The Belgian made contact with Dutch, Russian, German, and Spanish anarchists, as well as French and Belgian compagnons, cranking out antimilitary propaganda and traveling frequently to Brussels. In 1891, he found a job in a factory in the Parisian suburbs. He turned up at an anarchist gathering at place de l'Opéra, the heart of enemy territory, and later in Saint-Denis, where he gave a fiery speech asking the compagnons to stay away from work on May 1 and burn down their factories and the town hall for good measure. He was ordered to leave France in April 1891, in part because of his role in another strike. But he had disappeared.
In early July, police undertook a clumsy search of the residence of Pauwels's wife, in Argenteuil. They failed to discover letters that were poorly hidden—and which his wife burned after the men departed. On July 21, 1891, police swooped down on an apartment in Paris where Pauwels was staying and discovered explosives. Expelled from France, he penned a request asking to be taken to the Luxembourg border (he could not be returned to Belgium because no agreement existed for the extradition of those fleeing military conscription). Gendarmes took Pauwels there in a police wagon.
During the next year, Pauwels bounced between Luxembourg, from which he was also eventually expelled, Geneva, and Paris, where he was suspected of being involved in a plot to blow up the police station in Levallois-Perret. He abandoned his wife and daughter, who moved to Saint-Denis, where they lived with her parents and two brothers in abject misery on the ground floor of a brick hovel that was blackened by the smoke of nearby chimneys.
In 1892, Pauwels assumed the identity of a worker from the provinces, "Claude Defosse," one of many aliases that he used over the years. A heavy drinker of absinthe, that dangerous and potentially addictive drink made from wormwood, Pauwels developed a reputation for brutality, which alienated many compagnons, who considered him unbalanced. Also known as "Pointy Nose," the somber, sad Pauwels always spoke of the bourgeoisie with hatred, promising to wipe them out. He now survived by working as a tanner, borrowing money from militants in Saint-Denis and elsewhere, stealing (or living off the thefts committed by others), and receiving small sums from anarchist groups. Elisée Reclus may have given him a little money. Throughout his travels, he remained a frenetic propagandist, heaping abuse on Sébastien Faure, whom he called a "Jesuit." Pauwels carried a pistol and distributed propaganda encouraging soldiers to desert. Late in 1892, he was in Switzerland, and in January 1893, in Marseille and then Barcelona. While working for a time in a factory in Saint-Ouen, Pauwels found or stole the papers of a coworker named Rabardy from Rouen, and assumed the man's identity.
While compagnon Émile awaited trial in the Conciergerie, Pauwels decided to strike. On February 12, he entered the extremely modest Hotel des Carmes on rue des Carmes, and, refusing to give his name, he deposited four francs for a stay of eight days in a fifth-floor room. The next morning, he said he was Henry Sabauth, thirty-eight, a traveling salesman from Bordeaux. He told a young employee of the hotel, to whom he spoke Spanish, that he had arrived from Barcelona. Wearing a black felt hat and dark clothes, Pauwels carried a small suitcase made of gray cloth. A package about the size of a hat was attached to the suitcase with a wire.
On February 20, Pauwels left the Hotel des Carmes for two even shabbier hotels, taking a room in each. In both he placed a small bomb, which he rigged to explode the next time the door was opened. His goal was to kill policemen. He then left a note near two police stations, saying that he, Étienne Rabardy, was going to kill himself in his hotel room. A policeman went to the hotel on rue Saint-Jacques and went up to the room with the elderly concierge. They opened the door and the bomb exploded, mortally wounding the old woman and inflicting only light injuries on the policeman. At the miserable rooming house on rue du faubourg Saint-Martin, another policeman pushed open the door. The bomb, made from a can and suspended from the door, did not explode. The policeman called for experts, who detonated the device. Five days earlier, police had found bombs of exactly the same composition—dynamite, picric acid, and chorate powder—in a bank.
At 2:40 in the afternoon of March 15, Pauwels entered the church of the Madeleine, the site of some of Paris's most elegant baptisms and marriages. In the small foyer, the bomb he was carrying exploded with such force that it could be heard across the Seine in the Chamber of Deputies. Pauwels fell to the ground, his right hand hanging by a thread, with serious wounds to his stomach and spinal column. A bullet, which had struck him in the head, was later deemed the cause of death. The anarchist may have had the strength—and the presence of mind—to shoot himself. Pauwels carried with him a picture of Ravachol, along with details of the martyr's execution. No one else was injured, and damage to the church was slight.
