by Luc Sante
When your feet danced so hard in its rages,
Paris! when you bore so many thrusts of the knife,
When you lay there inert, preserving in your clear eyes
A bit of the goodness of tawny spring,
O woeful city, o city nearly dead,
Your head and two breasts thrust toward the Future
Which opens to your pallor its billions of gates,
City that the dark Past could bless.
…
Society, everything is restored—the orgies
Cry their old death rattle in the old whorehouses,
And the delirious gaslights, against reddened walls,
Point their sinister flames toward the pale blue skies!
“Revolution has its classics and its romantics, just like literature,” wrote Lucien Descaves. He explains that those of 1834 and ’48 were classics, following Horace’s brand of sacrificial fatalism, but “the Commune will stand forever in your heart as the next-to-last romantics, the anarchists surely being the last.” The anarchists had long been a minority, their influence—via Proudhon, the first to apply the term to himself—rather subsumed among all the warring factions in the Commune, but in the wake of the split between Marx and Bakunin in the late 1860s, the schism in the International Workingmen’s Association in September 1871, and the dissolution of that body after 1877, they began to come into their own, buoyed by a generalized disgust with parties, their platforms and protocols. By the mid-1880s there began to be signs of a palpable rage in the streets, with members of innocuous-sounding clubs adopting such aliases as Friend of Robespierre, Partisan of Dynamite, Chopper of Heads, Incendiary. Soon there were clubs that did not sound innocuous: The Insurgents, The Stateless, The League of Antipatriots, The Panther of the Batignolles. It was Clément Duval, a member of the last group, who in 1886 initiated the practice of what was called la reprise individuelle (individual repossession, you might say). He set two fires in an hôtel particulier on Rue Monceau in order to cover the theft of silver, jewels, and such. When captured, he cried, “Vive l’anarchie!”*
“The anarchist.” Illustration by Félix Vallotton, 1892
In 1883, Louise Michel and Émile Pouget had called for a rally of all those who were starving, to be held on the Esplanade of the Invalides, which the police forestalled by blocking all the streets leading there. The starving, instead, looted three bakeries; Michel and Pouget were indicted for theft and incitement to riot. That was one thing—it was generally agreed among the anarchists that everyone in need had the right to bread—but the theft of valuables from a private house presented a thornier problem, which divided opinion and remained a contentious issue for decades. There were moral authorities on both sides. The great geographer Élisée Reclus and Sébastien Faure, later a leading Dreyfusard and pacifist, approved of theft, considering it a revolutionary act, based on Proudhon’s idea that property is purely a function of labor and that any other assertion of property itself constitutes theft.* On the other hand, the libertarian collectivist Jean Grave took a hard line on lying, cheating, and theft, ranking them as counterrevolutionary and a betrayal of the people.
The editorial office of La Révolte, circa 1890
Alexandre “Marius” Jacob’s market stall, 1930s
The practice of individual repossession reached its apex with Alexandre “Marius” Jacob (1879–1954), an accomplished burglar who approached his task with a clear sense of ethics; he stole only from the rich, and among them only from business owners, investors, clergymen, judges, and the military, but never from, say, doctors or architects, because they did useful things. He always gave away a significant part of his take to the poor. Once, realizing that he’d broken into the house of the writer Pierre Loti, he left an apology and money for damages; another time, learning that an intended victim was choked by debts, he left her ten thousand gold francs. He was almost certainly a primary model for Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman-cambrioleur Arsène Lupin. Among the many tricks he devised was one often seen in movies (Jules Dassin’s Rififi, for example): breaking into an apartment from the floor above by poking an umbrella through the ceiling and using it to catch the plaster. At one point he bought a hardware store, where he could dismantle safes at his leisure. He wrote: “The right to live is not to be begged for, it’s to be taken. Theft is restitution, the redistribution of ownership. Rather than be shut up in a factory as in a prison, rather than beg for what is my right, I preferred to revolt and fight my enemies tooth and nail by waging war on the rich, targeting their goods.”
