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

by Merriman, John

  On February 17, a magistrate, three gendarmes, two clerks, and a policeman arrived at the auberge in Brévannes and tore through everything, including Madame Henry's bed and the rooms rented out to workers. In the kitchen they tasted the salt to make sure it was not some sort of deadly explosive. Émile's mother explained that a pot contained potassium, used for cleaning. They took several small tubes that the elder Fortuné had used to store minerals collected in the mines of Catalonia, and bullets from an old rifle that had belonged to a childhood friend. They seized letters that Fortuné had sent his mother from the Clairvaux prison, as well as the letter purportedly sent by Émile from Germany just as he was supposed to enter the army. They also took a photo of Fortuné, taken in Dijon in April 1892 with a group of anarchists, on which could be seen a black flag with the words DEATH TO THE BOURGEOISIE! At the back of the garden, in the middle of a group of poplar trees, was a hole several yards in circumference. Six steps led down to a sparsely furnished cave, with a table and two chairs. There the police found a wooden box, full of anarchist brochures, such as Fortuné's "Ravachol, an Anarchist? Absolutely!"

  A second investigating magistrate, Judge Espinas, was charged with solving the mystery of the explosion at 11, avenue de l'Opéra fifteen months earlier. Émile at first denied having had anything to do with the bomb that ultimately exploded in the police station. But on February 23, he asked to be taken to see Judge Espinas. He told him that he had left the bomb in front of the Carmaux Mining Company, describing its composition with pride.

  A week after the explosion at the Terminus, Émile gave the investigating judge Meyer a letter for his mother, listing the return address as the Conciergerie.

  My dear little Mother,

  You must have suffered when newspapers reported what I did last Monday. Believe me that before I committed that act, I thought very much about you and all those who are so dear to me. But what can one do? Motives that you cannot understand won out, and I threw my bomb into the Terminus. Since my arrest, I have often thought of you, and I have suffered because I realize the sadness into which you must be plunged. Nevertheless, dear Mother, you must overcome your pain. You must not let your tears be paraded before the spiteful and the indifferent. You must not believe those who will say that your son is a criminal. You know me and can say to them that the real criminals are those who make life impossible for anyone with a heart, those men who uphold a society in which everyone suffers. You can tell them that those who in our society refuse to accept a role that their very dignity rejects will take vengeance. On the side of the people, they devote themselves totally to their emancipation. Understand that very well, my Mother. Far from being embarrassed by me, whom you have nursed and given heart, be proud of what I have done. You will carry with you the esteem, the sympathy, and the affection of the only people who should really matter. I will have the pleasure of seeing and kissing you, my dear Mother. Ask my judge M. Meyer for authorization to see me, but promise me that you will be strong. Give a hug to my little Jules. If you can bring him with you, please do. He must have grown quite a bit since I last saw him, and he probably has begun to understand. Do not forget my Aunt Michalet, who must also be suffering. As for Fortuné, I will write him myself. Remember me to all our friends. See you soon, my little Mother. A thousand kisses from your son.

  On reading Émile's letter admitting responsibility for the bomb at the Café Terminus, Rose Caubet Henry exclaimed, thinking of the suffering of her family after her husband had been condemned to death in absentia by the French state and moved to exile in Spain, "He has avenged his father!" When his mother was the next day brought into the office of Judge Meyer, the bomber was at first visibly moved by seeing her, turning pale, with tears welling up in his eyes. He then returned to his steely demeanor, exhorting her to have courage. When she started to ask about what he had done, the son rebuffed her. "Don't speak to me about it. What I did, I wanted to do. Your tears serve no purpose." He told his mother that before the bombing he had selected a lawyer, knowing that he would likely be captured. He had thought of everything. To which his mother replied, "Everything, my poor child, except your mother."

  However, the lawyer Émile had chosen refused to take his case. His mother then chose a young lawyer called Hornbostel, a nationalist and a political reactionary. Hornbostel was one reason Parisian newspapers were so well informed about Émile. The lawyer furnished Le Temps with his account of his first meeting with the accused. Leaks to the press originated with judicial sources as well as prison guards: one published report referred specifically to piece number 462 of the dossier.

