ORSINI: The Story of a Conspirator

by Michael St. John Packe ‧ RELEASE DATE: N/A

The biographer of John Stuart Mill treats here in a remarkably inclusive but restrained fashion of that man of great resource and daring, a visionary and arch conspirator, the mercurial Felice Orsini, the would-be assassin of the Emperor Louis Napoleon III. Orsini was born in 1819 at Meldola in the Romagna, a region noted for its turbulent, fiery, resolute breed of men. His father had been a member of the secret Carbonari; Felice was to follow his revolutionary bent as part of the Italian Risorgimento. As compatriot of Mazzini, Garibaldi, Medici, Orsini became embroiled in a series of fantastic plottings throughout southern Europe. He was imprisoned, pending execution, in the fortress of Montua, from which he escaped boldly, ingeniously. In London and Paris, in conspiracy with the English Dr. Bernard, the assassination of the Emperor was plotted, which ineffectually planned, clumsily failed. Orsini and his equally ill-fated companion justly paid with their lives. A detached, undramatized telling, but this strange 19th century figure emerges vividly from the periphery of events.

Pub Date: N/A

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1958

Categories: NONFICTION