Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Paris, 1894
Prologue
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
...
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Footnotes
Copyright © 2009 by John Merriman
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South,
New York, New York 10003.
www.hmhbooks.com.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data
Merriman, John M.
The dynamite club : how a bombing in fin-de-siècle Paris
ignited the age of modern terror / John Merriman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-618-55598-7
1. Bombings—France—Paris—History—19th century. 2. Terrorism—
France—Paris—History—19th century. 3. Anarchism—France—
Paris—History—19th century. 4. Henry, Émile, 1872–1894. I. Title.
HV6433.F7A636 2009 363.3250944'36l—dc22 2008049470
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Robert Overholtzer
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
FOR VICTORIA JOHNSON
Paris, 1894
Places Where Émile Henry Lived and Worked
1. 101, rue Marcadet
2. 10, boulevard Morland
3. 31, rue Véron
4. Villa Faucheur, 1–3, rue des Envierges
5. 32, rue du Sentier
6. 5, rue de Rocroy
Other Addresses
7. Constant Martin's Shop, 3, rue Joquelet
8. Offices of La Révolte, 140, rue Mouffetard
9. Salle du Commerce, 94, rue du Faubourg-du-Temple
10. Home of Élisa Gauthey, 167, boulevard Voltaire
11. Carmaux Mining Company, 11, avenue de l'Opéra
12. Police Station, 22, rue des Bons Enfants
13. Execution site, place de la Roquette
14. Café Terminus, rue Saint-Lazare
Prologue
The Café Terminus
IN HIS ROOM on the edge of Paris, Émile Henry was preparing a bomb. He took a worker's metal lunchbox, broke off the handle and lid, and placed a cartridge of dynamite inside. He then filled a zinc tube with 120 pieces of buckshot, adding green powder and picric acid to make a deadly mix. In a small opening in the tube, he put a capsule of mercury fulminate, along with a fuse that would burn for fifteen to eighteen seconds, which he attached with sealing wax. The fuse protruded from the screw hole that had once secured the handle. Having soldered the tin container and wrapped wire around it, Émile put the bomb, which weighed about five pounds, in a deep pocket of his overcoat. He then armed himself with a loaded pistol and a knife, and walked out the door. It was February 12,1894.
His hand firmly on the bomb, the pale young man headed to the elegant boulevards in the area of the Opera. He wanted to detonate the bomb in this wealthy district, killing as many people as possible. He counted on fifteen dead and twenty wounded at the very least.
At the end of avenue de l'Opéra, Émile Henry stopped in front of the opera house, a giant gilded wedding cake of a building, its scale and rich decoration signifying the monumental ambition and self-indulgence of its founders and patrons. In that twenty-year-old edifice a fancy ball was taking place, and Émile knew that he could not get past the guards to throw his bomb. Upon moving away he mumbled to no one in particular, "Oh, I would have made them dance in there." He checked out the restaurant Bignon and the chic Café de la Paix in the Grand Hôtel, then proceeded to the Café Américain on rue de la Paix. (Had he consulted the Baedeker guide for 1889, he would have noted that it was "less frequented in the evening") He looked a little like a flâneur, an intellectual who might be something of a dandy, but Émile was in fact an impoverished bourgeois who lived on the margins of urban life. He strolled along the grands boulevards not just to observe nightlife in a detached manner, but to hate and to kill. The carriages and wagons that passed as he walked along boulevard des Ca-pucines may have included a black wagon carrying the "bois de justice"— the guillotine. An execution was planned for the following morning at place de la Roquette in a working-class neighborhood of Paris.
At about 8 P.M., Émile reached the Café Terminus, around the corner from the busy Gare Saint-Lazare. The Hôtel Terminus was only about twenty years old. The café, which one entered from rue Saint-Lazare, took up the ground floor; the hotel rooms occupied the upper floors. Opposite the entrance stood the counter where waiters collected drinks for patrons and behind which stood the cashiers and bartenders. Beyond that, up several steps, was the grand hall of the adjacent Restaurant Terminus. In the far left corner of the grand hall stood a compact raised stage, set for a small gypsy orchestra scheduled to play that evening.
Although his clothing was hardly elegant, with his dark pants, tie, and black felt hat, Émile Henry seemed like someone who might naturally be present there. At 8 P.M., as the café was slowly filling, he went in and took a small table to the right of the glass door that gave onto rue Saint-Lazare. He ordered a beer, and soon another, along with a cigar, and paid for them as the orchestra played. The musical program began at exactly 8:30, as it did each evening. It was to include seven pieces in the first set, to be followed by five violin solos (among them, pieces by Meyerbeer and Rossini). Several instrumental transcriptions of popular operatic arias were on offer. A short entr'acte, consisting of polkas, and a little Wagner were to follow. By 9 P.M., about 350 people had assembled in the Terminus. At 9:01, the small orchestra had just started to play the fifth piece in the first set, music from Daniel Auber's opera Les diamants de la couronne.
