The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (23 page)

That same day the prisoner was taken to the "anthropomorphic" department, where Alphonse Bertillon, "high priest" and creator of the service, took measurements of his head and body, including his height and the length of his middle finger, left foot, ear, forearms, and so on. Bertillon also photographed him. At 1:50
P.M.
on February 13, the prisoner was taken to see Judge Meyer. During the twenty-minute encounter, "Breton" briefly changed his name, saying that he was Léon Martin, admitted that he had thrown the bomb, and insisted that he had acted alone. He added, and not for the last time, that he regretted only one thing: that there had not been more victims.

In his cell, "Breton" asked about the number of victims in the Café Terminus. (He was told that of the twenty people who were injured, several had very serious wounds.) He invoked "legitimate defense" in explaining why he had fired three times at Poisson the policeman: the man had raised his sword to strike him. He volunteered that the
compagnons
were "very strong." He then added that like other anarchists, he had not been after a particular person, for example, a certain magistrate, "but rather the entire bourgeoisie, of which the former was only a representative." He sang the praises of Vaillant's deed. He warned his guards that he knew all their tricks. They would never get him to say anything he did not want to. France would pay because of Vaillant's execution. As the guards went off their shift, he was praising Ravachol, the "martyr."

Two of the guards, Duchâtel and Duthion, were gradually able to establish rapport with their charge. "Breton" asked them if Girard, the municipal chemist, had discovered the composition of his bomb. This question appeared to greatly preoccupy him. He began proudly to volunteer details. The bomb had comprised pieces of buckshot weighing about seven hundred grams, and in all, the bomb weighed more than four pounds. He explained that he had first gone to the Café de la Paix, and then the Café Américain, but neither seemed sufficiently full; he had then gone to the Terminus, waiting until it was quite crowded before throwing the bomb.

Some one hundred photos of "Breton" had been distributed to judicial and police offices (but not yet to newspapers) in an attempt to establish his identity. Magistrates in Saint-Étienne quickly noticed that the person in the photo corresponded exactly to a man who had been seen visiting various local anarchists. Reflecting the growing fascination with photos,
L'Éclair
speculated that the young man in the photo seemed about twenty-four to twenty-six years old, appearing "sure of himself, looking straight ahead, his lips seemingly in a mocking pose," and that he seemed intelligent—"his chin somewhat prominent giving his face a rather square, hard aspect," though overall he gave the impression of being a café waiter or an apprentice barber. His clothes were rather ragged—his pants, the journalist guessed, had come from the Belle jardinière department store, at least in their better days—but they were clean, that is, very bourgeois. Indeed, Émile had dressed in ordinary, even threadbare clothes, in order to give his deed "more of a working-class character." His vest was that of someone who owned a bar and was inscribed, like his underwear, with the letters
A.M.
An experienced buyer for the department store Bon Marché believed that the clothes had been made in Troyes and that the initials did not signify a brand of clothing but had been marked in special ink by "Breton" or another person. In any case, two letters, at a time when it was perfectly common for ordinary people to wear secondhand clothes, would not help identify the person now under arrest.

Insisting that he would prefer the guillotine to jail, the prisoner told his guards that his first name was Henri-Émile, not Léon, and that his mother lived outside of Paris. On February 14, the police speculated that "Breton" may have come from London, carrying anarchist manifestos that were the work of the Autonomy Club. A particularly violent proclamation printed in London had turned up, asking its readers to slaughter bourgeois and spread the blood of the murderers who were starving the poor to death.
Le Matin
complained that the anarchists finding refuge in the British capital were free to organize plots "under the benevolent eye, indeed even the protection, of Scotland Yard."

Early in the morning of February 14, someone in the prefecture concluded that "Breton" was Émile Henry. "Léon," that very useful undercover policeman, had picked up on the striking similarities between the newspaper descriptions of the bomber and the young anarchist who had fled Paris following the deadly explosion on rue des Bons-Enfants. Anarchist informers had, to be sure, infiltrated many of the anarchist groups. But Émile had remained in the shadows. He had avoided the large meetings that guaranteed surveillance by the police. And no photo of him or his brother had been taken on the occasion of their arrest in 1892.