  Hornbostel initially insisted that he could save Émile's life, despite the latter's admission that he had been responsible for the earlier bomb, which complicated things considerably. When news came that Borde, one of those wounded at the Terminus, had died from his wounds on March 12, Émile's only reaction was that this would add one more victim to his total. Borde's death put an end to any hope Hornbostel had entertained of avoiding the death penalty.

  At the paper store on rue La Fayette, where Émile claimed to have purchased the metal pen case that he had transformed into a detonator, the merchant produced a bill of sale that matched the date—November 4, 1892—that Émile had provided. During a reconstruction of the morning of November 8, he demonstrated without the slightest hesitation that he knew the building well at 11, avenue de l'Opéra, although he had not seen a mirror at the end of the vestibule, thinking it a passage instead. He recalled that there had been a sign for the company, indicating that the offices were up one floor. The sign was no longer there, but when the investigating magistrate asked an employee of the Carmaux Mining Company to find the old sign, it turned out to be exactly as Émile had described it. Judge Espinas viewed Émile's summary of events on the morning of November 8, 1892 as conclusive.

  Understandably frantic, Rose Caubet Henry made contact with Dr. Goupil, the friend of the family who had cared for Fortuné upon his return to Paris. Could Émile's actions be explained by madness? The doctor, a gray-haired, robust presence, believed that a neurasthenia "always threatens exhausted brains"—he had in 1876 written about such a theory. He believed that a person could not work more than eight hours a day without risking serious mental disorders. Émile had had a great amount of work imposed on him in school. Could the stress have caused lasting damage?

  In the meantime, Émile could hardly complain about his conditions in the Conciergerie. The relative comfort of his cell was making him "lazy and passive," as he put it. He often stayed in bed "like a rentier" after ten hours of sleep. If the guards woke him up too early, they risked his bad humor. He had the right to one hot bath per week and could wash his feet each day. His mother dropped off clean linen, and every few days, Madame Denaples, who ran a small restaurant on rue Saint-Martin in central Paris, where Émile's widowed seventy-year-old aunt had long worked as the cashier, brought clean clothes and homemade food. Local restaurants provided the guards' food, which they sometimes shared with their charge. After lunch, Émile lay on his bed or on a mattress on the floor, reading what books were available in the prison library—some with pages missing because prisoners needed them to serve an alternative, hygienic use. The director of the Conciergerie and Hornbostel brought him other titles to augment the prison's paltry selection. He read Alexandre Dumas, Herbert Spencer's First Principles of Biology, and three novels by Zola, including La Débâcle, about the terrible year of 1870–71, which Émile's father had seen firsthand, and Germinal, as well as Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, which was his favorite.

  Following what he called "a rather amicable discussion" in his cell with the director of the Conciergerie on February 27, Émile penned a long account of anarchist ideas. The director had asked him to do so, perhaps out of curiosity or in the hope of uncovering evidence that could be used against his prisoner. Describing authority, property, and religion as enemies of humanity in the quest for "absolute equality," Émile predicted that two or three gener
ations were all it would take "to save mankind from the influence of the artificial civilization to which it is subjected today. We must throw down this antiquated, rotten edifice. And that is what we are doing."

  Sometimes Émile walked in the prison garden, which was really just a large exercise yard decorated with three miserable little shrubs—two dwarf lilacs and a collapsing spindle tree—which nonetheless brightened the gray pavement and red brick wall with a splash of green. In the evening, he smoked his pipe and sometimes played cards, for tiny sums of money, with his guards, for whom he occasionally wrote verse. Upon waking in the morning, he often sang anarchist songs. "Dame Dynamite" was one of his favorite tunes. On one occasion, he shocked his guards by announcing that he was about to say his morning prayers, at which point he paused and began singing "The Martyrs of Anarchism."

