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

by Merriman, John

  Malato introduced Émile to a small, recently formed group of anarchists, whose members had tired of "the noisy, vapid, and often dubious individuals who invade the larger groups, paralyzing all activity." The young Émile became one of the most active and enthusiastic members of the group. Malato remembered that Émile would stay up virtually all night with his new anarchist friends, and then despite the lack of sleep, go off to work. During this period of feverish initiation, Émile rarely went to Brévannes. His mother did not really know what he was doing. All she could see was that he no longer seemed to enjoy himself, or even smile.

  Malato too saw a transformation in Émile and believed that it was caused by the appalling social injustices he saw every day. Despite his rather frail appearance, Émile's "indomitable will" seemed even more prominent than his "superior abilities and a burning enthusiasm for lofty ideals." The American anarchist Emma Goldman asserted that it was not anarchist theory that created terrorists but rather the shocking inequalities they saw around them, which could overwhelm a sensitive nature and indeed, a person's very soul. This rang true for Émile, who once said, "To those who say: hate does not give birth to love, I reply that it is love, human love, that often engenders hate."

  Émile became obsessed with the power of the state, embodied by the French army and by the police, so detested by the poor. The slaughter of more than twenty-five thousand ordinary people in the Paris Commune hung over French politics during the first three decades of the Third Republic. For Émile, the tragedy was deeply personal: his father, a good man who had escaped death "thanks to his coolness under pressure and his courage," was forced to flee to Spain, where he had contracted the mercury poisoning that ultimately killed him.

  After Émile had worked for several months at the Roubaix cloth company, his boss found in Émile's desk a manual for practical anarchism, along with a translation he had begun of an article in an Italian newspaper, whose headline read "Long Live Theft!" The newspaper also explained the advantage of "reversal bombs," which would explode when turned over or jarred, mixing the chemicals, if all went well, in the hands of a policeman. Émile lost his job.

  In January 1892, Émile found a position as an accountant for a small firm owned by Félix Vanoutryne, who produced cloth covers for furniture on rue du Sentier in Paris's garment district. The budding anarchist sent a third of his wages to his mother. He could not afford to eat lunch on many days, and may for a time have stayed with the singer Adrienne Chailley.

  Nine months later, Émile moved into a room on the third floor of a building beneath Montmartre on the extremely plebeian rue Marcadet. At least twenty-five different anarchist groups were based on Montmartre from 1889 to 1896, and they included some Spanish and Italian refugees. These groups shared space on the butte with painters, writers, and other artists and bohemians who frequented café-concerts in cabarets whose owners sympathized with the anarchists. The singer Aristide Bruant's famous, festive cabaret Le Chat Noir on boulevard de Rochechouart attracted anarchists, who were often shadowed by police spies and informants. Police also censored and antagonized artists, which, if anything, made them more daring, leading to the temporary shutdown of a few cabarets.

  The neo-impressionist painter Paul Signac was one of many artists with anarchist leanings. He had begun to paint peasants in the 1880s before becoming impassioned about urban poverty, and his work appeared in Grave's La Révolte. Henri Toulouse-Lautrec knew anarchists living in Montmartre as he brought to life its cabarets and café-concerts in paintings, lithographs, and posters. The impressionist Camille Pissarro joined the short-lived Club of Social Art in 1890, expressing the view that even if anarchism was strongly idealistic and Utopian, one had to admit "it is a beautiful dream." Some Utopian dreams in the past had, moreover, become realities, and thus there seemed to be reason for optimism, unless mankind returned to "complete barbarism." Pissarro, who had been forced into exile after the Commune, twice put up money so that Père Peinard could be printed when the newspaper's coffers were empty. Believing that art could be revolutionary, he also contributed drawings, as did Henri Ibels and Maximilien Luce.The symbolist poet Adolphe Retté was an anarchist, and so was, at least for a time, the naturalist and symbolist writer Paul Adam. The poet Laurent Tailhade's play Enemy of the People announced "that genius, beauty, and virtue are antisocial facts of the first order." A member of the audience, age seventeen at the time, recalled, "What dynamism and what dynamite! What bombs did we not intend to explode, charged with new explosives, a new art ... bombs that would be fireworks, bouquets of light." The writer Edmond de Goncourt made exactly the same connection in March 1892: "Oh, the songs of Bruant in the salons and dynamite under the coach doors! These two facts are very symptomatic of the end of the bourgeois era!" The anarchist critic Fénéon, one of the "midwives" of symbolism, considered colorful posters to be as "lively as dynamite."

