The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror

by Merriman, John

  The elite residents of the center and the western districts considered Paris's periphery dangerous, even if they actually knew little about these neighborhoods. Conservative supporters of the republic associated loss of religion, crime, and political radicalism with these outlying urban areas, especially those districts that lay beyond the now obsolete fortifications ("it is a completely red area, exuding death and blood"). Indeed, most of the exterior arrondissements, with the exception of western Paris, supported socialist candidates in national and municipal elections. Beginning with May 1,1890, when workers marched for the eight-hour day in a country that lagged behind other nation-states in legislative reform, each May Day seemed to raise the possibility of Armageddon in Paris, despite the fact that the marches were invariably peaceful.

  The numerous bars of the working-class neighborhoods—about twenty-five thousand such places were licensed to sell alcohol in Paris in the 1890s—aroused apprehension, even fear, among the upper classes. Henry Leyret, a journalist, bought a shabby estaminet, Le Déluge, in Belleville, to observe for himself the life of ordinary people in Paris. It was in such places, "barely furnished with basic necessary objects, extremely modest with several wooden tables covered by waxed cloth, where the worker can feel at home, and can be as he is. He feels at ease there, he talks, gossips, relating his little stories, elbows on the table..." For the price of a small cup of coffee in a central Parisian café, here a glass of absinthe, or several glasses of wine, could be had. Leyret counted twenty-five drinking spots within two hundred yards of his bar, a world of popular slang and boisterous celebration as well as heartbreaking despair.

  Leyret observed the solidarity of ordinary people, their constant need for short-term loans, and their conscious hatred of the police and the petty bourgeois, many of whom had conveniently forgotten their working-class origins as they rose in society and now considered workers with contempt, if not complete revulsion. For the petty bourgeois, it was "everyone for himself."

  Workers chronically feared not being able to make ends meet. As Leyret put it, "Life is not just a bowl of cherries. One has to eat, that ultimate necessity that dominates all other feelings." There were 200,000 unemployed workers in Paris. When their children complained, "Papa, I'm hungry!" some workers were forced to steal and some women became part-time prostitutes in order to pay the bills. In the opinion of the fledgling barman, ordinary workers might not tolerate such misery for much longer. They were bitterly disappointed by the Third Republic, rife as it was with financial scandals. Yet only a minority of these workers had joined unions. Some were suspicious of them, and others were not employed long enough in a unionized trade. Still others were indifferent, or demoralized. Most ignored elections, which had done virtually nothing to improve their lives. Utter disgust for parliament was rampant, particularly the Chamber of Deputies, scorned as "The Aquarium."

  Leyret recalled a discussion with a muscular worker, who exclaimed, "Goddammit, there are real men in Paris, who could take up their rifles, tools, pickaxes, and other things. To give a real thrashing to the government and its fat cat deputies, there had been the Revolution!...But then they spent their time yowling and jabbering, and that was the end of it...!" When the government shut down the Paris Labor Exchange in a typical act of repression, Leyret was struck by how fast the working-class initially mobilized, as the word "spread from the Latin Quarter to place de la Bastille, from place Maubert to Menilmontant, reaching the heights of Belleville, awakening the old instincts of the old Parisian fighters who work hard and who suffer." But that was all. The partisans of violence had missed "a wonderful occasion!" There were no chiefs ready to lead. Yet study groups and political organizations had proliferated. Public meetings and debates filled the halls of the periphery. The socialists, who now had organized political parties, were profiting from all this, swelling their ranks. To some, they at least seemed to offer some hope.

