The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (20 page)

Upon his return to Paris on or shortly before December 18—he had been seen in London at various points that fall—Émile could already see the results of the draconian measures taken against anarchists—spying, searches, and imprisonment of the innocent. The anarchist had become "a beast tracked everywhere, with the bourgeois press ... calling for its extermination." Police even stooped to underhanded methods; their spies, for example, entered a suspected anarchist's room and hid packages of tannin there, which were then "discovered" in a police search the next morning. In this way an anarchist whom the police wanted to put away would be sent to prison for three years. (This had happened to Émile's friend Mérigeau.) And then Raynal, the minister of the interior, could triumphantly announce in the Chamber of Deputies that the laws they had passed had "thrown terror into the anarchist camp."

The press promoted a rather fanciful idea about how to capture anarchists: each one could be trailed more or less continuously by a policeman "staying at his side and grabbing his arm at the critical moment." Yet there were many anarchists, and not enough police to follow all of them. Undercover agents could stake out known gathering places and monitor the buildings in which anarchists lived, but there were limits. Not everyone could be watched all the time, and many whom the police sought with special effort, such as Émile, proved difficult to find.

Auguste Vaillant went on trial on January 10. He offered a rambling defense full of heartfelt but vague references to the philosophes of the Enlightenment and the playwright Henrik Ibsen, among others. He condemned imperialism and, above all, "this accursed society where one can see a single man uselessly spend enough to feed thousands of families ... while one comes upon a hundred thousand unfortunate people without enough to eat." He was condemned to death.

Vaillant's life of deprivation and the plight of his young daughter, Sidonie, attracted great attention in the poor neighborhoods of Paris. How could President Sadi Carnot not pardon her father? "Who knows?" they said at Le Déluge. "Perhaps if he had always had enough to eat for little Sidonie, Vaillant never would have re-sorted to his little bomb! In any case, he had not killed anyone, and the wounded were healing rapidly. Why cut off his head?" A group of socialist deputies and the moderate politician Georges Clemenceau were among those who asked President Carnot to spare the man's life. A letter from Vaillant's young daughter, Sidonie, to Carnot's wife achieved nothing. The duchesse of Uzés, a monarchist, offered to adopt the girl; the anarchist Sébastien Faure ultimately took charge of her, at Vaillant's request. Paris awaited the execution. The police received an anonymous warning that anarchists renting a room right at place de la Roquette, the site of executions in Paris, planned to throw a bomb in protest. Rumors had anarchists leaping out to stab the chief executioner, Antoine-Louis Deibler, and spirit away his intended victim. The police wondered if anarchists whom they sought might show up at the execution to hear Vaillant's final words.

On the morning of the execution, Vaillant refused to speak with the prison chaplain. When asked if he wanted to drink the traditional glass of eau de vie before being executed, he replied, "I am not a murderer. I do not need to drink alcohol in order to have courage." Dr. Guillotine's blade fell at dawn on February 5, 1894. Auguste Vaillant became the first person in nineteenth-century France to be executed, even though he had not killed anyone.

News of the event spread rapidly through working-class Paris on that gray day, with thick clouds contributing to "a glacial and dark atmosphere of grief." To the working poor, it seemed that society had once again proved itself "implacable." In Henry Leyret's bar, a general sense of bewilderment reigned, "a desolate stupefaction, with shouts of anger about the future, and the expectation of vengeances that were sure to follow." Vaillant's death was appalling, especially in the darkest, shortest days of winter, when many people, such as construction workers, could not find employment and were short on credit. If he had killed people, as Ravachol had, perhaps Vaillant's execution could be understood. But Vaillant was an honest man, pushed to the limit by his misery. The hard times were responsible. In January, a Parisian family of three died in abject poverty, unable to pay their rent or even eat. In an exceptionally cold winter, such intimate hard dramas multiplied.

In the factories, workshops, and bars of Belleville, Vaillant's execution recalled the early Christian martyrs, echoing the image of Ravachol. Leyret overheard someone say, "They wanted to pulverize him in the name of property, and the faubourg does not have any property ... anarchism is extending its influence, infiltrating." Hundreds of arrests "among the humble" gave the impression that the government and its police force were persecuting the poor on behalf of the rich. People reasoned that Vaillant had been a victim of the bourgeoisie, and many more workers became attracted to the anarchists, while remaining indifferent to much of their political theory. Instead, they shared their bitterness, misery, and "gloomy despair." Here was something that could threaten the ruling classes even more than "propaganda by the deed": "the anarchism of feeling!" Two of Leyret's clients almost came to blows when one referred to the anarchists as "bandits," before the latter adroitly explained that he did not mean Vaillant, but rather men who used anarchism as an excuse to steal. More than one worker said that he would not want to be in President Carnot's shoes. It had also been "in the air" of the faubourgs that "The Aquarium" would explode. Anything could happen next. Parisians of means, as well as the police, waited to see how Vaillant's execution would be avenged.

