On Saturday night, in a relatively quiet area of Toulouse in southwest France, a 24-year-old man was rushed to hospital. He had an eight-inch-long WWI artillery shell crammed into his rectum. The shell was live. As he approached, Rangueil Hospital was evacuated, staff and patients running for cover as the bomb squad was called in and the fire brigade stood by.

The unnamed man is now fine. I mean, he’s definitely sore. And he’s going to have some tough conversations with his parents and the police that are due to interview him about handling “category-A munitions” next week. But at least he’s not the twitching heap of flesh who obliterated the proud city of Toulouse with his big anal sex-toy experiment. 

That said, we definitely still have questions. 

Question: What’s It Like Telling a Doctor You’ve Got an Artillery Shell Up Your Butt, Knowing You Could Take Out Him, the Building, and Everyone Else in It?
Picture the scene: You’re on a gurney, rolling through the fluorescent corridors of Rangeuil Hospital. Every bump sends a fresh wave of agony through your body as the metal shifts, possibly nearing your intestines by now. There’s an eight-inch artillery shell lodged in your rectum, and it might be live. 

As you stare up at the ceiling, you’re less concerned about the pain than the fact that you’re one jolt away from going down in history as the man who accidentally blew up a French hospital with his butt bomb.

The articles will write themselves. They’ll refer to you vaguely as an “unnamed Frenchman” with a dubious “social life”—at least until the Netflix researchers dig up every detail of your existence for the six-part documentary. Then, the actor playing you in the big-screen Safdie brothers adaptation (I googled “24-year-old actor” just now and the first one that came up was Caleb McLaughlin) will go full method, amplifying your faults, playing your trauma for laughs, becoming an avatar of you that entirely irons out the nuances of who you really were and what you did. This stuff will outlive you by decades. You’ll be mulch in the ground and people will still be laughing about your exploding arsehole in cocktail bars all over the world. 

Question: At What Point Would You Realize You Needed Medical Attention?
Let’s not be misers about this: I hope the guy at least got a few minutes of enjoyment. I hope he got to take a seat (maybe he was forced to stand?) and relish the feeling of being filled up by history. Why do I say this? Because at some point the satisfaction wore off and the realization that a potentially massacre-level emergency was trapped in his anus kicked in, and I can’t think of any worse moment a person could have.

Did he have family or other loved ones nearby? Was there time for them to call him an “embarrassment” or was it straight on the phone to the hospital? If I were his parent, I know I would have at least considered attempting a DIY extraction—There’s Something About Mary, penis-in-the-zipper style. Slip it out, clean it up, take the live shell to a bit of French wasteland (someone else’s problem) and sweep the whole affair under the rug. Then I’d hide grandad’s antique rifle before he got any other ideas. 

Question: How does a 24-year-old end up with a WWI artillery shell in the first place?
To be honest, I’d have thought that the “shoving-a-historical-relic-up-your-butt” phase comes later in life. At least in your late twenties? When an 88-year-old Frenchman put a WWI artillery shell up there a few years back it felt right. I mean, what else is there to do at that age?

I wonder if his particular piece of ordnance was the same brand as the 88-year-old’s. The picture of his chosen shell made it look quite smooth and nice—like any reasonable person would look at it and consider putting it in an orifice. But if you’d, say, just dug it up from the garden and it was half-fossilized, that’s a bumpier ride. 

“I’d hide grandad’s antique rifle before he got any other ideas”

If he did just stumble across the shell while digging around in the mud one day, was it a case of hauling it out and going straight to work, or did he set it aside somewhere secret for a rainy day, when there wasn’t anything good on the TV? Maybe it was a big treat? Maybe there’d been a few weeks of shoving smaller (then incrementally bigger) bits of war debris up there. First a .303 rifle round, then a Mauser, then the artillery shell as a kind of magnum opus. When he took it from the shoebox at the back of his wardrobe, he might have felt quite chuffed with himself—like he’d really earned the experience. 

Question: What Makes a WWI Shell More Appealing Than, Say, a Nice Roman Coin?
I don’t know if there’s a subreddit somewhere operating some kind of points system when it comes to putting things up your butt, but I’d be of the opinion that if he were to shove several smaller things up there—maybe five WWI bullets, and/or a few Byzantine coins—he’d get a more prolonged sense of satisfaction. With a solitary shell, the shame kicks in fast: you’re one and done. Multiple items, you’d think, delays the regret. He still could have been riding high while on the phone to the paramedics.

Question: Was This a Solo Endeavor or Do You Have Friends Who Are Into This?
Apparently, local media was speculating that the incident “might have had something to do with his social life.” Three ways you can read that. One, it’s a homophobic insinuation. Two, it actually points to the lack of a social life—like, maybe this wouldn’t have happened if he’d spent more time playing pétanque with his mates. And three, perhaps there’s a whole underground subculture of French lads hoping to get their hands on a nice bit of war shrapnel. Get a few beers in and borrow granddad’s metal detector. Maybe we’re misreading glory as tragedy. Maybe somewhere a “shell straddlers” group chat has found a new hero.

“Why not dream bigger? He could have scoured eBay for a nice Byzantine coin”

Finally, we must consider the possibility that this was a copycat crime. In which case, we may have to ask whether media coverage of the 88-year-old’s escapades back in 2022 helped create this emergency (and whether or not this article might lead to a future one).

Final Question: What Would’ve Happened if the Shell Had Been Extracted, Then Blown Up Toulouse, and the Guy Had Lived?
Would a court deem it sexual misadventure—a slap on the wrist—or domestic terrorism? Going to prison as a terrorist would be bad enough. But going to prison as a terrorist because you shoved a live WWI shell up your butt, and wiped out an ancient Roman city? You’re toast.

Didier, Jacques, Pierre—whatever your name is, if you’re reading this, please get in touch. We just want to understand. 

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