As a boy and then a young man, Ravachol worked in a mine and in various textile workshops, once joining other workers on strike. He quit one job because the pressure to work constantly left him no time to eat or to go to the bathroom. In Saint-Chamond, he was fired from a job because he was a few minutes late, despite the fact that he had often been forced to work overtime for nothing. After three years of an unpleasant apprenticeship as a dyer, during which his master refused to reveal the secrets of the trade, he left for Lyon in search of work. There, Ravachol joined a study group that read socialist and anarchist newspapers and hosted a small lecture series. Periods of unemployment became longer. By age eighteen, he had a reputation as a brawler. He read Eugène Sue's The Wandering Jew, a popular novel evoking the poor neighborhoods of Paris in the 1840s. Ravachol later claimed that by revealing the "odious conduct" of priests, the novel had turned him against religion. This process was completed by attending a socialist lecture, where he learned about the massacres that had followed the Paris Commune. After listening to several anarchist speakers, Ravachol embraced this new philosophy. He tried without success to make explosive devices. Then he was arrested for having provided a young woman with sulfuric acid, which she claimed to have needed to remove a corn from her foot. Instead, she had thrown it into the eyes of a lover who had cheated on her.
Unable to feed his mother and his younger siblings, Ravachol turned to stealing chickens, while his brother stole coal. He played the accordion at a few small festivals to earn a little money. When his mother rebuked him for having a relationship with a married woman, he severed ties with his mother. Ravachol subsequently broke into the grave of a baroness in search of jewelry (finding only a decomposing body and rancid flowers) and turned to counterfeiting, the illegal sale of alcohol, and, finally, murder.
In 1891 Ravachol suffocated an elderly hermit monk who had a good deal of cash hidden in his house in a hilltop village. After Ravachol made five or six trips back to the house to find more money, while the monk's lifeless body remained in bed, the police arrested him. But he managed to escape when the officers transporting him to jail were momentarily distracted.
Ravachol fled to Paris, living in the northern industrial suburb of Saint-Denis under the alias "Léon Léger." He stayed with a couple named Chaumartin, who introduced him to militant anarchists, exponents of "propaganda by the deed," who had made the capital their own. These included Charles Simon dit Biscuit (known as "Cookie"), eighteen years old, also from the Loire. The four were soon swept up in the furor surrounding two separate May Day incidents that would send shock waves through France.
For several months in 1891, in Fourmies, a wool-producing town of fifteen thousand people in northern France, a crisis had been looming. Salaries in textile mills had fallen by as much as 20 percent over recent years, and a strike seemed imminent. On the morning of May 1,1891, a confrontation occurred between those who wanted to continue to work and those who wanted to strike. A year earlier, French workers had chosen May 1 to commemorate the Haymarket affair in Chicago and to demonstrate for improved wages and conditions. Now, a year later, at about 6 P.M., several hundred young people and children marched through town. They were led by Maria Blondeau, eighteen years old, who danced along while holding a mayflower. Arriving at the small square in front of the church where troops had assembled, she taunted the soldiers, who were determined to stop the march. A few demonstrators hurled stones, hitting two soldiers. The commander ordered the troops to fire. Maria Blondeau fell dead, the top of her head torn off by bullets. A priest ran out, taking in his arms Félicie Pennelier, seventeen years old and also mortally wounded, and carrying her to the presbytery. He then returned with other clergy to implore the commandant to stop the shooting. Nine demonstrators lay dead, and more than thirty people had been wounded, some of whom were then shot dead by soldiers.
That same May Day, a small group of anarchists marched toward Clichy on the northwestern edge of Paris. Four policemen tried to block their way, and a brief scuffle ensued. A few of the anarchists stopped to get something to drink in a bar, and the police entered, supposedly to seize a "seditious" symbol, a red flag. Shots rang out, apparently from both sides—the police insisted that an anarchist fired first. Four gendarmes arrived as all but three of the demonstrators hurriedly departed. Three workers, Decamps, Dardare, and Léveillé, continued to resist in the bar but were subdued after suffering saber wounds and then were dragged off to the police station. There policemen kicked, punched, and pistol-whipped them, put them into cells for at least half an hour, and then went at them again. The prisoners were left without water or treatment for their wounds, which included a bullet lodged in Léveillé's leg.
