If Ney were to be shot, it is obvious that it should have been as a high act of justice.  If neither the rank nor the services of the criminal were to save him, his death could not be too formal, too solemn, too public.  Even an ordinary military execution is always carried out with grave and striking forms:  there is a grand parade of the troops, that all may see with their own eyes the last act of the law.  After the execution the troops defile past the body, that all may see the criminal actually dead:  There was nothing of all this in the execution of Ney.  A few chance passers, in the early morning of the 7th of December 1815, saw a small body of troops waiting by the wall of the garden of the Luxemburg.  A fiacre drove up, out of which got Marshal Ney in plain clothes, himself surprised by the everyday aspect of the place.  Then, when the officer of the firing party (for such the spectators now knew it to be) saw whom it was he was to fire on, he became, it is said, perfectly petrified; and a peer, one of the judges of Ney, the Duke de la Force, took his place.  Ney fell at the first volley with six balls in his breast, three in the head and neck, and one in the arm, and in a quarter of an hour the body was removed; “plain Michel Ney” as he had said to the secretary enunciating his title in reading his sentence, “plain Michel Ney, soon to be a little dust.”

The Communists caught red-handed in the streets of Paris in 1870 died with hardly less formality than was observed at the death-scene of the Prince of the Moskowa and Duke of Elchingen, and the truth then became plain.  The Bourbons could not, dared not, attempt to carry out the sentence of the law with the forms of the law.  The Government did not venture to let the troops or the people face the Marshal.  The forms of the law could not be carried out, the demands of revenge could be.  And if this be thought any exaggeration, the proof of the ill effects of this murder, for its form makes it difficult to call it anything else, is ready to our hands.  It was impossible to get the public to believe that Ney had really been killed in this manner, and nearly to this day we have had fresh stories recurring of the real Ney being discovered in America.  The deed, however, had really been done.  The Marshals now knew that when the Princes fled they themselves must remain to die for the Royal cause; and Louis had at last succeeded in preventing his return to his kingdom amongst the baggage waggons of the Allies from being considered as a mere subject for jeers.  One detail of the execution of Ney, however, we are told nothing of:  we do not know if his widow, like Madame Labedoyere, had to pay three francs a head to the soldiers of the firing party which shot her husband.  Whatever were the faults of the Bourbons, they at least carried out their executions economically.