  But then there were those who sank into despair. They hated the wealthy, who danced about, seemingly oblivious and indifferent to the misery of much of the working population. From his hospital bed, M.L., a porcelain worker, wrote a letter that spoke for many. The disease of consumption was killing him, and there was nothing left for the doctors to do. He did not know how much time he had left, perhaps a year at best. He felt himself dying. His chest burned. "Accursed society," he wrote, "you are responsible for my illness." Before he died, he wanted to "spit out again his hatred." It was the organization of French society that was killing him: "it is because of you that the unfortunate die of misery, if they do not first take their own lives in a cowardly and useless way." A worker and the son of workers, he had married "an unhealthy job," entering the factory at too young an age. When he had become ill, he was let go and told to head for the sidewalk, "old broken-down machine!" Bourgeois politicians and social re-formers would only talk on and on about improving the situation of workers and leading the battle against misery, encouraging it "savings."

  But the only remedy, according to M.L., was destruction, violent if necessary, of the existing order, so as to replace it with a society "free of bourgeois lies, laws, judges, police, and executioners. Ironically, the ruling classes had succeeded in persuading the masses that property is immutable and that authority is indispensable, and that one has to wait for improvements. They had emasculated the masses, annihilated its healthy feelings, proclaiming that these are the way things have always been, and will always be." Did not bourgeois society understand the evil that someone like him could do—someone who would not in any case live much longer? The comfortably off should not doubt "the power of a single man, fully resolved, master of himself ... Thoughtless and cruel bourgeois, do you not sense that I can transform myself into someone who can right wrongs, an avenger of the innumerable existences that your society has massacred, an avenger of all those who have revolted and live as outlaws, and those who have been tortured or eliminated?" He would soon die, to be sure, but not alone. "Bourgeois ... I want to take with me at least some of those who are responsible for my death."

  In Émile Zola's novel Germinal, published in 1885, the Russian anarchist Souvarine blows up a mine. Zola warns "the masters of society to take heed ... Take care, look beneath the earth, see these wretches who work and suffer. There is perhaps still time to avoid the ultimate catastrophe...[Yet] here is the peril: the earth will open up and nations will be engulfed in one of the most appalling cataclysms in history." In the Paris where Émile Henry lived, this prophecy seemed to be coming true.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Exile's Second Son

  ÉMILE HENRY WAS BORN into political militancy but not into terrorism. His father, Sixte-Casse Henry (always called Fortuné), the son of a furrier, was born in Nîmes in 1821. When he was about nine, his teacher, a priest, accused him of stealing a loaf of bread, calling him a "little thief." The boy grabbed the loaf of bread back and smacked the priest in the face with it. At age sixteen, he left his family to seek adventure, which he found on the barricades in Paris during the Revolution of 1848, an uprising of republicans and some socialists that led to the Second French Republic (1848–51). That regime was swept away in a wave of reaction and repression orchestrated by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, its first and only president. During the Second Empire, Fortuné was a republican and then a socialist. He joined the First International Workingmen's Association, a socialist organization founded by trade unionists and political militants in London in 1864. In 1857 Fortuné married Rose Caubet, who also came from the Midi, from French Catalonia, the Pyrénées-Orientales. Both retained a strong southern accent. Elegant and proper, with a rosy face and a shock of white hair, Fortuné was intelligent and educated. He wrote poetry and edited a radical newspaper in Carcassonne, where he was arrested for outrages "against the Catholic religion" and "against public morality" in 1861, as well as in Montpellier, for similar charges, that same year. He then moved to Bré- vannes, a village southeast of Paris, where he labored in quarries. In 1863 he was again arrested
for political militancy, spending several months in prison then, and once more in 1867.

  Fortuné Henry became a prominent figure in the Commune. Elected to its leadership, representing the plebeian tenth arrondissement (including the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l'Est), Fortuné signed authorizations for sending machine-gunners and munitions to the western suburb of Neuilly, a "certificate of indigence" for a very poor person, a requisition for one hundred Chassepot rifles for the Committee of Public Safety, an order to "put into effect the decree concerning the hostages," and another ordering the railroad stations of western Paris "to not let anyone leave for Versailles." Fortuné also put his name to an order that three hostages drawn from the clergy, the judicial authorities, the army, or the bourgeoisie "be executed for each Parisian civilian killed by shellfire from the attackers."