Émile found the music annoying, but, in any case, he had other plans. He took the bomb from his overcoat pocket, got up, and walked to the door, which a waiter closed behind him. But after taking a step or two outside, Émile turned back, lit the fuse (on the third try) with his cigar, opened the door, grabbed it with his left hand for support, and threw the bomb into the café, toward the orchestra.
This book is motivated by a very simple question: why did Émile Henry do what he did? Getting inside the mind of a bomber is no easy task, especially when the bombing took place over a century ago and halfway around the world. But for a historian in the early twenty-first century, the temptation is irresistible. Embroiled in our own "war on terror," it may well be instructive to look to the past for insight. The parallel is not a perfect one—the differences between the Islamist fundamentalists and Émile Henry's circle are obvious—but a deeper look reveals a gossamer thread connecting the two. And in that thread lies an important story.
Paris at the end of the nineteenth century was a place of shocking social inequalities. Far from the magnificent cathedral of Notre Dame, the sparkling opera house, the recently constructed Eiffel Tower, then the tallest structure in the world, and indeed far from all the glittering electric lights, department stores, and sprawling cafés of "the capital
of Europe," the poor lived in wretched neighborhoods. They had no political or economic recourse to improve their lot and no voice in government. Over the course of the nineteenth century, European states had enormously increased their ability to extract taxes from the people and conscript men into the military, all in the name of national pride. These demands placed a heavy burden on millions of subjects and citizens, from whom the ruling classes required unquestioning allegiance, even as they themselves started wars and crushed political dissidence. The powerful even engaged in state-sponsored terrorism—the terms terror and terrorism had, after all, been coined to describe state policies during the most radical phase of the French Revolution.
Naturally, this state of affairs fueled outrage among many Parisians. One of them was Émile Henry. He blamed capitalism, religion, the army, and the state for the plight of the underclass, who struggled to get by as the rich lived it up. In the city of lights, Émile Henry felt dislocated, alienated, and angry. It made him a perfect recruit for anarchism.
A historian once said that it "is bitter hard to write the history of remainders." This is certainly the problem facing any chronicler of anarchism, a philosophy that today has very few followers indeed. During its heyday, from 1880 to 1914, anarchist assassinations and bomb attacks occurred, by one count, in sixteen countries, including Australia and others in Europe, North America, and South America. Like many Utopian movements, anarchism developed as intolerable social and political conditions led its proponents to imagine and strive for a different, more just world, in which the beleaguered would at last prevail. This vision transcended national boundaries and cultures.
Thus The Dynamite Club is a story of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century: of those who held power and others who rose against it, in the name of what they saw as a just cause. But it is also the story of a changing world, in which new networks of communication and transportation connected people around the globe and brought waves of immigrants to countries such as the United States.
Most of all, it is the story of a very unusual terrorist. Armed with a bomb—and not his first—Émile Henry struck out blindly. While earlier anarchist bombers chose, for symbolic reasons, to target heads of states and uniformed officials, Émile was different. He was willing to sacrifice innocent life for what he considered a great cause. Moreover, unlike many anarchists, he was not born into abject misery. His family owned property, and he was an intellectual of academic achievement, with a bright future. The day he threw a bomb into the Café Terminus was a defining moment in modern history. It was the day that ordinary people became the targets of terrorists.
CHAPTER 1
Light and Shadows in the Capital of Europe
VERY EARLY IN France's Second Empire (1852–70), Emperor Napoleon III summoned Georges Haussmann, prefect of the département of the Seine. He instructed him to forge wide boulevards through the tangle of Parisian streets. Ostensibly, the emperor's goal was to help free the flow of goods and commerce and to bring more light, air, and thus better health to France's proud capital. But there was also a more subtle goal. At a time when European monarchs were desperately trying to maintain their authority against rising liberal, nationalist, and socialist movements—this would come to be called "the rebellious century"—Paris was the capital of revolution. Napoleon III wanted Haussmann to plow new boulevards through and around some of the most traditionally revolutionary neighborhoods, quartiers that had risen up during the French Revolution of 1789, the Revolution of July 1830, and the Parisian civil war of June 1848. Even more recently, barricades had gone up following the coup d'état on December 2,1851, orchestrated by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, then the president of the Second French Republic. After destroying the republic, he proclaimed himself emperor the next year, just as his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, had done almost fifty years earlier.
Parisian insurgents had used the narrow streets of plebeian neighborhoods to their advantage in the various insurrections. Now under the careful direction of Haussmann, whose name would eventually become a French verb (to "Haussmann" something means to bulldoze it), 120 miles of new boulevards and streets were constructed. Dubbed subsequently "the Alsatian Attila" by virtue of his family's origins in that eastern province and his penchant for urban demolition, Haussmann carried out the imperialism of the straight line, decimating neighborhoods in the heart of Paris in which tens of thousands of ordinary people lived. The rebuilding, and the soaring rents that followed, forced many to move toward the urban periphery, and for this upheaval they received compensation equivalent to about ten dollars per family. Most could not afford to live in the 34,000 new buildings and their 215,000 apartments along the boulevards. To the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, the striking new buildings that fronted the boulevards were "cold and lined up like soldiers at review." The term Triumphal Way, sometimes applied to the Champs-Élysées, was well suited to other boulevards too. (A joke from Haussmann's time had an elderly soldier speculating that "the Seine itself would be straightened, 'because its irregular curve is really rather shocking.'")
