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Title: Ravachol Author: Mitchell Abidor Date: 2009 Language: en Topics: Ravachol, biography, insurrectionary anarchy, France Source: Retrieved on 24th September 2020 from https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ravachol/biography.htm
Born François Koeningstein in 1859, Ravachol was perhaps the purest
avatar of the âbomb-throwing anarchist.â In a period that didnât lack
for other violent anarchists, like Auguste Vaillant and Emile Henry,
Ravachol managed to capture the imagination of those opposed to the
corrupt order of the French Third Republic. The novelist Paul Adam was
able to say of him: âIn this time of cynicism and irony, a saint is born
to us.â
A society with horrible divisions of high and low, marked by regular
political scandals and large-scale dislocation, France was fertile
ground for oppositional movements of all kinds. The short-lived mix of
left and right that was Boulangisme, Drumontâs ferocious anti-Semitism
(which actually managed to blame floods on the Jews), a growing
socialist movement, and various schools of anarchism, all battled for
public support.
Ravachol came to stand for the propagandists of the deed; anarchists not
interested in organizing mass movements to overthrew the bourgeois
order, but who felt that killing the representatives of that order, the
worst enemies of the proletariat, would bring about a better world.
Ravachol did not himself have to imagine the horrors of the life of the
working-class. Born into a poor family he started working at age eight.
A difficult early life, spent wandering France looking for work while
being paid a pittance, taught him to hate capitalism. Reading Eugene
Sueâs Le Juif Errant at age 18, and attendance at a collectivist circle,
made of him a convinced atheist and socialist. Continued reading led him
to choose anarchism as his chosen path against the capitalist system.
After years of difficulty, he felt forced to a life of crime as a way of
surviving. Few, indeed, are the revolutionary heroes who have
grave-robbing as a past occupation, but Ravachol, was neither an
ordinary criminal nor anarchist. By this time he had already worked as a
counterfeiter and contrebandier. Besides grave robbing, in 1891 he
robbed and killed a hermit, and was suspected of other murders as well,
for which he was arrested.
Escaping from police custody, in 1892 he embarked on the series of
political attacks for which he was to become famous. Avenging the
condemnations of a pair of anarchists, he attacked the home of a judge
and a government attorney, killing no one while causing considerable
property damage.
Captured and put on trial, he was sentenced to hard labor for his
political acts, but at a subsequent trial sentenced to death for the
murders he had committed. It was at the criminal trial that he attempted
to deliver an impassioned and unrepentant speech explaining the causes
of his acts and of his revolt, but was cut off before he could do so.
When his sentence was announced, his only response was: âVive
lâanarchie!â
He lived on in popular memory. A song was written in his honor, called
La Ravachole, and it is said that the word ravacholiser was invented to
describe the act of bomb throwing.