The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (2 page)

Parisian insurgents had used the narrow streets of plebeian neighborhoods to their advantage in the various insurrections. Now under the careful direction of Haussmann, whose name would eventually become a French verb (to "Haussmann" something means to bulldoze it), 120 miles of new boulevards and streets were constructed. Dubbed subsequently "the Alsatian Attila" by virtue of his family's origins in that eastern province and his penchant for urban demolition, Haussmann carried out the imperialism of the straight line, decimating neighborhoods in the heart of Paris in which tens of thousands of ordinary people lived. The rebuilding, and the soaring rents that followed, forced many to move toward the urban periphery, and for this upheaval they received compensation equivalent to about ten dollars per family. Most could not afford to live in the 34,000 new buildings and their 215,000 apartments along the boulevards. To the impressionist painter Auguste Renoir, the striking new buildings that fronted the boulevards were "cold and lined up like soldiers at review." The term Triumphal Way, sometimes applied to the Champs-Élysées, was well suited to other boulevards too. (A joke from Haussmann's time had an elderly soldier speculating that "the Seine itself would be straightened, 'because its irregular curve is really rather shocking.'")

When insurrection arose again in Paris in 1871, Haussmann's boulevards served one of their principal purposes. In the election following France's crushing defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–71), conservatives prevailed, electing a strongly monarchist assembly. Ordinary Parisians felt betrayed. After all, they had mobilized every resource to defend the capital against the Prussians, and now they were suffering from massive unemployment and soaring prices for scarce food. Landlords were demanding back rent, which could not possibly have been paid during the awful four-month siege of Paris.

On March 18,1871, Adolphe Thiers, the head of the provisional government, ordered troops to seize the cannons of the National Guard on Montmartre. In response, local people forced two generals against a wall and executed them. On March 26, the people of Paris—at least the men—elected their own government, which they called the Paris Commune. The Commune was in some ways a "festival of the oppressed," allowing many ordinary Parisians to become masters of their own lives for the first time, albeit briefly. Idealism and optimism abounded. The Commune initiated a number of significant social reforms—for example, it abolished night baking (a common grievance of bakers), created nurseries for working mothers, and recognized women's unions. The painter Gustave Courbet, who had shocked some bourgeois critics with his realist paintings of ordinary peasants and workers, embraced socialism and took an active role in the Commune. At his suggestion enormous pulleys were used to bring down the Vendôme column, on which stood a grand statue of Napoleon I. Photos from the period show workers and their families standing near pieces of the fallen imperial monument, in one of the most elegant neighborhoods in western Paris. They had simply walked into the fancy
quartiers
from which economic reality and police prejudice had previously excluded them.

But soon the authorities fought back. The Versailles troops poured through the western walls of Paris on May 22, and the network of broad, recently constructed boulevards allowed them to penetrate the area efficiently and repress the Commune. As many as twenty-five thousand Parisians perished at the hands of government soldiers, both in street fighting and by execution. To the elite, the Commune presented an apocalyptical vision of social revolution. The myth that the Communards consisted of "drunken commoners" and "apostles of absinthe" took hold. The government investigated more than forty thousand Parisians, some of whom were convicted and sent to prison or forced into exile. In the words of one prosecutor, "
À Paris, tout le monde était coupable"—"In
Paris, everyone was guilty."

To staunch Catholics, France's shocking defeat in the war and the subsequent rise of the Paris Commune seemed to be divine punishment meted out to "a nation fallen from grace," set right by a "sword brandished by a vengeful God." In expiation for the country's sins, Montmartre was chosen as a site for "a temple on a sacred mountain towering above the profane," a "point of intersection between heaven and earth." However, to those who rejected the public role of the church in France, the glistening white marble of Sacré-Coeur represented—like Haussmann's boulevards—the architecture of conquest, standing defiantly apart from its working-class environment: a strange "colossal monster."

