And François-Claudius Ravachol was prepared to take action. He wanted to avenge the three anarchists mistreated by the Clichy police, two of whom had been sent to prison in 1891. During the night of February 14–15, 1892, Ravachol and several other anarchists stole a considerable amount of dynamite, called "La Camelote" (or "junk"), from a quarry in Soisy-sous-Étiolles, southeast of Paris and not too far from Brévannes. In all, thirty kilograms of dynamite, 1,400 to 1,500 capsules, and two hundred yards of fuse disappeared in the night. The compagnons left the site with pockets "full of firecrackers." On February 29, a bomb exploded at an elite residence on elegant rue Saint-Dominique, doing little damage but frightening the city.
On March 7, with the help of Cookie and a cooking pot, Ravachol put together a bomb in a warehouse in Saint-Denis. It consisted of fifty dynamite cartridges and pieces of iron. His target was the Clichy police station, to avenge the three anarchists severely beaten there. But since police stations tend to be surrounded by police officers, Ravachol could not get close enough to place the bomb. He decided instead to kill Judge Benoît, who had presided over the trial of the Clichy three. On March 11, after Cookie had checked out the magistrate's house on boulevard Saint-Germain on the Left Bank, he, Ravachol, and two others took the tramway into Paris. After a few nervous moments at the customs barrier surrounding the capital—with the bomb hidden under the skirt of Rosalie Soubère (known as Mariette)—they entered Paris, after which the woman, her work accomplished, got off the tramway and returned home, the three men continuing on their route. On boulevard Saint-Germain, Ravachol entered the building, carrying two loaded pistols. Because he did not know which apartment was Benoît's, he placed the bomb on the second floor in the center of the building. He lit the fuse and sneaked out without being seen. The bomb detonated as he reached the sidewalk—a huge, terrifying explosion. But it killed no one and injured only one person slightly. Judge Benoît, who lived on the fifth floor, was unhurt.
Four days later, a dynamite cartridge exploded in front of the Lobau barracks near the town hall, shattering windows in Saint-Gervais church. The man responsible was Théodule Meunier, a cabinetmaker who had managed to escape to London after serving jail time for another crime. Charles Malato described him as "the most remarkable type of revolutionary visionary illuminist, an ascetic, as passionate in his search for the ideal society as [the French revolutionary] Saint-Just, and as merciless in seeking his way towards it." Many anarchists celebrated what L'Endehors called a "nicely symbolic" bomb.
The team of Ravachol and Cookie went to work again, preparing another bomb, this one with 120 cartridges of dynamite. The target would be Bulot, the prosecuting attorney in the Clichy case. On March 17, thanks to a police informer, Chaumartin (Ravachol's host) and Cookie were arrested. But Ravachol had already left for the suburb of Saint-Mandé. On March 27, he placed the bomb in Bulot's building on rue de Clichy, taking off down the street as it exploded. Seven people were injured, but not the magistrate and his family, who were away at the time. Ravachol climbed onto a bus that would take him down rue de Clichy so that he could see the great damage his bomb had inflicted. Soon thereafter, he stopped in a restaurant called Le Very, on boulevard de Magenta. He engaged a waiter called Lhérot in conversation. When the latter complained about military service, Ravachol held forth on anarchism. The waiter remembered a scar the diner had on his left hand. Three days later, Ravachol returned to dine in the same place. The waiter by then had seen a newspaper description of Ravachol, and instead of going to get the first course, he went to see the patron, who returned with the police. Ravachol was arrested, but not without a fight. It took ten policemen to subdue him.
Ravachol's arrest became the talk of anarchist circles—a policeman observed that the anarchists "hoped for and counted on at least some sort of violent response." Some bemoaned Ravachol's extreme imprudence. They felt it would have been better if he had been gunned down after shooting a policeman, not taken because he had talked too much. The police knew that Lhérot, the waiter, needed to look out for himself. At a gathering of about fifty anarchists on March 12, a speaker advised the faithful that the time had come to attack the "great exploiters"—banks, the Bourse, and elegant private residences. Foreign tourists began to flee the City of Dynamite. The fact that some anarchist publications brazenly described how to assemble bombs and even recommended the use of chemical weapons or poison heightened mass anxiety.