  Visiting days at the Conciergerie were Sunday and Thursday. For one hour, prisoners could sit across from their visitors, separated by wire screens. On one occasion he told his mother that the long-awaited social revolution might well come before his trial, and thus she should not worry. Overall, Émile seemed surprisingly uninterested by what was happening outside the prison, rarely looking out at the quays.

  In the meantime, newspapers debated the significance of the man in prison and his bomb. Maurice Barrés, the right-wing nationalist, considered Émile's attack a turning point in modern French history. He did not have much good to say about young people in France in the early 1890s. Barrés wondered if the disenchanted and dangerous Émile Henry might be part of a new wave. Henri Ribeyre of La Revue Blanche, a journal of literature and art, countered by arguing that it was difficult to blame the educational system. Uneducated workers had shown themselves capable of making bombs that were just as effective as the one tossed into the Café Terminus. Could it be a generational thing, involving those born at about the time of the Commune? The victory of the bourgeoisie over the Communards in 1871 had been total and devastating. (One journalist insisted that Émile had been conceived during the Commune, which explained it all.) The amnesty of 1880 had never really been accepted by the French upper classes, who had refused to pardon the insurgents. The flame of vengeance for the Commune still burned, and now it had killed. Émile had chosen as his target ordinary bourgeois, the base upon which the republic had been built. Émile's father had suffered at their hands. They would now pay the price.

  The largely upper-class readership of Le Figaro was given yet another indictment of French youth. Émile Henry was a young citizen of the fin-de-siècle, bringing to the disinherited "a new formula." Rather than accept their suffering or be consoled by religious faith, such young people engaged in open rebellion against the laws of society. Émile seemed to be "a bacillus" of modern education, lacking any instruction in the principles of morality. The right-wing La Patrie recalled a prediction made by one of Proudhon's early enemies, who wrote in 1840 that educated young people who could not find a proper place in society could become the enemies of society.

  Amid daily police searches and arrests of anarchists, a small bomb exploded in Lyon, and another one was discovered in Saint- Étienne. In Paris, railroad workers discovered a bomb placed against a pillar near a train about to leave for Mulhouse. To the Conciergerie, Hornbostel brought news that a small bomb had exploded on the evening of April 4 in the small, elegant restaurant of the Hôtel Foyot, across from the Luxembourg Palace, where the Senate met. The prince of Wales liked to eat there when he was in Paris. Only two full tables were occupied at the time in the restaurant. By incredible coincidence, at one of the tables sat Laurent Tailhade, a critic and poet with anarchist sympathies. His dinner companion was Lia Mialhe (also known as "Madame Roux," as well as "Violette"), a milliner, with whom he lived. The bomb, which had been placed outside on a windowsill near the table, exploded as the waiter was describing a dish to the couple.

  Laurent Tailhade was perhaps best known for his rather flippant commentary after Vaillant threw his small bomb into "The Aquarium": "What do the waves of humanity matter so long as the gesture is beautiful!" The explosion at the Foyot took out one of Tailhade's eyes. The bomb was probably placed by the anarchist literary critic Félix Fénéon, perhaps inspired by his friend Émile. That evening Fénéon coolly took an omnibus home to rue Lepic in Montmartre. When someone on the bus exclaimed that he had heard that another bomb had gone off, Fénéon indicated that it had been at the Foyot, a fact not yet known. He later admitted that he was responsible. In his cell, Émile appeared "delighted" by the news. "Once more, the idea [of anarchist bombs] has shown its value," he commented.

  Émile had not been allowed to see any of the letters that had arrived at the Conciergerie for him; they were apparently being kept by one of the prosecuting attorneys in an attempt to gather other leads. On March 6, Girard, the chemist, came to the Conciergerie. He was carrying a pot half full of sand. When he asked Émile to show him how he had closed the bomb after assembling it, he refused to do so. This convinced the judge that someone (probably Paul Bonnard, "Père Duchesne") must have helped him assemble it.