In August the men went on trial, accused of violence toward "agents of public order." The prosecuting attorney, Bulot, demanded the death penalty. Decamps defended himself by saying that he had merely tried to fend off the police, who were drunk. He had four children to feed. When Léveillé had his turn to speak, he sketched the anarchist position on modern society:
At the top there are priests engaged in the traffic of sacraments and religious ceremonies, soldiers selling secrets of a so-called national defense, writers glorifying injustice, poets idealizing ugliness, shopkeepers measuring produce with false scales, industrialists faking their products, and speculators fishing for millions in the insatiable sea of human stupidity. At the bottom there are building workers without homes, tailors without clients, bakers without bread, millions of workers beaten down by unemployment and hunger, families heaped in slums, and young girls, age fifteen, forced to earn money by enduring the sweaty embrace of old men or the rapacious assaults of young bourgeois.
Decamps and Dardare received exceptionally harsh sentences of five and three years in prison, whereas Léveillé was acquitted.
The events at both Clichy and Fourmies mobilized anarchists in Paris, notably Ravachol and his new friends. A group in the fifteenth arrondissement began to call itself Revenge for Fourmies. In L'Endehors, Zo d'Axa described the "martyrdom" of Decamps, Dardare, and Léveillé in the Clichy police station. To anarchists like Ravachol, the three names echoed like a battle cry.
In early August, even before the trial of the Clichy three, an anarchist meeting in the Salle du Commerce in northeastern Paris attracted about seven hundred people. A speaker sang the praises of the arrested anarchists, adding provocatively that "the life of a policeman is not worth that of a dog." There were rumors that a bomb would blow apart the Clichy police station. Indeed, in December, three small bombs were discovered there, leading Zo d'Axa to note in L'Endehors that "all seemed to point to better things, in terms of cleaning up the place!"
Ravachol, aided by his young friend Cookie, set out to avenge the "martyrs" of Clichy. He would do so with an explosive that was leveling the playing field for terrorists intent on striking against the state: dynamite.
In 1863, Alfred Nobel, a Swedish chemist and manufacturer, experimented with nitroglycerin, in an attempt to invent a more powerful industrial explosive. A year later, a shed used for the production of nitroglycerin exploded, and Nobel's brother and four other people were killed. Nobel then experimented with mixing nitroglycerin with a fine, porous black powder. In 1867 he took out a patent for dynamite. He developed a detonator, or blasting cap, made up of a copper casing filled with a charge of mercury fulminate. Dynamite immediately found a market, particularly among mining and construction companies, which used Nobel's invention to blow apart rock or anything else that stood in their way. Armies also quickly found uses for dynamite. Nobel became a very rich man. With some of the proceeds from his discovery, he later set up a fund to award people deemed to have furthered the "good of humanity."
In France, Nobel's writings were translated and made available by 1870. Dynamite quickly entered French mines and factories. The president of the state Committee on Fortifications produced a study of the theory and practice of dynamite use, and the French navy began to explore the possibility of crea
ting dynamite-loaded torpedoes.
The dangers of dynamite became clear almost immediately. Inadvertent and sometimes premature explosions of this substance killed workers. Soon, legal guidelines were established to define how it might be produced and used. In 1875 a law authorized the production and sale of dynamite and "eventually new explosives, that science could discover." It set some restrictions on its manufacture and transport, at least for civilian uses, specifying the places where it could be stored. Railroad companies, worried about the dangers associated with the explosive product, were extremely reluctant to transport it, despite being obliged to do so by a law in 1879. Annual reports tallied the number of accidents for the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, which oversaw the production, transport, and use of explosives; also, a parliamentary commission, preparing possible new legislation, listed terrible explosions that had occurred over the previous three centuries before dynamite had been invented. Other government officials published a separate history of the ways in which assassins, or would-be assassins, had made use of gunpowder, beginning with a failed attack in 1605 against James I of England. New regulations in 1882 further tightened conditions of transport, storage, and use. Other countries began to enact laws against the criminal use of explosives.