  With memories still vivid of the brutal repression of the Paris Commune, Montmartre represented the informal alliance between anarchism and avant-garde art. "We were all anarchists without throwing bombs," the Dutch fauvist painter Kees van Dongen reflected. "We had those kinds of ideas." Symbolists in particular, impressionists, and postimpressionists—the term was first used by Félix Fénéon—spurned the conventions of the salons, which they considered bourgeois; they insisted on expressing themselves aesthetically in any way they wanted, in total revolt. Like ordinary members of anarchist groups, they sought complete freedom to express their individuality. Shocking the reactionary bourgeoisie was part of their art. They also cared about the plight of the poor. Some of them were ambivalent about bombs, even though dynamite seemed to offer the potential of putting an end to horrific social inequalities. Idealists, they dreamed of a sparkling future society. Émile soaked up the anarchism of Montmartre. But unlike others, he would not be content with art as a weapon.

  In about 1876, Peter Kropotkin, Paul Brousse (a former Communard also living in exile in Geneva), and Mala testa began to speak of "propaganda by the deed." Kropotkin included the phrase in a program that he proposed in August 1878 to a congress of anarchists. The Russian terrorist Nechaev had viewed propagandists who sought to communicate to the masses with written propaganda as "idle word-spillers." To make the revolution, acts, or deeds, were required. A "deed" was to be a violent, even murderous act, a single initiative worth much more than a thousand pamphlets. Deeds could awaken "the spirit of revolt" in the masses by demonstrating that the state did not really have the strength it projected. Deeds would offer hope to the downtrodden: "Permanent revolt in speech, writing, by the dagger and the gun, or by dynamite ... anything suits us that is alien to legality." Such propaganda would reach the rural destitute as well as urban workers. Moreover, deeds like the assassinations of heads of state could incite a terrifying government reaction that might swell the ranks of anarchists and thus advance the revolution. A placard posted in Paris proclaimed, "Yes, we are guilty of proceeding with the practice of our theories by all means, by the word, by the pen, BY THE DEED—that is to say by revolutionary acts whatever they may be ... Yes, we acknowledge them loudly. We claim them as ours. We glory in them." The anarchist London Congress of 1881 formally adopted the strategy of "propaganda by the deed."

  In January 1883 a bomb exploded in a seedy music hall in Lyon. Kropotkin had nothing to do with it but was among the anarchists arrested. Accused of membership in the First International Workingmen's Association—which he denied—and denounced for his editorials published in Geneva, he was sentenced to prison. After his release early in 1886, Kropotkin returned to England, where he was active in anarchist circles and a frequent visitor to Paris. However, in 1890 he began to have second thoughts about "deeds," genuinely troubled by the deaths of innocent victims in such attacks. In March 1891 he came out against terrorist acts and denounced a deadly bomb attack in 1892 in Barcelona, a center of European anarchism. Isolated acts of violence were not enough, Kropotkin wrote. Indeed, they seemed counterproductive. But he added, "
We who ... seclude ourselves from the cry and sight of human sufferings, we are no judges of those who live in the midst of all this suffering ... Personally I hate those explosions, but I cannot stand as a judge to condemn those who are driven to despair." Malatesta was also against terrorism, saying that it brought out the beast in human beings and it was better to kill a chicken than a king, for one could eat the former.

