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

by Merriman, John

  At first, briefly, Émile considered himself a socialist. Then, late in 1891—or at the latest, the beginning of 1892—Émile became an anarchist. A primary influence was his older brother, Fortuné, who had left school in 1885 to take a job at the Central Pharmacy. Even shorter than Émile, Fortuné was stocky and dark-complexioned, with brown hair, a mustache, and sideburns. Excused from military service because of an ankylotic arm, Fortuné left the pharmacy after a "discussion" with his boss, probably about politics. Fortuné was then a socialist and briefly worked on a socialist newspaper. By 1889, he was known to the police, turning up at various socialist meetings, including one determined to achieve "the union of all proletarians" in view of "the decisive struggle" that would end the bourgeois republic. Early in 1891, Fortuné broke with the socialists and embraced anarchism. He believed that the state could not be transformed by socialist votes or even a socialist revolution; rather it had to be destroyed so that mankind could begin again. Fortuné emerged as a prominent, eloquent orator at anarchist meetings and debates. He spoke at gatherings of the League of the Anti-Patriots in Saint-Quentin, Bourges, and in the Loire mining basin. In the Ardennes on the Belgian border, a union leader, Jean-Baptiste Clément, had denounced the anarchist newspaper that was sponsoring a speech by Fortuné. The evening of the talk, Fortuné carried a pistol and a knife with him, fearing that Clément or one of his supporters might attack him.

  As is often the case, Émile's relationship with his older brother was complex. They often disagreed. Émile resented the fact that Fortuné, as the eldest, insisted on exercising authority. Émile later said that at one point he had even wanted to kill him. But after some difficult times, they had become close friends. Anarchism reconciled the Henry brothers, giving them something they could both believe in.

  Émile was now at the age for possible military conscription. A gendarme had come to the auberge in Brévannes with a letter summoning him to the military lottery. Émile's mother showed the gendarme a letter she had received from her son, who claimed to be working in Berlin for a wholesale merchant. The police could not find him in Paris. Émile's mother believed that he had gone to Berlin to sell merchandise purchased in Paris. But Émile was never in Germany. The letter to his mother was probably posted in Berlin by a German anarchist. In it Émile made clear that he had no intention of serving in the army and did not plan to return to France in the near future: "You know that if I fled France, it was because I will never be in the army." At the lottery, the mayor drew the number fifty-one for Émile. This meant that he was to serve in the 148th Infantry Division, beginning in September 1893. Émile would be officially declared a deserter in February 1892.

  At about the same time, Émile left socialism behind, believing that its intrinsically hierarchical nature (there were party leaders, for one) rendered it incapable of changing the existing order of things. His study of science had gradually led him to materialism and atheism. Structure and authority, inherent in all religions and political philosophies, had to disappear. How else could one reconcile morality with the laws of nature, in order to "regenerate the old world and give birth to a happy humanity"? He considered the anarchists whom he had met in Paris the finest people he had ever known because of their integrity, sincerity, straightforward nature, and contempt for prejudice. An anarchist environment, in which "individual ownership" would be replaced with communism, and "authority with liberty ... will raise humanity's moral standards. Man will grasp that he has no rights over a woman who gives herself to someone else, because that woman is simply acting in conformity with her nature." The "selfish bourgeois family" would be eliminated.

  When Émile went to Brévannes, he took his anarchist theories with him. A family friend, Madame Denaples, who worked in a restaurant in Paris, tried in vain to dissuade him from his newfound passion. Jules, the younger Henry brother, was quickly taken with his brother's new ideas and began reading anarchist tracts. In 1892, when he received a prize for his schoolwork, he shouted, "Long live the Commune!"