Then reports reached the Ministry of Foreign Affairs concerning deadly new "infernal machines," powerful bombs being produced in the United States. It was believed that a Philadelphia inventor had manufactured one such combustible called the "Ticker," which packed the equivalent of nine hundred pounds of powder and came with a clock that could be set thirty-six hours before the intended explosion. Elsewhere, a wicked "eight-day machine" had been created, and it could blow up three thousand pounds of powder with the help of a similar clock mechanism. Stories arose about other awful inventions: the "Little Exterminator," a mere two inches high, which could spread deadly vapors; the "Bottle Machine," filled with acidic powder; and the newest threat, "That Explodir" [sic]. Within French circles of power, rumors abounded that orders for these deadly devices were pouring in from Mexico, Italy, Austria, Germany, and Russia.
And indeed, governments had cause for fear; dyamite's potential for destruction was not lost on the anarchists. The "apostle of dynamite" was a German bookbinder named Johann Most. Born in 1846, Most was elected to the Reichstag as a Social Democrat, but then quit socialism after Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's anti-socialist legislation in 1878 forced him and others to flee. He moved toward anarchism, publishing in London the newspaper Freiheit (Freedom). Most was the first to realize that the mass press could greatly enhance the appeal of anarchism across the globe. In 1880, Most contended that "it was within the power of dynamite to destroy the capitalist regime just as it had been within the power of gunpowder and the rifle to wipe feudalism from the face of the earth." Dynamite thus developed a mystique. Johann Most saluted the destruction wrought by the Fenians in Ireland, who blew up a prison in 1867, killing twelve and wounding more than one hundred in their bid for independence from Britain. In Russia, the anarchist group People's Will made dynamite their weapon of choice, helped by a member who was a scientist. Most celebrated the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, in which dynamite had done its part. After being jailed in London, Most moved to the United States.
Most preached direct, violent action against the agents of the state, admitting that some "innocents" might get hurt in the process, which had in fact happened when Irish bombs, though not made with dynamite, had been detonated. Revolutionary groups welcomed him as a hero when he arrived in the United States as a political refugee. He continued to publish Freiheit in New York, lectured widely, and greatly influenced American anarchists. He worked for a time in an explosives factory in New Jersey, the right man in the right place. Imagining new uses for these substances, such as letter bombs (although the first one was not sent until 1895) and bombs dropping from the sky, Most wrote, "Let us rely upon the unquenchable spirit of destruction and annihilation which is the perpetual spring of new life." Most then published "The Science of Revolutionary Warfare—A Manual of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, GunCotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc., etc.," which was printed in Chicago and Cleveland in 1885 and 1886. What better way to prepare for revolution than with the "thunder" of dynamite? The explosive could "be carried in the pocket without danger ... a formidable weapon against any force of militia, police, or detectives that may want to stifle the cry for justice that goes forth from the plundered slaves ... It is a genuine boon for the disinherited, while it brings terror and fear to the robbers ... Our lawmakers might as well try to sit down on the crater of a volcano or on the point of a bayonet as to endeavor to stop the manufacture and use of dynamite." An anarchist newspaper in 1885 praised dynamite, "the good stuff! Stuff several pounds of this sublime stuff into an inch pipe ... plug up both ends, insert a cap with a fuse attached, place this in the vicinity of a lot of rich loafers who live by the sweat of other people's brows, and light the fuse ... A pound of this good stuff beats a bushel of ballots—and don't you forget it!" The newspaper La Révolution Sociale included a column called "Scientific Studies," which described how to make dynamite, as well as other explosives.
