The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (7 page)

Bakunin believed in the revolutionary instincts of the masses but held that they would not rise up spontaneously against the state. A single spark, or several, were needed to bring about the revolution. The Commune gave him hope, as anarchists had been among its exponents, and his vision of the eventual abolition of the state found resonance among Russian as well as western European disciples. Even if unsuccessful, terrorist attacks—which he did not specifically advocate—would inevitably be followed by massive state repression. This in turn would increase dissatisfaction among the people, bringing revolution closer.

Unlike Karl Marx and other revolutionary socialists, Bakunin looked not to an enlightened working class, but to the peasantry, to bring about revolution. He viewed peasants as revolutionaries who did not yet know it. The village (
mir
) provided a natural, harmonious setting, but it was beset by avaricious landlords and by soldiers defending the interests of the state. In earlier centuries, after all, Russian peasants had risen up against tsars, or on behalf of false tsars. Revolutionaries should work feverishly to prepare for an even greater revolution: "The revolutionary is a man under vow. He ought to occupy himself entirely with one exclusive passion: the Revolution ... He has only one aim, one science: destruction ... Between him and society, there is war to the death, incessant, irreconcilable." Bakunin defined freedom as "the absolute right of every human being to seek no other sanction for his actions but his own conscience, to determine these actions solely by his own will, and consequently to owe his first responsibility to himself alone ... I become free only through the freedom of others." Thus destruction became "a creative passion."

Bakunin distrusted and quarreled loudly with Karl Marx, who he felt did not go far enough. After all, Marx was not interested in destroying the state but in replacing it with another one, socialist in character. Bitter divisions between anarchists and socialists helped bring an effective end to Marx's International Workingmen's Association in 1876, following its meeting in Philadelphia—a site Marx had selected because he knew that European anarchists could not afford the passage across the Atlantic. "Let us not become the leaders of a new religion," Bakunin warned his rival, not long before Bakunin died that same year. The Russian who once said that to be a true revolutionary, one had to have the devil in the flesh, continued to influence the development of anarchism from the grave, above all in Spain and Italy. In France, the break between anarchists and socialists became final in 1881. The anarchists defiantly went their own way, rejecting electoral politics because they saw it as a means of propping up the bourgeois state. They adopted the black flag as their symbol and in France rejected the "Marseillaise," which represented the bourgeois republic.

A different kind of anarchist led the charge after Bakunin's death. Peter Kropotkin was a geographer and a prince, the son of a Russian army officer of the nobility. Convicted of sedition because he had written a manifesto describing the structure of a future anarchist society, Kropotkin spent two years in prison before escaping Russia in 1876. After first going to London, he spent time living in Switzerland in the Jura Mountains, where watchmakers seemed to live in perfect harmony without the intrusion of the state. Moreover, Switzerland was federalist, and the original home of the Red Cross, the kind of voluntary association that the anarchists believed would spontaneously emerge following the destruction of the state. Kropotkin became convinced that local organizations were both a means to a better life and an end in themselves, infused with the morality of individuals left to their own devices. In the end, ownership of property would become superfluous: everyone would have enough to get along. This was the basis of Kropotkin's anarchist communism. (Proudhon, on the other hand, believed that the revolution would not eliminate all private property.) Kropotkin's optimism was contagious, respect for him enormous, even among those who did not agree with him, and his influence, like his vision, was international. The British writer Oscar Wilde once said that Kropotkin lived one of the only two perfect lives he had ever seen.

