The most eminent surgeons of Paris were immediately summoned to the assistance of the Prince. But the wound was fatal, and all their efforts were in vain. In the presence of death the Duc de Berry showed a very generous and magnanimous heart. He implored his wife, his brother, and all others surrounding his bed to use their influence with the King to get his murderer pardoned, and expressed his profound sorrow that he had been stabbed by a Frenchman. Up to his last moment the thought that his murderer would be executed in a cruel manner disturbed him, and when toward morning the King came to bid him farewell, he repeated his request that the murderer should be forgiven and not be executed; but without eliciting the promise from his uncle. With this dying request for the life of his murderer on his lips, he expired very early in the morning.
The sensation which the assassination of the Duc de Berry created not only in Paris, but throughout France and Europe, was enormous. All parties equally condemned and lamented the crime. While the ultra-Royalists deplored in the murder the extinction of all their hopes for the establishment of the old Bourbon dynasty on a sure foundation, the liberal parties foresaw that it would put an end to the liberal tendencies of the government of Louis the Eighteenth. The sinister forebodings of the liberals were only too well founded. The Royalists tried at first to create the impression that the murder was but the symptom of a widespread conspiracy organized by the revolutionary elements of the kingdom against the royal family and the entire nobility, and boldly charged the liberal policy of the government as being the cause of it. In a session of the Chambers one of the deputies went even so far as to move the impeachment of M. Decazes, Minister of the Interior, as an accessory to the crime committed by Louvel. While the Chambers refused to act upon this infamous motion, the entire Royalistic press demanded the dismissal of Decazes, and the King reluctantly yielded to the universal demand. “M. Decazes has slipped in the blood shed by Louvel’s dagger,” wrote Chateaubriand in commenting on the dismissal of the liberal minister. And that era of reaction and repression commenced which ten years later ended in the dethronement of the elder branch of the Bourbon dynasty and in the flight and exile of Charles the Tenth. The entire liberal party was punished for the crime of one fanatic.