The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (19 page)

The police intensified their campaign against anarchists. They undertook searches, seized newspapers (French and foreign), made arrests for little or no reason, and intimidated employers into firing anarchist workers. Magistrates used existing laws to expel foreigners, including Germans, Austrians, Belgians, Italians, and a Spaniard. The crackdown had greatly reduced the number of known anarchist meetings, and a number of key militants left for London, weakening some organizations. Anarchists no longer met in sizable gatherings, where undercover police agents or informers could report on what was said. Realizing this, the police focused their attention on the
compagnons
espousing "individual initiative," like Émile. These were the ones who disappeared into the shadows. The police continued to watch Martin's dairy store and, in Brévannes, À l'Espérance. Madame Henry had received no letters, and her comings and goings appeared perfectly normal. Where was her second son, Émile Henry?

ON DECEMBER
9, 1893, Auguste Vaillant, an unemployed worker distraught at being unable to feed his family, tossed a small bomb into the Chamber of Deputies. Born in the Ardennes near the Belgian border in 1861 and abandoned by his father when he was about ten, Vaillant started an apprenticeship with a pastry cook. However, he was let go when he got hungry one day and made a cake for himself. He worked for a time in a sawmill and then briefly as a laborer demolishing a rampart in Charleville. He was arrested for eating a meal in a restaurant for which he was unable to pay. At the age of twelve, an aunt put the young Vaillant on a train for Marseille, although he had no ticket. He was arrested again, and his father, who was a gendarme on the island of Corsica, paid the fine of sixteen francs.

From that day on, Vaillant was on his own. He walked all the way to Marseille. Desperately hungry, he stole food in order to survive as he wandered from place to place. He was jailed four times for theft and for begging.

After working as a quarryman in Algeria, Vaillant left for Argentina in 1890 to try to start a new life. There he tried his hand at farming in Chaco Province for two and a half years. But everything went wrong, and he complained that his situation amounted to a kind of slavery. After returning to France in 1893 and living at first in Montmartre, Vaillant married, and soon his wife gave birth to a baby girl, Sidonie. He got a job as a leatherworker in Saint-Denis. When his employer refused to pay him more than twenty francs a week, Vaillant reminded him that he had a wife and a child to feed. The boss replied, "I don't give a damn about your wife. I hired you." After flirting with socialism, Vaillant became an anarchist, meeting with the groups the Independents and the Equals in Montmartre.

Living in the suburb of Choisy-le-Roi, his family wracked with hunger, Auguste Vaillant decided to strike a blow that would call France's attention to the plight of poor people like him. He purchased materials to make a small bomb, which he filled with green powder, sulfuric acid, tacks, and small nails, enough to hurt but not to kill. He obtained a pass that allowed him to observe a session of the Chamber of Deputies, where he sat in the second row of the balcony. Soon he stood and threw the device, tossing it over the head of an astonished lady in the first row. When the small bomb exploded, the president of the Chamber of Deputies merely announced, with memorable calm, "The session continues."

A few spectators, including a priest, and several deputies suffered only light injuries. Vaillant himself suffered some kind of wound while throwing the bomb and sought assistance at the Hótel-Dieu (the central hospital). There the staff discovered traces of gunpowder on his hands. He was arrested and readily admitted guilt, saying that he had acted alone. Indeed, he had not told any of his anarchist acquaintances about what he was planning. All the deputies were the same, he insisted, and he had wanted to attack society itself.

In Henry Leyret's bar, Le Déluge, in Belleville, a worker arrived at 7
A.M.,
laughing and shouting, "Here's some news. 'The Aquarium' blew up!" The news met with little surprise. People had expected it. No one expressed any sympathy for the injured deputies. After all, they were paid twenty-five francs a day for doing nothing. A worker in the bar suggested that President Sadi Carnot decorate the person who threw the bomb, another adding that the anarchists were indeed "tough guys!"

On December 11, the police obtained information about anarchist plans to blow up the entire Palais-Bourbon, and possibly even the Palais de l'Élysée, the residence of the president. The Parisian anarchist groups known as Compagnons of the Fourteenth Arrondissement and No Country favored the first proposal, as did anarchists in London, who believed that the bombing of the Chamber of Deputies would be a particularly effective symbolic attack, since financial scandals had more than tarnished "The Aquarium."

