In May 1906, as King Alfonso XIII and his new bride, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, traveled by carriage from their wedding ceremony to the royal palace, an anarchist threw a bomb at them. They were unscathed, but the attack killed twenty-three people and injured more than a hundred. Three years later, Spanish soldiers and police killed more than two hundred people during "the Tragic Week," five days of combat in the streets of Barcelona during a general strike in which anarchists played a major part. The torture of a well-known anarchist, Francisco Ferrer, attracted worldwide attention, garnering sympathy for anarchists as well as disdain for government policies. That the Spanish labor movement remained relatively disorganized relative to its French and Italian counterparts meant that many workers looked to anarchism for hope. Thus, while the press in many other countries helped affirm the stereotype of the anarchist as a dangerous bomber, in Spain his image remained that of a martyr, victimized by the state. Anarchist attacks in Spain continued following World War I. Despite the duplicity of their Stalinist rivals, anarchists would play a major role in the defense of the republic against Franco's nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). But in the end the shaky alliance defending the republic lost, and the 150, 000 people executed by the new government included thousands of anarchists.
In the United States, anarchist attacks killed more than fifty people from 1914 to 1920. In 1919, about thirty bombs were sent through the mail to U.S. officials, ranging from the attorney general to mayors. Two months later, explosions rocked the residences of officials in seven cities. On September 16, 1920, an attack on Wall Street, possibly the work of an Italian anarchist, killed thirty-three people and wounded more than two hundred. In Russia, the revolution of 1917 quickly turned into a nightmare for anarchists. By 1920, the Bolsheviks had crushed their anarchist allies, with whom they had united in the Civil War against the White forces in Ukraine. A largely popular revolution was transformed into a dictatorship. "They have shown how the revolution is not to be made," Kropotkin insisted. The anarchist told Lenin, "Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold ... What future lies in store for communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way on every honest feeling?"
The "dynamite club" in France was more imagined than real. It was the creation of fearful Parisians, with the help of the popular press. A well-placed police specialist at the time wrote that those who believed that anarchist deeds were the result of an organized plot were flat wrong. The real threat came from individual anarchist bombers, like Émile. This did not make the upper clases any less anxious, but it did suggest that going after organized plots was folly. In the words of this particular agent, "there weren't any."
So what did link the anarchists who went to the guillotine? Ravachol was a marginal character, "a great bandit, a savage rebel who had put himself in the service of the anarchist cause." Vaillant was a family man crushed by hunger and misery, unable to feed his family, who lashed out in a desperate attempt to call attention to the plight of poor people. Pauwels was an occasional laborer, a thug, and a born killer. Caserio, alone in his misery at age twenty-one, learned to hate the rich.
Émile was different. He was a young middle-class intellectual who might have enjoyed a productive life, were it not for his father's treatment at the hands of the state, exacerbated by the appalling poverty that Émile witnessed in Paris. Émile remained a complex person, a self-detesting bourgeois who proclaimed over and over his hatred for "the bourgeoisie." He was confident, proud, even arrogant, distant, indeed cold, dismissive of the "crowd" that he considered "cowardly" and ignorant of their true interests. "In contrast to Vaillant, who loved the people," Charles Malato remembered, "Émile Henry only loved the idea. He felt a marked estrangement from the ignorant and servile plebs, a feeling shared by a number of literary and artistic anarchists," by whom Malato meant, among others, Camille Pissarro, Laurent Tailhade, and Émile's own friend Félix Fénéon. During his final days in his cell in La Roquette, Émile wrote, "I love all people in their humanity for what they should become, but I have contempt for what they are."
In his own way, Émile could be described as a nineteenth-century Hamlet. He took arms against the sea of troubles devastating much of humanity, seeking to bring an end to them with his bombs.
In 1900, Paris proudly presented itself to tourists as "a pacified capital, far from the tragic and bloody days of revolution." The omnipresent police, with garrisons of soldiers always ready to assist if necessary, ensured public order. The City of Light was a different place, even wealthier than before. The traditional revolutionary neighborhoods of the center Right Bank had gradually become less densely populated, the very texture of some neighborhoods destroyed or at least altered by Haussmann's boulevards. Moreover, ordinary people increasingly lived on the urban periphery. Paris had been subdued.