Paris continued on high alert. Policemen went from rooming house to rooming house, carrying photos of Pauwels and searching for information on men of ages twenty-five to thirty-five who had not returned to their lodgings on the night of March 15. They came up with five names, including two described as "miserably dressed," hardly a distinguishing characteristic. Employees of the Hotel de Carmes formally identified Pauwels as the person staying in the hotel. His father-in-law came to identify him at the morgue but refused to claim the body.
In his cell, Émile speculated at first that the bomber of the church of the Madeleine was Meunier, an anarchist recently condemned to death in absentia. But when Émile asked for part of a newspaper to serve as toilet paper, a guard inadvertently gave him half of Le Petit Journal of March 17, which identified the dead man as his friend Pauwels. It certainly seemed that this bomb had been made from the stash of dynamite taken from Émile's room. Where was the rest?
On April 27, Émile Henry went on trial for his life in the Assize Court. The court was within the Palais de Justice, that monumental stage for Paris's major and often theatrical trials. Standing between two enormous corridors that joined the east and west entrances, the rectangular hall stood above the renovated Conciergerie prison. The space devoted to Émile's trial, and the other anarchist trials that had preceded it, reflected the Third Republic's desire to showcase its progressive system. Journalists and other spectators, entering by the door opposite the judge's bench, crammed into every available space. The upper classes, often including a disproportionate number of women, sat in front. Some clutched opera glasses so as not to miss a single detail of the spectacle. The people whom Émile hated the most would be sitting closest to him.
Magistrates and lawyers made majestic entrances through one of the two doors. The judges wore red robes trimmed in white fur, the lawyers black robes and elaborate traditional hats. Below them sat the lawyers who would represent the prosecution and the defense.
The prosecutor was Bulot, of the Clichy trial, whose apartment Ravachol had attempted to blow up. Two long galleries of seats lined each side of the courtroom. The jury sat on the same side of the room as the prosecutor. Across from them stood a small enclosed dock for the accused, guards posted on either side. Another dock seated more than fifty journalists from twenty Parisian newspapers, ready to cater to the public's intense fascination with the trial. Windows across from the prisoner's dock flooded the courtroom with light, leaving the jury in the shadows. In the middle of the hall stood a table, on which was placed material evidence: the battered remnants of tables; a dozen chairs piled one upon the other, some peppered with holes; bloodstained clothes; broken pitchers and pieces of tableware; shattered boards and other wreckage brought from the Café Terminus. In front of this dramatic evidence and before a painting of Christ, witnesses would swear to tell the truth. At the back of the court the public waited eagerly—some occupying reserved seats, others boldly pushing their way forward in the back section. As the bourgeois press described it, the crowd was bathed in the plebeian aromas of sausage and garlic.
Guards led Émile from the prison below, up the spiral staircase between the two courtrooms, and through the little door into the courtroom. His entrance hushed all conversation. Every eye focused on him. He
had the bearing of a young student at an elite school, awaiting an exam. Dressed properly, even elegantly, this dandy of anarchism wore a nice white shirt with a stiff, starched white collar, a black jacket, and a black satin tie. In the back of the courtroom sat his mother, wearing an old dress, an equally worn cape, and a hat, decorated with a small branch of wisteria. She seemed beaten down, resigned to the suffering that had overwhelmed her. Near her sat Dr. Goupil.
The prisoner's ironic smile seemed to broaden when he saw the packed courtroom. Before sitting down, he paused to gaze at the public. Five or six court artists took up their pens and brushes in order to immortalize him. Now doors swung open, and the lawyers entered.
The presiding magistrate opened the trial, asking the prisoner to state his age, occupation, and residence: "Émile Henry, age twenty-one and a half," he replied in his husky, adolescent voice. His domicile? "The Conciergerie." Émile listened impassively to the charges—one murder and twenty attempted murders at the Café Terminus and five murders at the police station in November 1892—and occasionally, he reached up nervously to rearrange his hair. But on the whole he seemed very sure of himself and his ability to handle any question. He reacted to the charges with smiles, shrugs, or gestures of denial. Several times, with his eyes half shut, he seemed to be reliving the acts of which he stood accused.