On April 22, 1892, at 5 A.M., twelve policemen banged on the door of the journalist Zo d'Axa and searched his apartment for dynamite. After fifteen days in custody, he managed to leave the tribunal before his sentencing on charges of insulting a magistrate and provocation to murder (condemned to eighteen months in prison and a fine of two thousand francs). He headed for London, first staying with Charles Malato near Regent's Park. Émile Pouget and Errico Malatesta were now also in the British capital, along with other anarchist exiles.
Just before Ravachol's trial was to begin in Paris, on April 25, a bomb blew up the restaurant Le Véry. It had been placed in a small suitcase recently purchased for the occasion. The explosion killed two men, including Monsieur Véry himself, giving rise to the savage pun of Père Peinard: "Vérification." With Ravachol in jail, two principal suspects remained, both members of a group of anarchist cabinetmakers called the Flat Feet: Meunier and Jean-Pierre François, known to friends and police simply as Francis—a powerful man, with a black beard and mustache and a look of sullen resignation etched on his face. Francis accompanied Meunier to the restaurant, and the latter placed the bomb in its case next to the counter. A French police agent working in London noted that as far as he knew, Francis had not previously killed anyone, and he spent most of his time drinking. In and out of jail for years, Francis had the typical itinerary of many a militant anarchist, as he dodged policemen and landlords alike.
On April 26, Ravachol's trial took place in the Assize Court in the Palace of Justice on the île de la Cité. Soldiers guarded the courtroom, and police even stood between the accused and the judge and jury. Bulot, the prosecuting attorney, the same man Ravachol had tried to kill a month earlier, contemptuously called the anarchist "a mere knight of the dynamite club," which the anarchist took as a compliment. Four other anarchists, all workers, were also tried, including Cookie, Ravachol's faithful, dangerous assistant. When asked specifically if he had helped Ravachol, Cookie coolly replied, "Absolutely." The jury condemned Ravachol as well as Cookie to life in prison with hard labor. (Cookie would be killed two years later during a prison riot on Devil's Island, French Guiana.)
In June, Ravachol again went on trial in the town of Montbrison, near Saint-Étienne. Amid rumors that anarchists would strike a blow there, security measures were extremely tight. In the Palace of Justice, a former convent, Ravachol addressed horrified magistrates and jurors. "See this hand?" he asked the courtroom. "It has killed as many bourgeois as it has fingers." As for the murder of the hermit monk, Ravachol explained, "If I killed, it was first of all to satisfy my personal needs, then to come to the aid of the anarchist cause, for we work for the happiness of the people." His only regret was the society he saw around him. Condemned to death for the murder of the hermit and two women near the small industrial town Saint-Chamond, as well as for several other killings that he probably did not commit, Ravachol went to the guillotine on July 11,1892. Smiling, confident, insolent, with his "jaw of a wolf" set firmly forward, he told the priest who approached him with a crucifix, "I don't give a damn about your Christ. Don't show him to me; I'll spit in his face." On the way to the guillotine, which was guarded by a cordon of troops, he sang,
To be happy, goddammit,
You have got to kill those who own property,
To be happy, goddammit,
You must cut the priests in two,
To be happy, goddammit,
Put the good Lord into the shit...
The guillotine's blade, operated skillfully by the chief executioner, Antoine-Louis Deibler, cut short
Ravachol's attempt to shout "Vive la révolution!"
In his "Eulogy for Ravachol," the anarchist critic Paul Adam warned that "the murder of Ravachol will open an era." He had been impressed with the way that Ravachol had propagated "the great idea that the ancient religions advocated the quest for death for the good of the world, the abnegation of oneself ... for the exaltation of the poor and the humble." Ravachol became "the peal of thunder to which succeeds the joy of sunlight and of peaceful skies." Adam portrayed Ravachol as "a redeemer" and compared his "sacrifice and suffering" to those of Jesus Christ: Both were nonconformists, both expressed contempt for the values of contemporary society, and both represented high ideals. Both were executed at age thirty-three. Christ had been betrayed by Judas, and Ravachol, a "violent Christ," as described by Victor Barrucand in L'Endehors, had been betrayed by the waiter in Le Véry (as well as by his former friend, Chaumartin, who had provided magistrates with important evidence). A woodprint by the artist Charles Maurin, reproduced frequently in the anarchist press, portrayed Ravachol as a martyr, his defiant, heroic visage set within the frame of a guillotine.
