The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (25 page)

Laurent Tailhade was perhaps best known for his rather flippant commentary after Vaillant threw his small bomb into "The Aquarium": "What do the waves of humanity matter so long as the gesture is beautiful!" The explosion at the Foyot took out one of Tailhade's eyes. The bomb was probably placed by the anarchist literary critic Félix Fénéon, perhaps inspired by his friend Émile. That evening Fénéon coolly took an omnibus home to rue Lepic in Montmartre. When someone on the bus exclaimed that he had heard that another bomb had gone off, Fénéon indicated that it had been at the Foyot, a fact not yet known. He later admitted that he was responsible. In his cell, Émile appeared "delighted" by the news. "Once more, the idea [of anarchist bombs] has shown its value," he commented.

Émile had not been allowed to see any of the letters that had arrived at the Conciergerie for him; they were apparently being kept by one of the prosecuting attorneys in an attempt to gather other leads. On March 6, Girard, the chemist, came to the Conciergerie. He was carrying a pot half full of sand. When he asked Émile to show him how he had closed the bomb after assembling it, he refused to do so. This convinced the judge that someone (probably Paul Bonnard, "Père Duchesne") must have helped him assemble it.

Then there was the woman seen by the law student on the stairs at 11, avenue de l'Opéra. Who was she? The anarchist Mérigeau, recently imprisoned, had told an undercover agent that the woman seen on the stairs was "Rosalie," Mariette Soubère, a twenty-four-year-old ribbon worker and anarchist from Saint-Étienne who lived with
compagnon
Joseph Béala in Saint-Denis. Both had been accused of helping Ravachol kill two women in July 1891 in Saint-Étienne. However, a meeting in the judge's office made it clear that Mariette Soubère and Émile had never before met. The police then arrested the singer Adrienne Chailley, known as "Marie Puget." She knew the Henry brothers and closely resembled the woman seen on the staircase. The undercover agent "Thanne" believed that she had carried the bomb into the building and up to the mezzanine. Following the explosion at the police station, she had stopped singing, drank even more, and now thought she saw police agents behind every plant. When confronted in the judge's office with Adrienne Chailley and Bonnard, Émile turned pale but shook Bonnard's hand and winked at the woman. Back in his cell he told the guards that he only knew Bonnard, although he later asked if Adrienne Chailley had been released, indicating that they did indeed know each other.

On February 23, police raised the possibility that the woman seen on the stairs might have been Émile himself, in drag. His youthful appearance and short stature might have helped him momentarily pass for a young woman; his short hair could easily have been covered by a woman's wig.

Judge Espinas, hoping to discover the identity of the woman, became obsessed with discovering Émile's mistress, someone willing to serve as an accomplice. In one session, Émile was confronted with Madame Élise Schouppe (most recently the mistress of the anarchist burglar Ortiz), who had lived near him on rue Véron. Émile had been seen on rue Lepic several times with her husband. Espinas believed Madame Schouppe had also been Émile's lover. Émile had once taken her and her children on a country outing to Brévannes but insisted that he "had never had relations with that person." He had certainly had lovers but said that for such an operation as making and planting a bomb, he would never have trusted a woman.

Ten francs arrived for Émile at Meyer's office, sent by someone called Élisa. At first agents thought the money was from Madame Élise Schouppe. In fact, Élisa Gauthey had sent it—the strands of hair Émile had carried with him in his locket were of course hers. Meyer had Madame Gauthey arrested as a potential material witness on March 13.

On March 15, the Belgian anarchist Philibert Pauwels, a friend of Émile, entered the church of the Madeleine, carrying a bomb. Pauwels was much more like Ravachol than Émile. If anyone most fit Bakunin's ideal of an anarchist—"the devil in the flesh"—it was Pauwels. Born in Flanders in Belgium in 1864, he had been an awful pupil in school, of limited intelligence, compounded by eye and ear problems. Pauwels was the black sheep of a respectable working-class family—his father was a master cabinetmaker known as "Rouge-Barette" who worked and drank hard; his mother was a caring parent. Two well-respected uncles worked in nearby mines. Pauwels was a disreputable character who even cheated in games with other children. Leaving home at the age of fourteen, he went to Paris in the early 1880s and found some work in the glove-making industry before returning to Belgium, where he skipped out on military service.

