Maxime Vuillaume

Maxime Marie Abel Joseph Vuillaume (19 November 1844 – 25 November 1925), Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, was a French engineer, particularly known for his work on the Gotthard Tunnel. He was also a journalist and pamphleteer. He was involved in the Paris Commune of 1871, on the fall of which he was forced to go into exile, and later wrote several volumes of detailed memoirs of the Commune (Mes Cahiers Rouges).

Biography

Vuillaume was born in Saclas, in Seine-et-Oise (now in Essonne), son of Claude Joseph Vuillaume and his wife Augustine (née Grégoire). He studied at the Collège Sainte-Barbe and the École des Mines. In his youth in Paris he frequented revolutionary circles.

In 1871 Vuillaume with Eugène Vermersch and Alphonse Humbert re-founded the newspaper Le Fils du Père Duchêne, which took its name from the journal of Jacques-René Hébert at the time of the French Revolution.

After the Bloody Week (la Semaine sanglante) in May 1871 which brought the Paris Commune to its end, he fled to Switzerland, with Eugène Protot and other communards, passing through the Jura. In 1872 he was engaged as the secretary of the entrepreneur Louis Favre, based in Altdorf in Uri. From that position during the active phase of the excavation and construction of the Saint-Gotthard tunnel he was able to observe and write about the work at close hand. By his numerous articles published in La Nature (a science review) under the pseudonym Maxime Hélène, he made generally known the progress of the works on the tunnel and the person of Louis Favre. He also published articles on explosives, which was his speciality.