The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (3 page)

The modern glories of Paris were on full display during the magnificent Exposition Universelle in 1889, a world's fair that affirmed the triumph of the Third Republic, France's prominent role in Europe, and the expanding French colonial empire in Southeast Asia and Africa. This empire, to be sure, had been constructed at the expense of peoples considered to be the "inferior races," as Jules Ferry, who had served as minister for foreign affairs, termed them. This attitude was reflected in some of the exhibits, including the "Negro Village," which exhibited hundreds of Africans. The exposition, which stretched along both sides of the Seine in western Paris, also celebrated technological progress (with omnipresent reminders of France and Paris as the center of Beaux-Arts). Most of the more than 32 million visitors who strolled through the enormous Gallery of Machines gazed down from a catwalk to view the wonders achieved by science, especially in the form of consumer goods. Thomas Edison himself, "the Wizard of Menlo Park," had a look at the pavilion that celebrated his work, ten years after electricity illuminated a grand Parisian café for the first time.

The Eiffel Tower commemorated the Revolution and France's Third Republic. Nine hundred feet in height, it then stood as the tallest structure in the world. Built of iron, the tower symbolized the glories of engineering as well as the industrial age in general.

But the progress celebrated at the exposition and the fruits of capitalism on display in the boulevards, department stores, hotels, and cafés brought unforeseen economic and social consequences. Even as the middle classes embraced Paris's elegant cafés, the horseraces at Longchamps, and rides through the Bois de Boulogne. Some bourgeois came to feel disconnected, even isolated, anonymous, and helpless, as they sought new urban pleasures. The work of the early impressionists, particularly Gustave Caillebotte, reflects this sense of dislocation. Bourgeois couples or individuals share space, but nothing else, or gaze down on the street from the isolated safety of an apartment. The Catholic poet and writer Charles Péguy would famously exclaim that "the World has changed less since Jesus Christ than it has in the past thirty years," and the pace of innovation was hard to adjust to.

But if one was to be a victim of this trend, it was certainly better to be a rich one, or at least a middle-class one, than truly poor. The seemingly endless wonders of modern times had brought precious little to the indigent. Augustin Léger, an anarchist, described the place of the Opera in the imagination of the poor:

What I saw in the evening when I wandered through the wealthy neighborhoods! The other day, I was walking near the opera. There was some sort of nighttime occasion going on ... I saw luxurious carriages, men and women covered with jewelry, dressed in their finery, carrying rare flowers, and I noted scandalous scenes, as well! I was shocked. What a beautiful society when the budget of the state spends four million francs on the opera each year as a subsidy, with the goal of making even it ever more beautiful ... while poor people try to get by in the streets and public places, without anywhere to live ... What kind of society is this when the rich drink full glasses of champagne with women to whom they give fistfuls of money, while their brothers in the lower classes die of misery, the cold, and hunger!

A visitor who glanced away from the centers of flamboyant Parisian prosperity observed that "away in the distance, on the horizon, across light violet mists, lay uncertain outlines of smoky suburbs, behind which, nothing being visible, we still fancied Paris. On another side, other enormous suburbs, crowded upon the heights like armies ready to descend, full of sadness and menace." The guest was looking toward the north and northeast. Paris, after all, was still predominantly a city of workers, the privileged neighborhoods in western Paris notwithstanding. Handicraft production was still important in the capital of luxury but had declined in relative terms. The second industrial revolution brought factories producing rubber, steel, and machines to the outskirts of Paris, an area that offered more space, proximity to rail and canal transport, and a way to avoid the customs barriers that taxed goods entering Paris's city limits, thereby making raw materials somewhat cheaper. The northern and eastern faubourgs—peripheral settlements once beyond the city limits but now well within them—gave way to increasingly industrialized suburbs, where many of the workers lived. These included skilled workers such as ironsmiths, foundry workers, and mechanics; semiskilled laborers such as machine tenders; unskilled proletarians, among them thousands of women; and service workers who lived on the outskirts of Paris but often worked in the fancier neighborhoods of the center and west. "Dirty" industries, such as manufacturers of soaps and chemicals, were relegated to the outskirts; they involved activities and people unwanted by those in the center. Beyond the city limits, wine and other drinks were cheaper, and modest bars thrived.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the lives of most workers had marginally improved, at least if one considers wages and the cost of living. Their diet was more varied, and the relative price of food had declined. Yet economic instability, physical exhaustion, and frequent unemployment still defined working-class existence. The contrast between the relatively prosperous west and the proletarian east was gradually matched by the disparity between center and periphery, a development hastened by Haussmann's construction. In the mid-188os, in twelve of these poorer neighborhoods, ordinary workers made up more than 70 percent of the population. Other neighborhoods boasted an even larger proportion of them.

