). My major theoretical focus will be on the relationship
between the motivations of the individual actors and the ‘spirit of the times’. In this task
I do not evoke the notion of ‘downward causality’ (see Førland, 2008), but rather tend
towards Margaret Gilbert’s (1992) conception of ‘plural subjects’. In this, the actors
involved contribute to the construction of the ‘spirit of the times’ which, in turn, by creat-
ing imaginative communities, have consequences over and above those of each separate
group. The concept of imagined communities is, of course, true for all communities,
which are by their nature social constructions and to this extent imagined entities. In this,
following Førland, I thus reject methodological individualism whilst retaining the pri-
macy of ontological individualism. Additionally, I will consider whether these two regi-
cides are idiosyncratic events which can only be presented idiographically by considering
the ‘facts of the matter’ or, alternatively, nomothetically in terms of generalizations about
madness and mental pathology.
My method involves a detailed examination of both cases supported by contemporary
press sources and the widespread public comments from both intellectuals and the gen-
eral populace. Historical research presents a number of challenges that should be
acknowledged from the outset. Mary Bosworth (2001), in her interesting discussion of
the methodological implications and problems of studying the imprisonment of women
in 18th century France, notes the patchy and faint information that is often the only mate-
rial available in historical research2 and how the researcher’s ethical stance can affect
interpretation of the data. However, as Bosworth points out, these problems are not to be
avoided, for as criminologists we have a duty to understand and document the past as
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