How was the revolution to be made? Bakunin believed that the rebellious passion of the peasants would bring about the revolution. Kropotkin believed in the necessity of a vanguard of heroic anarchists who would spread the word and lead the downtrodden masses toward revolution. In
Catechism of the Revolutionary
(1869), the Russian nihilist Sergei Nechaev described the revolutionary as "a doomed man," without even an identity: "he has no personal interests, no affairs, no sentiments, attachments, property, not even a name of his own. Everything in him is absorbed by one exclusive interest, one thought, one passion—the revolution ... To him whatever aids the triumph of the revolution is ethical; all that hinders it is unethical and criminal." Although he was not an anarchist, Nechaev helped shape the future image of the anarchist, anonymously putting together his bombs and depositing them before disappearing into the night. Nechaev founded a terrorist organization: People's Will (Narodnaya Volya). But it was not an anarchist group. People's Will was a socialist organization that was hierarchically organized and demanded universal suffrage and political liberties, as well as land for all people. Its members planned the assassinations of state officials and political personages in the hope of increasing public awareness of the plight of the masses. Bakunin, as well as other revolutionaries, eventually turned against Nechaev, concluding that he was a murderer and a disreputable fanatic who could not be trusted.

Martyrdom played an important part in the struggle of these Russian revolutionaries. It became part of revolutionary lore that as Vera Figner, a leader of People's Will, awaited execution (the sentence was commuted at the last minute), she imagined her martyrdom, thinking of revolutionaries who had perished before: "Pictures of people who had died long ago awoke in my memory, my imagination worked as never before." Even if this account could never be verified, the execution scene itself became an important part of the collective memory of anarchists.

The imperial Russian police crushed People's Will, but its tactics came to be adopted by some anarchists worldwide. And in western Europe, events during the 1880s encouraged anarchists, particularly in wretchedly poor rural regions in southern Spain and Italy. Errico Malatesta was among the optimistic, active, and influential. Born into a landowning family in southern Italy, Malatesta was expelled from medical school in Naples for taking part in a demonstration. He became an anarchist, eventually learned the trade of electrician, and gave away property he had inherited from his parents to the tenants who lived there. Anarchism appealed to poor rural laborers in southern Italy, who retained a strong sense of injustice and suffering at the hands of policemen. Malatesta led armed Calabrian peasants in Benevento, northeast of Naples, in April 1877 as they burned parish and tax records, distributed rifles seized from the national guard and money taken from the safe of a tax collector, and called for the seizure and collectivization of land. The insurgents received some support from nearby villages in a revolt that lasted ten days before being put down.

In 1883, police in Paris broke up an anarchist-inspired march of unemployed people; some of the demonstrators pillaged a bakery, and arrests followed. In Andalusia in southern Spain that same year, peasants murdered an innkeeper they believed to be a police spy. The Civil Guard moved in, using perhaps fabricated evidence of a secret society plot to kill the rich in order to crush anarchism in Andalusia. And in Montceau-les-Mines in Burgundy in 1884, striking workers organized a group called the Black Band and went on a rampage, pillaging the French town.

Several other small-scale events gave French authorities further pause. About the same time, a gardener called Louis Chavès shot to death the mother superior of the convent that employed him, and then fired at police, who killed him. He had already sent a letter to an anarchist newspaper, "You start with one to reach a hundred, as the saying goes. So I would like the glory of being the first to start. It is not with words or paper that we shall change existing conditions. The last advice I have for true anarchists, for active anarchists, is to arm themselves according to my example with a good revolver, a good dagger, and a box of matches." An anarchist newspaper began to raise money to purchase a pistol to avenge Chavès. That same year, a man claiming to be an anarchist tossed a bottle full of explosive chemicals into the Paris Bourse. It exploded, although no one was hurt. He then fired three random shots, without effect. A burglar named Clément Duval, who stole from a wealthy Parisian residence, was transformed into Comrade Duval. His explanation: "The policeman arrested me in the name of the law; I hit [the policeman] in the name of liberty! When society refuses you the right to existence, you must take it." In the eyes of some anarchists—though hardly all—any act that might hasten "social disorganization" and ultimately the revolution was legitimate, including theft and the destruction of private property. An Italian thief called Vittorio Pini announced during his trial in Paris that he was not a thief but had merely taken riches that the bourgeoisie had taken before.

Émile Henry could not help but soak up the charged atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Paris. The plight of ordinary people was growing ever more serious. Someone would have to carry the mantle of visionaries like Proudhon and Bakunin.