  Terrorism became a European, then a worldwide, phenomenon beginning in the 1880s. After assassinating Tsar Alexander II, who had eliminated serfdom in Russia twenty years earlier, the group People's Will was itself eliminated in a wave of repression in 1882 carried out by a powerful national police force established to defend the Russian autocracy. Subsequently, spectacular anarchist assassinations struck down the Spanish prime minister Cánovas de Castillo in 1897, Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary in 1898 (despite the fact that she could not stand her husband, Emperor Franz Joseph, from whom she lived apart), and the American president William McKinley in 1901. King Umberto I of Italy, who survived an attempt on his life made by an anarchist in 1878, remarked that he considered assassination a "professional risk." He was murdered twenty-two years later by Gaetano Bresci, an Italian silk worker who was part of an active group of anarchists in Paterson, New Jersey. Bresci bought a pistol for seven dollars, practiced using it, and returned to Italy to kill the monarch he called "King Machine Gun" because the army had gunned down demonstrators in Milan in 1898.

  In western Europe, anarchists wanted to remake the world through revolution. To Kropotkin, this required "men of courage, not satisfied with words, but ever seeking to transform them into action, men of integrity for whom the act is one with the idea, for whom prison, exile, and death are preferable to a life contrary to their principles ... these are the lonely sentinels who enter the battle long before the masses are sufficiently ready to raise the banner of insurrection." In Joseph Conrad's novel The Secret Agent, the anarchist Karl Yundt ruminates, "I have always dreamed ... of a band of men absolute in their resolve to discard all scruples in the choice of means, strong enough to give themselves frankly the name of destroyers, and free from the taint of that resigned pessimism which rots the world. No pity for anything on earth, including themselves, and death enlisted for good and all in the service of humanity—that's what I would have liked to see."

  Émile became part of an increasingly strident group of anarchists in Paris. Their targets were private property and authority, "two vicious germs" that formed the basis of contemporary society. Both had "to be destroyed, eradicated from social life" in order to bring about "absolute equality." Émile had lost all faith in the socialists, rejecting the claims of Marxists that the destruction of capitalism was inevitable once workers became sufficiently conscious of themselves as a class. With his anarchist friends, he distrusted the hierarchy of socialist organizations, which he felt compromised individual initiative.

  To Émile, the repressive power of the state was clearly becoming greater amid the poverty in "People's Paris." An English newspaper later had it right, affirming that "no anarchist forgot the savage repression ... Henry is the son of a man who has seen thousands of working men, women, and children shot down in heaps, while well-dressed men and dainty ladies struck the bound prisoners with canes and parasols, shrieking 'Shoot them all!'" Only a new kind of revolution could save humanity.

  Émile read Kropotkin's popular pamphlet "The Anarchist Morality" and his book The Conquest of Bread, in which the anarchist argues that a minority of humanity had succeeded in controlling the majority of resources, despite the fact that "all belongs to all." Two French anarchist theorists also influenced Émile's intellectual development. On several occasions, Émile brought the anarchist propagandist Sébastien Faure, whose work he had also read, to Brévannes. Born into a prosperous commercial family in Saint- Étienne, Faure emerged as a tireless and effective anarchist orator and propagandist. Virtually all compagnons revered Faure, except the many husbands whose wives he seduced. Essentially a propagandist unwilling to participate in any illegal or violent activities, he nonetheless accepted in principle any act that could ultimately serve the cause of anarchist revolution.

  Émile also acknowledged the influence of Elisée Reclus in his development as an anarchist. Like Kropotkin, Reclus was a respected geographer, a theoretician admired by many for his spirit of solidarity and his kindness to other anarchists who needed assistance. The son of a Protestant pastor in the southwest, he had first become a democrat-socialist. Banished from France after Louis Napoleon Bonaparte's coup d'état in 1851, Reclus traveled for the next six years in England, Ireland, the United States, and Senegal, where he married a Senagalese woman with whom he had two children. Early in the 1870s he became an anarchist, founding a group with Bakunin. He was expelled from France again in 1871 following the Commune. Upon his return Reclus wrote for a number of major journals and published a guide to London and a book about towns on the Riviera. Reclus argued that revolutions were a natural part of human development. Society would eventually reach a state of perfection, making governments and nations unnecessary. Anarchy thus stood as "the highest expression of order." Émile was among his many followers.

