The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror
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Authors: John Merriman
Copyright © 2009 by John Merriman
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
For information about permission to reproduce selections from
this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
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New York, New York 10003.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication Data
Merriman, John M.
The dynamite club : how a bombing in fin-de-siècle Paris
ignited the age of modern terror / John Merriman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
978-0-618-55598-7
1. Bombings—France—Paris—History—19th century. 2. Terrorism—
France—Paris—History—19th century. 3. Anarchism—France—
Paris—History—19th century. 4. Henry, Émile, 1872–1894. I. Title.
HV
6433.
F
7
A
636 2009 363.3250944'36l—dc22 2008049470
Printed in the United States of America
Book design by Robert Overholtzer
DOC
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Paris, 1894F
OR
V
ICTORIA
J
OHNSON
Places Where Émile Henry Lived and Worked
1. 101, rue Marcadet
2. 10, boulevard Morland
3. 31, rue Véron
4. Villa Faucheur, 1–3, rue des Envierges
5. 32, rue du Sentier
6. 5, rue de Rocroy
7. Constant Martin's Shop, 3, rue Joquelet
8. Offices of
La Révolte,
140, rue Mouffetard
9. Salle du Commerce, 94, rue du Faubourg-du-Temple
10. Home of Élisa Gauthey, 167, boulevard Voltaire
11. Carmaux Mining Company, 11, avenue de l'Opéra
12. Police Station, 22, rue des Bons Enfants
13. Execution site, place de la Roquette
14. Café Terminus, rue Saint-Lazare
The Café Terminus
IN HIS ROOM
on the edge of Paris, Émile Henry was preparing a bomb. He took a worker's metal lunchbox, broke off the handle and lid, and placed a cartridge of dynamite inside. He then filled a zinc tube with 120 pieces of buckshot, adding green powder and picric acid to make a deadly mix. In a small opening in the tube, he put a capsule of mercury fulminate, along with a fuse that would burn for fifteen to eighteen seconds, which he attached with sealing wax. The fuse protruded from the screw hole that had once secured the handle. Having soldered the tin container and wrapped wire around it, Émile put the bomb, which weighed about five pounds, in a deep pocket of his overcoat. He then armed himself with a loaded pistol and a knife, and walked out the door. It was February 12,1894.
His hand firmly on the bomb, the pale young man headed to the elegant boulevards in the area of the Opera. He wanted to detonate the bomb in this wealthy district, killing as many people as possible. He counted on fifteen dead and twenty wounded at the very least.
At the end of avenue de l'Opéra, Émile Henry stopped in front of the opera house, a giant gilded wedding cake of a building, its scale and rich decoration signifying the monumental ambition and self-indulgence of its founders and patrons. In that twenty-year-old edifice a fancy ball was taking place, and Émile knew that he could not get past the guards to throw his bomb. Upon moving away he mumbled to no one in particular, "Oh, I would have made them dance in there." He checked out the restaurant Bignon and the chic Café de la Paix in the Grand Hôtel, then proceeded to the Café Américain on rue de la Paix. (Had he consulted the Baedeker guide for 1889, he would have noted that it was "less frequented in the evening") He looked a little like a flâneur, an intellectual who might be something of a dandy, but Émile was in fact an impoverished bourgeois who lived on the margins of urban life. He strolled along the
grands boulevards
not just to observe nightlife in a detached manner, but to hate and to kill. The carriages and wagons that passed as he walked along boulevard des Ca-pucines may have included a black wagon carrying the "
bois de justice"—
the guillotine. An execution was planned for the following morning at place de la Roquette in a working-class neighborhood of Paris.
At about 8
P.M
., Émile reached the Café Terminus, around the corner from the busy Gare Saint-Lazare. The Hôtel Terminus was only about twenty years old. The café, which one entered from rue Saint-Lazare, took up the ground floor; the hotel rooms occupied the upper floors. Opposite the entrance stood the counter where waiters collected drinks for patrons and behind which stood the cashiers and bartenders. Beyond that, up several steps, was the grand hall of the adjacent Restaurant Terminus. In the far left corner of the grand hall stood a compact raised stage, set for a small gypsy orchestra scheduled to play that evening.
Although his clothing was hardly elegant, with his dark pants, tie, and black felt hat, Émile Henry seemed like someone who might naturally be present there. At
8 P.M
., as the café was slowly filling, he went in and took a small table to the right of the glass door that gave onto rue Saint-Lazare. He ordered a beer, and soon another, along with a cigar, and paid for them as the orchestra played. The musical program began at exactly 8:30, as it did each evening. It was to include seven pieces in the first set, to be followed by five violin solos (among them, pieces by Meyerbeer and Rossini). Several instrumental transcriptions of popular operatic arias were on offer. A short entr'acte, consisting of polkas, and a little Wagner were to follow. By 9
P.M.,
about 350 people had assembled in the Terminus. At 9:01, the small orchestra had just started to play the fifth piece in the first set, music from Daniel Auber's opera
Les diamants de la couronne.
