The Dynamite Club

Author:Merriman, John M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016-02-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

Two Bombs

ON DECEMBER 9, 1893, Auguste Vaillant, an unemployed worker distraught at being unable to feed his family, tossed a small bomb into the Chamber of Deputies. Born in the Ardennes near the Belgian border in 1861 and abandoned by his father when he was about ten, Vaillant started an apprenticeship with a pastry cook. However, he was let go when he got hungry one day and made a cake for himself. He worked for a time in a sawmill and then briefly as a laborer demolishing a rampart in Charleville. He was arrested for eating a meal in a restaurant for which he was unable to pay. At the age of twelve, an aunt put the young Vaillant on a train for Marseille, although he had no ticket. He was arrested again, and his father, who was a gendarme on the island of Corsica, paid the fine of sixteen francs.

From that day on, Vaillant was on his own. He walked all the way to Marseille. Desperately hungry, he stole food in order to survive as he wandered from place to place. He was jailed four times for theft and for begging.

After working as a quarryman in Algeria, Vaillant left for Argentina in 1890 to try to start a new life. There he tried his hand at farming in Chaco Province for two and a half years. But everything went wrong, and he complained that his situation amounted to a kind of slavery. After returning to France in 1893 and living at first in Montmartre, Vaillant married, and soon his wife gave birth to a baby girl, Sidonie. He got a job as a leatherworker in Saint-Denis. When his employer refused to pay him more than twenty francs a week, Vaillant reminded him that he had a wife and a child to feed. The boss replied, “I don’t give a damn about your wife. I hired you.” After flirting with socialism, Vaillant became an anarchist, meeting with the groups the Independents and the Equals in Montmartre.

Living in the suburb of Choisy-le-Roi, his family wracked with hunger, Auguste Vaillant decided to strike a blow that would call France’s attention to the plight of poor people like him. He purchased materials to make a small bomb, which he filled with green powder, sulfuric acid, tacks, and small nails, enough to hurt but not to kill. He obtained a pass that allowed him to observe a session of the Chamber of Deputies, where he sat in the second row of the balcony. Soon he stood and threw the device, tossing it over the head of an astonished lady in the first row. When the small bomb exploded, the president of the Chamber of Deputies merely announced, with memorable calm, “The session continues.”

A few spectators, including a priest, and several deputies suffered only light injuries. Vaillant himself suffered some kind of wound while throwing the bomb and sought assistance at the Hôtel-Dieu (the central hospital). There the staff discovered traces of gunpowder on his hands.

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