Émile Pouget’s Almanach du Père Peinard, 1898
The anarchist spectrum was broad. All the anarchists hated and feared capitalism, the state, the military, and the church, but beyond that commonality there were a thousand shades of difference. Jacob was a redistributionist, but there were others practicing individual repossession who kept their booty for themselves. They were individualist anarchists, who had read Max Stirner’s The Ego and Its Own (1845): “I decide whether it is the right thing in me; there is no right outside me. If it is right for me, it is right. Possibly this may not suffice to make it right for the rest; that is their care, not mine: let them defend themselves.” Even among the individualists there was a range of stances, from lone wolves not averse to collective action when it suited them, all the way over to people whose views resembled the ice-cold egotism that passes for libertarianism today. And there were many more who tried variously to reconcile their distrust of the state with their redistributive ethics, and professed a variety of forms of antiauthoritarian communism. Sébastien Faure attempted to define the thread that linked the diverse range of anarchists: “The common point is the negation of the principle of Authority in social organization and a hatred of all the constraints imposed by the institutions that are based upon that principle.”
An 1894 police report claimed there were about five hundred anarchists in Paris. Among these some belonged to those historically anarchist professions, typesetting and proofreading; there were journalists, cabinetmakers, tailors, barbers, cobblers, cooks, as well as one investor, one stockbroker, one architect, one insurance agent, and three grocers. But there were many anarchisants (fellow travelers, to borrow the Soviet locution). There were writers and artists who were engaged with the cause: Félix Fénéon, Laurent Tailhade, Octave Mirbeau, Henri de Regnier, Francis Viellé-Griffin, Émile Verhaeren, Camille and Lucien Pissarro, Félix Vallotton, Paul Signac, Maximilien Luce; and some who were disengaged but varyingly sympathetic, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Paul Valéry, Remy de Gourmont. The subscribers to La Révolte included some prominent enemies of the Commune: Anatole France, Leconte de Lisle, J.-K. Huysmans. There were connections running both ways between a wing of the anarchists and the fanatical anti-Semite Édouard Drumont. The arch-Catholic Léon Bloy hated capitalism and the bourgeoisie enough that he sometimes made common cause. One test of intellectuals’ sympathy was whether they agreed to let excerpts from their works be reprinted gratis in the anarchist sheets; Zola, Maupassant, Georges Courteline, François Coppée emphatically did not. There was the singular Jehan Rictus, who behaved like an anarchist, shared tables with the anarchists, sometimes published in the anarchist press and read at anarchist cafés, but always let it be known that he belonged to the party of order. There was a class division among the anarchists in which exclusion worked contrary to the norm: Fénéon, Tailhade, et al. were never invited to the workers’ estaminets where the hard-liners drank and sang. And of course there were a thousand touchy situations in which shadings of dogma and degrees of commitment opened or closed doors. As the journalist Arthur Ranc observed, “Everyone is someone else’s reactionary.”
A poster for Georges Darien’s journal L’Escarmouche, by Henri-Gabriel Ibels, 1893
On May 1, 1891, the army opened fire on a crowd of strikers in the textile manufacturing town of Fourmies, near the Belgian border, killing ten, including two children, ages eleven and thirteen. The same day, a demonstration in Clichy
turned into a shoot-out between anarchists and police; no one knew why, or who started it (though two of the anarchists were given long prison terms). To avenge both incidents, a man whose nom de guerre was Ravachol (né François Koenigstein) planted a bomb on March 11 of the following year at the home of a judge in the Clichy case, and then two weeks later another bomb at the residence of the other judge. In between the two, an anonymous bomb that everyone assumed Ravachol had planted went off in the Lobau barracks. There were no injuries from any of them, but forty thousand francs in damages. The evening of the Lobau bombing Ravachol dined at a restaurant on Boulevard Magenta and chatted with the waiter about the latest bomb, which hadn’t yet been reported in the press. Two days later he came back; the waiter tipped off the cops; it took ten of them to subdue Ravachol. In court he was accused of a long list of unsolved crimes that included the robbery of the grave of a countess and the murder of a famous hermit who had amassed a fortune in alms—none of which could be realistically linked to him. Nevertheless, he was sentenced to death. He was the least moved of all those in the courthouse when the sentence was pronounced; he shouted, “Vive l’anarchie!”