The French state, against which the anarchists struggled, helped lead Europe into a murderous war in 1914. The Great War killed about 9 million men, including 1.5 million French soldiers, and unleashed the demons of the twentieth century.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Acknowledgments
In following Émile Henry around Paris, I benefited from the kindness of the staff of the Archives de la préfecture de police, in the Commissariat of the fifth arrondissement of Paris. I am still struck by the contrast between researchers coming down from the archives, carrying their laptop computers and passing by people (including many tourists) who turned up in the same establishment because their wallets were stolen or their cars or bicycles impounded. The coffee machine is still in the martial arts gym where the police train.
In the course of working on this book, I have asked many friends and colleagues questions on detail and more. They have always graciously responded. Thanks to Richard Sonn, Steven Vincent, Paul Jankowski, Mark Micale, Stephen Jacobson, Vanessa Schwartz, Dominique Kalifa, John Monroe, Brian Skib, Leon Plantagna, Victoria Johnson, Carl Strikwerda, Judith Walkowitz, Richard Bach Jensen, Constance Bantman, Robert Fishman, Ray Jonas, Steven Englund, Mathieu Fruleux, Chris Brouwer, Valerie Hansen, Timothy Messer-Kruse, Beverly Gage, Pascal Dupuy, Darrin McMahon, Martin A. Miller, Eugenia Herbert, George Eisenwein, Yves Lequin, Bruno Cabanes, Carl Levy, and Pietro DiPaolo.
It was a pleasure to give talks and receive comments on Émile Henry and anarchism at Montana State University, Florida State University, the University of Connecticut, the University of Southern California, the University of Minnesota, Washington University in St. Louis, the University of Edinburgh, the University of Newcastle, Stanford University (where the French historians of northern California met), Carleton College, Yale University (Department of French), and Brooklyn College. For my research in Paris, I received funding from the Whitney Griswold research fund at Yale.
I benefited from participating in a conference in Arlington, Virginia, in June 2007, organized by David Rapoport: "What Can and Cannot Be Learned from History About Terrorism: A Dialogue Between Historians and Social Scientists."
Three dear friends read the original draft of this book and, as usual, offered shrewd, helpful comments. So many thanks to Jay Winter, David Bell, and Don Lamm, who, with Emma Parry and Christy Fletcher, have encouraged and represented this project from the beginning.
I have been very fortunate, for decades, to enjoy the inspiration and friendship of Peter Gay and of my late friend Charles Tilly. They taught me how to do history. I will always owe them so much.
At Houghton Mifflin, the tough-minded, outstanding editor Amanda Cook helped shape this book. I am much indebted to her. I also greatly appreciate Susanna Brougham's wonderful manuscript editing.
Carol, Laura, and Christopher Merriman have heard versions of this story in a variety of places. Thanks and much love to my family, as ever. Chris too has had the rather strange experience of dining in the caférestaurant that t
he principal character of this book blew up on a February evening more than a century ago.
Balazuc, June 25, 2008
Notes
Prologue
[>] a black wagon carrying ... the guillotine: Gérard A. Jaeger, Anatole Deibler ( 1863–1939): L'homme qui trancha 400 têtes (Paris, 2001), p. 117.
[>] Account from Le Soleil, Feb. 13, 1894; Le Gaulois, Feb. 17, 1894; Le Figaro, Apr. 15 and 28, 1894; Archives of the Prefecture of Police, Ba 1115, prefect of police, Feb. 14, 1894.
[>] "the history of remainders": words of Charles Tilly.
assassinations and bomb attacks: Richard Bach Jensen, "The International Campaign Against Anarchist Terrorism, 1880–1914/30S" (unpublished paper), p. 2; by Jensen's calculations 160 people were killed and at least 500 wounded by anarchist attacks during the period.
1. Light and Shadows in the Capital of Europe
[>] "the rebellious century": Charles Tilly, Louise Tilly, and Richard Tilly, The Rebellious Century: 1830–1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975).
[>] "cold and lined up": Robert L. Herbert, Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society (New Haven, 1988), p. 15.
"its irregular curve": T. J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (New York, 1984), p. 35.
[>] "colossal monster": Émile Zola, Paris (Paris, 1898), p. 394.
"The straight line": Charles Yriarte, "Les types parisiens—les clubs," Paris-Guide (Paris, 1867), pp. 929–30, from Jean-Pierre A. Bernard, Les deux Paris: Les réprésentations de Paris dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle (Seyssel, 2001), p. 199.
somewhat unreal spectacle: See Rosalind H. Williams, Dream Worlds: Mass Consumption in Late-Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley, 1982), pp. 84–85; Bernard, Les deux Paris, p. 193; Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998).
