1894: Auguste Vaillant, bomb-throwing anarchist
5 comments February 5th, 2009 Headsman
“For too long a time, our voice is responded to with prison, the rope or the fusillade, but don’t delude yourselves: the explosion of my bomb is not only the cry of Vaillant in rebellion, but is the cry of an entire class that calls for its rights and will soon join its acts to its words.”
On this date in 1894, bomb-throwing anarchist — literally — Auguste Vaillant was beheaded in France.
The preceding December, the young Vaillant (French Wikipedia link) went from impoverished obscurity to national bogeyman by hurling a bomb into the Chamber of Deputies — reprisal for the 1892 execution of the anarchist Ravachol.
This bomb’s symbolic effect greatly exceeded its injury to life and limb: Vaillant said he had not been intending to kill, and in fact he did not. (Vaillant himself was among the wounded. His nose was blown off.)
But his political affiliations brought a suppression of anarchists and their press, and, of course, this day’s operation of the guillotine.*
“Mort à la société bourgeoise! Vive l’anarchie!”
Vaillant’s dying sentiment was taken up by Emile Henry, who bombed a Paris cafe the next week, and Sante Geronimo Caserio, an Italian immigrant who assassinated French President Marie Francois Sadi Carnot four months later.
* “Between the time of Vaillant’s arrival at the guillotine and the closing of the baskets containing his remains,” says the New York Times’ account, “scarcely more than twenty seconds elapsed.”
On this day..
- 2013: Abdullah Fandi Al-Shammary, long time coming - 2020
- 1803: Antonio Lavagnini, impiccato e squartato - 2019
- 1892: A day in the death penalty around Kentucky - 2018
- 1717: Anna Maria Wagemann, the last witch burned at Fürfeld - 2017
- 1886: Dennis Dilda - 2016
- 1601: Starina Novak, hajduk - 2015
- 1999: Leo Echegaray, by lethal injection in the Philippines - 2014
- 10 executions that defined the 1970s - 2013
- 1862: Samuel Calhoun, antebellum serial killer - 2013
- 1860: John Guthrie, antislavery horse thief - 2012
- Feast Day of St. Agatha - 2011
- 1945: Denise Bloch, Lilian Rolfe and Violette Szabo - 2010
- 1597: The 26 Martyrs of Japan, for God and trade routes - 2008
Entry Filed under: 19th Century,Beheaded,Capital Punishment,Cycle of Violence,Death Penalty,Execution,France,Guillotine,History,Martyrs,Public Executions,Terrorists
Tags: 1890s, 1894, anarchism, anarchist, anarchists, february 5, la roquette prison, marie francois sadi carnot, paris, sante geronimo caserio, sante jeronimo caserio
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