The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (15 page)

Even before Émile's bomb had gone off in Paris, rumors had surfaced concerning a planned attack against the Carmaux Mining Company. But the police had focused their attention on the mining town itself. They were caught off guard by the explosion in Paris. Émile's bomb surprised anarchists too. In London, Kropotkin, Malato, and Malatesta seemed genuinely astonished by the news of the terrorist attack. In Paris, Émile's friend Martin told a policeman that he did not know who had left the bomb but was happy to see the anarchists credited in the press. Jacques Prolo, a well-connected anarchist, told an undercover policeman that the attack had not been planned by any group. Some anarchists expressed concern that the event could hurt the chances of Francis, who was facing extradition from Britain so that he could be put on trial in Paris for blowing up the restaurant Le Véry. The police, however, faced certain challenges that made it difficult to arrest dangerous anarchists: the ease with which they could leave the country and the information provided in the newspapers, which alerted suspects that the police were on their trail.

The police had no idea who had placed the bomb in the offices of the Carmaux Mining Company and received conflicting reports from witnesses. The concierge had noticed no one ascending the stairs to the landing late that morning and remembered seeing only one young man between twenty-five and thirty years of age, with a blond mustache and a dark coat and hat. This visitor had asked to see a seamstress called Lucie, who lived in the building. But when questioned, this young man, a law student named Frapper, mentioned that he had encountered a woman on the staircase, and she was carrying a basket with a large object in it. Was she a patient of one of the doctors whose offices were located in the building? When the police checked into this possibility, they found that no woman had scheduled an appointment for that morning. If the woman was a domestic employed in the building, she would not use the main staircase, but rather the service entrance, which ruled out that line of inquiry. The woman Frapper described was small, with a black shawl over her head. The object, or objects, in the basket was covered with newspaper. When Frapper left the building, between 11 and 11:10, he saw such an object placed against the door. Two men had been seen standing outside the building fifteen or twenty minutes before the bomb was found, but no other man had been seen in the building at that time.

The prefecture of police compiled a list of 180 possible suspects, including Malatesta, who was in London, and the Henry brothers. The June 1 edition of
Le Temps,
in which the bomb had been wrapped, carried a short article about the arrest of Fortuné and Émile Henry on May 30–31. Moreover, someone who knew Émile had written a letter to the prefect of police, denouncing him.

Fortuné had an alibi. He had been sitting in a courtroom in Bourges in central France on November 8 (this was his fifth court appearance within a few years). He was scratched from the list of suspects.

Police broke into Émile's room on rue Véron, with the help of a neighboring locksmith, but they found nothing to implicate the occupant in the crime. The renter had lived there only since October 8 and had paid in advance. Police found few furnishings and possessions: a shabby iron bed, a chair, and odds and ends of no value—nothing suspicious. The concierge informed the police that on the day after Émile's precipitous departure, she had received a letter from him, mailed in London and asking her to give an accompanying missive to Lambert, the law student who had slept in Émile's room a couple of times.

The police interviewed Émile's boss, Dupuy, on rue de Rocroy. He described the two errands that Émile had completed on the morning of November 8. Dupuy believed that he had taken forty-five minutes to get to his stop on boulevard de Courcelles, and then (believing he had begun with the latter errand) twenty-seven minutes to reach rue Tronchet, near the church of the Madeleine. He would have spent no more than ten minutes combined at the two addresses. Simply put, it seemed impossible that he could have somehow—between errands—gone back up to his room in Montmartre to pick up a bomb, returned to central Paris, and placed it in front of the door of the Carmaux Mining Company on avenue de l'Opéra. Moreover, upon his return to work, Émile had indeed seemed calm and maintained this demeanor when Dupuy returned with a newspaper describing the horrific explosion in the police station. He had left work at 6
P.M.
as usual. Émile Henry was dropped from the list of suspects.

