Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [59]
Scores of these ephemeral journals and bulletins appeared, with names like Antichrist, New Dawn, Black Flag, Enemy of the People, the People’s Cry, The Torch, The Whip, New Humanity, Incorruptible, Sans-Culotte, Land and Liberty, Vengeance. Groups and clubs calling themselves “Anti-patriots’ League” or “Libertarians” held meetings in dimly lit halls furnished with benches where members vented their contempt for the State, discussed revolution, but never organized, never affiliated, accepted no leaders, made no plans, took no orders. To them the State, in its panic over the Ravachol affair, in its rottenness revealed by the Panama affair, appeared to be already crumbling.
In March of 1893 a man of thirty-two named August Vaillant returned to Paris from Argentina, where he had gone in the hope of starting a new life in the New World but had failed to establish himself. Born illegitimate, he was ten months old when his mother married a man not his father, who refused to support the child. He was given to foster parents. At twelve, the boy was on his own in Paris, living by odd jobs, petty theft and begging. Somehow he went to school and found white-collar jobs. At one time he edited a short-lived weekly called l’Union Socialiste but soon, like others among the disinherited, gravitated to Anarchist circles. As secretary of a Fédération des groupes indépendants, he had some contact with Anarchist spokesmen, among them Sebastien Faure, whose “harmonious and caressing voice,” beautiful phrases and elegant manners could make anyone believe in the millennium as long as they were listening to him. Vaillant married, parted from his wife, but kept with him their daughter, Sidonie, and acquired a mistress. Not the footloose or libertarian type, he held together his tiny family until the end. After his failure in Argentina he tried again to make a living in Paris, and like his contemporary Knut Hamsun, then hungrily wandering the streets of Christiania, experienced the humiliation of “the frequent repulses, half-promises, the curt noes, the cherished deluded hopes and fresh endeavors that always resulted in nothing,” until the last frustration when he no longer had any respectable clothes to wear when applying for a job. Unable to afford a new pair of shoes, Vaillant wore a pair of discarded galoshes he had picked up in the street. Finally he found work in a sugar refinery paying 3 francs a day, too little to support three people.
Ashamed and bitter to see his daughter and mistress go hungry, disillusioned with a world he never made, he decided to end his life. He would not go silently but with a cry of protest, “a cry of that whole class,” as he wrote the night before he acted, “which demands its rights and some day soon will join acts to words. At least I shall die with the satisfaction of knowing that I have done what I could to hasten the advent of a new era.”
Not a man to kill, Vaillant planned a gesture that had some logic. He saw the disease of society exemplified by the scandal-ridden Parliament. He manufactured a bomb out of a saucepan filled with nails and with a non-lethal charge of explosive. On the afternoon of December 9, 1893, he took it with him to a seat in a public gallery of the Chambre des Députés. An observer saw a tall gaunt figure with a pale face rise to his feet and hurl something down into the midst of the debate. Vaillant’s bomb detonated with the roar of a cannon, spraying the deputies with metal fragments, wounding several but killing none.
The sensation, as soon as the news was known, was enormous, and was made memorable by an enterprising journalist. He asked for comment that night at a dinner given by the journal La Plume to a number of celebrities, including Zola, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rodin and Laurent Tailhade.