  Then there was the woman seen by the law student on the stairs at 11, avenue de l'Opéra. Who was she? The anarchist Mérigeau, recently imprisoned, had told an undercover agent that the woman seen on the stairs was "Rosalie," Mariette Soubère, a twenty-four-year-old ribbon worker and anarchist from Saint-Étienne who lived with compagnon Joseph Béala in Saint-Denis. Both had been accused of helping Ravachol kill two women in July 1891 in Saint-Étienne. However, a meeting in the judge's office made it clear that Mariette Soubère and Émile had never before met. The police then arrested the singer Adrienne Chailley, known as "Marie Puget." She knew the Henry brothers and closely resembled the woman seen on the staircase. The undercover agent "Thanne" believed that she had carried the bomb into the building and up to the mezzanine. Following the explosion at the police station, she had stopped singing, drank even more, and now thought she saw police agents behind every plant. When confronted in the judge's office with Adrienne Chailley and Bonnard, Émile turned pale but shook Bonnard's hand and winked at the woman. Back in his cell he told the guards that he only knew Bonnard, although he later asked if Adrienne Chailley had been released, indicating that they did indeed know each other.

  On February 23, police raised the possibility that the woman seen on the stairs might have been Émile himself, in drag. His youthful appearance and short stature might have helped him momentarily pass for a young woman; his short hair could easily have been covered by a woman's wig.

  Judge Espinas, hoping to discover the identity of the woman, became obsessed with discovering Émile's mistress, someone willing to serve as an accomplice. In one session, Émile was confronted with Madame Élise Schouppe (most recently the mistress of the anarchist burglar Ortiz), who had lived near him on rue Véron. Émile had been seen on rue Lepic several times with her husband. Espinas believed Madame Schouppe had also been Émile's lover. Émile had once taken her and her children on a country outing to Brévannes but insisted that he "had never had relations with that person." He had certainly had lovers but said that for such an operation as making and planting a bomb, he would never have trusted a woman.

  Ten francs arrived for Émile at Meyer's office, sent by someone called Élisa. At first agents thought the money was from Madame Élise Schouppe. In fact, Élisa Gauthey had sent it—the strands of hair Émile had carried with him in his locket were of course hers. Meyer had Madame Gauthey arrested as a potential material witness on March 13.

  On March 15, the Belgian anarchist Philibert Pauwels, a friend of Émile, entered the church of the Madeleine, carrying a bomb. Pauwels was much more like Ravachol than Émile. If anyone most fit Bakunin's ideal of an anarchist—"the devil in the flesh"—it was Pauwels. Born in Flanders in Belgium in 1864, he had been an awful pupil in school, of limited intelligence, compounded by eye and ear problems. Pauwels was the black sheep of a respectable working-class family—his father was a master cabinetmaker known as "Rouge-Bare
tte" who worked and drank hard; his mother was a caring parent. Two well-respected uncles worked in nearby mines. Pauwels was a disreputable character who even cheated in games with other children. Leaving home at the age of fourteen, he went to Paris in the early 1880s and found some work in the glove-making industry before returning to Belgium, where he skipped out on military service.

  Pauwels had first came to the attention of the police as a militant anarchist in January 1885 in Saint-Denis, where he founded the group Anarchist Youth of Saint-Denis and participated in other groups in Montmartre, Montreuil, and Paris. At a meeting of the Equals of Montmartre, he met the young Auguste Vaillant, as well as Sébastien Faure. However, after a violent argument, Pauwels never returned to that particular group. Whenever he found employment, he was considered a good worker. He sold copies of the anarchist newspaper Land and Liberty and provided other reading material to workers who came to his house, where he displayed the black flag of anarchism. He married Albertine Lardon, an embroiderer working in Saint-Denis, in 1886, and four years later they and their young daughter moved to Argenteuil. Pauwels's wife, who suffered from tuberculosis, also became a militant anarchist. She once told her husband that the day she felt that the end was near, he should get a bomb for her, and her final effort would be to use it against the bourgeoisie.