  Émile remained an intellectual, somewhat detached from most of the people who crowded into the anarchist meetings. Unlike Fortuné, a gifted speaker, Émile stayed out of the limelight and was introspective, taciturn, and resolutely individualist. Only occasionally attending anarchist meetings and never giving a speech in public, Émile was a loner. However, at one gathering in central Paris he had a violent altercation with an anarchist (who later killed himself); Émile accused the man of being insufficiently militant.

  Late in February 1892, Émile become one of several anarchists who signed a letter, published in La Révolte, stating that anarchists should participate in the May Day demonstrations. In principle, anarchists believed that such events, which called for reforms like the eight-hour workday, merely helped prop up the bourgeois state and kept workers from the real business of revolution. But if anarchists refused to become involved in a real working-class movement, might they not cut themselves off from the proletariat, losing the occasion to make converts to their cause?

  The letter in La Révolte laid out four reasons for supporting the demonstrations planned for May 1: (1) on any occasion that workers left their workshops and factories to demonstrate in the street, anarchists should be there to win them over to the cause of social revolution; (2) May 1 was no more important than any other date, but because "people have a tendency to think about revolution on that day, it would be strange and even pitiful if anarchists advised them to stay at home to rest"; (3) even if May 1 was to be a political demonstration in which socialist leaders sought to make the masses follow them, proletarians had the capacity to go further than their "so-called representatives" would like; and (4) the fears of several compagnons that periodic demonstrations could ultimately prevent more serious action on other days were not well founded. Malato and "Jacques Prolo" (the alias of Jean Pansader, one of the most effective organizers of anarchist groups in the suburbs, with contacts in Spain, Italy, and especially Chicago) were among the eight other anarchists who signed with Émile.

  The letter raised suspicion among the police, who were eager to prevent armed confrontation on May 1. They believed that Émile was living with his close friend Constant Martin, who ran a small shop selling milk and cheese near the Bourse in central Paris. Like Émile's father, Martin had gone into exile following the Commune and likewise returned when amnesty was offered. He had converted quickly to anarchism, becoming something of a patriarch to a small group of militant anarchists suspected of thefts. Martin was a complex personality, selfless, devoted, and ready to make any sacrifice for the cause, which rendered him suspicious, and thus he was constantly on guard. The police considered him dangerous. In some ways he was Émile's mentor. Martin sympathized with the "right of theft," a topic anarchists hotly debated and which some practiced. Jean Grave's Le Révolt
é had condemned "the right to theft" in 1885. Malatesta in 1889 understood that anarchists who stole from the bourgeoisie were merely "robbing the robber" if they were hungry, but he did not support thefts merely to get more money. In any case, advocating the "right to theft" was unusual for a shopkeeper, as Martin presumably did not want even anarchists stealing his goods.

  Like his brother Fortuné, the younger Henry now made it onto the police's watch list because of his new anarchist sympathies and his embrace of "propaganda by the deed."

  Another person whom the police took a strong interest in was François-Claudius Ravachol, a poor dyer's assistant turned anarchist. He would come to have a great deal of influence on Émile—and events in Paris.

  CHAPTER 4

  Dynamite Deeds

  FRANÇOIS-CLAUDIUS RAVACHOL, whose name would become synonymous with terrorism, was born in 1859 into gnawing poverty in the small town of Saint-Chamond near the burgeoning industrial city of Saint-Étienne in the département of the Loire. His father was a Dutch mill worker who beat and then abandoned his French wife and their four children. Ravachol's mother worked, at least when employment was available, in a factory that prepared raw silk. When Ravachol was a young boy, she often sent him out to beg for money. The boy was handed over to a farmer whose animals he was to help care for, but he was sent back to his mother the following year. Until he was eleven, Ravachol attended primary school, where he was mocked for his shabby clothes. One winter he herded cows and sheep in the mountains, but lacking proper shoes, his feet were always freezing. It was at this time that his youngest sister died of fever.