Émile found the music annoying, but, in any case, he had other plans. He took the bomb from his overcoat pocket, got up, and walked to the door, which a waiter closed behind him. But after taking a step or two outside, Émile turned back, lit the fuse (on the third try) with his cigar, opened the door, grabbed it with his left hand for support, and threw the bomb into the café, toward the orchestra.
This book is motivated by a very simple question: why did Émile Henry do what he did? Getting inside the mind of a bomber is no easy task, especially when the bombing took place over a century ago and halfway around the world. But for a historian in the early twenty-first century, the temptation is irresistible. Embroiled in our own "war on terror," it may well be instructive to look to the past for insight. The parallel is not a perfect one—the differences between the Islamist fundamentalists and Émile Henry's circle are obvious—but a deeper look reveals a gossamer thread connecting the two. And in that thread lies an important story.
Paris at the end of the nineteenth century was a place of shocking social inequalities. Far from the magnificent cathedral of Notre Dame, the sparkling opera house, the recently constructed Eiffel Tower, then the tallest structure in the world, and indeed far from all the glittering electric lights, department stores, and sprawling cafés of "the capital of Europe," the poor lived in wretched neighborhoods. They had no political or economic recourse to improve their lot and no voice in government. Over the course of the nineteenth century, European states had enormously increased their ability to extract taxes from the people and conscript men into the military, all in the name of national pride. These demands placed a heavy burden on millions of subjects and citizens, from whom the ruling classes required unquestioning allegiance, even as they themselves started wars and crushed political dissidence. The powerful even engaged in state-sponsored terrorism—the terms
terror
and
terrorism
had, after all, been coined to describe state policies during the most radical phase of the French Revolution.
Naturally, this state of affairs fueled outrage among many Parisians. One of them was Émile Henry. He blamed capitalism, religion, the army, and the state for the plight of the underclass, who struggled to get by as the rich lived it up. In the city of lights, Émile Henry felt dislocated, alienated, and angry. It made him a perfect recruit for anarchism.
A historian once said that it "is bitter hard to write the history of remainders." This is certainly the problem facing any chronicler of anarchism, a philosophy that today has very few followers indeed. During its heyday, from 1880 to 1914, anarchist assassinations and bomb attacks occurred, by one count, in sixteen countries, including Australia and others in Europe, North America, and South America. Like many Utopian movements, anarchism developed as intolerable social and political conditions led its proponents to imagine and strive for a different, more just world, in which the beleaguered would at last prevail. This vision transcended national boundaries and cultures.
Thus
The Dynamite Club
is a story of Europe at the end of the nineteenth century: of those who held power and others who rose against it, in the name of what they saw as a just cause. But it is also the story of a changing world, in which new networks of communication and transportation connected people around the globe and brought waves of immigrants to countries such as the United States.
Most of all, it is the story of a very unusual terrorist. Armed with a bomb—and not his first—Émile Henry struck out blindly. While earlier anarchist bombers chose, for symbolic reasons, to target heads of states and uniformed officials, Émile was different. He was willing to sacrifice innocent life for what he considered a great cause. Moreover, unlike many anarchists, he was not born into abject misery. His family owned property, and he was an intellectual of academic achievement, with a bright future. The day he threw a bomb into the Café Terminus was a defining moment in modern history. It was the day that ordinary people became the targets of terrorists.
Light and Shadows in the Capital of Europe
VERY EARLY IN
France's Second Empire (1852–70), Emperor Napoleon III summoned Georges Haussmann, prefect of the
département
of the Seine. He instructed him to forge wide boulevards through the tangle of Parisian streets. Ostensibly, the emperor's goal was to help free the flow of goods and commerce and to bring more light, air, and thus better health to France's proud capital. But there was also a more subtle goal. At a time when European monarchs were desperately trying to maintain their authority against rising liberal, nationalist, and socialist movements—this would come to be called "the rebellious century"—Paris was the capital of revolution. Napoleon III wanted Haussmann to plow new boulevards through and around some of the most traditionally revolutionary neighborhoods,
quartiers
that had risen up during the French Revolution of 1789, the Revolution of July 1830, and the Parisian civil war of June 1848. Even more recently, barricades had gone up following the coup d'état on December 2,1851, orchestrated by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, then the president of the Second French Republic. After destroying the republic, he proclaimed himself emperor the next year, just as his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte, had done almost fifty years earlier.