When insurrection arose again in Paris in 1871, Haussmann's boulevards served one of their principal purposes. In the election following France's crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), conservatives prevailed, electing a strongly monarchist assembly. Ordinary Parisians felt betrayed. After all, they had mobilized every resource to defend the capital against the Prussians, and now they were suffering from massive unemployment and soaring prices for scarce food. Landlords were demanding back rent, which could not possibly have been paid during the awful four-month siege of Paris.
On March 18,1871, Adolphe Thiers, the head of the provisional government, ordered troops to seize the cannons of the National Guard on Montmartre. In response, local people forced two generals against a wall and executed them. On March 26, the people of Paris—at least the men—elected their own government, which they called the Paris Commune. The Commune was in some ways a "festival of the oppressed," allowing many ordinary Parisians to become masters of their own lives for the first time, albeit briefly. Idealism and optimism abounded. The Commune initiated a number of significant social reforms—for example, it abolished night baking (a common grievance of bakers), created nurseries for working mothers, and recognized women's unions. The painter Gustave Courbet, who had shocked some bourgeois critics with his realist paintings of ordinary peasants and workers, embraced socialism and took an active role in the Commune. At his suggestion enormous pulleys were used to bring down the Vendôme column, on which stood a grand statue of Napoleon I. Photos from the period show workers and their families standing near pieces of the fallen imperial monument, in one of the most elegant neighborhoods in western Paris. They had simply walked into the fancy quartiers from which economic reality and police prejudice had previously excluded them.
But soon the authorities fought back. The Versailles troops poured through the western walls of Paris on May 22, and the network of broad, recently constructed boulevards allowed them to penetrate the area efficiently and repress the Commune. As many as twenty-five thousand Parisians perished at the hands of government soldiers, both in street fighting and by execution. To the elite, the Commune presented an apocalyptical vision of social revolution. The myth that the Communards consisted of "drunken commoners" and "apostles of absinthe" took hold. The government investigated more than forty thousand Parisians, some of whom were convicted and sent to prison or forced into exile. In the words of one prosecutor, "À Paris, tout le monde était coupable"—"In Paris, everyone was guilty."
To staunch Catholics, France's shocking defeat in the war and the subsequent rise of the Paris Commune seemed to be divine punishment meted out to "a nation fallen from grace," set right by a "sword brandished by a vengeful God." In expiation for the country's sins, Montmartre was chosen as a site for "a temple on a sacred mountain towering above the profane," a "point of intersection between heaven and earth." However, to those who rejected the public role of the chur
ch in France, the glistening white marble of Sacré-Coeur represented—like Haussmann's boulevards—the architecture of conquest, standing defiantly apart from its working-class environment: a strange "colossal monster."
By the time Émile Henry threw his bomb into the Café Terminus, Paris, the "capital of Europe," really comprised two cities. The boulevards Saint-Michel, de Sébastopol, and Saint-Denis, which joined in a single long stretch cutting through the center of Paris and running north and south, symbolized the distance between the "People's Paris" of the east and the increasingly chic neighborhoods of the west. The latter, particularly after Louis XIV constructed his opulent royal palace and gardens at Versailles in the seventeenth century, had pulled privilege westward, leaving the artisans and ordinary workers to their own devices in the neighborhoods of central and eastern Paris. To the west, the Bois de Boulogne became a destination at which the wealthy could see and be seen, preening in the comfort of carriages on their way to outdoor restaurants and balls. To one critic, "The straight line [of the boulevards] has killed off the picturesque and the unexpected." Rue de Rivoli, "so long, wide, and cold, on which promenade prosperous people as cold as the street on which they walk," formed an apt example.
Viewed from Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre, the electric lights, which had replaced the old gas lamps, glowed far below in the fancy neighborhoods of the boulevards and created a magical but also somewhat unreal spectacle. Some aspects of fin-de-siècle Paris were so strangely new, they seemed more than a little overwhelming.
In the late nineteenth century, the grands boulevards of Paris symbolized urban modernity, their wide sidewalks planted with trees and offering ample space to stroll, window-shop, and dream. The boulevards became the staging ground for the belle époque—the "good old days" or the "gay nineties"—that period of rapid material progress and exhilarating cultural innovation. These grand thoroughfares were dotted with kiosks offering a vast array of newspapers and periodicals, some now available with brightly colored illustrations. Department stores, decked out with new electric lights, carefully arranged shop windows, and a wide range of products, welcomed a constant flow of customers. The novelist Émile Zola referred to these stores, which were built early in Napoleon Ill's Second Empire, as the Cathedrals of Modernity. Their aisles appeared to be an extension of the grands boulevards themselves. Rather than bargaining, the time-honored way to acquire goods in a traditional market, in the new department stores you simply paid the price as marked.
The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror Page 1