  A half-century earlier, in 1840, a printer from Besançon in the mountainous Franche-Comté in eastern France had been the first to call himself an anarchist. The bookish Pierre-Joseph Proudhon started his studies wearing wooden sabots, lacking enough money to purchase books. A painfully shy man who preferred solitude, Proudhon was horrified by what he had seen in Lyon and Paris, those centers of luxury that represented the "royal rule of gold." And he hated the state. "Whoever lays a hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant. I declare him to be my enemy," he insisted. According to Proudhon,

  To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, hoaxed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sold, betrayed, and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

  Proudhon became well known for his 1840 pamphlet called "Property Is Theft." (He was being provocative—what he actually believed was that too much property was theft.) Proudhon and his followers saw universal manhood suffrage as a constitutional tyranny in which the people nominally ruled but did not really govern, a sham perpetuated by the powerful. The seeming "disorder" of anarchism would in reality lead to a natural economic order based on equal social relationships, organized into cooperating mutual associations without the hindrance of the state. And because people were basically good, a truly just society could then be constructed, permitting individuals to reach their full potential. As Proudhon put it, "Anarchy is order; government is civil war."

  The influence of the Enlightenment can be seen here, particularly the writings of the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had celebrated the primitive as something of an ideal. He imagined that people learned from each other by embracing nature, cooperating freely, and living happily ever after. Proudhon insisted that anarchy was an "organized, living society," offering "the highest degree of liberty and order to which humanity can aspire." Everybody would have enough to get along.

  In part, anarchism was a reaction to the rapidly expanding power of governments following the creation of nation-states in the nineteenth century. On one hand, the nation had become an object of allegiance for an increasing number of ordinary people in France, one of the consequences of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period. Primary schools taught French in regions in which other languages, dialects, or patois had long dominated. Maps of France, and of its colonies, took on a symbolic role. At the same time, states extracted more taxes and military conscripts from the people. Expanding bureaucracies, police forces, and armies manifested state power. Like France, Prussia, Russia, and Austria had crushed the revolutions of 1848, which had broken out in these conservative states on behalf of nationalism, political liberalism, and the rights of workers.

  To be sure, there was a decidedly millenarian (as well as upto pian) quality to anarchism, which resembled certain political movements of previous centuries. Anarchists were confident that a new, improved society could exist one day, but they believed that violent revolution was a prerequisite. The French Revolution (1789–99) had offered a similar hope. Ordinary people had overthrown the monarchy. Moreover, several radicals (including Jacques Roux and Gracchus Babeuf) had then called for social revolution, including the redistribution of property. Despite their relatively short lives (the former committed suicide, the latter was executed), they left the legacy that revolution could be
fomented by conspiracy.

  Proudhon's followers maintained considerable influence among artisans in France during the Second Empire and the Commune. When a laborer asserted to an anarchist during the Commune that this time, unlike 1848, the workers would not be cheated of their victory, the anarchist replied, "They have already robbed you of your victory. Have they not named a government?" The fierce repression that followed the Commune made it very difficult for anarchists (or for that matter, socialists) in France.

  The cause to which Émile now pledged himself was dominated by two Russian figures, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. And they would affect events on the world stage for years to come. Both were of noble origin, examples of the "conscience-stricken" Russian gentry aware of the fact that they were well-off because others were poor. Born in 1814, Bakunin, the consummate rebel, was an enormous man with a huge beard and a hearty appetite for food, drink, and cigars, which he smoked incessantly. After leaving Russia in 1840, he traveled, a mobile revolutionary, to the German states, Switzerland, and then France, from which he was expelled when the Russian ambassador complained about his activities. He went to Paris after the Revolution of February 1848 drove King Louis-Philippe from the throne. Borrowing money from the new provisional republican government, he headed toward Russian Poland to try to foment revolution there. During the "Springtime of the Peoples," a period of optimism for many ordinary people following the liberal and nationalist revolutions that took place in 1848 in the German states, the Habsburg Empire, the Italian states, and France, he led police in several countries on a merry chase. He set up various anarchist groups, some real, some imaginary, before ending up in a Russian prison for six difficult years. Undaunted, he then resumed his career as a professional revolutionary.

