From his answers under interrogation, Damiens seems to have been put into a state of agitation by the uproar that followed the refusal of the French Catholic clergy to grant the holy sacraments to members of the Jansenist sect.

[1] Louis XV's thick winter clothes were protective and so the knife inflicted only a slight wound, penetrating 1 cm (0.4 in) into his chest.

[1] Fetched from his prison cell on the morning of 28 March 1757, Damiens allegedly said "La journée sera rude" ("The day will be hard").

[1] He was then remanded to the royal executioner Charles-Henri Sanson (who would ironically later go on to execute King Louis XVI) who, after emasculating Damiens, harnessed horses to his arms and legs to be dismembered.

[19] The execution was witnessed by 18th-century adventurer Giacomo Casanova, who had coincidentally arrived the same day of the attack, and included an account in his memoirs:[20] We had the courage to watch the dreadful sight for four hours ... Damiens was a fanatic, who, with the idea of doing a good work and obtaining a heavenly reward, had tried to assassinate Louis XV; and though the attempt was a failure, and he only gave the king a slight wound, he was torn to pieces as if his crime had been consummated. ...

I was several times obliged to turn away my face and to stop my ears as I heard his piercing shrieks, half of his body having been torn from him, but the Lambertini and the fat aunt did not budge an inch.

They told me, and I pretended to believe them, that their horror at the wretch's wickedness prevented them feeling that compassion which his unheard-of torments should have excited.The critic Ian Haywood has argued that Edmund Burke alludes to Damiens's torture in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1775), when he writes "When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they are delightful" (emphasis added), punning on "press" to refer to Damiens's ordeal.

[19] Philosopher Cesare Beccaria explicitly cited Damiens's fate when he condemned torture and the death penalty in his treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764).

[19] The execution is referenced by Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities, Book the Second (1859), Chapter XV: "One old man says at the fountain, that his right hand, armed with the knife, will be burnt off before his face; that, into wounds which will be made in his arms, his breast, and his legs, there will be poured boiling oil, melted lead, hot resin, wax, and sulphur; finally, that he will be torn limb from limb by four strong horses.

"[23]An allusion to Damiens's attack and execution, and Casanova's account of it, are used by Mark Twain to suggest the cruelty and injustice of aristocratic power in chapter XVIII of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889).

Baroness Orczy refers to the incident in Mam'zelle Guillotine (1940), part of the Scarlet Pimpernel series, which features the fictionalised character of his daughter Gabrielle Damiens.