By the time Émile Henry threw his bomb into the Café Terminus, Paris, the "capital of Europe," really comprised two cities. The boulevards Saint-Michel, de Sébastopol, and Saint-Denis, which joined in a single long stretch cutting through the center of Paris and running north and south, symbolized the distance between the "People's Paris" of the east and the increasingly chic neighborhoods of the west. The latter, particularly after Louis XIV constructed his opulent royal palace and gardens at Versailles in the seventeenth century, had pulled privilege westward, leaving the artisans and ordinary workers to their own devices in the neighborhoods of central and eastern Paris. To the west, the Bois de Boulogne became a destination at which the wealthy could see and be seen, preening in the comfort of carriages on their way to outdoor restaurants and balls. To one critic, "The straight line [of the boulevards] has killed off the picturesque and the unexpected." Rue de Rivoli, "so long, wide, and cold, on which promenade prosperous people as cold as the street on which they walk," formed an apt example.

Viewed from Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre, the electric lights, which had replaced the old gas lamps, glowed far below in the fancy neighborhoods of the boulevards and created a magical but also somewhat unreal spectacle. Some aspects of fin-de-siècle Paris were so strangely new, they seemed more than a little overwhelming.

In the late nineteenth century, the
grands boulevards
of Paris symbolized urban modernity, their wide sidewalks planted with trees and offering ample space to stroll, window-shop, and dream. The boulevards became the staging ground for the belle époque—the "good old days" or the "gay nineties"—that period of rapid material progress and exhilarating cultural innovation. These grand thoroughfares were dotted with kiosks offering a vast array of newspapers and periodicals, some now available with brightly colored illustrations. Department stores, decked out with new electric lights, carefully arranged shop windows, and a wide range of products, welcomed a constant flow of customers. The novelist Émile Zola referred to these stores, which were built early in Napoleon Ill's Second Empire, as the Cathedrals of Modernity. Their aisles appeared to be an extension of the
grands boulevards
themselves. Rather than bargaining, the time-honored way to acquire goods in a traditional market, in the new department stores you simply paid the price as marked.

The boulevards of the Right Bank of the Seine featured luxurious hotels and expensive restaurants frequented by foreign tourists and their counterparts from other parts of France. The names of the
grands cafés,
catering to a well-heeled clientele who came to sit, observe the passing scene, and read newspapers, reflected British and American influence: Grill Room, Express Bar, Piano Player. One knowledgeable contemporary insisted that "the bar, the democratic and modern café, has dethroned the old drinking places that were on street corners and are now disappearing ... What can one say about the innumerable harm brought by the bars, foreign imports all!" Flâneurs observed the never-ending spectacle of the boulevards. Here, crowded, dark, and dirty Paris seemed to disappear into the "city of light."

In front of the recently constructed train station of Saint-Lazare stood the Hôtel Terminus. The widely respected Baedeker guidebook described it as "not quite so well situated" as the other great hotels, just a little beyond the fanciest
quartier.
It provided five hundred rooms, each with electric lighting and a telephone, and its least expensive accommodation cost four francs, a full day's wage for many workers. Lunch, including wine, coffee, and liqueurs, cost five francs; dinner cost seven, and full board could be had for sixteen francs.

The elegant avenue de l'Opéra, along which wagons and carriages, including those of the police, were still pulled by horses, was lined with hotels, cafés—notably, the Café de Paris—and luxury shops. The avenue, almost 650 yards long and 30 yards wide, stretched from place du Théâtre-Français, not far from rue de Rivoli, which runs parallel to the Seine to the opera house. No trees had been planted along the avenue, so the view of the commanding edifice would not be obstructed.

With the inscription
ACADÉMIE NATIONALE DE MUSIQUE,
the Opera, which opened in 1875, was at the time the largest theater in the world. It covered nearly three acres but seated only 2,156 people, fewer than La Scala in Milan, San Carlo in Naples, or the opera house in Vienna. A prominent guidebook proudly noted that "there is hardly a variety of marble or costly stone that has not been used," green and red granite from Sweden and Scotland, yellow and white marble from Italy, red porphyry from Finland, and marble from other regions of France. The purchase of the site and the construction of the building cost fabulous sums. It took fourteen years to put together the principal façade; its rich ornamentation included a portico with seven arches, whose pillars were embellished with statues representing Music, Idyllic Poetry, Lyric Poetry, Drama, Lyric Drama, Dance, and Song. Inside, the grand staircase led to the boxes and balconies on each floor, from which the lavishly dressed operagoers could observe the magnificent stage, 178 feet wide and 74 feet deep. Monday and Friday evening performances were considered the most fashionable, with evening dress required for the best seats, which cost the equivalent of three or four days' wages for most workers.