[>] aisles appeared to be an extension: Philip Nord, Parisian Shopkeepers and the Politics of Resentment (Princeton, 1986), p. 133.
British and American influence: Bernard, Les deux Paris, pp. 218–19.
spectacle of the boulevards: A point made by, among others, Vanessa R. Schwartz.
[>] The Opera, which opened: Karl Baedeker, Paris and Environs, with Route from London to Paris (Paris, 1896).
[>] "heart of the great city": Zola, Paris, p. 91.
"I live at your expense"; Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France, 1885 to World War I (New York, 1968), pp. 5–6.
"at the proper moment"; Ibid., p. 10.
"On the boulevard each day"; Bernard, Les deux Paris, pp. 208–9.
[>] "steam-powered journalism": Schwartz, Spectacular Realities, p. 28.
[>] the expanding French colonial empire: Pascal Ory, L'Expo Universelle (Paris, 1989), p. 95.
some bourgeois came to feel disconnected: See Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, chapters 3 and 4.
[>] "the world has changed less": Shattuck, The Banquet Years, p. xv.
"What I saw": Augustin Léger, Journal d'un anarchiste (Paris, 1895), pp. 308–9.
"away in the distance": Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878–1978 (New Haven, 1979), p. 13, quoting Edmondo de Amicis, Studies of Paris (1882).
[>] hastened by Haussmann's construction: Lenard R. Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871–1914 (Baltimore, 1984), pp. 11–12.
[>] wells stood near cesspools: Ibid., pp. 58–59.
[>] about twenty-five thousand: Henry Leyret, En plein faubourg (Paris, 2000, originally published 1895), p. 8.
[>] "barely furnished with basic": Ibid., pp. 20–21.
"everyone for himself": Ibid., pp. 142–46.
"Life is not just a bowl of cherries": Ibid., p. 67.
[>] "Goddammit, there are real men in Paris": Ibid., p. 114.
"spread from the Latin Quarter": Ibid., pp. 115–16.
From his hospital bed: Le Libertaire, Feb. 4, 1895.
[>] "the masters of society ... take heed": Eugenia Herbert, The Artist and Social Reform: France and Belgium, 1885–1898 (New Haven, 1980), p. 153, from Zola, Oeuvres, 50, 650 (Dec. 1885).
2. The Exile's Second Son
[>] On Fortuné Henry and Émile Henry's early life: Archives Nationales, BB24 853; Archives of the Prefecture of Police, Ba 1115, telegram of Feb. 16 and report of Mar. 13, 1894; Le 19e Siècle, Feb. 20, 1894; La Paix, Feb. 18, 1894; L'Intransigeant, Feb. 17, 1894; and Charles Malato, "Some Anarchist Portraits," Fortnightly Review, 333, new series, Sept. 1, 1894, PP- 327–28.
[>] a collection of songs: Fortuné Henry, Les chants de l'enfance (Paris, 1881); L'Écho de Paris, Feb. 16, 1894.
[>] in Brévannes: Marie F. de la Mulatière, Regards sur Limeil-Brévannes (Saint-Georges-de-Luzençon, 1988), p. 41. The 1896 census: 1, 234 (total population, 1, 527, counting those at the hospice, with Limeil 259 and Brévannes 975).
A l'Espérance: Ba 1115, police report, Aug. 23, 1893; L'Intransigeant, Feb. 17, 1894.
[>] Émile received a small scholarship: L'Écho de Paris, Feb. 18, 1894; Le Journal, Feb. 17, 1894; Le Petit Temps, Feb. 16, 1894; Jean Maitron, Le mouvement anarchiste en France, I (Paris, 1975), pp. 239–40, and Malato, "Some Anarchist Portraits," p. 328.
[>] "I hope to build a good future": Le 19e Siècle, Apr. 27, 1894.
outside Venice: Henri Varennes, De Ravachol à Caserio (Paris, 1895), pp. 229–31; Le 19e Siècle, Feb. 20 and Apr. 27, 1894.
happy to have received letters: Le 19e Siècle, Feb. 20, 1894.
