The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (26 page)

The prisoner's ironic smile seemed to broaden when he saw the packed courtroom. Before sitting down, he paused to gaze at the public. Five or six court artists took up their pens and brushes in order to immortalize him. Now doors swung open, and the lawyers entered.

The presiding magistrate opened the trial, asking the prisoner to state his age, occupation, and residence: "Émile Henry, age twenty-one and a half," he replied in his husky, adolescent voice. His domicile? "The Conciergerie." Émile listened impassively to the charges—one murder and twenty attempted murders at the Café Terminus and five murders at the police station in November 1892—and occasionally, he reached up nervously to rearrange his hair. But on the whole he seemed very sure of himself and his ability to handle any question. He reacted to the charges with smiles, shrugs, or gestures of denial. Several times, with his eyes half shut, he seemed to be reliving the acts of which he stood accused.

On the side of the defense stood the bearded defense lawyer Hornbostel. Virtually unknown in Paris, the son of a prominent lawyer in Marseille, Hornbostel knew that playing on the big stage of the Assize Court of the Seine could make his career. To prepare, he had taken ten elocution lessons from Silvain, a well-known actor at the Comédie-Française, who himself was in the courtroom, eager to see his pupil perform. But Hornbostel was outmatched. He had not yet mastered the dramatic, theatrical gestures so necessary to arguing a case, and did not use his shoulders to impress judge, jury, and audience. He mumbled. And he defended a man determined to be convicted and executed, one who sought revolutionary immortality.

The role of the presiding magistrate, Judge Potier, would ordinarily have been to "unmask" the accused, poking holes in his defense with leading questions. This trial would be different. Émile admitted, with unrestrained pride, to virtually all the charges against him. He contradicted or corrected minor points in an arrogant, mocking tone. He had not entered the Café Terminus at 8:30
P.M.,
but at 8. He had not hidden a bomb under the belt of his pants, but rather in the pocket of his overcoat—"I wasn't going to unbutton my pants in the middle of a café!" When asked why he had chosen the particular location for his attack, he replied, "Because it was a
grand café,
frequented by the bourgeoisie." Why had he not stopped in the other big cafés he had passed along the way? "There weren't enough people. The apéritif hour of these folks was over." This sent a collective shudder through the courtroom. When asked if he had told the investigating magistrate Espinas that he wanted to kill as many people as possible to avenge Vaillant, he replied, "Absolutely," mimicking Simon
dit
Biscuit, Ravachol's boyish accomplice.

Potier interjected, "You have contempt for the lives of others?"

"No." Émile corrected him. "Only those of the bourgeosie."

He confirmed that he had fired point-blank at Gustave Étienne, the railway employee referred to by Potier as "a courageous citizen," who ran after the bomber and grabbed him. And that he had fired at the barber Léon Maurice—Émile interrupted sarcastically: "A second courageous citizen." He regretted having shot only one policeman. When the presiding judge reminded him that several of those whom he had tried to kill were workers, Émile's response was that they should have minded their own business. If he had had a better revolver, he would have killed them too. When the judge noted that the accused had constructed the bomb with the care of "a veritable artist," Émile thanked him for the compliment.

The presiding magistrate then began to try to show that Émile was anything but a victim of bourgeois society, but rather someone who "had found along his road only hands reaching out to him, protectors, and benevolent, generous people." He was, after all, a bourgeois. When Émile recounted his trip to avenue de l'Opéra that fateful afternoon, he noted wryly that he had taken public transportation. "As a good bourgeois, I did not go on foot," he said, drawing smiles. Potier pointed out that he might have been admitted to the prestigious École polytechnique. Why had he not wanted to be an officer in the army? "Nice career, in which one kills the unfortunate, as at Fourmies. I would rather be here than there!"

