Martial Bourdin

Martial Bourdin (1868 – 15 February 1894) was a French anarchist, who died on 15 February 1894 when chemical explosives that he was carrying prematurely detonated outside the Royal Observatory in Greenwich Park, London.

Royal Observatory, Greenwich c. 1902 as depicted on a postcard

Although Bourdin sustained massive injuries, he remained alive and able to speak. He did not, however, reveal his name, specific target, or motives. He was carried to the Seamen's Hospital nearby, where he died 30 minutes later.

Later, police investigators discovered that Bourdin had left his room on Fitzroy Street in London and travelled by tram from Westminster to Greenwich Park. The police concluded that "some mischance or miscalculation or some clumsy bungling" had caused the bomb to explode in Bourdin's hand.[1] Because he was found with a large sum of money, the police speculated that he had planned to leave for France immediately.

The police later raided the Club Autonomie in London, a popular club for foreign anarchists, including Bourdin.

Legacy

Bourdin's gruesome death and the mystery surrounding his attempted act inspired Joseph Conrad's novel, The Secret Agent. Some scholars believe T. S. Eliot references Bourdin in his Ariel poem "Animula" when he writes "Pray...// For Boudin, blown to pieces," although Eliot uses the spelling "Boudin" and may not have had the anarchist in mind.[2]

Notes
  1. "Propaganda by Deed - the Greenwich Observatory Bomb of 1894". Archived from the original on 17 February 2013.
  2. Southam, B. C., A Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994, p. 245.
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References


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