June 24, 1894: Sadi Carnot, the President of France, is assassinated in Lyon. He was 56 years old.
Marie François Sadi Carnot was born on August 11, 1837 in Limoges, New Aquitaine. His father, Hippolyte Carnot, was also a politician, and was a brother of the scientist now regarded as the father of thermodynamics, Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot, for whom he named his son.
Following the fall of France's Second Empire in 1870 and the Paris Commune the next year, he left his profession of civil engineering to enter public service in the Third Republic. By 1880, he was in the Cabinet, serving twice as Minister of Public Works, and in 1885 was named Minister of Finance. Scandal doomed the Presidency of Jules Grévy in 1887, and Carnot was seen as clean, and was thus an easy choice to be the new President.
For his 1st 2 years in office, Carnot and the nation were threatened by the popularity of Georges Ernest Boulanger, a would-be dictator nicknamed Général Revanche ("General Revenge"), whom many liberals feared would become the next Napleon Bonaparte, after Napoleon III had been overthrown as Emperor as a result of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.
But he celebrated his January 1889 election as a deputy (equivalent to a U.S. Senator) for Paris by running off to see his mistress, Marguerite Brouzet, Vicomtesse de Bonnemains. His absence from the capital meant that his supporters couldn't rally around him, giving his opponents time to build a criminal case against him. On April 4, he was stripped of his immunity from prosecution, and was sentenced to deportation. He and the Vicomtesse fled to London, where she died of tuberculosis in his arms in 1891. Her remains were returned to France, and so did he. A few weeks later, he shot himself at her grave.
In 1889, Carnot presided over the 100th Anniversary celebrations for the French Revolution, including the Paris Exhibition, a world's fair, and the opening of what became its, and eventually, France's, best-known icon, the Eiffel Tower. The most troubling period of his tenure turned out to be the scandal over France's abandonment of building the Panama Canal in 1892 (resumed by the U.S. in 1904), but Carnot's personal integrity saved the government.
President Carnot was reaching the zenith of his popularity, when, on June 24, 1894, after delivering a public banquet speech at the Palais du Commerce in Lyon, in which he appeared to imply that he would not seek re-election, he was stabbed on the Rue de la République by an Italian anarchist named Sante Geronimo Caserio. Carnot was transported to the Préfecture du Rhône nearby, but died shortly after midnight on June 25.
The stabbing aroused widespread horror and grief, and the president was honoured with an elaborate funeral ceremony in the Panthéon on July 1, 1894, after which he was interred in the Panthéon's crypt, alongside other notable figures in French history, including Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Victor Hugo.
Among those buried there since 1894 are Louis Braille (his remains transferred from elsewhere), Alexandre Dumas père (ditto), Marie and Pierre Curie (ditto), Émile Zola, Josephine Baker, Jean Moulin and Jean Monnet.
Caserio called the assassination a political act, and was executed on August 16, 1894. Within 2 months, the Dreyfus Affair began, and France was thrown into turmoil. It can only be guessed how Carnot would have handled it, but on January 16, 1895, it brought down his successor, Jean Casimir-Perier.
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June 24, 1894 was a Sunday. The only professional sports league then operating in North America was baseball's National League. But the Eastern teams were in States that still did not permit professional sports to be played on Sundays, so all 3 games played that day were in the Midwest:
* The Cincinnati Reds beat the Louisville Colonels, 7-5 at Eclipse Park in Louisville, Kentucky.
* The Baltimore Orioles beat the Chicago Colts, forerunners of the Cubs, 11-10 at the West Side Grounds in Chicago.
* And the St. Louis Browns, forerunners of the Cardinals, beat the Cleveland Spiders, 14-10 at the 1892-1898 version of Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.
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