Also on the list was Rullière, the nineteen-year-old son of the mistress of Ravachol, a young man known as "the son of Ravachol." The container for the bomb resembled those used by Ravachol, arousing interest in Rullière's whereabouts. Among the other suspects, seven could be designated only as X because their names were unknown, although fairly complete descriptions were available for six of them, including a certain "bird merchant on the avenue de l'Opéra, small, graying, 48 to 50 years of age," and his female companion, "small, about 40 years old, brown hair, with a black hat and scarf." A shoemaker, a porcelain decorator, and a female embroiderer were hauled in; they had attended anarchist meetings. Foreigners suspected of anarchism appeared on the list, among them two Italians, a Belgian student, a couple of German subjects, an Austrian, and a Swiss, as well as various provincial anarchists and a certain Puchel known as "Choucroutemann," presumably an Alsatian who liked to eat—especially
choucroute,
sauerkraut—and who had turned up in Paris nine days before the explosion. Along with an Italian anarchist known as "Macaroni," Puchel disappeared immediately after the incident.

Stories came forth, possible explanations. A merchant had observed two young men about nineteen years of age strolling in front of the building at number 11. They had paused to look at a combination cane and pistol in the window of the store, so the merchant continued to watch them until they left. Several passersby had been struck by "the attitude" of a rather slight young man who walked out of the building.

The police followed up on every possible lead, even the highly improbable ones. One story had Malato and the brothers Placide and Remi Schouppe deciding to attack the Carmaux Mining Company because they assumed that the police would think it the work of miners (this made little sense, in that anarchists eagerly accepted responsibility for their violent acts). Gustave Mathieu, believed to have helped Ravachol construct bombs, would have made the "engine," with the help of a certain Madame Mollet, who carried the bomb. When police later interviewed the wife of Ortiz, the anarchist-burglar, she claimed that her husband had carried out the attack, and this story had begun to circulate among anarchists. The source was hardly credible—Madame Ortiz was dead drunk at the time.

The massive police search for the bomber reflected the new investigating techniques that emerged in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Policing had become more scientific, emphasizing attention to tiny but significant clues. The fictional investigator Sherlock Holmes (who first arrived on the British scene in 1887) epitomized this new approach. The interviewing of suspects and witnesses had become more systematic. The press, with close ties to the prefecture of police, was able to follow major cases with often surprising accuracy, thanks to inside information and leaks, some of which were purchased. The success of memoirs published by prefects of police and of both newspaper serials and popular novels focused on crime revealed the intense public interest in this realm. Readers, already woozy from stories of the spectacular scandals involving leaders of the Third Republic, could turn their attention to events even more dramatic and threatening: the anarchist bombings.

Meanwhile, the anarchist press smirked about the "firecracker" that had exploded. In
Père Peinard,
Émile Pouget described 11, avenue de l'Opéra as one of the most elegant corners of a "neighborhood of aristos ... fancy digs, goddammit! Marble everywhere, gilded things everywhere else, and damned soft rugs on every stairway—a lot softer than the straw mattresses of prol[etarian]s."
Père Peinard
could not help but note that the sergeants who arrived on the scene had refused to carry the package because "it was not done to have a policeman in uniform actually carrying a package." And as for the explosion, "Oh, hell, here was a blow that rocked the whole miserable joint off its hinges. The swine were no longer living!" The government had thought that subjecting Ravachol to the guillotine had put an end to bombings, but "now the really good stuff will begin." Apparently the dynamite missing from Soisy had been found: "It appears so ... a thousand bombs!"

In the opinion of most people of means, anarchism amounted to nothing less than a philosophy of murder and theft. They considered all anarchists to be cruel, hateful people who killed the elderly to steal from them, or robbed graves—as Ravachol did—while preparing "diabolical bombs intended to blow the bourgeoisie into another world." Moreover, the theft of dynamite earlier that year from Soisy-sous-Étiolles was common knowledge. It was out there somewhere. Some anarchists had told the
compagnons
that they were combatants in a modern war. They should prepare their dynamite; the moment was not far off when they would be called upon to use it. An anarchist newspaper helpfully provided the formula for mercury fulminate, a great quantity of which could be made for one and a half francs, to which could be added mercury, azotic acid, and alcohol baumé. If one wanted to blow up the theater of Odéon, the Opera, or a café, here was how to do it. The paper illustrated how to make a bomb, with mercury fulminate at the bottom, as if it was as simple and normal a task as making a Provençal beef stew. And if the dynamiter wanted to blow up your house? "Nothing easier!" He could hide a small bomb in his pocket, find a pretext to walk in, and leave behind "this trinket which appears so harmless ... a quarter of an hour later, you blow up."