In fact, the population of Paris had risen from about 1.8 million people in 1872 to almost 2.5 million by 1891. Impoverished people from the provinces arrived and accelerated the development of working-class suburbs on the margins of urban life. This immigration swelled the ranks of Parisians—many, if not most, driven to urban life by the monumental difficulty of making ends meet in rural France. Falling prices for farm products meant that what farmers raised brought in little money. Moreover, the grape phylloxera epidemic attacked the country's vineyards. In Paris, craft production became saturated. These new workers found jobs in recently established industries, such as metallurgy, which by 1898 occupied over two thousand factories, employing more than twenty workers each. The exterior districts (arrondissements) grew far more rapidly than did the central city. These heavily populated industrial suburbs subsumed land that had only recently presented a bucolic scene of villages and farms.

If wages and conditions of life had improved for Parisian workers during the 1870s, unemployment kept about half of the working population on the edge of economic disaster. During years of recession, notably 1883–87, 1889, and 1892, between a quarter and a half of all workers in major occupations were unemployed. And in most years, perhaps half of all industrial workers lived in poverty, particularly as wages in some sectors declined. Getting enough to eat was a constant preoccupation for ordinary working people.

Within the limits of the city itself, tens of thousands of workers were piled into old houses, basements, attics, and even stables that had been divided and then subdivided into small rooms. Many were only a few square yards in size, some with ceilings of less than two yards in height. Extra floors were maladroitly added where possible, and the tiny, unsanitary apartments often lacked running water or heat. Thousands of workers lived in rooming houses, which offered little more than a bed in a tiny room or in a dormitory, where beds were laid out side by side. Because of these conditions, landlords were a target of popular wrath.

"People's Paris" remained in many ways a very unhealthful place to live, its hovels notorious. Rates of infant mortality and death from tuberculosis were both much higher on the periphery—for TB, five times greater in the impoverished twentieth district in the far northeast than in the district of the Opera. Moreover, in the industrial suburbs, with their chemical and metallurgical factories, tanneries, freight railway stations, and canals, shacks of all sorts formed nascent shantytowns, standing amid mud and raw sewage. If drinkable water was now available in the center of Paris, this was by no means the case in the industrial suburbs such as Saint-Ouen, where women lined up early in the morning with buckets to get filtered water when the faucets were opened for the street sweepers. In the suburbs more than thirty thousand wells stood near cesspools that were hardly ever emptied.

People of means got around in Paris by horse-drawn omnibus, tramway, taxi, or private carriage. Thirty-four lines of omnibuses—rectangular, closed carriages with windows, drawn by two or three horses—crisscrossed Paris from seven in the morning until shortly after midnight. An omnibus could be expected to pass about every five minutes. They complemented the tramways, even larger carriages pulled by horses along tracks, which could accommodate up to fifty people. The poor, however, had to walk, because they lacked the money for a fare.

In the mid-188os the tramway lines radiated to a number of suburbs, including Saint-Denis, Gennevilliers, and Vitry, as well as Versailles, a rather different kind of suburb. But their cost—fifty centimes for the tramway—was prohibitive for most people. Riverboats (
bateaux-mouches
) had begun their journeys through Paris in 1867, depositing passengers on both sides of the Seine. There were now more than a hundred of them—but, again, it cost ten to twenty centimes to take them. Private carriages, much more expensive, were simply out the question for ordinary people. Thus each day, from the heights of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth arrondissements, thousands of workers and domestics of every conceivable variety walked down to work, returning on foot that night. Most anyone having to go from one suburb to another walked, because there was no other way: public transportation lines in Paris radiated like spokes on a wheel, just as the railroads did, to and from the capital.