Ordinary criminals might appear downtrodden, colorful, or wretched, victims of fate or poor choices. Ravachol had been different. His almost "noble bearing" before death and his determined defense of anarchism until the very end stood out for all to see. He seemed to mock the guillotine, confident that ultimately his cause would win out. Père Peinard taunted,
Ravachol's head has rolled at their feet; they fear it will explode, just like a bomb!...And for Christ sake's shut up about your whore of a society; it has no need of being defended—it's at its death rattle ... You claim that his death at the guillotine is an expiation. Well, why did you hide like bandits to do the trick? Why encircle the prison with thousands of troops, rifle in hand, bayonets fixed? Why only one little spot left free: the one where Ravachol would be assassinated?...And the guillotine-lickers are there surrounding him, never taking their eyes off him. If only he would have a moment of weakness. If only his eyes had become misty for a moment or two and they could have bleated to their whorespapers: "Ravachol trembled."
Ravachol had wanted to keep speaking, but Deibler's assistants had thrown him down on the plank and, holding him by his ears, forced his head into the guillotine's glassless window, even as he continued to shout.
The "Song of Père Duchesne," which Ravachol had sung during his last steps to the guillotine, was reprinted by La Révolte, and the lyrics were widely circulated. Anarchist publications saluted his "greatness of character." Pouget's almanac in 1893 reproduced his portrait and saluted Ravachol's "dandy adaptation of cooking pots to the solution of the social question." Five thousand copies of a brief commentary titled "Ravachol, an Anarchist? Absolutely!" were circulated, echoing Cookie; it was attributed to Fortuné Henry. Fénéon proclaimed that the anarchist "deeds" had done more for propaganda than two decades of brochures by Kropotkin or Reclus. Anarchist newspapers and arguably the coverage given to such attacks by the mainstream press publicized "propaganda by the deed." Thus emerged the stereotype of the dark-coated, elusive anarchist lurking in the shadows with a bomb hidden under his coat, an image that Joseph Conrad would later capture in The Secret Agent.
The anarchist press called for vengeance, saluting the memory of the martyr Ravachol. According to L'Endehors, when dynamite spoke, people listened, and "the conspiracy of silence [was] vanquished." It was sheer delusion to imagine a peaceful revolution "in face of the blind oppression of Capital"; this was the dream of those who had never been hungry. Anarchists sang "La Ravachole" to the tune of a leftist song from the days of the French Revolution, the "Carmagnole":
In the Great City of Paris
Live the well-fed bourgeois
And the destitute who have empty stomachs
But they have long teeth.
Let's dance the Ravachole, Long live the sound,
Let's dance the Ravachole, long live the sound of the explosion!
It will be, it will be,
All the bourgeois will taste the bomb,
It will be, it will be,
These bourgeois, these bourgeois, we'll blow them up!
A tailor penned a song in honor of "Dame Dynamite":
Our fathers once danced
To the sound of the cannons of the past!
Now this tragic dance
Requires stronger music.
Let's dynamite, let's dynamite!
Refrain
Lady Dynamite, let's dance fast!
Let's dance and sing!
Lady Dynamite, let's dance fast!
Let's dance and sing, and dynamite!
The spectacular and seemingly unprecedented attacks generated a veritable psychosis that took hold of Paris. Everyone knew that a considerable stock of dynamite had been hidden somewhere. Ravachol had proudly refused to account for the remaining cartridges that had been in his possession. Moreover, Ravachol himself had promised that he would be avenged. This was hardly reassuring. The factories that produced explosives and chemicals were located in the industrial suburbs, right in the hotbed of anarchy. Authorities suspected that workers were stealing dynamite and cartridges from factories, workshops, and mines, and stored them in secret places. Miners, in particular, could easily procure dynamite.