The bomb in the police station carried Paris's panic to a new level. Big business and the grand cafés worried about its economic impact, especially with the Christmas holidays little more than a month away. Some wealthy people were afraid to go to theaters, restaurants, shops, or the Bois de Boulogne, where they believed they saw an anarchist behind every tree. According to rumors, bombs were about to explode in churches, poison had been prepared for reservoirs, and the Black Death or cholera was about to descend. (The most recent epidemic of the latter had passed through only eight years earlier.) Police complained that current law limited their ability to repress the anarchists. They feared the possible reconstitution of militant groups such as the Avengers of Ravachol.

In various locations in and around Paris, pranksters planted discarded sardine cans, which were taken to be small explosive devices. From March to November 1892 about three hundred "bombs" were found and transported—very carefully—to the municipal laboratory for analysis. There, a special device had been built in the basement to absorb the shock of an explosion. The "bombs," such as the six that arrived on the morning of November 15, were detonated here. Half of them, like the can found at Les Halles that was filled with mere gravel, were the work of mischief makers. Three turned out to be "infernal machines," though minor ones. But the threat continued. Just after Christmas, a small bomb exploded in the barracks of the prefecture of police.

In mid-December Rose Caubet Henry cleaned out her son's room on rue Véron. She told the concierge that she would return later in the week with a mover from Brévannes. A wagon carried away Émile's few possessions, under the watchful eyes of policemen, who followed it until it passed beyond the fortifications.

Earlier that month, Émile had written a letter from London to the
compagnon
in Orléans to whom he had earlier sent the letter for Dupuy. He apologized for his long silence, caused by many "hassles." Now he was on the eve of a trip, probably a very long one. Émile promised that when they next met, he would relate his "peregrinations" from city to city. His friend certainly had learned from newspapers the details of "the pretty little dance" that had killed five policemen in Paris. Émile had learned from a journalist the day after the explosion that his brother was in prison in Bourges and that the police were looking for Émile himself. Why? He had no idea but was sure that the cops would come to visit him soon. His employer must have told the police where he had been living because no other person knew of his address in Paris (he added, "A serious anarchist knows how to stay hidden in order to be ready to act quickly when the moment comes"). Therefore Émile had left without fanfare and headed for London.

Émile told his friend that he had a little money and would leave London in four or five days. The place bored him. He would go to Liverpool and await the next boat for New York. After about six months in America, he would return to France. He swore that he would make the bourgeois pay for all of their persecutions and that "until the day that I fall in this battle, I will bite as long as I still have teeth." To his dear friend he said goodbye, and perhaps adieu. He hoped to write from Liverpool, and Émile assured him that no matter where he was, he would have in his heart only love for anarchism and ferocious hatred for "our enemies."

But Émile remained in London. It may have been dull, but it was safe. Police repression in continental European states had turned London into something of a refuge for anarchists. The chief police inspector, the Irishman William Melville, estimated that about a thousand foreign anarchists resided in the city. They had come in waves: the French after the Commune, the Germans in the wake of Bismarck's crackdown on the socialists in 1878, the Italians after the first attempt to kill King Umberto I in 1878, and the Russians after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. The number had increased after Switzerland became less hospitable in the 1880s, alarmed by the anarchists' incendiary publications and revolutionary activism and pressured by the French government. About four hundred French anarchist exiles lived in London during the early 1890s. Their movements were frequent and unpredictable; therefore the chief inspector's count was simply an estimate (and did not include, in principle, various criminals on the lam, hangers-on, and other refugees passing through).