Emile Cottin (14 March 1896-8 October 1936) was a French anarchist who, on 19 February 1919, launched a failed assassination attempt on Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau. He was killed in action while serving in an anarchist column during the Spanish Civil War.
Biography[]
Emile Cottin was born in Creil, France on 14 March 1896, and he worked as a cabinet-maker before becoming a "propaganda of the deed" anarchist in 1915. In 1918, he witnessed the violent breakup of a strike at an aviation factory during World War I, and, as Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau was blamed for the incident, Cottin swore to assassinate him. On 19 February 1919, he fired multiple shots as Clemenceau as he left his Rue Franklin home in Paris to attend the Paris Peace Conference, but only one bullet struck the Prime Minister; it missed his vital organs, and he recovered from his wounds. At his trial, Cottin declared himself a Bolshevik, and his death sentence was commuted to ten years in prison after an anarchist newspaper noted that Jean Jaures' successful assassin had not received the death sentence while the unsuccessful Cottin had. Following Cottin's release in 1929, he remained under house arrest, but, with the start of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, he travelled to Spain to join the anarchist columns fighting against the fascist Falangists. Cottin was killed in battle at Farlete in Aragon in 1936.