François Koenigstein, a.k.a. Ravachol
Octave Mirbeau wrote, “Ravachol doesn’t scare me. He is transitory, like the terror he inspires, which is the thunderbolt that will be followed by a joyful sun and clear skies. After the dark business is finished, the dream of universal harmony beckons.” Ravachol entered into myth even before his head was separated from his shoulders. He was compared to Christ, portrayed framed by the guillotine with the rising sun behind; people sang “Dansons la Ravachole” to the tune of “La Carmagnole,” a famous song of 1792. In prison, Ravachol received flowers, requests for autographs, an expensive box of grapes from Algeria. A sign appeared in the window of a cheap hotel in the Épinettes: THERE ARE NO JUDGES IN THIS HOUSE. A story went around town about a man who enjoyed an expensive meal in a restaurant, after which he told the proprietor that he had no money, but that his friends were anarchists who would blow up the place in case there was trouble—so the owner treated him to a bottle of champagne. On July 11, on his way to the Widow, Ravachol told the chaplain, “I don’t care about your Christ. Don’t show him to me—I’ll spit on him,” and then sang “Le Père Duchêne,” a song that had just appeared anonymously that year: “If you want to be happy / Hang your landlord / Chop the priests in half…” The sheet music sold on the streets like chestnuts in winter, the vendors just a beat ahead of the cops, who seized all they could find. An enterprising reporter went around asking vendors what kind of people had bought them, to which the reply was invariable: “We sold them only to the gentry.”
Ravachol at his execution. Illustration by Charles Maurin, 1892
That reporter (Charles Flor, a Belgian who wrote under the pseudonym Flor O’Squarr, as his father had before him) explained to his readers the rationale behind the bombings, “in vulgar French”: “You don’t have a rifle. And even if you had a rifle it wouldn’t do you much good, since you have no bullets, since you don’t know how a rifle works, since despite your courage you are hardly up to measuring your skills against those of the army … You are a combatant in the war of today, so prepare your dynamite. The time is not far off when you’ll be called to the front.”
The massacre at Fourmies, 1891
A series of attempted reprisals followed Ravachol’s execution, culminating in the bomb that Auguste Vaillant threw into the Chamber of Deputies on December 29, 1893. There were no injuries and hardly any damages; after the brief commotion ceased, the chairman intoned, “La séance continue.” Vaillant, the son of a gendarme in Corsica, had left his family and lived alone in Paris from age twelve, was arrested for begging, emigrated to Argentina and came back three years later, and at the time of the bombing was secretary of the Philanthropic Library for the Study and Popularization of the Natural Sciences. At the guillotine, a mere month after the bombing, he predicted that his death would be avenged. And so it was, a week later, when a bomb went off in the Café Terminus outside the Gare Saint-Lazare.