  As troops from Versailles gunned down Parisians, Fortuné managed to escape, disguised as a painter. He made it to Zaragosa in Spain, and then to Barcelona, where his wife had already found refuge. The Versailles government condemned him to death in absentia for "insurrection."

  At first the Henry family prospered in Spain. Fortuné worked in a copper mine in Catalonia, and then a coal mine in Bayarque, near Cartagena. He rose to the position of manager in one of them. Life was difficult in a new place, though, with a new language, Catalan, to learn (at least for Fortuné—Rose Caubet Henry probably already knew some Catalan because of her place of origin). Fortuné Henry faced the challenge of earning enough money to take care of his family, while dreaming of returning to France, where his first son, Jean Charles Fortuné—he too was always known as Fortuné—had been born in 1869. Émile ( Joseph-Émile-Félix), Fortuné's second son, was born in 1872 in Sant-Marti-de-Provensals, part of Poble Nou, on the edge of Barcelona, which was then becoming industrialized. The official witnesses at the baby's baptism were a welder and a locksmith. The expansion of Barcelona made Poble Nou essentially part of the Catalan city, adding its textile and chemical plants to the increasingly industrial landscape. A third son, Jules, would be born in 1879.

  When Émile was six, he did so well on the obligatory examination given in the primary school of Sant-Marti-de-Provensals that he was awarded a certificate of merit, proclaiming that the boy had demonstrated "a great proof of his hard work and talent." The citation was presented in the name of King Alphonso XII by the governor of Barcelona on June 1,1878.

  But things began to fall apart for the Henry family. "Several reverses overtook us," Madame Henry would later recall. Anarchism was finding an increasing number of adepts in Spain, particularly in Catalonia, where the Italian anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli had arrived to propagate his creed. The elder Henry stood accused of involvement in the Catalan anarchist movement, as one of the troublemakers in Cartagena and Murcia. The Spanish government confiscated the family's possessions.

  Following the amnesty of the Communards in 1879, the Henry family returned to France, settling in Brévannes, where they owned a small piece of property. During the Commune, in order to prevent the government from seizing Henry's property, an uncle, Jean Bordenave, arranged its transfer to Fortune's sister-in-law, a diminutive hunchback who lived with Fortune's older sister, the marquise de Chamborant, in elegant Passy on the western edge of Paris. The Henrys were able to reclaim the property, though they had to threaten legal action against their relatives before doing so.

  Brévannes was part of the commune of Limeil-Brévannes, two villages less than two miles apart, located nine miles southeast of Paris. From the crest of Limeil, Paris could be seen in the distance. The view from lower-lying Brévannes was blocked by a big hill. Limeil had a thirteenth-century church, but Brévannes only a small chapel, served by a chaplain. Brévannes had no public school until 1867. In September 1870, as Prussian troops began their siege of the capital in the war of 1870–71, virtually all the inhabitants of Brévannes fled to Paris. When they returned, following France's capitulation in late January 1871, they found their houses pillaged.

  Late in 1881, Fortuné Henry published the first volume of a collection of songs and dances for children. (There would be no sequel.) He dedicated the book to mothers and teachers. The song "Peasants and Workers" celebrated the riches of France's fields and workshops, ending with "It is work that brings us together / work that tomorrow can / bring happiness to the entire human race!" Fortuné's radical politics and contempt for the army—which had, after all, massacred thousands of Communards—is clear in another composition, "The Two Malbrough" (a misspelling of Marlborough), sung to the tune of a song written by French soldiers to mock the English general John Churchill, duke of Marlborough (an ancestor of Winston Churchill), against whom they had fought.

  Fortuné Henry had returned from Spain with mercury poisoning, which he contracted either from vapors from veins of mercury discovered in the copper mines or from a hat factory, where he had also worked. He began to suffer "attacks of brain fever." He met up with an old acquaintance, a doctor and former Communard named Goupil. The latter found him poor but hardworking and hired him as his secretary. Yet Fortuné died in 1882, when Émile was just ten. Two years later, Émile contracted typhoid fever. He could not see for several months, though he eventually recovered.

