The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (12 page)

To be happy, goddammit,
You have got to kill those who own property,
To be happy, goddammit,
You must cut the priests in two,
To be happy, goddammit,
Put the good Lord into the shit...

The guillotine's blade, operated skillfully by the chief executioner, Antoine-Louis Deibler, cut short Ravachol's attempt to shout "
Vive la révolution!
"

In his "Eulogy for Ravachol," the anarchist critic Paul Adam warned that "the murder of Ravachol will open an era." He had been impressed with the way that Ravachol had propagated "the great idea that the ancient religions advocated the quest for death for the good of the world, the abnegation of oneself ... for the exaltation of the poor and the humble." Ravachol became "the peal of thunder to which succeeds the joy of sunlight and of peaceful skies." Adam portrayed Ravachol as "a redeemer" and compared his "sacrifice and suffering" to those of Jesus Christ: Both were nonconformists, both expressed contempt for the values of contemporary society, and both represented high ideals. Both were executed at age thirty-three. Christ had been betrayed by Judas, and Ravachol, a "violent Christ," as described by Victor Barrucand in
L'Endehors,
had been betrayed by the waiter in Le Véry (as well as by his former friend, Chaumartin, who had provided magistrates with important evidence). A woodprint by the artist Charles Maurin, reproduced frequently in the anarchist press, portrayed Ravachol as a martyr, his defiant, heroic visage set within the frame of a guillotine.

Ordinary criminals might appear downtrodden, colorful, or wretched, victims of fate or poor choices. Ravachol had been different. His almost "noble bearing" before death and his determined defense of anarchism until the very end stood out for all to see. He seemed to mock the guillotine, confident that ultimately his cause would win out.
Père Peinard
taunted,

Ravachol's head has rolled at their feet; they fear it will explode, just like a bomb!...And for Christ sake's shut up about your whore of a society; it has no need of being defended—it's at its death rattle ... You claim that his death at the guillotine is an expiation. Well, why did you hide like bandits to do the trick? Why encircle the prison with thousands of troops, rifle in hand, bayonets fixed? Why only one little spot left free: the one where Ravachol would be assassinated?...And the guillotine-lickers are there surrounding him, never taking their eyes off him. If only he would have a moment of weakness. If only his eyes had become misty for a moment or two and they could have bleated to their whorespapers: "Ravachol trembled."

Ravachol had wanted to keep speaking, but Deibler's assistants had thrown him down on the plank and, holding him by his ears, forced his head into the guillotine's glassless window, even as he continued to shout.

The "Song of Père Duchesne," which Ravachol had sung during his last steps to the guillotine, was reprinted by
La Révolte,
and the lyrics were widely circulated. Anarchist publications saluted his "greatness of character." Pouget's almanac in 1893 reproduced his portrait and saluted Ravachol's "dandy adaptation of cooking pots to the solution of the social question." Five thousand copies of a brief commentary titled "Ravachol, an Anarchist? Absolutely!" were circulated, echoing Cookie; it was attributed to Fortuné Henry. Fénéon proclaimed that the anarchist "deeds" had done more for propaganda than two decades of brochures by Kropotkin or Reclus. Anarchist newspapers and arguably the coverage given to such attacks by the mainstream press publicized "propaganda by the deed." Thus emerged the stereotype of the dark-coated, elusive anarchist lurking in the shadows with a bomb hidden under his coat, an image that Joseph Conrad would later capture in
The Secret Agent.

The anarchist press called for vengeance, saluting the memory of the martyr Ravachol. According to
L'Endehors,
when dynamite spoke, people listened, and "the conspiracy of silence [was] vanquished." It was sheer delusion to imagine a peaceful revolution "in face of the blind oppression of Capital"; this was the dream of those who had never been hungry. Anarchists sang "La Ravachole" to the tune of a leftist song from the days of the French Revolution, the "Carmagnole":

In the Great City of Paris
Live the well-fed bourgeois
And the destitute who have empty stomachs
But they have long teeth.
Let's dance the Ravachole, Long live the sound,
Let's dance the Ravachole, long live the sound of the explosion!
It will be, it will be,
All the bourgeois will taste the bomb,
It will be, it will be,
These bourgeois, these bourgeois, we'll blow them up!

A tailor penned a song in honor of "Dame Dynamite":

Our fathers once danced
To the sound of the cannons of the past!
Now this tragic dance
Requires stronger music.
Let's dynamite, let's dynamite!
         Refrain
Lady Dynamite, let's dance fast!
Let's dance and sing!
Lady Dynamite, let's dance fast!
Let's dance and sing, and dynamite!