DURING THE LATE
1870s and early 1880s, groups of anarchists began to organize in and around Émile Henry's Paris. In 1882, approximately thirteen anarchist groups existed, with at least 200 members in all. Eleven years later, the police counted more than 2,400 anarchists and considered 852 of them dangerous. Most French anarchists were average workers—metalworkers, bricklayers, printers, and others drawn from myriad occupations in late-nineteenth-century France.

In Paris, such groups were based in specific neighborhoods, in keeping with the anarchist view that the revolution would be achieved through local insurrections. Usually groups of anarchists organized street by street. They communicated through the anarchist press, meetings, debates, and brightly colored posters advertising such events. Anarchists opened soup kitchens to feed the hungry and started several anarchist libraries—really just book collections in the homes of certain anarchists. The subculture of ordinary people, including the slang (argot) of the streets and bars, infused the movement with dynamism.

Anarchists did not have to work hard to win recruits in northeastern Paris. For example, in plebeian Belleville, a neighborhood of artisans (particularly brass workers and jewelers) and laborers on the edge of the capital, had more than its share of disaffected poor people. In a place that Maurice Chevalier and Édith Piaf would make famous four decades later, a strong local identity had been forged, in part through the knowledge that the fancy central and western neighborhoods of Paris spurned and feared Belleville's poor while using their labor to maximize their own wealth and comfort. Belleville had suffered disproportionately in the violent repression that followed the Commune, in part because of the leftist political tendencies of its residents. The salient role of the neighborhood in the Commune reinforced the association—at least in the minds of Parisian elites and government authorities—between Belleville and the "dangerous classes," cementing its unjustified reputation as a place of rampant crime.

The anarchist groups in Belleville and the twentieth arrondissement in the mid-188os sported colorful names such as the Libertarians, the Black Flag, the Tiger, the Deserters of Charonne, the Anarchist Group of Belleville, and the Anarchist Group of Père Lachaise (Cemetery). The Anarchist Group of Belleville and the Anarchist Group of the Twentieth Arrondissement had existed for years. Dynamite, Revolver in the Hand, the Starving, Hatred, Social War, and the Indigent also sprang up. In the Marais district on the Right Bank, a good many immigrants brought their anarchism with them from Russia, reading Yiddish publications dedicated to the cause.

Anarchism was also particularly attractive in the growing industrial suburbs. Indeed, one short-lived anarchist newspaper that appeared in 1891 was called simply
The Suburb (Le Faubourg).
In overcrowded Saint-Denis (the population had more than doubled there from 1861 to 1891, to fifty thousand) fewer than a third of the houses had running water. Thousands of people lived in shanties that were literally thrown together, made of bricks or any other material that could be found and covered with sheet metal or asphalt-reinforced cardboard.

Anarchists held their usually modest gatherings in bars or cafés, sometimes in a backroom or upstairs room that was rented, sometimes not (it was understood that the group would at least purchase drinks). Or they would rent a small hall in the neighborhood for the evening. When it was time to pay for the hall rental and drinks, those with money paid up, and the place for the next gathering was decided. Larger halls were rented for meetings that brought together various groups of anarchists to discuss abstaining from elections, propaganda encouraging conscripts to refuse to report for military service, or plans for demonstrations or events to mark the anniversary of the Commune—an enduring source of inspiration as well as a practical guide for the movement. Two of the most important venues were Belleville's Salle Favié and the Salle du Commerce on rue du Faubourg-du-Temple. On Friday, March 30,1883, for example, posters announced a grand public meeting, organized by the group Vengeance of Anarchist Youth and located on rue de Charenton in eastern Paris. The topic for discussion: "the workers' crisis, revisionist agitation, and revolutionary movements." The small entry fee went toward the rental of the hall and other related expenses.

Yet finding rooms or even bars in which anarchist groups could meet was extremely difficult, particularly once the police started pressuring owners. Neighbors tired of the shouting and singing that emanated from the meetings also took a stand. For example, in November 1893 the group known as the Lads of the Butte (Montmartre) met in a bar. But when the gathering was over, the owner of the establishment told them that they could not return. They had recently been evicted from another bar on the same street because their presence terrified local shopkeepers.