Apex Hour At Suu

On Friday, 10 October 1800, a ragtag group of artists and Jacobins were arrested at the Paris Opéra, accused of plotting to stab First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte in his box. In the coming weeks the suspected ringleaders of this so-called Conspiracy of Daggers were swiftly tried, convicted, and guillotined as a warning to other would-be assassins. But how guilty were they? Although the regime prosecuted its case confidently, its critics from the beginning insisted that the accused were little more than patsies goaded into the crime by an undercover agent. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including official proceedings, firsthand accounts, architectural plans, secret British intelligence reports, as well as letters and scores in the French National Library and the Paris Opéra archives—this lecture reopens the case and argues that the “conspiracy” was likely an elaborate set-up by the authorities and that the opera performed on that fateful evening played a key role in entrapping and foiling the assassins.Dougl