Public opinion turned against the intelligentsia—particularly writers and some journalists—for being sympathetic to anarchism, giving it a measure of respectability. The book
On Intellectual Complicity and Crimes of Opinion: The Provocations and Apologies for Crimes by Anarchist Propaganda,
quickly published in the wake of the most recent anarchist attacks, claimed that intellectuals were in part responsible for the remarkable increase in the number of anarchists in France. The book's author called Dostoyevsky's
Crime and Punishment"an
admirable manual for assassination" and argued that the Spanish anarchist Santiago Salvador, who bombed the Liceo Theater in Barcelona, had been nourished by the work of Malatesta and other anarchist theorists. Cheap newspapers and subversive posters polluted Paris with dangerous ideas, which had a "hypnotic" effect on people already weak from alcoholism. A magistrate equated propaganda "by ideas" with "propaganda by the deed," the former equally as criminal, in his view; the theoreticians of anarchy were every bit as dangerous as the murderers who actually wielded the dagger.

How would France, and the rest of Europe, respond to terrorist deeds? Following acrimonious debate, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, on December 12 and 18, passed laws so controversial and deemed so unfair by their critics that socialists dubbed them the "scoundrelly" or "shameful" laws—because these statutes could be used against them too. Under the new laws, anyone who wrote anything sympathetic to anarchism could be prosecuted on the grounds that such writing indirectly provoked crimes. The law of December 12 toughened existing legislation (the law of 1881) related to the media: it was first applied not against an anarchist but against the author of an article in a socialist paper who appeared to express sympathy for the plight of Auguste Vaillant. This signaled to many that the legislation was indeed aimed at all political opposition from the left. The law permitted the seizure of newspapers and preventive arrests. It criminalized any expression of sympathy for anarchist attacks, or for murder, pillage, arson, or any other violence, as well as for antimilitary propaganda.

The second law, which followed six days later, codified the concept of an association of malefactors, or "evildoers," suggesting a massive anarchist plot against people, property, and the public peace. It authorized harsh penalties, including execution, for anyone convicted of building or keeping an explosive device—or any product used to make one.

In the eyes of the law, anarchism took on a new, specific definition; "the anarchist sect" constituted "a veritable association." No matter that it lacked official statutes or constitution—it existed by virtue of a "pre-established agreement" by which it recruited and protected its members. This conception of anarchism resembled the
compagnonnages
(although that reference was not made), which offered lodging and food to skilled artisans who traveled from town to town to hone their skills. In like manner, when anarchists went from Paris to provincial cities or arrived from other countries, they received assistance from local anarchists. To exemplify how the anarchists' network of mutual aid functioned, the police cited the small fund Jean Grave kept in the offices of
La Révolte
on rue Mouffetard, distributed to anarchists in need of a little assistance or to subsidize propaganda. And though a good amount of internal debate characterized the movement, lawmakers argued that all anarchists shared a single goal: to abolish the state through violence. The fact that anarchists often signed their propaganda collectively was cited as proof that all members of the movement acted as one. Thus the government came to a rather sweeping conclusion: that any anarchist who attended a meeting was complicit in this destructive plan. Furthermore, anarchism was to be excised from public debate, in speech and in print. Anarchist newspapers, or any paper that spoke well of anarchism, were "lit matches thrown into the middle of explosive materials."

Thus anarchism itself became a crime. By virtue of the law of December 18, associations of "evildoers" could be indicted not only for committing an offense, but also for appearing to plan, anticipate, or express sympathy for or interest in such an act. Thus, anyone who knew an anarchist or discussed anarchism could be prosecuted, as could members of any anarchist organization, presumed by its very existence to be criminal in nature, a threat to public peace.