In short, the belle époque was not
belle
for most French men and women, who had little reason for optimism and great concern for the future. Millions still lived in abject misery. The gap between the wealthy and the poor had, if anything, increased. The
livret,
a booklet that workers were obliged to carry in which was inscribed past work experience (and made it easy to blacklist militants), disappeared only in 1890. In the best of circumstances a working-class family of four all had jobs, and the father who worked three hundred days a year could bring home about 450 francs. His spouse could earn about 180 francs, and two children each about 65, for a total of 760 francs. Unfortunately, a family of four required about 860 francs just to get by.
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The elite residents of the center and the western districts considered Paris's periphery dangerous, even if they actually knew little about these neighborhoods. Conservative supporters of the republic associated loss of religion, crime, and political radicalism with these outlying urban areas, especially those districts that lay beyond the now obsolete fortifications ("it is a completely red area, exuding death and blood"). Indeed, most of the exterior arrondissements, with the exception of western Paris, supported socialist candidates in national and municipal elections. Beginning with May 1,1890, when workers marched for the eight-hour day in a country that lagged behind other nation-states in legislative reform, each May Day seemed to raise the possibility of Armageddon in Paris, despite the fact that the marches were invariably peaceful.

The numerous bars of the working-class neighborhoods—about twenty-five thousand such places were licensed to sell alcohol in Paris in the 1890s—aroused apprehension, even fear, among the upper classes. Henry Leyret, a journalist, bought a shabby estaminet, Le Déluge, in Belleville, to observe for himself the life of ordinary people in Paris. It was in such places, "barely furnished with basic necessary objects, extremely modest with several wooden tables covered by waxed cloth, where the worker can feel at home, and can be as he is. He feels at ease there, he talks, gossips, relating his little stories, elbows on the table..." For the price of a small cup of coffee in a central Parisian café, here a glass of absinthe, or several glasses of wine, could be had. Leyret counted twenty-five drinking spots within two hundred yards of his bar, a world of popular slang and boisterous celebration as well as heartbreaking despair.

Leyret observed the solidarity of ordinary people, their constant need for short-term loans, and their conscious hatred of the police and the petty bourgeois, many of whom had conveniently forgotten their working-class origins as they rose in society and now considered workers with contempt, if not complete revulsion. For the petty bourgeois, it was "everyone for himself."

Workers chronically feared not being able to make ends meet. As Leyret put it, "Life is not just a bowl of cherries. One has to eat, that ultimate necessity that dominates all other feelings." There were 200,000 unemployed workers in Paris. When their children complained, "Papa, I'm hungry!" some workers were forced to steal and some women became part-time prostitutes in order to pay the bills. In the opinion of the fledgling barman, ordinary workers might not tolerate such misery for much longer. They were bitterly disappointed by the Third Republic, rife as it was with financial scandals. Yet only a minority of these workers had joined unions. Some were suspicious of them, and others were not employed long enough in a unionized trade. Still others were indifferent, or demoralized. Most ignored elections, which had done virtually nothing to improve their lives. Utter disgust for parliament was rampant, particularly the Chamber of Deputies, scorned as "The Aquarium."

Leyret recalled a discussion with a muscular worker, who exclaimed, "Goddammit, there are real men in Paris, who could take up their rifles, tools, pickaxes, and other things. To give a real thrashing to the government and its fat cat deputies, there had been the Revolution!...But then they spent their time yowling and jabbering, and that was the end of it...!" When the government shut down the Paris Labor Exchange in a typical act of repression, Leyret was struck by how fast the working-class initially mobilized, as the word "spread from the Latin Quarter to place de la Bastille, from place Maubert to Menilmontant, reaching the heights of Belleville, awakening the old instincts of the old Parisian fighters who work hard and who suffer." But that was all. The partisans of violence had missed "a wonderful occasion!" There were no chiefs ready to lead. Yet study groups and political organizations had proliferated. Public meetings and debates filled the halls of the periphery. The socialists, who now had organized political parties, were profiting from all this, swelling their ranks. To some, they at least seemed to offer some hope.