Its author was Émile Henry, twenty-one years old, the son of Fortuné Henry, a Communard sentenced to death in absentia who died of lead poisoning from working in a mine in Spain during his exile. Émile was admitted to the Polytechnique but decided not to attend, instead making his way to the anarchist circuit. At first he repudiated Ravachol: “A true anarchist attacks his enemy; he doesn’t bomb houses where there are women, children, workers, and servants.” He changed his mind a few months later. In November 1892 he delivered a package containing a bomb to the offices of a mining company, but it looked sufficiently suspicious that it was taken to the police precinct house on Rue des Bons-Enfants, where it exploded, killing six. He disappeared for a year or so, then came back to town and rented a room under the name Dubois (i.e., Smith). He made a bomb using a cooking pot, a quantity of zinc, twenty-four bullets, dynamite, fulminate of mercury, and a miner’s wick measured to burn for fifteen seconds. He left with the bomb fastened to his belt, and armed with a revolver loaded with dum-dum bullets and a knife the blade of which he had attempted to coat with poison. He made his way up Avenue de l’Opéra, but the fancy places—Café de la Paix, Café Américain, Restaurant Bignon—were insufficiently crowded. Café Terminus, not nearly as fancy, was crowded. He sat near the door, ordered a bock and a cigar and then another bock. At nine o’clock, while the orchestra played a piece by Vincent d’Indy, he lit the wick with his cigar, stepped to the door, turned around, and threw the bomb, which witnesses described as looking like a tin can, in the direction of the orchestra. It hit the electric chandelier, broke a crystal tulip, and hit the ground, spreading thick, bitter smoke. A few seconds later it exploded, injuring twenty people and killing one. The action profoundly divided anarchist opinion. Octave Mirbeau declared that “a mortal enemy of anarchism could not have done better than Émile Henry,” adding that police provocation was widely suspected. Laurent Tailhade, on the other hand, uttered his notorious mot: “Of what importance are a few vague people if the gesture is beautiful?”
The arrest of Émile Henry, 1894
Two bombs went off the following week with no significant damage, probably set by the Belgian anarchist Désiré-Joseph Pauwels, who died in the vestibule of the Madeleine church on March 15, the sole victim of his own bomb. On April 4 a bomb went off in the Foyot restaurant, across the street from the Palais de Luxembourg, meeting place of the Senate. Tailhade, with exquisite irony, was the sole victim. Although the clientele was made up primarily of politicians, financiers, and their mistresses, Tailhade, an inveterate gourmand, was there romancing his own mistress. He lost an eye in the blast while protecting his companion, Julie Mialhe. No one was ever formally accused, although rumors flew, especially fifty years or more later, when people took turns accusing the dead, including Fénéon and the veteran activists Louis Matha and Paul Delesalle, perhaps based on ancient grudges (the most persuasive case involves a certain “Julien,” who has never been identified). On June 24 an Italian anarchist, Sante Geronimo Caserio, fatally stabbed the president of the republic, Sadi Carnot, during a ceremony in Nice, after which people all over France looted and burned businesses owned by Italians. A thematically related show trial was held two months later, at which the indicted included Fénéon, Faure, Grave, Paul Reclus, Émile Pouget (editor and publisher of the workers’ journal Le Père Peinard, written entirely in slang; also noted for coining the word sabotage), a number of apolitical burglars, and a butcher’s apprentice accused of stealing a cutlet. The anarchists were all acquitted. The era of bombings had ceased, although, until the war broke out twenty years later, bomb squads were kept busy attending to every lost suitcase or misplaced kitchen appliance that happened to turn up on the street.
The bombing of Chez Foyot, 1894
“The pallbearers.” Illustration by Félix Vallotton
The Dreyfus case opened sharp divisions among the anarchists. Many rallied to Drumont on the grou
nds of that tiresomely recurrent “socialism of fools”; many declared Dreyfus’s guilt or innocence irrelevant, since treason was inculcated in the military; many would say, like Descaves’s character Philémon, an old Communard, “We’re with him provisionally, but he’ll never be with us. If another popular uprising broke out, he’d be back in service gunning us down.” Grave and Faure, figures of moral authority, took the side of Dreyfus, and they eventually convinced Pouget, not previously a friend of the Jews. Nevertheless, the internal sniping and doctrinal hairsplitting that resulted from the case hastened the demise of many alliances and the departure of numerous anarchists for socialist or anarcho-syndicalist configurations. The artists and intellectuals did not abandon the cause so much as drift away. The last act of the glamorous era occurred in 1899, when Zo d’Axa (né Alphonse Gallaud de La Pérouse), the flamboyant editor of L’Endehors and La Feuille, vigorously campaigned a donkey for public office. The animal wound up being seized by the cops.
A room tossed by the police