  Madame Henry struggled to make ends meet, at first working as a dressmaker. Dr. Goupil offered to seek public contributions in order to help the family. Madame Henry's sister-in-law, the marquise de Chamborant, convinced her not to agree to this, fearing public humiliation. But things got worse, and the widow and her three sons had neither food nor heat in Brévannes. Through the intercession of someone on the Paris municipal council, a former Communard, the Henry family received one hundred francs as public assistance.

  At times, Rose Caubet Henry had little good to say about her more well heeled relatives, most of whom had turned their back on her family. Her sons had been "abandoned by those in our family who could have helped them. There was no humiliation that they were not made to suffer." However, relations with her husband's family improved, and overall her children could not complain about their relatives. The marquise took an interest in her nephews; she indulged and even spoiled them. Émile, in particular, often spent his school vacations with his aunt's family.

  A village of fewer than a thousand people, with small tile and cotton factories, Brévannes remained very much a country place. Fields of potatoes stretched along the central avenue de la Planchette, although phylloxera had killed the village's grapevines. Rose Henry, whose gray hair, enveloped in wool cloth, gave her the look of a peasant, built a small house on the land she owned on the main road. She turned the house into an auberge, which she named À l'Espérance (Hope). The sign informed passersby that there was goat's milk for sale. Behind the auberge was a small garden enclosed by a fence, a clothesline, and a few chickens and a goat scratching for something to eat. The auberge itself consisted of three rooms. Furnishings were sparse: a counter, a table made of white wood with the ubiquitous checked tablecloth, and several chairs. Workers sat around the table, or, when the weather permitted, in the garden. The second room served as a small store offering a few grocery items and drinks. The third room was the kitchen. In the back, at the end of the garden, stood a small building with rooms that Madame Henry rented to workers. Mainly these were builders working on a hospice for the elderly and the terminally ill, the front gate of which stood across the street, on the grounds of an old château that had seen better days.

  At the age of ten, Émile received a small scholarship to a school in Fontenay-sous-Bois, east of Paris. Émile began his studies there during the 1882–83 academic year, remaining for two years. He received excellent marks. A teacher there noted Émile's superior intelligence and excellent disposition. At the suggestion of school administrators, he took the entrance exam for one of the upper-level schools in Paris. In 1884 he received a half scholarship to the École primaire supérieure Jean-Baptiste Say in Auteuil, on the western edge of Paris, where he studied for four years. The marquise paid the rest
of his annual fees. The other pupils playfully called Émile "Microbe" because of his small size. He ranked third in his class after the first semester, and his report praised his excellent conduct, good judgment, and lively imagination. Émile had done extremely well in all subjects except chemistry. His second report was even more glowing, saluting "perfect" conduct, "an excellent pupil in every way, very intelligent, hardworking, and docile. Certainly will do well." He received a grade of three out of five for his responses to questions on Caesar's Commentaries in Latin, a textual reading of a passage from a classical play, the history of the Treaty of the Pyrénées in 1659 (which fixed the border with Spain), the geography of the French coasts, and finally, syllogisms. Moreover, Émile's progress in chemistry, which had been his weakest subject, had been remarkable. His professor added, "I can only sing the praises of this pupil so far as his character, conduct, and performance." Monsieur Philippe, another of his teachers, remembered that he never had to reproach or punish Émile. Émile was the most talented pupil he had ever known. A fellow student remembered him as brilliant, while yet another considered him "a perfect youth, the most honest that one could ever meet."

  Over the next years, Émile continued to shine. He earned a second prize for excellence in 1885–86, first prize for excellence in the same year, a second prize the following year, and honorable mention in 1887–88. Émile received his baccalauréat in science, with honors, four days before his sixteenth birthday, passing examinations in physics, math, and chemistry. His examiners asked him about the detonating properties of chlorine. Émile demonstrated uncommon promise.