  Bakunin believed in the revolutionary instincts of the masses but held that they would not rise up spontaneously against the state. A single spark, or several, were needed to bring about the revolution. The Commune gave him hope, as anarchists had been among its exponents, and his vision of the eventual abolition of the state found resonance among Russian as well as western European disciples. Even if unsuccessful, terrorist attacks—which he did not specifically advocate—would inevitably be followed by massive state repression. This in turn would increase dissatisfaction among the people, bringing revolution closer.

  Unlike Karl Marx and other revolutionary socialists, Bakunin looked not to an enlightened working class, but to the peasantry, to bring about revolution. He viewed peasants as revolutionaries who did not yet know it. The village (mir) provided a natural, harmonious setting, but it was beset by avaricious landlords and by soldiers defending the interests of the state. In earlier centuries, after all, Russian peasants had risen up against tsars, or on behalf of false tsars. Revolutionaries should work feverishly to prepare for an even greater revolution: "The revolutionary is a man under vow. He ought to occupy himself entirely with one exclusive passion: the Revolution ... He has only one aim, one science: destruction ... Between him and society, there is war to the death, incessant, irreconcilable." Bakunin defined freedom as "the absolute right of every human being to seek no other sanction for his actions but his own conscience, to determine these actions solely by his own will, and consequently to owe his first responsibility to himself alone ... I become free only through the freedom of others." Thus destruction became "a creative passion."

  Bakunin distrusted and quarreled loudly with Karl Marx, who he felt did not go far enough. After all, Marx was not interested in destroying the state but in replacing it with another one, socialist in character. Bitter divisions between anarchists and socialists helped bring an effective end to Marx's International Workingmen's Association in 1876, following its meeting in Philadelphia—a site Marx had selected because he knew that European anarchists could not afford the passage across the Atlantic. "Let us not become the leaders of a new religion," Bakunin warned his rival, not long before Bakunin died that same year. The Russian who once said that to be a true revolutionary, one had to have the devil in the flesh, continued to influence the development of anarchism from the grave, above all in Spain and Italy. In France, the break between anarchists and socialists became final in 1881. The anarchists defiantly went their own way, rejecting electoral politics because they saw it as a means of propping up the bourgeois state. They adopted the black flag as their symbol and in France rejected the "Marseillaise," which represented the bourgeois republic.

  A different kind of anarchist led the charge after Bakunin's death. Peter Kropotkin was a geographer and a prince, the son of a Russian army officer of the nobility. Convicted of sedition because he had written a manifesto describing the structure of a future anarchist society, Kropotkin spent two years in prison before escaping Russia in 1876. After first going to London, he spent time living in Switzerland in the Jura Mountains, where watchmakers seemed to live in perfect harmony without the intrusion of the state. Moreover, Switzerland was federalist, and the original home of the Red Cross, the kind of voluntary association that the anarchists believed would spontaneously emerge following the destruction of the state. Kropotkin became convinced that local organizations were both a means to a better life and an end in themselves, infused with the morality of individuals left to their own devices. In the end, ownership of property would become superfluous: everyone would have enough to get along. This was the basis of Kropotkin's anarchist communism. (Proudhon, on the other hand, believed that the revolution would not eliminate all private property.) Kropotkin's optimism was contagious, respect for him enormous, even among those who did not agree with him, and his influence, like his vision, was international. The British writer Oscar Wilde once said that Kropotkin lived one of the only two perfect lives he had ever seen.

