Monster Assassin: Would-be regicide awaits his dismemberment. Rare.

[Robert-François Damiens] / [Torture]. Monstre assassin du Roy. Das Ungeheuer, der Meuchel Mördter des K. in Frankreich. Vorstellung des Francisci Roberti Damien wie er in dem Thurn Montgommery auf einem eisernen Bett gelegen… S.l.: s.n., s.a. [1757]. [24.7 x 20.5 cm the sheet, 22.0 x 18.5 the plate]. Folds and wrinkles, marginal loss of lower left corner, tear to left margin, minor staining. 
 
 
Rare, separately issued engraving depicting (in plan) the would-be regicide Robert-François Damiens (1715-57) strapped to an iron bed in his torture/interrogation room inside the Montgomery Tower in the Conciergerie in Paris.
 
On 5 January 1757 Damiens made a (rather feeble) attempt on the life of Louis XV at the Palace of Versailles. After much torture in the Tour Montgomery failed to reveal any accomplices, on 28 March, 1757, in Place de Grève (Place de l’Hôtel-de-Ville), Damiens was horrifically tortured (“compression boots,” red-hot pincers, burning sulfur, molten lead, boiling oil, etc.), endured a severely botched drawing-and-quartering, and died miserably; his torso was then burned at the stake, his ashes scattered to the winds.
 
Casanova, who had just arrived in Paris, witnessed the execution (it sickened him). Voltaire alluded to the event in his Candide. Dickens wrote of it in A Tale of Two Cities. In 1764 Cesare Beccaria discussed the Damiens affair in Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments), his famous treatise condemning judicial torture and execution. Michel Foucault opened his 1975 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison) with a case study of the Damiens execution, which was the last execution by dismemberment performed in France.
 
The engraving, which was intended for a German-speaking audience, was likely produced during Damiens’ imprisonment and before his execution. 
 
OCLC and KVK locate just 1 copy of this engraving (Bibliothèque nationale de France), but the subject was treated in a handful of similar prints (each of which is quite rare today).
 
*D. K. Van Kley, The Damiens affair and the unraveling of the ancien régime, 1750-1770.