[>] hoped to return to France: Ba 1115, "Notices sur Émile Henry," Feb. 13, 1894; Le Petit Temps, Feb. 16, 1894; Le Figaro, Feb. 16, 1894; Le 19e Siècle, Feb. 20, 1894; La Paix, Feb. 18, 1894; L'Éclair, Feb. 17, 1894.
[>] Émile was short: Malato, "Some Anarchist Portraits," p. 330.
"the most perplexing philosophic speculations": Ibid., p. 329.
[>] "Me, a Spiritist?" L'Intransigeant, Feb. 16, 1894; Le Temps, Feb. 20, 1894; Le 19e Siècle, Feb. 20, 1894; Malato, "Some Anarchist Portraits," p. 329. Thanks to John Monroe.
[>] "a reposing creature of love": Le Journal, May 17, 1894.
"reign of attraction": L'Intransigeant, Feb. 19, 1894.
[>] "how many afternoons": Malato, "Some Anarchist Portraits," p. 330.
[>] "I would like simply to disappear": Le Journal, May 17, 1894; Le Gil Bias, May 9, 1894.
"that madness would take me over": Le Gil Bias and L'Intransigeant, May 9, 1894; Le Journal, May 17, 1894.
[>] on one occasion, a cow: Joan U. Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (New Haven, 1988), pp. 269–71.
"the present morality": Daniel Guérin, éd., No Gods, No Masters (Oakland, 2005), pp. 398–401.
[>] possible military conscription: Ba 1115, Feb. 14, 1892, and Feb. 17, 1894; L'Intransigeant, Feb. 17, 1894. Émile later also claimed that he went to Berlin, but a report filed by "Léon" on Feb. 23, 1894, dismissed this: "The time that Émile Henry claims to have spent in Berlin is purely imaginary."
[>] "no rights over a woman": Ba 1115, Émile Henry, Feb. 27, 1894, double cell nos. 1 & 2, Conciergerie.
"Long live the Commune!": Ba 1115, reports of Mar. 12 and 14, 1894.
"royal rule of gold": K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (New York, 1984), p. 17.
[>] "Anarchy is order": George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (New York, 1962), p. 276.
"organized, living society": Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York, 1970), p. 42.
[>] quality to anarchism: See Émile's "Déclaration"; Varennes, De Ravachol, pp. 235–41.
"robbed you of your victory": Woodcock, Anarchism, p. 276.
[>] "a man under vow": Alexandre Varias, Paris and the Anarchists: Aesthetes and Subversives During the Fin-de-Siècle (Paris, 1996), pp. 41–42.
[>] "the freedom of others": Guérin, Anarchism, p. 33.
"Let us not become": Ibid., p. 3.
/> [>] the only two perfect lives: James Joll, The Anarchists (New York, 1979), p. 142.
"a doomed man": Marie Fleming, "Propaganda by the Deed: Terrorism and Anarchist Theory in Late-Nineteenth-Century Europe," in Terrorism in Europe, eds., Yonah Alexander and Kenneth A. Myers (New York, 1982), p. 13.
[>] "with one to reach a hundred": Woodcock, Anarchism, pp. 301–3.
"in the name of liberty": Joll, The Anarchists, p. 114.
Anarchist attacks: Woodcock, Anarchism, pp. 300–3, 366–67; Jean Préposiet, Histoire de l'anarchisme (Paris, 2000), pp. 391–92; David Stafford, From Anarchism to Reformism: A Study of the Political Activities of Paul Brousse (Toronto, 1971), p. 84; Joll, The Anarchists, pp. 112–14.
3. "Love Engenders Hate"
[>] thirteen anarchist groups: Archives Nationales, F7 12506, Dec. 1893.
slang (argot): Richard D. Sonn, "Marginality and Transgression: Anarchy's Subversive Allure," in Gabriel P. Weisberg, éd., Montmartre and the Making of Mass Culture (New Brunswick, 2001), p. 132.
[>] "dangerous classes": Gérard Jacquemet, "Belleville ouvrièr à la belle époque," Le Mouvement Social, 118 (Jan. 1982), pp. 61–77.
[>] Vengeance of Anarchist Youth: Ba 1508, poster.
[>] "Death to the pigs": Ba 77, Dec. 13, 1892.
"hysterical madwoman": Ba 1115, report of Mar. 14, 1894; Le Matin, Feb. 23, 1893.
Henry Leyret, the Belleville: Henry Leyret, En plein faubourg (Paris, 2000, originally published 1895), pp. 130–31, 151–52.
The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror Page 23