On the side of the defense stood the bearded defense lawyer Hornbostel. Virtually unknown in Paris, the son of a prominent lawyer in Marseille, Hornbostel knew that playing on the big stage of the Assize Court of the Seine could make his career. To prepare, he had taken ten elocution lessons from Silvain, a well-known actor at the Comédie-Française, who himself was in the courtroom, eager to see his pupil perform. But Hornbostel was outmatched. He had not yet mastered the dramatic, theatrical gestures so necessary to arguing a case, and did not use his shoulders to impress judge, jury, and audience. He mumbled. And he defended a man determined to be convicted and executed, one who sought revolutionary immortality.
The role of the presiding magistrate, Judge Potier, would ordinarily have been to "unmask" the accused, poking holes in his defense with leading questions. This trial would be different. Émile admitted, with unrestrained pride, to virtually all the charges against him. He contradicted or corrected minor points in an arrogant, mocking tone. He had not entered the Café Terminus at 8:30 P.M., but at 8. He had not hidden a bomb under the belt of his pants, but rather in the pocket of his overcoat—"I wasn't going to unbutton my pants in the middle of a café!" When asked why he had chosen the particular location for his attack, he replied, "Because it was a grand café, frequented by the bourgeoisie." Why had he not stopped in the other big cafés he had passed along the way? "There weren't enough people. The apéritif hour of these folks was over." This sent a collective shudder through the courtroom. When asked if he had told the investigating magistrate Espinas that he wanted to kill as many people as possible to avenge Vaillant, he replied, "Absolutely," mimicking Simon dit Biscuit, Ravachol's boyish accomplice.
Potier interjected, "You have contempt for the lives of others?"
"No." Émile corrected him. "Only those of the bourgeosie."
He confirmed that he had fired point-blank at Gustave Étienne, the railway employee referred to by Potier as "a courageous citizen," who ran after the bomber and grabbed him. And that he had fired at the barber Léon Maurice—Émile interrupted sarcastically: "A second courageous citizen." He regretted having shot only one policeman. When the presiding judge reminded him that several of those whom he had tried to kill were workers, Émile's response was that they should have minded their own business. If he had had a better revolver, he would have killed them too. When the judge noted that the accused had constructed the bomb with the care of "a veritable artist," Émile thanked him for the compliment.
The presiding magistrate then began to try to show that Émile was anything but a victim of bourgeois society, but rather someone who "had found along his road only hands reaching out to him, protectors, and benevolent, generous people." He was, after all, a bourgeois. When Émile recounted his trip to avenue de l'Opéra that fateful afternoon, he noted wryly that he had taken public transportation. "As a good bourgeois, I did not go on foot," he said, drawing smiles. Potier pointed out that he might have been admitted to the prestigious École polytechnique. Why had he not wanted to be an officer in the army? "Nice career, in which one kills the unfortunate, as at Fourmies. I would rather be here than there!"
Potier evoked Rose Caubet Henry's "great despair" that her son had avoided military service and had been classified a deserter, then mentioned, provocatively, "another person, whose name it is useless to mention, and who, since that time, has stopped loving you," a clear reference to Élisa Gauthey. The presiding judge wanted the accused to disclose his activities during the eighteen months before the Café Terminus attack, thereby identifying accomplices. Émile would admit only to having worked for six weeks as a mechanic. He said that he had received income "from my work" and thus had been able to pay for the bomb materials himself. Émile rejected, with some indignation, the judge's suggestion that he had lived off the thefts of Ortiz. But the president insisted that "even in depriving oneself, one still needs resources in Paris." His white hands were not those of a worker, and they were "now covered with blood from murder." Émile rose to his feet and replied, "Covered with red like your robe, monsieur le président." He denied being the man who had posed as a British businessman and, along with Ortiz, robbed the wealthy lady in the Norman village of Fiquefleur.
