François Claudius Ravachol (; born Koenigstein; 14 October 1859 – 11 July 1892), also known as the Christ of Anarchy, was a French illegalist anarchist mainly known for his terrorist activism, impact, the myths that developed around his figure, and his influence on the anarchist movement, French society and art. He is also credited as being one of the main launchers of the Ère des attentats (1892-1894).
Born in 1859 in Saint-Chamond, in the Saint-Étienne area, Ravachol grew up in poverty and domestic violence. Later, he began a life of crime marked by the murder and robbery of a rich hermit. In this city, Ravachol gradually adopted anarchist ideas and met other activists, such as Rosalie Soubère and Joseph Jas-Béala. He managed to escape from arrest, and with these two accomplices, the militant moved to Paris in 1891. There, joined by the young anarchist militant Charles Simon, Clotilde Mabillon, her husband Chaumartin and maybe Gustave Mathieu, they carried out the Saint-Germain and Clichy bombings, targeting the judge and prosecutor responsible for the judicial persecution of anarchists arrested during the Clichy affair (1891).
Quickly arrested after the second attack, he stood trial, took full responsibility for the bombings in an effort to protect his companions, and was sentenced to life imprisonment with mitigating circumstances granted by the jury. Later, he was tried for the hermit’s murder and condemned to death, ultimately being guillotined on 11 July 1892, at Montbrison.
Although he was swiftly captured, arrested, and executed shortly after his attacks, which caused no fatalities, Ravachol is widely regarded as one of the launchers of the Ère des attentats, a wave of anarchist terrorism from 1892 to 1894. His assumption of full responsibility, efforts to exonerate his companions, and transformation from criminal to "people's avenger" in a sense, made him a martyr for anarchists and a folk hero within the French population. He also became the cultural archetype of the "anarchist terrorist". Ravachol's actions also marked a turning point in the evolution of terrorism; he was one of the first terrorists to move away from a symbolism centered on individuals and toward one centered on locations, targeting a place as much as a person, in his case. This aspect has become important in modern terrorism but was little understood by the contemporary press, which failed to grasp the motivations behind his actions.
Since then, he has become the avatar of numerous cultural adaptations, being variously portrayed in art and media as a vigilante acting to save humanity, a rebel without morals, or in more ironic and satirical takes that use his image to mock the authorities and the wealthy, as seen in traditional Parisian songs.
Biography
Birth and youth
François Claudius Ravachol was born 14 October 1859 in Saint-Chamond, Loire. He was the eldest child of the four children of a Dutch father (Jean Adam Koenigstein) and a French mother (Marie Ravachol). His father beat his mother and eventually abandoned the family, leaving Marie Ravachol and their children alone. For her part, she worked, whenever she had the opportunity, as a laborer in a raw silk industry. His mother frequently sent him to beg for money for the family and he started working at a very young age, even though he was attending school.
He left school at the age of eleven, after being bullied by his classmates because he wore "shabby" clothes. Around this time, he worked as a livestock herder during the winter, doing so without proper shoes, which caused his feet to be constantly frozen. His younger sister died of fever around this period. In the following years, Ravachol worked as a shepherd but also as a miner and in various other industries in the region. He was once fired from a job for arriving five minutes late, despite having worked many unpaid overtime hours. Around the age of 16, he secured a position in Saint-Chamond as an apprentice dyer with Richard and Puteau. However, this apprenticeship ended without the dyers deciding to keep him on or teach him more about their craft in greater detail. For additional income he played accordion at society balls on Sundays at Saint-Étienne for 5 francs per evening.Jean-François Gonon, Histoire de la chanson stéphanoise et forézienne, Saint-Étienne, 1906, p. 403.
Militantism, crimes, anarchism When he completed his apprenticeship without success, Ravachol left Saint-Chamond and the Saint-Étienne region to go to Lyon in search of work. There, he began attending public readings in study circles that read socialist and anarchist newspapers. At the age of 18, Ravachol read the book The Wandering Jew (1844) by Eugène Sue, which, according to his own testimony, started his distancing from religious ideas. After a lecture given by the communard Paule Minck, in which she discussed the Semaine sanglante (Bloody Week), on 3 December 1881, in Saint-Chamond, he fully completed his break from religion.
After being dismissed from a new job along with his brother, he found himself unemployed and in poverty. Unable to provide for his family, Ravachol began by stealing chickens, while his brother stole coal. At the same time, he gradually became an anarchist and started attempting to make bombs, though without success at first. He was already in possession of dangerous materials, as he was arrested after supplying sulfuric acid to a woman.
Meanwhile, Marie and François Ravachol entered into conflict: the mother reproached her son for being in an intimate relationship with a married woman. As a result of these accusations, he severed all ties with his mother. Then, on the night of 14 to 15 May 1891, in Terrenoire, he dug up the grave of Baroness de la Rochetaillée with the aim of finding and retrieving her jewelry.Philippe Fraimbois, « Ravachol, les anarchistes et la République », La Nouvelle Revue d'histoire, hors-série, n°13H, automne-hiver 2016, . He found nothing and returned empty-handed. Ravachol also began selling alcohol illegally and got involved in counterfeiting operations.