Potier evoked Rose Caubet Henry's "great despair" that her son had avoided military service and had been classified a deserter, then mentioned, provocatively, "another person, whose name it is useless to mention, and who, since that time, has stopped loving you," a clear reference to Élisa Gauthey. The presiding judge wanted the accused to disclose his activities during the eighteen months before the Café Terminus attack, thereby identifying accomplices. Émile would admit only to having worked for six weeks as a mechanic. He said that he had received income "from my work" and thus had been able to pay for the bomb materials himself. Émile rejected, with some indignation, the judge's suggestion that he had lived off the thefts of Ortiz. But the president insisted that "even in depriving oneself, one still needs resources in Paris." His white hands were not those of a worker, and they were "now covered with blood from murder." Émile rose to his feet and replied, "Covered with red like your robe,
monsieur le président.
" He denied being the man who had posed as a British businessman and, along with Ortiz, robbed the wealthy lady in the Norman village of Fiquefleur.

The police were still looking for Placide Schouppe and Paul Reclus, the nephew of Élisée Reclus and an advocate of the "right to theft," whom they suspected of helping Émile prepare the bomb, perhaps with Schouppe's help. Émile concluded, "'Justice' will not be satisfied with only one head—it must have two. Once again, I prepared, closed, and carried the bomb myself."

When Émile was under investigation immediately following the first bombing, the police had concluded that he would not have had time to return to rue Véron to get the bomb and take it to avenue de l'Opéra. Now an employee of the district attorney's office had duplicated the trek Émile claimed to have taken and had demonstrated that it was indeed possible to do so.
^*
Potier finally appeared to accept Émile's version of events.

Victims of the Café Terminus bombing, ordinary people, simply told their stories, without cross-examination. Some walked with difficulty, with the help of canes or supported on the arm of someone who had been a bit luckier. Tapping his fingers incessantly on the wooden gate of the prisoner's dock, Émile looked on indifferently, remarking that he had seen many worse injuries in mining or factory accidents. Would he have used the other bombs in his room? "Naturally." When Potier interjected that he was cynical, Émile corrected him. "It is not cynicism, it is conviction!"

Potier reserved a hero's welcome for the policeman Poisson, who was wearing his new cross of the Legion of Honor, and, under his uniform, scars from two bullet wounds. Madame la Bar-onne d'Eckstedt, a wealthy woman who owned at least one building, and her sister both trembled when they related their evening at the Café Terminus. They had not wanted to give their names to the police, for fear of anarchist vengeance. The minister of the interior had awarded an indemnity of fifteen hundred francs to Madame Kinsbourg, another
rentière,
who had suffered three leg wounds.

A small parade of "experts" followed. The role of such witnesses became increasingly important in French legal proceedings during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Girard, the omnipresent director of the municipal laboratory, flattered Émile by saying that the bomb had been well put together, shattering marble tables and cast iron supports like flimsy wood. He described Émile's two bombs, the "reversal" device that had killed on rue des Bons-Enfants, and the fuse-detonated bomb that had exploded in the Terminus. When Hornbostel asked which was the more dangerous, Girard replied, "Both!"The second bomb could have been even more powerful but for a small fault in its mounting. Girard acknowledged that he and Émile had discussed this (scientist to scientist) and had agreed on the nature of the error. In Girard's opinion Émile would have needed someone to help him close the bomb, but the accused continued to insist that he had acted alone.

On the second day, the court summoned character witnesses for the defense, including one of Émile's former teachers. When Dupuy, his employer at the time of the explosion on rue des Bons-Enfants, completed his testimony, Émile cocked his head in a way that seemed to say, What is the use of defending me? His former boss replied with a shrug that suggested he had simply told the truth about the quality of his work. The comte Ogier d'lvry, son-in-law of the marquise de Chamborant, an army officer, and a self-styled man of letters, spoke as "a bourgeois condemned to death like all the others." He testified that he considered Émile a maniac and showed his disgust for his distant relative's crimes. He explained that all the Henry family had been "rebels"—republicans under the monarchy, Communards under the Republic, and now more anarchist than anarchy itself. Throughout the parade of witnesses, Émile demonstrated emotion only when his uncle Jean Bordenave, who had returned to Paris from Italy, left the dock. The accused man's eyes became moist with tears, and he said, "Thank you, and adieu! I will never see you again!"