Poems sang the praises of dynamite:
At last a toast to Science
To dynamite that is the force
The force in our own hands
The world gets better day by day.
In Paris, Père Peinard did its part to perpetuate the cult of dynamite among the anarchist faithful. It seemed so simple. "Do you want some dynamite?" the newspaper asked. "For a little money ... you can buy a liter of it." An international anarchist gathering in London called for "the study of the new technical and chemical sciences from the point of view of their revolutionary value." Several anarchist groups during the 1880s in Paris enthusiastically took names invoking dynamite, such as the Dynamitards. In the Dordogne in southwest France, a liquor called Dynamite went on sale in 1888. At Montmartre's Cabaret du Chat Rouge, "Dame Dynamite" was high on the list of favorite songs. One could even dance to the "Dynamite Polka."
Dynamite played a part in the Haymarket affair in Chicago in 1886. During the 1880s, the influence of anarchism had grown in Chicago's labor movement, finding adherents particularly among the large number of German and Bohemian workers there. A wave of labor militancy, marked by increased organization, brought massive strikes followed by some major victories that affected workers of many trades, skilled and unskilled. Notably "The Great Upheaval" of 1886 led to a shorter workday. The lords of finance and industry launched a counteroffensive, targeting militants such as Albert Parsons.
A Texas-born former employee of the Internal Revenue Service, Parsons had married Lucy Gonzalez, a black woman with Mexican and Indian antecedents. He edited an anarchist newspaper, Alarm, which contended that one man with dynamite was the equivalent of an entire military regiment. According to Lucy Parsons, "The voice of dynamite is the voice of force, the only voice which tyranny has ever been able to understand." Other anarchists joined this chorus. During a speech, the German-born labor leader August Spies, who edited a German-language anarchist newspaper, held up an empty piece of tube and implied how it could be used: "Take it to your boss, and tell him we have 9,000 more like it—only loaded." Rumors spread quickly that anarchists planned to blow up the Board of Trade building.
On May 3, 1886, Chicago policemen attacked strikers outside the McCormick Reaper Works, shooting six men dead and beating others with their clubs. Such acts were fairly typical of the way bosses and police, cheered on by people of means, dealt with labor militancy at the time. Anarchist leaders prepared an armed retort.
The next day, a mass meeting began at 7:30 in the evening on Desplaines Street, adjacent to Haymarket Square. As armed police moved in amid fiery speeches by Spies and others, someone—probably a German anarchist—threw a small dynamite bomb in their general direction. A policeman lay dead, probably killed by the explosion. Subse
quent shots resulted in the death of four other policemen, almost certainly killed by "friendly fire." Businessmen and newspapers screamed for revenge. Albert Parsons, who had gone into hiding in Wisconsin, returned (foolishly) to stand trial with seven others. The prosecution proved no conspiracy of any kind to start a social revolution or to bomb the police, nor any connection between the men and the bomb, but that made little difference to the jury. It found seven of the defendants guilty of murder as charged, giving them the death penalty. The penalties of three were commuted, but Louis Lingg, a violent German anarchist, somehow managed to get a dynamite cartridge into his cell and committed suicide by blowing himself up. Despite petitions calling on the Supreme Court and the governor of Illinois for clemency, Albert Parsons, Spies, and two others were hanged in Cook County Jail in November 1887.
The Haymarket riot was a touchstone for anarchists in Europe and in the United States, where the trials and subsequent executions pushed Emma Goldman, an immigrant from Russia, to anarchist militancy. The events in Chicago demonstrated three things to anarchists: that anarchism had international appeal, that anarchists could mobilize workers, and that the repressive power of the state, serving the interests of high finance and big business, remained strong. The image of the bodies of four men hanging in the Windy City in the United States, supposedly a progressive republic, became etched in the anarchist collective memory. Like the Paris Commune, Haymarket made clear that given the strength and resolution of the bourgeois state, the revolution would have to be bloody.
The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror Page 8