Dynamite and the fear of anarchist attacks became lodged in the upper-class imagination, contributing to the sense that Parisians were living in a whole new era. As one bombing followed another, it became possible to imagine an organized plot—a dynamite club—against society of unprecedented destructive power. Newspaper headlines stoked Parisians' anxieties. The dailies dramatized each anarchist attack, competing for eager, if apprehensive, readers. This coverage pushed the Third Republic's financial scandals off the front pages, to the relief of compromised politicians. People of means were afraid to frequent elegant restaurants or attend the theater, and many planned to send their families to the provinces if the government did not act decisively against what seemed to be a rapidly increasing threat. Some owners of apartments in fancy neighborhoods now hesitated to rent to magistrates, for fear of the "dynamitards." Bulot, who had prosecuted the Clichy three and Ravachol, noted that magistrates were becoming targets: "Really!" he complained, "the profession of judge is becoming impossible because of the anarchists!" Jean Grave replied in La Révolte that it was surprising that a functionary who earned his living calling for executions did not realize that there might eventually be some danger in it for him. Ravachol so terrified his upper-class contemporaries that for a time his name was used as a French verb: ravacholiser meant "to kill someone, preferably by blowing up the person with dynamite."
In the meantime, hundreds of scrawled messages left in mailboxes or sent by regular mail gave ravenous landlords and unfair concierges something to worry about. Such missives were signed by "the avengers of Ravachol," "the compagnons of Ravachol," or "an anarchist from the quartier." An "exploiter of the proletarian" received a message telling him that "Next Sunday, May 1, you will be blown up!" It was signed "Dynamite." A group of anarchists had sworn to eliminate the bourgeois who exploited them. How would this be accomplished? Nothing could be simpler—"a little dynamite and you can kiss goodbye the riches you have accumulated, thanks to the sweat of workers." A certain Madame Boubon-neaud, a property owner of some means, received her warning from those who followed "the school of Ravachol ... We are going to Ravachol you."
In the Chamber of Deputies, one deputy accused anarchists of working "to wipe out the work of six thousand years and take the world back to the age of cavemen, without seeing that humanity would again assume the painful burden of centuries of barbarism ... Their savage hatred and furious rage aim at nothing less than the destruction of all that exists."
The police moved against anarchists, whether or not they espoused "propaganda by the deed"—and the vast majority of anarchists did not. The authorities used existing laws to expel foreigners, including Germans, Austrians, Belgians, Italians (a
mong them Malatesta), and at least one Spaniard. One day late in April, the police arrested sixty-six anarchists, most of whom were considered propagandists. The prefecture of police increased the number of undercover police and paid informants. The police undertook searches, seized newspapers and correspondence, made arrests for little or no reason, and intimidated employers into firing workers suspected of being anarchists. The government gave the police in Paris free rein, with virtually no constraints. The "dynamite psychosis" seemed to justify countless violations of individual rights.
At first Émile Henry rejected the deeds of Ravachol. "Such acts," he said, "can only do great damage to our cause ... A true anarchist strikes his enemy, but he does not dynamite houses where there are women, children, workers, and domestics." But Émile soon came to embrace Ravachol's tactics for carrying out the revolution. Indeed, police suspected that Émile and his older brother had gone to Montbrison with the goal of blowing up the house of the prosecuting attorney. Police met virtually every train, but neither brother was actually seen in Montbrison or Saint-Étienne.
As Émile now saw at close range, the state was becoming ever more powerful, fully capable of defending the privileges of the rich while the destitute struggled to survive. The repressive police campaign in the wake of Ravachol's bombs was a reflection of this. Revolution seemed to require strong, violent acts in order to impress ordinary people.
The neighborhoods in which Émile lived help turn his love for humanity into a steely hatred for people of means. With the exception of a short stint in a tiny room at 10, boulevard Morland, between the Bastille and the Seine (he left without paying his rent after a month), his time in Paris was spent in plebeian Montmartre and then in Belleville. From November 25,1891, to October 8, 1892, he lived in a room on the third floor at 101, rue Marcadet, in the eighteenth arrondissement. Every day, Émile encountered the ravages of poverty and misery.
The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror Page 9