The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (30 page)

For several years, a small group of
compagnons
commemorated Émile's execution by making a pilgrimage to the auberge in Brévannes. But over the years, their numbers dwindled. In 1896, someone managed to get into the cemetery to leave flowers, with the inscription
MEMORY AND VENGEANCE.
A rock was also placed on Émile's tomb, on which was written
MURDERED, A VICTIM OF SOCIETY.
In 1901, Madame Henry had apparently made it known that she would welcome "comrades" as she would any other clients but that she would not tolerate speeches and singing. Élisa Gauthey, although still living in Paris, had reap-peared in Brévannes on at least one anniversary of Émile's execution, chatting with the few
compagnons
present.

After his release from prison, Fortuné Henry took a job working for the Central Pharmacy in Paris, where he had earlier been employed. In 1896, Fortuné and Jules told anarchists who came to the auberge to pay homage to Émile that the two of them would become "men of action" only after their mother's death. But in 1904, Fortuné founded an anarchist community in Aiglemont in the Ardennes, renting a small piece of land. He constructed a hut made of clay and branches. He later purchased the place for eight hundred francs, but because he never did believe in property, a friend became the nominal owner. Fortuné began raising vegetables and managed to attract eleven people there. This seemed to be the kind of ideal, natural community that Proudhon had predicted would bring happiness and transform society. However, the participants began to quarrel, perhaps because of Fortuné's rather authoritarian personality. The community struggled until 1909. After five years of "ridiculous deprivations and hurt feelings, the attempt just collapsed miserably." Fortuné's practical experience in anarchism had failed. As for Jules, he took over his mother's auberge when he came of age, several years after the execution. Instead of becoming a militant anarchist, he started a small business selling eggs and butter, and he prospered.

Once "propaganda by the deed" no longer attracted adherents, anarchists turned their efforts to unionization, hoping that such organizations would provide a base for the future revolution. Unions had been illegal in France until 1884 (although in fact they had existed in many trades through aid or friendly societies, and some had served as "resistance societies" when necessary to support strikes). The National Federation of Unions was created two years later. In 1892, anarchists in London, among them Kropotkin and Malato, had already called for more involvement with unions. Pouget, in particular, had become impressed with the
success
of British trade unions and led his followers toward syndicalism. Like Errico Malatesta—whom Émile had attacked for his "associationalist" views—Pouget came to believe that the strength of the state could be countered only with organized labor. Moreover, unions pressed for reforms like the eight-hour day and, in doing so, helped integrate workers, unions, and socialism into the politics of the Third Republic.

In 1895,
Les Temps Nouveaux,
begun in May of that year with the support of Reclus and Kropotkin, published an article by the militant labor organizer Fernand Pelloutier, "Anarchism and the Trade Unions." Fatally ill with tuberculosis, Pelloutier described what he hoped would be the "dying society" of capitalism and explained his shift to syndicalism. What was sometimes called "anarcho-syndicalism" insisted that the shop floor offered not only the best means of planning revolution but also a glimpse of future human solidarity and organization. To Pelloutier, such a view did not require dynamite to be heard. Direct action through unions, not individual action or bombs, or involvement in politics, would be the means to revolution.

More militant workers, including many anarchists, also turned to unions, which made good use of the Labor Exchanges (Bourses du Travail) that had begun to spring up in French industrial cities in the late 1880s. Workers could go there to learn about job opportunities and to discuss their grievances and hopes for the future. Moreover, the Bourses provided solidarity and a social life for working-class families. The "heroic days of syndicalism" that began in 1895 and lasted in France until 1907 brought more strikes, as workers pursued the dream of a grand future General Strike, which would bring the capitalist state to its knees. In 1902, the Bourses joined the General Confederation of Labor (C.G.T.), which had been created in 1895 as an umbrella structure for trade unions. Achieving some palpable successes in reform, such as establishing an employer's legal liability for industrial accidents and reducing the workday to ten hours for women and children, the unions gradually improved the lives of many workers.