Émile identified himself to the guards Duchâtel and Duthion on that same Wednesday morning, February 14. He wrote the date and place of his birth in Duchâtel's notebook, saying that his father was dead and his mother still living, although he refused to provide her address. He also mentioned his brother Fortuné, indicating that he was in prison, and offered details of his own arrest, along with his brother, at the end of May 1892. Vanoutryne, his employer on rue du Sentier, confirmed his identity. Léon Breton was without a doubt Émile Henry. He told his guards that they should do their job, and he would do his, which was to destroy the bourgeoisie. He boasted that if he had enough material, he would take it upon himself to blow up all of Paris. If his career as a terrorist was over, others would follow him. He gave the impression that he had more dynamite or other similar explosives in his room. Vaillant, whose execution he wanted to avenge, had put together a "ridiculous" bomb, using mere nails instead of dynamite and buckshot, which had so much more to offer to the cause. Émile's bomb had been very different, as would be those that followed.

Early that same morning, at the Villa Faucheur in Belleville, a neighbor noticed that the door of the room of "Monsieur Dubois" had been left wide open, leaving visible a stark iron bed and straw mattress, a single table, and some papers that had been burned. The door had been forced. The police arrived. Girard, the director of the municipal laboratory turned bomb squad, hurried to Belleville to see the room and found traces of a green powder and pieces of metal. Shown a photo of Émile, the guard identified him as Émile Dubois, the "mechanic" who had said that he would be gone about four days.

As it happened, four hours after they heard about the explosion and their friend's arrest, Matha, Ortiz, Millet, and perhaps Philabert Pauwels, a Belgian anarchist, had gone to the Villa Faucheur. They managed to sneak past the concierge and broke into Émile's room, carrying away enough dynamite, fulminate, picric acid, and chlorate powder to make twelve to fifteen bombs.

By now some working in the prefecture of police believed that Émile was the young blond man seen outside 11, avenue de l'Opéra in November 1892. Émile immediately became a prime suspect in that unsolved case. One of the investigating magistrate's most important tasks was to discover what Émile had done between then and his attack at the Café Terminus. Such information might reveal dangerous accomplices still roaming the streets of Paris or London.

Judge Meyer told the prisoner that the police now knew that he lived at the Villa Faucheur in Belleville. Émile responded that he had never heard of the place. When told that the police had found material for making more bombs there, which was not true, he fell into the trap, saying that he was sure that they were not still there. He thus let slip two things: that those who had cleaned out his room had known about his plan and that they had agreed that if Émile was captured, they would take the explosive materials stored there. Asked if he had accomplices, he replied that he was "a righter of wrongs, not a denouncer." Indeed, he claimed that he had considered biting his tongue in two so that he would be incapable of revealing anything, or mutilating both hands, so that he would be unable to write.

A debate over the attack on the Café Terminus erupted in the Chamber of Deputies. One deputy blamed the socialists (who in elections the previous August had gained thirty seats) and demanded that their red flag be banned. He also complained about the "scandalous scenes" at the cemetery of Ivry, around Vaillant's tomb, which had become something of a pilgrimage site, asking what measures the government planned to take against the scoundrels who had declared war on society and "who spread death without even looking at their victims."

The press immediately seized upon a crucial element unique to this attack. The bomber had chosen random victims—he simply threw his bomb into a group of people. This time the target was not the government or one of its officials or representatives, or a public monument, or the office or house of a wealthy financier or captain of industry, but rather ordinary people having a beer and listening to music in a cafe. The risk to the safety of everyday Parisians seemed heightened, and the police were blamed for being unprepared. The press demanded harsh and immediate action: "We must make sure that the instincts of hate and blood that boil over impetuously in certain individuals disappear from our civilized society. The repression must be both dignified and pitiless."

THE IDENTITY OF
the Café Terminus bomber shocked Paris. He was not a marginal criminal like Ravachol nor a poor devil like Vaillant. The young man now in custody was a bourgeois, an intellectual, a fact that, according to one journalist, reflected "our so troubling and complex contemporary life."