Dr. Goupil, after asserting that he could not swear before a God in whom he did not believe, contended that Émile was mentally disturbed, perhaps a result of the typhoid fever he had suffered when he was twelve. In Goupil's opinion, he should be examined by specialists. Émile interrupted defiantly. "Pardon, but I don't want any of that. I am not in any way mentally disturbed." The accused took full responsibility for his acts: "My head does not need to be saved. I am not mad. I am perfectly aware of what I am doing." He stated that his notable academic success demonstrated full recovery from typhoid fever. Fortuné Henry, whom the presiding judge of the court had refused to let testify as a character witness, had written Hornbostel from Clairvaux prison to support the view that his brother was insane, a result of his father's being condemned to death in France in absentia and then "reduced to wandering in a foreign land." Dr. Goupil contended that Émile suffered from oversensitivity—it was "disgust, anger, and passion" that had led to his act.

Two days before the trial, Émile had written to the judge, saying that his mother had wanted to attend but that he had tried to dissuade her from doing so, even though Hornbostel wanted her to testify on her son's behalf. She spent all of the trial (except its first moments) waiting in a small room with several friends; each day of the trial, the press depicted her plight. Fearing how the ordeal might affect her, Émile at one point stood and asked Potier to disallow her attendance at the remainder of the proceedings. Spectators murmured their support, and the presiding judge momentarily suspended the trial.

Bulot summarized the prosecution's case and demanded the death penalty. Émile seemed to be an example of "a perfect little petty bourgeois." He was a property owner in Brévannes who had received the assistance he needed from his family and teachers. He had become "profoundly proud, envious, and marked by an implacable cruelty." His poor mother inspired only great pity, but her suffering should not influence the verdict. Her son's bombs had left five widows and ten orphans. Did the accused intend to solve the gnawing problem of poverty by killing people? Only capital punishment could "provide satisfaction." Émile would try to save himself to kill again. Even if he were sent to the hellhole of a prison in Cayenne in French Guiana, Émile would escape. When Bulot said that the accused had forgotten his duties to his mother, Émile exploded, standing up and shouting, "Do not insult my mother! You will not reproach my attitude toward my mother! You never cared if she was dying of hunger!"

Émile was then asked to present his own defense, the "Declaration" that he had written in the Conciergerie. He did so, speaking slowly and clearly, at first from memory, until finally asking for his notes. He defended anarchy and "propaganda by the deed." His presentation was compelling, even riveting—impressive even to those prepared to hate him for what he had done. He began by insisting that as an anarchist, he was responsible to but one tribunal, himself.

Émile went on: The state had guillotined a man who had killed no one—Auguste Vaillant. But the bourgeoisie and its police had not counted on unknown men, waiting in the shadows, appalled by police action, eager to lash out, "in turn, to hunt the hunters." Émile really did not need a specific provocation to kill, but the timing of the bomb at the Café Terminus was in his eyes a response to the repressive campaign against the anarchists and to the judicial murders of Ravachol and Vaillant.

Vaillant had been unknown to almost all
compagnons
before his arrest, Émile explained. Yet the police campaign against anarchists had made them collectively responsible for his act. Now it was the turn of the bourgeoisie to be collectively responsible for his execution. Should anarchists carry out deeds only against deputies who pass laws against us, magistrates who apply them, or policemen who enforce them? No. The police were acting on behalf of the bourgeoisie, who profit from the labor of workers. The petty bourgeois was no better than the others, applauding the acts of the government. Living on three hundred to five hundred francs a month, they were "stupid and pretentious, always lining up on the side of the strongest." They were the ordinary clientele of the Café Terminus and the other
grands cafés.
That is why he had struck so randomly. It was time for the bourgeoisie to understand that "those who suffer have finally had enough: they are showing their teeth and will strike even more brutally than they have been abused." The anarchists had no respect for human life because the bourgeoisie itself had shown none. Those who had murdered ordinary people in Fourmies should not call others murderers:

[We will] spare neither women nor children because the women and children we love have not been spared. Are they not innocent victims, these children, who in the faubourgs slowly die of anemia, because bread is rare at home; these women who in your workshops suffer exhaustion and are worn out in order to earn forty cents a day, happy that misery has not yet forced them into prostitution; these old men whom you have turned into machines so that they can produce their entire lives and whom you throw out into the street when they have been completely depleted?