On 18 June 1891, in Chambles, he murdered and robbed Jacques Brunel, a 93-year-old hermit who had lived off alms and charity. Though seemingly without resources, the elderly man was not poor; he had amassed donations for over fifty years while pretending to be extremely impoverished, which made him a man of relatively considerable wealth. Ravachol was then arrested for this murder but managed to escape. According to the police: as they seized him after observing his residence, he struggled, insulted them, and declared that the anarchists' revenge would fall upon the officers. Then, while he was being transferred, the police encountered an accomplice of Ravachol, carrying a package, who came directly at them to block their path. As the officers began questioning him about why he was there and what he was carrying, he responded by insulting them. Suddenly, Ravachol then shoved two officers near him with a shoulder blow and fled at high speed towards Terrenoire, where the pursuing police lost his trail in the deep night that had fallen. When the police returned to the initial point of the escape to find the alleged accomplice, he had disappeared.
He spent some time hiding in the home of two of his companions, Rosalie Soubère and Joseph Jas-Béala. On 30 July, the press reported on two letters he had sent them—each written in different handwriting. In the first, he mocked the police, saying he had been able to walk around publicly the previous Sunday in Terrenoire, a district of Saint-Étienne. He noted that the prefecture had been wrong to search for him near the nearby dam, as he had 'no desire to drown', and that if he had wanted to take a swim, he would rather have gone to Andrézieux. In the second letter, he said he was heading to Vichy and intended to return on 9 August to attend the city’s industrial exhibition. Toward the end of August 1891, a guard found this note signed Ravachol at the foot of a statue there:I visited the fine arts exhibition. I found it fairly good. However, I reserved the right to critique some of the paintings later.He also fled to Spain sometime after the murder. This is where he found refuge with Paul Bernard, another exile. It is speculated that during this time in Spain, particularly Barcelona, Ravachol learned how to make bombs. In August, 1891, he traveled to Paris using a fake name and 'met up with other Parisian anarchists'. At this meeting, he met Henri Louis Descamps' wife, Descamps being one of the arrested and judged during the Clichy affair. There, Charles Chaumentin and his wife, both anarchist militants, welcomed and hosted him.
Radicalization of 'Ravachol's band'
Ravachol was joined there by Soubère and Jas-Béala, which is probably an indication that the group was already planning to launch attacks targeting the authorities in Paris. The group also met Charles Simon, a young anarchist militant whom Chaumentin introduced to them by declaring that he 'knew Paris like the back of his hand' and that he was someone capable of helping them with their plans.
Indeed, the situation in France was very tense between the anarchists and the French state, which radicalized Ravachol and his group. They reacted primarily to two major events: in 1891, the Fourmies massacre, where the army fired on demonstrators demanding an eight-hour workday, and the Clichy affair, where anarchists were arrested, struck with sabers, beaten, and deprived of water and care by the police for some time. The fact that the anarchists arrested after the Clichy affair were judged with great severity, with prosecutor Léon Bulot demanding the death penalty for all three and judge Edmond Benoît (1843–1909) sentencing them to harsh prison terms of two and five years, had a significant impact on anarchist circles in France and acted as the catalyst for the attacks carried out by Ravachol. Deeply shocked by these developments, Ravachol decided to take action against the magistrates responsible for the judicial persecution of the Clichy anarchists.
On the night of 14–15 February 1892, the group, managed to seize thirty kilograms of dynamite by stealing it from the Soisy-sur-Seine quarry, giving them the possibility to use this significant arsenal in the preparation of attacks.
Bombings
In the following days, Ravachol and Simon built the bomb, Simon conducted a first reconnaissance of the judge's residence at 136 Boulevard Saint-Germain, and then the group of four took the tramway to carry out the attack on 11 March 1892. Soubère sat between Simon and Béala and carried the bomb, hiding it under her skirts. She then handed it to Ravachol, who, armed with two loaded pistols, entered the building, placed the bomb on the second floor, the center of the building—since he did not know exactly where Benoît lived. He lit the fuse and fled, while Soubère and Béala stood watch outside. The militant remained on-site to observe the aftermath of the explosion as his companions left the area.
The bombing caused no deaths, did not hit judge Benoît, who lived on the fifth floor, and injured one person.
The anarchists involved in the plan were not satisfied with the failure of their operation: they decided to make another attempt soon after, this time targeting the prosecutor in the Clichy affair, Bulot. This preparation was complicated by the arrest of Simon after the betrayal of Charles Chaumentin, turned police informant, who denounced them. According to Jean Maitron and Rolf Dupuy, this denunciation by the traitorous anarchist actually provided little help to the police, as the authorities already knew most of the information he provided. Ravachol subsequently committed the Clichy bombing in the next days, with a similar mode of action, but this time injuring seven people in the process, while still not killing their target, Bulot.
Denunciation and arrest