Pauwels had first came to the attention of the police as a militant anarchist in January 1885 in Saint-Denis, where he founded the group Anarchist Youth of Saint-Denis and participated in other groups in Montmartre, Montreuil, and Paris. At a meeting of the Equals of Montmartre, he met the young Auguste Vaillant, as well as Sébastien Faure. However, after a violent argument, Pauwels never returned to that particular group. Whenever he found employment, he was considered a good worker. He sold copies of the anarchist newspaper
Land and Liberty
and provided other reading material to workers who came to his house, where he displayed the black flag of anarchism. He married Albertine Lardon, an embroiderer working in Saint-Denis, in 1886, and four years later they and their young daughter moved to Argenteuil. Pauwels's wife, who suffered from tuberculosis, also became a militant anarchist. She once told her husband that the day she felt that the end was near, he should get a bomb for her, and her final effort would be to use it against the bourgeoisie.

The Belgian made contact with Dutch, Russian, German, and Spanish anarchists, as well as French and Belgian
compagnons,
cranking out antimilitary propaganda and traveling frequently to Brussels. In 1891, he found a job in a factory in the Parisian suburbs. He turned up at an anarchist gathering at place de l'Opéra, the heart of enemy territory, and later in Saint-Denis, where he gave a fiery speech asking the
compagnons
to stay away from work on May 1 and burn down their factories and the town hall for good measure. He was ordered to leave France in April 1891, in part because of his role in another strike. But he had disappeared.

In early July, police undertook a clumsy search of the residence of Pauwels's wife, in Argenteuil. They failed to discover letters that were poorly hidden—and which his wife burned after the men departed. On July 21, 1891, police swooped down on an apartment in Paris where Pauwels was staying and discovered explosives. Expelled from France, he penned a request asking to be taken to the Luxembourg border (he could not be returned to Belgium because no agreement existed for the extradition of those fleeing military conscription). Gendarmes took Pauwels there in a police wagon.

During the next year, Pauwels bounced between Luxembourg, from which he was also eventually expelled, Geneva, and Paris, where he was suspected of being involved in a plot to blow up the police station in Levallois-Perret. He abandoned his wife and daughter, who moved to Saint-Denis, where they lived with her parents and two brothers in abject misery on the ground floor of a brick hovel that was blackened by the smoke of nearby chimneys.

In 1892, Pauwels assumed the identity of a worker from the provinces, "Claude Defosse," one of many aliases that he used over the years. A heavy drinker of absinthe, that dangerous and potentially addictive drink made from wormwood, Pauwels developed a reputation for brutality, which alienated many
compagnons,
who considered him unbalanced. Also known as "Pointy Nose," the somber, sad Pauwels always spoke of the bourgeoisie with hatred, promising to wipe them out. He now survived by working as a tanner, borrowing money from militants in Saint-Denis and elsewhere, stealing (or living off the thefts committed by others), and receiving small sums from anarchist groups. Elisée Reclus may have given him a little money. Throughout his travels, he remained a frenetic propagandist, heaping abuse on Sébastien Faure, whom he called a "Jesuit." Pauwels carried a pistol and distributed propaganda encouraging soldiers to desert. Late in 1892, he was in Switzerland, and in January 1893, in Marseille and then Barcelona. While working for a time in a factory in Saint-Ouen, Pauwels found or stole the papers of a coworker named Rabardy from Rouen, and assumed the man's identity.

While
compagnon
Émile awaited trial in the Conciergerie, Pauwels decided to strike. On February 12, he entered the extremely modest Hotel des Carmes on rue des Carmes, and, refusing to give his name, he deposited four francs for a stay of eight days in a fifth-floor room. The next morning, he said he was Henry Sabauth, thirty-eight, a traveling salesman from Bordeaux. He told a young employee of the hotel, to whom he spoke Spanish, that he had arrived from Barcelona. Wearing a black felt hat and dark clothes, Pauwels carried a small suitcase made of gray cloth. A package about the size of a hat was attached to the suitcase with a wire.

