Calais Riot

A violent uprising of striking workers at an ammunition factory owned by Compagnie Générale Bouchard in February 1912 in Calais.

An anarchist instigator (probably an agent infiltrator) told to striking workers to stel explosives fro the factory, he then stole the dynamite and his thugs used it to make a bomb which exploded.

It resulted in the deaths of 4 factory managers and 15 employees of the Lessard detective agency, which had been hired for security by factory owner Hermès Bouchard. 57 strikers were arrested and jailed. Anarchists and communists are accused. Many of the workers later confessed that they had no specific grievances, but instead had been drunk and provoked to violence by an anarchist agitator among them. According to unecdotal accounts, the protests had been peaceful until police and Lessard detectives fired into the crowd. Later, they rounded up and executed the injured. Onlookers said they had been threatened by authorities not to speak about what they saw.