The spectacular and seemingly unprecedented attacks generated a veritable psychosis that took hold of Paris. Everyone knew that a considerable stock of dynamite had been hidden somewhere. Ravachol had proudly refused to account for the remaining cartridges that had been in his possession. Moreover, Ravachol himself had promised that he would be avenged. This was hardly reassuring. The factories that produced explosives and chemicals were located in the industrial suburbs, right in the hotbed of anarchy. Authorities suspected that workers were stealing dynamite and cartridges from factories, workshops, and mines, and stored them in secret places. Miners, in particular, could easily procure dynamite.

Dynamite and the fear of anarchist attacks became lodged in the upper-class imagination, contributing to the sense that Parisians were living in a whole new era. As one bombing followed another, it became possible to imagine an organized plot—a dynamite club—against society of unprecedented destructive power. Newspaper headlines stoked Parisians' anxieties. The dailies dramatized each anarchist attack, competing for eager, if apprehensive, readers. This coverage pushed the Third Republic's financial scandals off the front pages, to the relief of compromised politicians. People of means were afraid to frequent elegant restaurants or attend the theater, and many planned to send their families to the provinces if the government did not act decisively against what seemed to be a rapidly increasing threat. Some owners of apartments in fancy neighborhoods now hesitated to rent to magistrates, for fear of the "
dynamitards.
" Bulot, who had prosecuted the Clichy three and Ravachol, noted that magistrates were becoming targets: "Really!" he complained, "the profession of judge is becoming impossible because of the anarchists!" Jean Grave replied in
La Révolte
that it was surprising that a functionary who earned his living calling for executions did not realize that there might eventually be some danger in it for him. Ravachol so terrified his upper-class contemporaries that for a time his name was used as a French verb:
ravacholiser
meant "to kill someone, preferably by blowing up the person with dynamite."

In the meantime, hundreds of scrawled messages left in mailboxes or sent by regular mail gave ravenous landlords and unfair concierges something to worry about. Such missives were signed by "the avengers of Ravachol," "the
compagnons
of Ravachol," or "an anarchist from the
quartier.
" An "exploiter of the proletarian" received a message telling him that "Next Sunday, May 1, you will be blown up!" It was signed "Dynamite." A group of anarchists had sworn to eliminate the bourgeois who exploited them. How would this be accomplished? Nothing could be simpler—"a little dynamite and you can kiss goodbye the riches you have accumulated, thanks to the sweat of workers." A certain Madame Boubon-neaud, a property owner of some means, received her warning from those who followed "the school of Ravachol ... We are going to Ravachol you."

In the Chamber of Deputies, one deputy accused anarchists of working "to wipe out the work of six thousand years and take the world back to the age of cavemen, without seeing that humanity would again assume the painful burden of centuries of barbarism ... Their savage hatred and furious rage aim at nothing less than the destruction of all that exists."

The police moved against anarchists, whether or not they espoused "propaganda by the deed"—and the vast majority of anarchists did not. The authorities used existing laws to expel foreigners, including Germans, Austrians, Belgians, Italians (among them Malatesta), and at least one Spaniard. One day late in April, the police arrested sixty-six anarchists, most of whom were considered propagandists. The prefecture of police increased the number of undercover police and paid informants. The police undertook searches, seized newspapers and correspondence, made arrests for little or no reason, and intimidated employers into firing workers suspected of being anarchists. The government gave the police in Paris free rein, with virtually no constraints. The "dynamite psychosis" seemed to justify countless violations of individual rights.

At first Émile Henry rejected the deeds of Ravachol. "Such acts," he said, "can only do great damage to our cause ... A true anarchist strikes his enemy, but he does not dynamite houses where there are women, children, workers, and domestics." But Émile soon came to embrace Ravachol's tactics for carrying out the revolution. Indeed, police suspected that Émile and his older brother had gone to Montbrison with the goal of blowing up the house of the prosecuting attorney. Police met virtually every train, but neither brother was actually seen in Montbrison or Saint-Étienne.

As Émile now saw at close range, the state was becoming ever more powerful, fully capable of defending the privileges of the rich while the destitute struggled to survive. The repressive police campaign in the wake of Ravachol's bombs was a reflection of this. Revolution seemed to require strong, violent acts in order to impress ordinary people.