According to this aggressive new legal initiative, a person could be considered an accomplice to a serious crime without participating in it at all. One critic provided this possible scenario as a warning: Say an anarchist commits a crime and then is given lodging by a friend. The criminal writes something on a piece of paper given to him by his host, who is not necessarily an anarchist. Thus both the "criminal" and the person he is visiting, who had provided both a bed and a piece of paper, could be prosecuted as members of an anarchist conspiracy and subject to a harsh sentence. Similar examples abounded. A prosecutor could assume that a knife used in any way by the printers of the anarchist newspaper
La Révolte
actually served as a weapon. And in fact, a social reformer who organized meals for the poor was prosecuted because speeches were given as people ate. Police also seized documents about Sicily from the geographer Élisée Reclus, sure that they had found proof of a secret society. Even jokes about anarchism could lead to jail sentences.

The harsh crackdown in France was replicated in Italy and Spain. In Italy, emergency legislation in June 1894 in response to anarchist attacks banned newspapers and parties considered "subversive." The government shipped three thousand anarchists to penal colonies, and hundreds of their colleagues went abroad as exiles. In Spain, the police began to persecute labor organizations, considering them "revolutionary" and therefore dangerous by definition. Any leftist political activity became identified with anarchism. Police harassed socialists and even shut down anarchist cultural publications.

In the meantime, more suspicious objects were being discovered around Paris. Just before Christmas, the city's chief chemist, Girard, examined a dead rat that had been wrapped in paper and sent to a wine merchant. Girard determined that the object was not a bomb.

Waves of police raids and searches targeted all kinds of anarchists. The police drew up a list of more than five hundred of them in Paris, putting together a separate list of foreigners. Fortuné Henry's address was listed as unknown although he was in prison, and Émile could not be located. Beginning at six in the morning on January 1, 1894, French police carried out an especially ambitious 552 searches. During January and February, 248 people were arrested on suspicion of being anarchists, and 80 of them were still in jail after two months had passed, although the police complained that the most recent searches and arrests—the sudden arrival of police wagons with bells clanging, the police waving guns—gave anarchists time to destroy compromising papers or simply disappear. Meanwhile, anarchist bombs in Spain had caused widespread panic. A journalist related that bombs "hang as a menace over the entire bourgeoisie ... there is no person who does not worry about dynamite, nitroglycerine, and detonators ... Satan has made himself a dynamiter and tries to be equal with God." In Paris, anarchists were not the only people seething at these systematic roundups. Nothing like this coercive police activity had been seen since the final days of the Commune.

Those arrested in Paris included some familiar faces, including Léveillé, the locksmith arrested and battered in Clichy two and a half years earlier; Achille Étiévant, the anarchist typographer suspected of knowing the whereabouts of the stolen dynamite; and Élisée Bastard, a well-known anarchist orator. Alexander Cohen, a Dutchman who had translated a play for the Odèon theater, was arrested and deported. In Toulouse, a man was charged with "apology for the crime of murder" for shouting "Long live anarchy! Long live Ravachol!" An anarchist received two years in prison for having preached anarchist theory to a man who later stole something from his boss. An anarchist called Rousset was put on trial for having organized evening gatherings that fed up to five thousand people and received contributions from respected writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Émile Zola, and Alphonse Daudet. The minister of the interior, David Raynal, requested lists of all people who were not anarchists but had some sort of relationship with one or more members of the movement and who therefore might "come to their aid by personal friendship." Police forbade kiosks from selling
Père Peinard, La Révolte, Revue Libertaire,
and even some socialist papers. Émile Pouget, fearing arrest, left for London in January 1894. (There he may have been involved in a swindle, selling to a collector some teeth supposedly extracted from Ravachol, along with forged autographs of the famed revolutionaries of 1789—Robespierre, Marat, and Danton.) The police shut down
Père Peinard
on February 21, 1894.

Even then, the press continued to document the overreaching efforts of the police. A news dealer named Desforges, who had a kiosk on place Clichy, was detained with his seventeen-year-old son, who had never been in any kind of trouble. Louis Bouchez, a sculptor, was arrested at his parents' house because he had expressed sympathy for anarchism, though he had done nothing else. Charles Paul, an upholsterer, had joined a gymnastic organization on rue Lepic in Montmartre and was accused of being the friend of a well-known
compagnon
in that center of anarchism. This was enough to get him arrested.