where his forces were overwhelmed. He was forced to
flee for France, but Napoleon, in the midst of his famed
“100 days” in power which ended in his own defeat at
Waterloo, refused to see him. Murat therefore raised a
small force and set out for Italy to regain his throne. He
landed at Pizzo, but the Austrians were waiting, and he
was captured. Quickly tried and found guilty, he was
sentenced to death. The judge ordered that he be given
“half an hour to receive the solace of religion” before the
sentence was carried out. On the morning of 13 October
1815, Murat was taken to a courtyard. Carrying a small
engraving of his wife, he shouted to the firing squad,
“Save my face... aim at my heart... fire!” His body
was buried in an unmarked grave.
Although Murat is considered one of the better of
the French generals during the Napoleonic era, he had
serious faults. The writers of the The Wordsworth Dic-
tionary of Military Biography note:
It is unthinkable to exclude Joachim Murat from
any list of the great names of the Napoleonic
Wars, yet his claims for inclusion are curiously
unsatisfactory to the student of military history.
In the final analysis Murat stands as the ultimate
symbol of a particular type of soldier: the outra-
geously-uniformed officer of light cavalry, swag-gering and dueling and wenching, laughing at
danger... and quite prepared to start his own
wars if his masters were slow to provide him with
entertainment. Murat was by no means a great
commander; there were several among his subor-
dinates who displayed a far greater mastery of the
art of maneuvering large bodies of horse in the
field. In keeping with his Gascon heritage, he was
extravagantly boastful and vain, and even in an
age of conspicuous military glamour his dazzling
personally-designed uniforms were considered a
trifle ridiculous. Hot-headed to a fault, he often
crossed the line which divides a fiery spirit from
sheer unthinking stupidity.References: Perodi, P., Memoirs of the Reign of Murat...
(Boston: West and Richardson, 1818); Espitalier, Albert,
Napoleon and King Murat (London: John Lane, 1911);
Cole, Hubert, The Betrayers: Joachim and Caroline Murat
(London: Eyre Methuen, 1972); Maceroni, Francis, In-
teresting Facts Relating to the Fall and Death of Joachim
Murat, King of Naples... (London: Printed for Ridgways,
1817); Windrow, Martin and Francis K. Mason. “Murat,
Joachim, Prince Murat,” in The Wordsworth Dictionary
of Military Biography (Hertfordshire, U.K.: Wordsworth
Editions Ltd., 1997), 208–210. muRAt, JoAchim