The neighborhoods in which Émile lived help turn his love for humanity into a steely hatred for people of means. With the exception of a short stint in a tiny room at 10, boulevard Morland, between the Bastille and the Seine (he left without paying his rent after a month), his time in Paris was spent in plebeian Montmartre and then in Belleville. From November 25,1891, to October 8, 1892, he lived in a room on the third floor at 101, rue Marcadet, in the eighteenth arrondissement. Every day, Émile encountered the ravages of poverty and misery.

The building in which Émile lived stood within the shadow of Montmartre, dominated by the basilica of Sacré-Coeur, still under construction at that time. As Émile walked through the streets of his neighborhood, he caught occasional glimpses of the looming structure.

Sacré-Coeur's very presence on Montmartre gnawed at the anarchists, along with other groups of disadvantaged people. The anarchist lithographer Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen depicted an imaginary revolutionary attack on the basilica. At Montmartre's café Le Chat Noir, the audience sang: "Since a temple has burdened it, our old Montmartre is much changed, because of the construction on our butte." It was rumored that more than a hundred dynamite cartridges were ready to go, stocked in Saint-Denis. In July, several
compagnons
let it be known in a meeting that dynamite would be distributed by the anarchist group The Miners' Revenge, with the goal of destroying Sacré-Coeur. A year later, an anarchist meeting protested the "provocations" of the clergy, an occupying force on Montmartre. In 1893, a man known only as "Captain Boulogne" proposed to a meeting of anarchists that they vote to blow up Sacré-Coeur.

In Zola's novel
Paris
(1898), Guillaume Froment wants to strike a blow for anarchism. He first considers blowing up the Opera. But he concludes that this would "in the whirlwind of anger and justice [only] destroy a little set of enjoyers." Why not the Bourse? But such "a blow at money, the great agent of corruption," would also have limited impact. Nor would he target the "Palais d'Injustice," or the Arc de Triomphe, the latter symbolizing warfare and the "sanguineous glory of conquerors." He decides to blow up Sacré-Coeur. He hates the basilica, which haunts him. Guillaume Froment could savor its destruction: "And all at once came thunder and earthquake, and a volcano opening and belching forth fire and smoke, and swallowing up the whole church and its multitude of worshippers ... And how fearful would be the avalanche: a broken forest of scaffoldings, a hail of stonework, rushing and bounding through the dust and smoke onto the roofs below."

From the heights of the Montmartre butte, stairs still lead down rue des Abbesses to rue Véron, a narrow street of cobblestones beneath Sacré-Coeur. Early in October 1892, Émile moved into a small room on the top floor of number 31, then a shabby building like the others nearby. Today an old sign on that building proclaims
GAS AVAILABLE ON EVERY FLOOR,
but that was not the case when Émile lived there. A shop stood to the left of the door, with the concierge's apartment to the right. Émile's only known visitor in those months was a certain Lambert, a provincial law student and friend who stayed with him from time to time. But he knew anarchists on nearby rue Lepic, including Félix Fénéon and Léon Ortiz. A tall, elegant, well-spoken anarchist-burglar known to his friends as Trognon ("Cutie"), Ortiz was Mexican-born of a Polish mother. He espoused the right to steal. He lived with his girlfriend (who was thus known as La Trognette). These men shared a hatred of Sacré-Coeur and what it represented.

On May 28,1892, a large crowd squeezed into the Salle du Commerce, 94, faubourg du Temple. The shadow of the martyred Ravachol was very much present. Trouble had arisen in the hall a month earlier, when anarchists disrupted a meeting held before an election, shouting that workers should abstain from electoral politics. Hundreds of people managed to get into the building. Two glass doors shattered in the tumult, while a crowd outside howled. One speaker set the tone: "Let's steal, kill, and dynamite—all means are good in order to get rid of this scum." Then it was Fortuné's turn. He saluted the theories of Ravachol and denounced "the governmental and bourgeois class." Ravachol had done the right thing. Everybody had seen "the general panic" caused by "two or three rocks" that he had left in apartment buildings. If that could have continued for fifteen days, "we would have been masters of the situation." In the meantime, the bosses were letting the poor die of hunger, while sleazy financial scandals continued. Resistance was difficult when ordinary people faced the rifles that had killed marchers in Fourmies. Then Fortuné shouted, "We have something even better, and you know the results ... Death to those who govern! Death to the bourgeoisie!" He appeared to wave a dynamite cartridge, pulled from his pocket. "Here are our weapons, what we need to blow up the bourgeoisie! Death to those bandits."