The prosperous city panicked yet again. Where would the next bomb explode? Must Parisians now fear bourgeois bombers as well? Police worried about an identical attack on the Grand Hôtel and guarded major Parisian monuments. Small objects that resembled bombs kept turning up. Police raced to a fort near Saint-Denis, carrying a map found in an anarchist's room that seemed to indicate that dynamite had been buried there. Indeed, a patch of dirt had apparently been turned over. Perhaps the anarchists got there first? Félix Dubois's book
The Anarchist Peril
stirred further alarm by claiming that there were tens of thousands of anarchist believers. The book recounted two decades of anarchist horrors to an eager, if fearful public.

When part of the scenery at the Théâtre de la Gaîté collapsed during a play, some audience members screamed hysterically, and chaos ensued. An electrician told police that a month earlier three men had come to ask him to put together a complicated machine that could be made to explode. He had seen them twice since then, once in Belleville. He remembered that one of them was called Émile. From Marseille, a woman wrote to warn that if the attacks were not stopped, France risked becoming "a new Poland," referring to that country's repeated partitioning by its more powerful neighbors. Montmartre's Concert Lisbonne would soon advertise that it was "the only Concert protected against Bombs," and its posters jokingly offered insurance policies against explosions, this supposedly following a pact made with groups such as The Avengers, Those Without Pity, and The Spiders of Despair.

In the meantime, the police undertook more searches of residences and arrested hundreds of anarchists, acts that ultimately affected some three thousand families. Such moves angered many ordinary people. After all, the government had not taken such aggressive and decisive action against the corrupt officials involved in the financial scandals that had rocked the Third Republic.

From London came news that employees at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich had heard an explosion late in the afternoon of February 15. Martial Bourdin, a young, solitary French anarchist and an acquaintance of Émile, had accidentally blown himself up when explosives he was carrying detonated when he tripped over the roots of a tree. The British too seemed to have something to fear, particularly as the newspapers in London speculated that the material for Bourdin's bomb (intended to destroy the Royal Observatory) had come from Émile's room in Paris and that the Autonomy Club had offered a course in chemistry, with the goal of producing such explosives. In April, two young Italian anarchists who, following the precise instructions of Johann Most for the preparation of bombs, were arrested by Scotland Yard for planning to bomb the London Stock Exchange. Their goal: to kill "moneyed bourgeois."

The police showed up in Brévannes on February 15. Madame Henry tried to appear calm, but she was of course extremely nervous. She did not want to talk about her son, whom she said she had not seen since August 1892. Yet neighbors had seen Émile there on occasion during the previous autumn and believed that his mother had given him some money so that he could get by.

Three journalists made their way to Brévannes the next day by train. They then walked an hour along a path lined with fields and orchards, interspersed by small houses with chickens pecking in the yard. Finally, amid flowering acacias and thorny bushes stood the auberge, recently whitewashed, with the sign
À L'ESPÉRANCE, VINS ET RESTAURANT
above the door. The auberge had done well enough while the hospice across the road was still under construction. But now, since most of the work had been completed, Madame Henry had less business. Soon hundreds of thousands of readers became familiar with the simple country auberge, with its sparse furnishings and bare walls. They also came to know the small, sad lady of about fifty years with gray hair, her eyes rimmed in red. On the day the journalists visited, she seemed confused but expressed herself clearly in a strong Midi accent. Four workers sat around the wooden table, talking in low voices and sharing a bottle of wine. Her aunt and Jules were there. Madame Henry did not hide the fact that her husband's radical politics had influenced her son, nor that her eldest son was in prison. But she insisted that Émile could not be the dynamiter of the Café Terminus—he was simply incapable of hurting anyone. She had no reason to be ashamed of Émile, who adored her and had given her nothing but satisfaction. Over the next few days, several of Émile's classmates went to Brévannes to express their incredulity. And Émile's mother began to receive upsetting, anonymous letters, some merely vulgar insults written in the margins of articles clipped from the Parisian press about her son.