In 1898, a character much like Émile appeared in French literature, in Zola's
Paris
(1898) as little Victor Mathis, "slight and almost beardless, with a straight, stubborn brow, gray eyes glittering with intelligence, a pointed nose and thin lips expressive of stern will and unforgiving hatred." Like Émile, Mathis was an educated bourgeois, and he could have entered the ficole normale. In the story, Mathis avenges the guillotining of the character Salvat, as Émile had that of Vaillant. Mathis is, like Émile, "the destroyer pure and simple, the theoretician of destruction, the cold energetic man of intellect ... in his desire to make murder an instrument of the social evolution ... a poet, a visionary, but the most frightful of all visionaries ... who craved for the most awful immortality." But by the time
Paris
was published, the era of "propaganda by the deed" in France had drawn to a close.

Despite the fact that the "scoundrelly laws" had made the printing of anarchist propaganda extremely difficult, anarchists still published twelve newspapers in France in 1914. But they remained a small minority, on the fringe. In London, the anarchists had dispersed. Even Victor Richard's grocery store on Charlotte Street was considerably less welcoming to them. The funeral of Martial Bourdin, the French anarchist who had been blown up by a bomb as he walked through Greenwich Park on his way to destroy the Meridian, had been marked by counter-demonstrations, and the windows of the Autonomy Club had been smashed by a mob. The club closed in February 1894, and anarchists moved discreetly into more distant neighborhoods. They faced increasing hostility in London. On May Day of that year, crowds harassed anarchists gathering in Hyde Park.

Across Europe, the number of militant anarchists was beginning to decline. In early March 1894, the prefecture of police concluded that no more than five hundred of them resided in Paris, a dramatic decline. In 1897, a police expert gave the figure of four thousand, out of a French population of 39 million people. Those considered truly dangerous were few and were loners, like Émile and Caserio, men who virtually never spoke or acted but readied themselves in the shadows. No one, not even the militant anarchists, could predict their intentions. The solitary actor, of which Émile was the prime example, was above all discreet, and his transformation into a murderer, an avenger of social wrongs, was often sudden. It was almost impossible to monitor such people.

Isolated anarchist acts still occurred, to be sure. From December 1911 to May 1912, a band of self-styled violent anarchists terrorized France and Belgium. Led by a petty criminal and auto mechanic turned anarchist, Jules Bonnot, these men used automobiles (and thus were very modern) and rifles in a series of audacious and on occasion murderous hold-ups, notably of banks. They were killed or captured by the police, and three members were guillotined. Bonnot's band terrorized on a small scale but did not set off a revival of "propaganda by the deed." The members of the band were "illegalists," on the fringes of what remained of the movement. In 1914, on the eve of World War I, only about a thousand militant anarchists lived in France. Terrorism was no longer seen as an effective means to an end; even hard-core anarchists shared this conclusion.

Elsewhere anarchism continued a checkered course. In Italy, government restraint after the assassination of King Umberto I in 1900 by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci undercut the movement, reducing anarchist attacks. As in France, workers increasingly turned to unions and politics. In contrast, in Spain anarchism remained extremely potent, especially in the port and industrial suburbs of Barcelona and among the miserably poor, exploited laborers in rural Andalusia. In close alliance with nobles and churchmen, the government undertook a program of brutal repression following the enactment of legislation in 1896—which allowed, among other things, the torture of suspected anarchists—and this swelled the anger of the poor. As one Spanish anarchist put it, "The problem was not only one of bread but one of hatred." Executions brought reprisals, continuing a chain of violence.

