The French Chamber of Deputies bombing is presented not as a political narrative in its own right but as an example of how the mind can mistake a violent interruption for an intelligible part of its surroundings. In Freud’s account, two visitors interpreted the sound of an anarchist’s bomb through assumptions about parliamentary procedure, demonstrating how the drive to make impressions coherent can falsify what happened.

The Explosion and Its Immediate Context

After a sitting of the French Chamber of Deputies, an anarchist threw a bomb into the Chamber. The explosion caused alarm, which Dupuy brought to an end with the words “La séance continue”. The episode is recalled through the subsequent questioning of visitors in the gallery, whose testimony shifts attention from the bombing itself to the interpretations people placed on its sound.

Two Mistaken Interpretations

Among those questioned were two visitors from the provinces. The first had heard an explosion just after a speech ended, but took it for a customary parliamentary shot fired whenever a speaker finished. The second arrived at the same basic explanation, while altering its meaning: he thought such shots were commendations reserved for particularly successful speeches. Neither recognized the sound as an anarchist bomb; each fitted it into a familiar account of parliamentary practice.

Secondary Revision and Misunderstanding

Freud uses the visitors’ error to illustrate the mind’s ordinary effort to create order from sensory impressions. In waking thought, as in the function he calls secondary revision in dreams, scattered material is organized into relations and placed within an apparently intelligible context. Yet coherence is not proof of accuracy: people can misread what they perceive and even falsify its truth in the process. Freud therefore warns that an apparently lucid or coherent dream should not be accepted at face value; interpretation must return to the underlying material rather than trust the story the mind has made of it.