Bouvet and Millerand
On Bastille Day 1922, anarchist Gustave Bouvet attempted to assassinate French President Alexandre Millerand.
On Bastille Day 1922, anarchist Gustave Bouvet attempted to assassinate French President Alexandre Millerand.
Gustave Bouvet (1898–1984) was raised in Angers and moved to Paris as a teenager. He was involved in the Anarchist Youth since his early 20s (1919) and took leadership positions in the Anarchist Federation. Bouvet also wrote for Le Libertaire under the pseudonym Juvénis and sentenced to ten months' imprisonment for printing and publicly posting a leaflet, "To Young Soldiers", in 1921. [1]
On July 14, 1922, the French national holiday of Bastille Day, French President Alexandre Millerand traveled in procession, returning from a Longchamps military parade with thousands of troops. As his carriage neared the presidential home, the Élysée Palace, on the Champs Elysees, Gustave Bouvet fired three shots of his revolver at a car, believing it to be the president's. In fact it was the Prefect of Police. The president rode in an open carriage hundreds of feet behind him. The president's Algerian cavalry guard of honor surrounded the president for protection. [2]
Police on bicycle pursued the shooter, plucking Bouvet from a crowd that was assaulting him, and returning him to the police station, where his identity and prior imprisonment was ascertained. President Millerand, in the afternoon, traveled to French General Hubert Lyautey and made him a Marshal of France. [2]
The shooter was sentenced in January 1923 to five years of labor and ten years of banishment from France. However, he was released two years into the sentence, in January 1925, and was partially paralyzed. He would marry and live for another 59 years. [1]
Sante Geronimo Caserio was an Italian anarchist and the assassin of Marie François Sadi Carnot, President of the French Third Republic. Caserio was born in Motta Visconti, Lombardy. On 24 June 1894, he fatally stabbed President Carnot after a banquet, to avenge the executions of anarchist bombers Auguste Vaillant and Émile Henry.
Alexandre Millerand was a French politician who served as President of France from 1920 to 1924, having previously served as Prime Minister of France earlier in 1920. His participation in Waldeck-Rousseau's cabinet at the start of the 20th century, alongside the Marquis de Galliffet, who had directed the repression of the 1871 Paris Commune, sparked a debate in the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) and in the Second International about the participation of socialists in bourgeois governments.
Gaetano Bresci was an Italian anarchist who assassinated the king Umberto I of Italy. As a young weaver, his experiences with exploitation in the workplace drew him to anarchism. Bresci emigrated to the United States, where he became involved with other Italian immigrant anarchists in Paterson, New Jersey. News of the Bava Beccaris massacre motivated him to return to Italy, where he planned to assassinate Umberto. Local police knew of his return but did not mobilize. Bresci killed the king in July 1900 during Umberto's scheduled appearance in Monza amid a sparse police presence.
Johann Joseph "Hans" Most was a German-American Social Democratic and then anarchist politician, newspaper editor, and orator. He is credited with popularizing the concept of "propaganda of the deed" in the United States.
Gennaro Rubino was an Italian anarchist who unsuccessfully tried to assassinate King Leopold II of Belgium.
François Claudius Koenigstein, also known as Ravachol, was a French anarchist. He was born on 14 October 1859, at Saint-Chamond, Loire and was guillotined on 11 July 1892, at Montbrison after being twice found guilty of complicity in bombings.
Fernand Léonce Émile Pelloutier (1867–1901) was a French journalist, trade union organiser and anarcho-syndicalist theoretician. A revolutionary from an early age, after beginning a career in journalism, Pelloutier became involved in socialist politics. He briefly joined the French Workers' Party, but following a disagreement with its leader over his proposal for a general strike, he left the party and joined the anarchist movement. He became the leader of the Bourses du Travail, in which he advocated for anarcho-syndicalism. Having suffered from tuberculosis luposa for most of his career, he eventually succombed to the disease, and died in 1901 at the age of 33.
Maxime Brunerie is a French convicted criminal and former neo-Nazi activist, known for his 14 July 2002 assassination attempt on Jacques Chirac, while he was still the President of France, during the Bastille Day celebrations in Paris.
Alexandre Marius Jacob (1879–1954), also known by the names Georges, Escande, Férau, Jean Concorde, Attila, and Barrabas, was a French anarchist and illegalist.
Gustave Adolphe Lefrançais (1826–1901) was a French teacher and journalist, known for participating in the Paris Commune, the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) and Jura Federation.
Auguste Vaillant was a French anarchist known for his bomb attack on the French Chamber of Deputies on 9 December 1893. The French government's reaction to this attack was the passing of the infamous repressive Lois scélérates, three French laws passed from 1893 to 1894 which restricted freedom of the press.
The Trial of the Thirty was a trial in 1894 in Paris, France, aimed at legitimizing the lois scélérates passed in 1893–94 against the anarchist movement and restricting press freedom by proving the existence of an effective association between anarchists.
Moishe Tokar was a Jewish anarchist who attempted to assassinate the Russian general Sergei Gershelman.
Louis Alexandre Louvet was a French tram driver, proofreader, anarcho-syndicalist activist and anarchist. He wrote for many anarchist journals.
On 24 June 1894, in Lyon, France, French President Sadi Carnot was assassinated by Italian anarchist Sante Geronimo Caserio. Acting in retaliation for the execution of Ravachol and the subsequent ratification of the anti-anarchist lois scélérates, Caserio stabbed Carnot in his open carriage outside the Palais du Commerce at 9:15 p.m. Carnot died at 12:45 a.m. the next morning, and Caserio was executed on 6 August 1894. More lois scélérates were passed in response to the assassination.
The Philippe Daudet affair, named after Philippe Daudet (1909–1923), was a French legal filing and subsequent controversy following the suicide of Philippe Daudet at age 14. The initial investigation into Philippe's death concluded he had committed suicide via gunshot, following plans to carry out anarchist attacks against the French government and other high-profile individuals. Philippe was the son of Action Française founder Léon Daudet, who successfully petitioned to the court to investigate Philippe's death, while rejecting the results of the initial investigation. Léon instead claimed there was a grander conspiracy against himself and his family. Léon mobilized Action Française and the Daudet family, both claiming that anarchist groups, French police, and the French government had conspired in his son's death. The case and its appeals were concluded in 1925, with the official ruling being that there was no evidence of murder or conspiracy.
On 12 February 1894, Émile Henry carried out an anarchist attack at the Café Terminus. Initially planning to assassinate Sadi Carnot, the president of the republic, who had just refused to pardon Auguste Vaillant, he decided against the attack upon noticing the large number of police officers stationed around the Élysée Palace. Instead, he redirected his efforts to the Café Terminus, where he detonated his bomb, killing one person and injuring 17 others. Émile Henry was arrested at the end of this episode, sentenced to death, and guillotined three months later.
Jeanne Françoise Morand, known as Jane Morand (1887–1969), was a French seamstress, housekeeper, and individualist anarchist activist. A prominent figure in the French anarchist movement, she organized the Comité Féminin in the 1910s, one of the leading anarcha-feminist and feminist organizations of the time. Morand is also known for, along with Henriette Tilly, helping to spread feminism within anarchist circles and influencing Le Cinéma du Peuple in the decision to produce Les Misères de l’aiguille, likely the first feminist film in history.
Armandine Mahé (1880–1968), was a French schoolteacher, seamstress, and activist in individualist anarchism and later anarchist communism. Alongside her sister Anna Mahé and Albert Libertad, she co-founded the journal L'Anarchie, which she managed for a time before gradually shifting away from individualist anarchism to embrace anarcho-communism.