The police were still looking for Placide Schouppe and Paul Reclus, the nephew of Élisée Reclus and an advocate of the "right to theft," whom they suspected of helping Émile prepare the bomb, perhaps with Schouppe's help. Émile concluded, "'Justice' will not be satisfied with only one head—it must have two. Once again, I prepared, closed, and carried the bomb myself."
When Émile was under investigation immediately following the first bombing, the police had concluded that he would not have had time to return to rue Véron to get the bomb and take it to avenue de l'Opéra. Now an employee of the district attorney's office had duplicated the trek Émile claimed to have taken and had demonstrated that it was indeed possible to do so.* Potier finally appeared to accept Émile's version of events.
Victims of the Café Terminus bombing, ordinary people, simply told their stories, without cross-examination. Some walked with difficulty, with the help of canes or supported on the arm of someone who had been a bit luckier. Tapping his fingers incessantly on the wooden gate of the prisoner's dock, Émile looked on indifferently, remarking that he had seen many worse injuries in mining or factory accidents. Would he have used the other bombs in his room? "Naturally." When Potier interjected that he was cynical, Émile corrected him. "It is not cynicism, it is conviction!"
Potier reserved a hero's welcome for the policeman Poisson, who was wearing his new cross of the Legion of Honor, and, under his uniform, scars from two bullet wounds. Madame la Bar-onne d'Eckstedt, a wealthy woman who owned at least one building, and her sister both trembled when they related their evening at the Café Terminus. They had not wanted to give their names to the police, for fear of anarchist vengeance. The minister of the interior had awarded an indemnity of fifteen hundred francs to Madame Kinsbourg, another rentière, who had suffered three leg wounds.
A small parade of "experts" followed. The role of such witnesses became increasingly important in French legal proceedings during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Girard, the omnipresent director of the municipal laboratory, flattered Émile by saying that the bomb had been well put together, shattering marble tables and cast iron supports like flimsy wood. He described Émile's two bombs, the "reversal" device that had killed on rue des Bons-Enfants, and the fuse-detonated bomb that had exploded in the Terminus. When Hornbostel asked which was the more dangerous, Girard replied, "Both!"The second bomb could have been even more powerful but for a small fault in its mounting. Girard ack
nowledged that he and Émile had discussed this (scientist to scientist) and had agreed on the nature of the error. In Girard's opinion Émile would have needed someone to help him close the bomb, but the accused continued to insist that he had acted alone.
On the second day, the court summoned character witnesses for the defense, including one of Émile's former teachers. When Dupuy, his employer at the time of the explosion on rue des Bons-Enfants, completed his testimony, Émile cocked his head in a way that seemed to say, What is the use of defending me? His former boss replied with a shrug that suggested he had simply told the truth about the quality of his work. The comte Ogier d'lvry, son-in-law of the marquise de Chamborant, an army officer, and a self-styled man of letters, spoke as "a bourgeois condemned to death like all the others." He testified that he considered Émile a maniac and showed his disgust for his distant relative's crimes. He explained that all the Henry family had been "rebels"—republicans under the monarchy, Communards under the Republic, and now more anarchist than anarchy itself. Throughout the parade of witnesses, Émile demonstrated emotion only when his uncle Jean Bordenave, who had returned to Paris from Italy, left the dock. The accused man's eyes became moist with tears, and he said, "Thank you, and adieu! I will never see you again!"
Dr. Goupil, after asserting that he could not swear before a God in whom he did not believe, contended that Émile was mentally disturbed, perhaps a result of the typhoid fever he had suffered when he was twelve. In Goupil's opinion, he should be examined by specialists. Émile interrupted defiantly. "Pardon, but I don't want any of that. I am not in any way mentally disturbed." The accused took full responsibility for his acts: "My head does not need to be saved. I am not mad. I am perfectly aware of what I am doing." He stated that his notable academic success demonstrated full recovery from typhoid fever. Fortuné Henry, whom the presiding judge of the court had refused to let testify as a character witness, had written Hornbostel from Clairvaux prison to support the view that his brother was insane, a result of his father's being condemned to death in France in absentia and then "reduced to wandering in a foreign land." Dr. Goupil contended that Émile suffered from oversensitivity—it was "disgust, anger, and passion" that had led to his act.
The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror Page 19