Louis-Michel le Peletier, marquis de Saint-Fargeau (29 May 1760-20 January 1793) was a revolutionary French politician. He was known as the deciding 361st vote of the National Convention’s vote on the execution of King Louis XVI of France, although he originally fought to abolish the death sentence.
Biography[]
Le Peletier in the National Convention
Louis-Michel Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau was born on May 29th, 1760, in Paris. Very promising, he became councilor of the Paris Parliament (before the French Revolution, parliaments were judicial institutions and had no legislative function) in 1779; being under the age limit, he was admitted with special permission, most probably because of a Templar Order intercession.
Among other law-related activities, he climbed the ladder of that institution until 1789, when he was elected to the Estates General as a representative of the nobility. Pretty soon, he discarded his noble origins and supported the cause of the Third Estate. He then devoted himself to politics, even becoming for almost two weeks president of the National Constituent Assembly in June 1790. Being a lawyer, he took part in the writing of a draft of a criminal code, of which the most striking point is the abolition of the death penalty, but that idea is dismissed.
Assassination of Louis-Michel Le Peletier[]
On the very evening of the vote, Le Peletier was killed under mysterious circumstances at a cafe in the Palais Royal. Contemporary sources credit a former Royal Guardsman as the killer, but the exact identity of the murderer remains mysterious to this day.
He was really assassinated by Arno Dorian, a member of the Assassin Order who was investigating his role in Francois-Thomas Germain's conspiracy. When he headed to theCafe Fevrier in the Palais Royal (113 Galerie de Valois) that night, he was guarded by 70 men. However, Dorian managed to distract some guards by driving a brute berserk with a special dart, and he entered the third floor dining room, where Le Peletier was located. He assassinated him with his hidden blades after kicking him to the ground, and he fled the scene. His daughter Louise-Suzanne Le Peletier was officially named "Daughter of the Nation" by a grieving National Convention, and she was an ardent royalist that destroyed the famous painting of her father's death by Jacques-Louis David before she died in 1829.