  How was the revolution to be made? Bakunin believed that the rebellious passion of the peasants would bring about the revolution. Kropotkin believed in the necessity of a vanguard of heroic anarchists who would spread the word and lead the downtrodden masses toward revolution. In Catechism of the Revolutionary (1869), the Russian nihilist Sergei Nechaev described the revolutionary as "a doomed man," without even an identity: "he has no personal interests, no affairs, no sentiments, attachments, property, not even a name of his own. Everything in him is absorbed by one exclusive interest, one thought, one passion—the revolution ... To him whatever aids the triumph of the revolution is ethical; all that hinders it is unethical and criminal." Although he was not an anarchist, Nechaev helped shape the future image of the anarchist, anonymously putting together his bombs and depositing them before disappearing into the night. Nechaev founded a terrorist organization: People's Will (Narodnaya Volya). But it was not an anarchist group. People's Will was a socialist organization that was hierarchically organized and demanded universal suffrage and political liberties, as well as land for all people. Its members planned the assassinations of state officials and political personages in the hope of increasing public awareness of the plight of the masses. Bakunin, as well as other revolutionaries, eventually turned against Nechaev, concluding that he was a murderer and a disreputable fanatic who could not be trusted.

  Martyrdom played an important part in the struggle of these Russian revolutionaries. It became part of revolutionary lore that as Vera Figner, a leader of People's Will, awaited execution (the sentence was commuted at the last minute), she imagined her martyrdom, thinking of revolutionaries who had perished before: "Pictures of people who had died long ago awoke in my memory, my imagination worked as never before." Even if this account could never be verified, the execution scene itself became an important part of the collective memory of anarchists.

  The imperial Russian police crushed People's Will, but its tactics came to be adopted by some anarchists worldwide. And in western Europe, events during the 1880s encouraged anarchists, particularly in wretchedly poor rural regions in southern Spain and Italy. Errico Malatesta was among the optimistic, active, and influential. Born into a landowning family in southern Italy, Malatesta
was expelled from medical school in Naples for taking part in a demonstration. He became an anarchist, eventually learned the trade of electrician, and gave away property he had inherited from his parents to the tenants who lived there. Anarchism appealed to poor rural laborers in southern Italy, who retained a strong sense of injustice and suffering at the hands of policemen. Malatesta led armed Calabrian peasants in Benevento, northeast of Naples, in April 1877 as they burned parish and tax records, distributed rifles seized from the national guard and money taken from the safe of a tax collector, and called for the seizure and collectivization of land. The insurgents received some support from nearby villages in a revolt that lasted ten days before being put down.

  In 1883, police in Paris broke up an anarchist-inspired march of unemployed people; some of the demonstrators pillaged a bakery, and arrests followed. In Andalusia in southern Spain that same year, peasants murdered an innkeeper they believed to be a police spy. The Civil Guard moved in, using perhaps fabricated evidence of a secret society plot to kill the rich in order to crush anarchism in Andalusia. And in Montceau-les-Mines in Burgundy in 1884, striking workers organized a group called the Black Band and went on a rampage, pillaging the French town.

  Several other small-scale events gave French authorities further pause. About the same time, a gardener called Louis Chavès shot to death the mother superior of the convent that employed him, and then fired at police, who killed him. He had already sent a letter to an anarchist newspaper, "You start with one to reach a hundred, as the saying goes. So I would like the glory of being the first to start. It is not with words or paper that we shall change existing conditions. The last advice I have for true anarchists, for active anarchists, is to arm themselves according to my example with a good revolver, a good dagger, and a box of matches." An anarchist newspaper began to raise money to purchase a pistol to avenge Chavès. That same year, a man claiming to be an anarchist tossed a bottle full of explosive chemicals into the Paris Bourse. It exploded, although no one was hurt. He then fired three random shots, without effect. A burglar named Clément Duval, who stole from a wealthy Parisian residence, was transformed into Comrade Duval. His explanation: "The policeman arrested me in the name of the law; I hit [the policeman] in the name of liberty! When society refuses you the right to existence, you must take it." In the eyes of some anarchists—though hardly all—any act that might hasten "social disorganization" and ultimately the revolution was legitimate, including theft and the destruction of private property. An Italian thief called Vittorio Pini announced during his trial in Paris that he was not a thief but had merely taken riches that the bourgeoisie had taken before.