On about December 15, 1893, Émile went to the watchmaker's shop where he had apprenticed for a month in the summer of 1892. He asked if there was any work for him, saying that he had been in London but would remain in Paris if he could find employment. He tried to sell the watchmaker a watch that was missing a minute hand, but it was worth nothing.

On December 20, Émile appeared at the Villa Faucheur (named after the owner of the property) on rue des Envierges in Belleville. Saying that he was a mechanic and providing a reference from a previous landlord (which turned out to be a forgery), he took a small room. The rent would be 120 francs a year, and he gave 5 francs to the concierge as a tip. He gave his name as "Émile Dubois" (he had used the name "Louis Dubois" when he lived on boulevard Morland). Despite its rather grand-sounding name, the Villa Faucheur was a modest residence, an immense
cité ouvrière
on a street lined with workers' residences. There were two large entryways at numbers 1 and 3, each with an imposing iron gate. A few bourgeois of modest means lived in the complex, including seven or eight policemen. Poorer residents, like the so-called Dubois, lived farther back in the complex. His room was in the middle of path number 1, about halfway back, on the left, across from a small empty lot. On each side of the small building stood a wall about a yard high, topped by a small iron fence, alongside a tiny garden. On the fourth floor, Émile's room stood across from the stairs, between the lodgings of a copper turner and an older man who was a jeweler.

As Émile walked out of the gate, below him to the right was the Belleville Garden (sometimes called Belleville Park). On a clear day, he could easily see the Eiffel Tower, constructed little more than four years earlier; the Panthéon, where heroes of the state were buried; and Notre Dame de Paris—for Émile, three imposing symbols of the enemy. In Honoré de Balzac's
Père Goriot, a
novel set earlier in the century, a minor noble from the Charentes, Rastignac, looks down from Père Lachaise Cemetery toward the wealthy
beaux quartiers
of Chaussée d'Antin and Opéra. He gestures in that direction and says that henceforth it will be war between him and the world he wants to conquer, until he is accepted in wealthy society. Émile looked toward elegant Paris and pledged another kind of war, one of total destruction.

A neighbor described the new young renter as quite nice and gentle. Sometimes he returned home late, after 9 or even 11
P.M.,
and on those days, he could be heard singing anarchist songs. During the time he lived there, "Émile Dubois" had but one known visitor, a well-dressed law student who appeared to be about twenty and who stayed with him a day or two, although another neighbor said that occasionally someone would come by and ask for him. He had received two letters during his time there—one from England.

The police grew increasingly interested in this Émile. One agent overheard, in a conversation between Constant Martin and another anarchist in mid-January 1894, that Émile Henry was hiding somewhere in Ménilmontant. He was thought to have transformed his room into an "anarchist laboratory." The police thought that tracking the anarchist militant Jacques Prolo would lead them to Émile, as the two seemed sure to meet. The investigators believed that Émile had returned to Paris with three other anarchists. On February 4 "Léon," an ace among the expanded corps of undercover police agents following militant anarchists, offered his opinion: Émile was somewhere in Belleville or Montmartre. That same day, a police informer reported that Émile was indeed back in Paris.

On February 8, the undercover policeman "Thanne" again expressed certainty that the bomb that exploded on November 8, 1892, had been put together by Émile Henry and Paul Bonnard, an anarchist shoemaker known as "Père Duchesne," who took his name from a radical newspaper published during the French Revolution. Bonnard had been seen in the company of Adrienne Chailley, the anarchist singer, the day before the explosion at the office of the Carmaux Mining Company. If she had carried the bomb into the building, which was by no means certain, Émile would have stood guard at the front door. Thanne was very lucky to pick up this information, as only two or three anarchists knew about the planned attack beforehand. In order to prove Chailley's participation, Thanne had only to demonstrate that she was the lover of one or the other anarchist, and this he hoped to do by interviewing her landlord, her concierge, or a hotel porter. The growing belief that Émile had been responsible for the bomb made his presence in Paris all the more threatening.

The Hôtel Terminus, with the Café Terminus on the right side, and the Gare Saint-Lazare to the left of the hotel.

The village of Brévannes, where Rose Caubet Henry and her family lived.

Rose Caubet Henry, Émile's mother, in her bar, À l'Espérance.
Collection Roger-Viollet