In Émile Zola's novel
Paris
(1898), Abbé Pierre Froment arrives at place de l'Opéra and describes it thus:

The heart of the great city seemed to beat on that spot, in that vast expanse where met so many thoroughfares, as if from every point the blood of distant districts flowed thither along triumphal avenues. Right away to the horizon stretched the great gaps of avenue de l'Opéra, rue du Quatre-Septembre, and rue de la Paix ... Then there was the detached mass of the opera house, slowly steeped in gloom and rising huge and mysterious like a symbol, its lyre-bearing figure of Apollo, right aloft, showing a last reflection of daylight amid the livid sky. And all the windows of the house fronts began to shine, gaiety sprang from those thousands of lamps which coruscated one by one, a universal longing for ease and free gratification of each desire spread with the growing dusk; while, at long intervals, the large globes of the electric lights shone as brightly as the moons of the city's cloudless nights.

Avenue de l'Opéra and the opera house itself stood as centerpieces of a city caught up in a feast of consumer goods. Across the stage of the Parisian boulevards strolled proud bankers, captains of industry, and successful merchants, wearing dark coats and top hats; their ladies were decked out in elegant long dresses, constricting corsets, and huge stylish hats. Doormen clicked their heels in respect as the well-to-do passed by, and policemen and soldiers stood at attention. The mien of the wealthy told the poor, "I live at your expense."

The term
boulevardiers
came into use to describe men who turned up "at the proper moment in the proper café." According to Jules Claretie's
Life in Paris 1896,
"On the boulevard each day one can gamble on love, money, winning or losing, the
boulevardiers
are like fish in the water of this urban aquarium, residents in this zoo, where it is better to be a young fish or a young lion." For the upper classes, such display was part of urban life, constantly reaffirming and celebrating their social distance from, say, the waiters in the fine restaurants who brought plate after plate of elaborately prepared food, along with wine, which according to the current taste was now coordinated to complement each dish.

Sold in kiosks, hawked by peddlers, and delivered to homes, newspapers flourished as never before in belle époque Paris. Given their low cost, as well as the continued growth of Paris itself, print runs of the twenty daily newspapers doubled in the 1880s, and weekly supplements followed, all this largely due to improvements in printing techniques. The Linotype machine, introduced in the 1880s, made composition easier. Through lithography, photographs and color could appear in print. A wide range of subject matter was on offer: sensational scandals, of which there were no small number in the first decades of the Third Republic, as well as entertaining serials, crimes big and small, and enticing advertisements. Several newspapers featured interviews and investigations.

The press played a decisive role in the mass politicization of this period, and each newspaper had a particular political slant. People got most of their news, as well as discussion of the issues of the day, from the papers, which together powerfully shaped public opinion. The government paid journalists to support its policies, and politicians themselves penned articles in the major papers. Zola described "steam-powered journalism, polished off in twenty minutes, edited on the fly, written at full gallop at a café table."
Le Matin
had begun publication in 1882, and many considered it the first "American-style" newspaper in France. The relatively moderate
Le Petit Parisien
printed nearly a half-million copies of each issue in the early 1890s, and
Le Petit Journal a
million. Posters were plastered all over Paris to advertise the advent of
Le Journal
in September 1892, with an ambitious first print run of 200,000 copies. The wealthy read the right-wing
L'Écho de Paris
and the more moderate republican
Le Temps,
considered a newspaper of quality and more serious (especially about expanding France's colonial empire) than other more flamboyant contenders, along with its rival
Le Figaro.
Monarchists had their own newspapers
(Le Soleil
and
Le Gaulois),
among others on the political right
(L'Intransigeant, La Presse, La Cocarde, Le Drapeau, L'Éclair, La Patrie,
and the viciously anti-Semitic
La Libre Parole).
The right-wing press dominated Paris and would have its heyday during the campaign, a few years later, against the Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus, falsely accused of selling military secrets to Germany.