GENNASI (GIULIO CESARE). - Lot 174

Lot n° 174
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Result : 845EUR
GENNASI (GIULIO CESARE). - Lot 174
GENNASI (GIULIO CESARE). Autograph letter signed, in French, addressed to William Jerdan, editor of the London newspaper The Sun. Paris, December 8, 1815. 2 pp. in-4, address on spine; small angular lack. Count Giulio Cesare Ginnasi, who in 1814 had negotiated France's debt to the Roman States, was then papal commissioner in Paris to return to Rome the goods confiscated by the French between 1809 and 1812. Here, he offers an article recounting Joachim Murat's execution, based on an account given to him by a Neapolitan Cabinet courier who was visiting Paris and had been present at Pizzo during the events: "Murat disembarked on 8 February at noon with thirty men. He was armed with a saber and two pistols on his belt. When he arrived at the Piazza di Pizzo, he found the militia assembled and going through a review. Those accompanying him shouted "Long live Joachim", and the people showed nothing but astonishment. Murat spotted a veteran by the name of Trenta Capelli and called out to him, but the veteran did not respond. Someone from Murat's retinue ran after the veteran, saying, "The king is calling you." "My king is in Naples," the veteran resumed, and on the spot invited the people to seize Murat, and his retinue. They were indeed pursued. Murat's people defended themselves, and Murat himself discharged his pistols several times; but finding himself pressed, he fled towards the coast, where, no longer finding the two boats that had brought him, he threw himself into a small fisherman's boat, until, seeing that he could not escape the multitude surrounding him, he surrendered himself, and his retinue. They tore off his epaulets and stripped him of his uniform. A woman of the people ... tore off one of his favorites, of which we know he was very fond. The militia seized him, rescuing him from the fury of the people. They put him in the fort. News of this event reached Naples on the morning of the 10th, and that same evening a courier from the Cabinet was dispatched to General Nunziante. The courier arrived in Pizzo at noon on the 12th. On the 13th, at nine o'clock in the morning, the Council of War met, and the session ended at four o'clock with Murat's condemnation. They offered to send him a priest, with whom he spoke for an hour. He then left the prison, whose door opens onto the fort's small courtyard, and was shot there by eight grenadiers, veterans of the division that had accompanied Ferdinand to Sicily. When the people heard the firing, they shouted "Long live King Ferdinand! The body was then taken to the church, and prayers were said for the dead..." ATTACHED: - Journal des débats n° of September 17, 1815, including information on Joachim's passage to Corsica (4 pp. in-folio). - The November 16, 1815 issue of Journal des Débats, including a translation of a decree issued by Ferdinand IV of the Two Sicilies concerning Joachim Murat's landing: "[......] the landing carried out by Joachim Murat on the coast of later Calabria had no other purpose, as proven by his operations and those of the men who followed him, than to incite our peoples to revolt against our royal authority, and to ignite civil war in our States...; considering that the people of the commune of Pizzo, in whose roadstead the landing took place, not only resisted the seduction, audacity, threats and weapons used in this unexpected incursion, but that moreover, animated by that inviolable fidelity which we expect, in similar circumstances, from all our faithful and loyal subjects, and full of generous zeal against the disturber of public peace, they promptly arrested and imprisoned Joachim Murat and his accomplices [....]" (4 pp. folio).
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