In May 1906, as King Alfonso XIII and his new bride, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria of Great Britain, traveled by carriage from their wedding ceremony to the royal palace, an anarchist threw a bomb at them. They were unscathed, but the attack killed twenty-three people and injured more than a hundred. Three years later, Spanish soldiers and police killed more than two hundred people during "the Tragic Week," five days of combat in the streets of Barcelona during a general strike in which anarchists played a major part. The torture of a well-known anarchist, Francisco Ferrer, attracted worldwide attention, garnering sympathy for anarchists as well as disdain for government policies. That the Spanish labor movement remained relatively disorganized relative to its French and Italian counterparts meant that many workers looked to anarchism for hope. Thus, while the press in many other countries helped affirm the stereotype of the anarchist as a dangerous bomber, in Spain his image remained that of a martyr, victimized by the state. Anarchist attacks in Spain continued following World War I. Despite the duplicity of their Stalinist rivals, anarchists would play a major role in the defense of the republic against Franco's nationalist forces during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). But in the end the shaky alliance defending the republic lost, and the 150, 000 people executed by the new government included thousands of anarchists.

In the United States, anarchist attacks killed more than fifty people from 1914 to 1920. In 1919, about thirty bombs were sent through the mail to U.S. officials, ranging from the attorney general to mayors. Two months later, explosions rocked the residences of officials in seven cities. On September 16, 1920, an attack on Wall Street, possibly the work of an Italian anarchist, killed thirty-three people and wounded more than two hundred. In Russia, the revolution of 1917 quickly turned into a nightmare for anarchists. By 1920, the Bolsheviks had crushed their anarchist allies, with whom they had united in the Civil War against the White forces in Ukraine. A largely popular revolution was transformed into a dictatorship. "They have shown how the revolution is
not
to be made," Kropotkin insisted. The anarchist told Lenin, "Vladimir Ilyich, your concrete actions are completely unworthy of the ideas you pretend to hold ... What future lies in store for communism when one of its most important defenders tramples in this way on every honest feeling?"

The "dynamite club" in France was more imagined than real. It was the creation of fearful Parisians, with the help of the popular press. A well-placed police specialist at the time wrote that those who believed that anarchist deeds were the result of an organized plot were flat wrong. The real threat came from individual anarchist bombers, like Émile. This did not make the upper clases any less anxious, but it did suggest that going after organized plots was folly. In the words of this particular agent, "there weren't any."

So what did link the anarchists who went to the guillotine? Ravachol was a marginal character, "a great bandit, a savage rebel who had put himself in the service of the anarchist cause." Vaillant was a family man crushed by hunger and misery, unable to feed his family, who lashed out in a desperate attempt to call attention to the plight of poor people. Pauwels was an occasional laborer, a thug, and a born killer. Caserio, alone in his misery at age twenty-one, learned to hate the rich.

Émile was different. He was a young middle-class intellectual who might have enjoyed a productive life, were it not for his father's treatment at the hands of the state, exacerbated by the appalling poverty that Émile witnessed in Paris. Émile remained a complex person, a self-detesting bourgeois who proclaimed over and over his hatred for "the bourgeoisie." He was confident, proud, even arrogant, distant, indeed cold, dismissive of the "crowd" that he considered "cowardly" and ignorant of their true interests. "In contrast to Vaillant, who loved the people," Charles Malato remembered, "Émile Henry only loved the idea. He felt a marked estrangement from the ignorant and servile plebs, a feeling shared by a number of literary and artistic anarchists," by whom Malato meant, among others, Camille Pissarro, Laurent Tailhade, and Émile's own friend Félix Fénéon. During his final days in his cell in La Roquette, Émile wrote, "I love all people in their humanity for what they should become, but I have contempt for what they are."

In his own way, Émile could be described as a nineteenth-century Hamlet. He took arms against the sea of troubles devastating much of humanity, seeking to bring an end to them with his bombs.

In 1900, Paris proudly presented itself to tourists as "a pacified capital, far from the tragic and bloody days of revolution." The omnipresent police, with garrisons of soldiers always ready to assist if necessary, ensured public order. The City of Light was a different place, even wealthier than before. The traditional revolutionary neighborhoods of the center Right Bank had gradually become less densely populated, the very texture of some neighborhoods destroyed or at least altered by Haussmann's boulevards. Moreover, ordinary people increasingly lived on the urban periphery. Paris had been subdued.

The French state, against which the anarchists struggled, helped lead Europe into a murderous war in 1914. The Great War killed about 9 million men, including 1.5 million French soldiers, and unleashed the demons of the twentieth century.