On February 20, Pauwels left the Hotel des Carmes for two even shabbier hotels, taking a room in each. In both he placed a small bomb, which he rigged to explode the next time the door was opened. His goal was to kill policemen. He then left a note near two police stations, saying that he, Étienne Rabardy, was going to kill himself in his hotel room. A policeman went to the hotel on rue Saint-Jacques and went up to the room with the elderly concierge. They opened the door and the bomb exploded, mortally wounding the old woman and inflicting only light injuries on the policeman. At the miserable rooming house on rue du faubourg Saint-Martin, another policeman pushed open the door. The bomb, made from a can and suspended from the door, did not explode. The policeman called for experts, who detonated the device. Five days earlier, police had found bombs of exactly the same composition—dynamite, picric acid, and chorate powder—in a bank.

At 2:40 in the afternoon of March 15, Pauwels entered the church of the Madeleine, the site of some of Paris's most elegant baptisms and marriages. In the small foyer, the bomb he was carrying exploded with such force that it could be heard across the Seine in the Chamber of Deputies. Pauwels fell to the ground, his right hand hanging by a thread, with serious wounds to his stomach and spinal column. A bullet, which had struck him in the head, was later deemed the cause of death. The anarchist may have had the strength—and the presence of mind—to shoot himself. Pauwels carried with him a picture of Ravachol, along with details of the martyr's execution. No one else was injured, and damage to the church was slight.

Paris continued on high alert. Policemen went from rooming house to rooming house, carrying photos of Pauwels and searching for information on men of ages twenty-five to thirty-five who had not returned to their lodgings on the night of March 15. They came up with five names, including two described as "miserably dressed," hardly a distinguishing characteristic. Employees of the Hotel de Carmes formally identified Pauwels as the person staying in the hotel. His father-in-law came to identify him at the morgue but refused to claim the body.

In his cell, Émile speculated at first that the bomber of the church of the Madeleine was Meunier, an anarchist recently condemned to death in absentia. But when Émile asked for part of a newspaper to serve as toilet paper, a guard inadvertently gave him half of
Le Petit Journal
of March 17, which identified the dead man as his friend Pauwels. It certainly seemed that this bomb had been made from the stash of dynamite taken from Émile's room. Where was the rest?

On April 27, Émile Henry went on trial for his life in the Assize Court. The court was within the Palais de Justice, that monumental stage for Paris's major and often theatrical trials. Standing between two enormous corridors that joined the east and west entrances, the rectangular hall stood above the renovated Conciergerie prison. The space devoted to Émile's trial, and the other anarchist trials that had preceded it, reflected the Third Republic's desire to showcase its progressive system. Journalists and other spectators, entering by the door opposite the judge's bench, crammed into every available space. The upper classes, often including a disproportionate number of women, sat in front. Some clutched opera glasses so as not to miss a single detail of the spectacle. The people whom Émile hated the most would be sitting closest to him.

Magistrates and lawyers made majestic entrances through one of the two doors. The judges wore red robes trimmed in white fur, the lawyers black robes and elaborate traditional hats. Below them sat the lawyers who would represent the prosecution and the defense.

The prosecutor was Bulot, of the Clichy trial, whose apartment Ravachol had attempted to blow up. Two long galleries of seats lined each side of the courtroom. The jury sat on the same side of the room as the prosecutor. Across from them stood a small enclosed dock for the accused, guards posted on either side. Another dock seated more than fifty journalists from twenty Parisian newspapers, ready to cater to the public's intense fascination with the trial. Windows across from the prisoner's dock flooded the courtroom with light, leaving the jury in the shadows. In the middle of the hall stood a table, on which was placed material evidence: the battered remnants of tables; a dozen chairs piled one upon the other, some peppered with holes; bloodstained clothes; broken pitchers and pieces of tableware; shattered boards and other wreckage brought from the Café Terminus. In front of this dramatic evidence and before a painting of Christ, witnesses would swear to tell the truth. At the back of the court the public waited eagerly—some occupying reserved seats, others boldly pushing their way forward in the back section. As the bourgeois press described it, the crowd was bathed in the plebeian aromas of sausage and garlic.

Guards led Émile from the prison below, up the spiral staircase between the two courtrooms, and through the little door into the courtroom. His entrance hushed all conversation. Every eye focused on him. He had the bearing of a young student at an elite school, awaiting an exam. Dressed properly, even elegantly, this dandy of anarchism wore a nice white shirt with a stiff, starched white collar, a black jacket, and a black satin tie. In the back of the courtroom sat his mother, wearing an old dress, an equally worn cape, and a hat, decorated with a small branch of wisteria. She seemed beaten down, resigned to the suffering that had overwhelmed her. Near her sat Dr. Goupil.