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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 October 2011
On September 12, 1642, in Lyons, Place des Terreaux, the headsman's ax falls anew, punishing Henri d'Effiat, Marquis de Cinq-Mars, for the crime of ‘lèse-majesté’. As if to conjure away premonitions of the uncertainties that always accompany a new regency, uncertainties that threaten the edifice of Absolutism so laboriously constructed during their joint reign, Richelieu and Louis XIII insist on the execution of Cinq-Mars and his coconspirator, de Thou, as a final spectacular demonstration of royal authority. This execution is only the latest in a series that throughout the 1620s and 1630s radically underlined the decline of the nobility and the concomitant rise of ‘raison d'Etat’: Marillac's death was perhaps the most unjust, Montmorency's the most pathetic. Surely, however, Cinq-Mars' execution fired the imagination of his contemporaries, and of history, as the most tragic.
Of the many versions of the conspiracy, trial and execution of d'Effiat we possess, Vigny's fictional narrative Cinq-Mars is particularly compelling in its Romantic excess:
‘Qu'attends-tu? que fais-tu là?’ dit-il [Cinq-Mars] ensuite à l'exécuteur qui était là et n'avait pas encore tiré son couperet d'un méchant sac qu'il avait apporté. Son confesseur, s'etant approché, lui donna une médaille; et lui, d'une tranquillité d'esprit incroyable, pria le pere de tenir le crucifix devant ses yeux, qu'il ne voulut point avoir bandés. J'aperçus les deux mains tremblantes du vieil abbé Quillet, qui élevait le crucifix. En ce moment une voix claire et pure comme celle d'un ange entonna l'Ave maris Stella. […]
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