The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (6 page)

However, a vestige of good sense now allowed Émile to see the absurdity of his current state. He begged filisa to be patient with him and excuse his "painful ruminations." What exactly was "this mysterious affinity" that can push one person toward another, "throwing him without any compulsion at the feet of his conqueror?" He was trying to understand "this accursed passion, which annihilates all of a person's faculties, which takes over the entire brain, which can turn even the most resilient person into a toy in the hands of someone he adores." He hated this passion because it "caused so much harm, suffering, tears, disillusionment, and discouragement." He wanted to flee far from her, in the hope of curing his heart and mind, because for now he could do nothing but sleep, inert, "like an animal without any conscience!" However, such a separation would compromise his very existence. He would conclude the letter, because the more he wrote, the less reasonable he became, "such that madness would take me over if I followed along with my thoughts."

Yet Émile's thoughts had already begun to turn away from filisa Gauthey. In Paris, he was increasingly appalled by the omnipresence of grinding poverty. Every day he encountered the miserably poor, the jobless, the hungry, the desperate. They became his passion. A friend remembered that when "he saw a poor wretch wasting away of hunger and had nothing of his own to share with him, he stole"—including, on one occasion, a cow, which he took to a starving woman. A worker who lived on boulevard Voltaire recalled Émile giving money and sometimes shelter to "unfortunate people" and his particular love for children. On one occasion, he invited a friend who had been evicted by his landlord to stay in his room until he could find another place.

Until the middle of 1891, Émile Henry had always respected what he called "the present morality," including the principles "of country, family, authority, and property." However, his teachers had forgotten to teach him one thing, "that life, with its struggles and disappointments, with its injustices and inequalities, opens the eyes of the ignorant ... to reality." This had happened to him. He had been told that life was "open to the intelligent and the energetic," but what he saw in the Paris of the Third Republic clearly demonstrated otherwise. He began to realize "that only the cynics and grovelers can get a place at the banquet." He had believed that social institutions were based on justice and equality but had found only "lies and treachery," a republic rife with sleazy financial scandals and massive corruption, amid shocking poverty. The upper class "has appropriated everything, robbing the other class not just of the sustenance of the body but also of the sustenance of the mind."

In 1887, it emerged that Daniel Wilson, the son-in-law of the president of France (Jules Grévy), had sold the Legion of Honor, a medal signifying France's highest honor, to those who could afford it, making a tidy profit. He and other members of the Chamber of Deputies had also taken large bribes in exchange for their support of a company that had begun construction of the Panama Canal and then run into daunting difficulties before going broke in 1889. Such sums paid for fine dinners in the restaurants and hotels of the
grands boulevards
on which Émile walked. Without a hint of shame, Wilson, who used the stationery of the president of France to drum up business, proclaimed that he had done nothing more than any politician worthy of the name. Many criticized the blatant corruption, along with the wasteful colonial adventures, of the current government, questioning its legitimacy.

The injustice plagued Émile, an extremely sensitive young man. Every hour of every day, the bourgeois state ignored or even abused the weak. The contrasts between rich and poor in Paris were indeed astonishing. According to those on the upper rungs of society, the factory owner who accumulated a colossal fortune from the labor of his pitifully poor workers was an honest man, and the politician and the minister who took bribes were "devoted to the public good." Army officers who experimented with new rifles by shooting African children understood that they were doing their duty to their country; one of them had received congratulations in the Chamber of Deputies from its president. Émile felt profoundly dislocated and alienated by this state of affairs. He loved humanity but hated what he saw around him.

At first, briefly, Émile considered himself a socialist. Then, late in 1891—or at the latest, the beginning of 1892—Émile became an anarchist. A primary influence was his older brother, Fortuné, who had left school in 1885 to take a job at the Central Pharmacy. Even shorter than Émile, Fortuné was stocky and dark-complexioned, with brown hair, a mustache, and sideburns. Excused from military service because of an ankylotic arm, Fortuné left the pharmacy after a "discussion" with his boss, probably about politics. Fortuné was then a socialist and briefly worked on a socialist newspaper. By 1889, he was known to the police, turning up at various socialist meetings, including one determined to achieve "the union of all proletarians" in view of "the decisive struggle" that would end the bourgeois republic. Early in 1891, Fortuné broke with the socialists and embraced anarchism. He believed that the state could not be transformed by socialist votes or even a socialist revolution; rather it had to be destroyed so that mankind could begin again. Fortuné emerged as a prominent, eloquent orator at anarchist meetings and debates. He spoke at gatherings of the League of the Anti-Patriots in Saint-Quentin, Bourges, and in the Loire mining basin. In the Ardennes on the Belgian border, a union leader, Jean-Baptiste Clément, had denounced the anarchist newspaper that was sponsoring a speech by Fortuné. The evening of the talk, Fortuné carried a pistol and a knife with him, fearing that Clément or one of his supporters might attack him.

As is often the case, Émile's relationship with his older brother was complex. They often disagreed. Émile resented the fact that Fortuné, as the eldest, insisted on exercising authority. Émile later said that at one point he had even wanted to kill him. But after some difficult times, they had become close friends. Anarchism reconciled the Henry brothers, giving them something they could both believe in.

Émile was now at the age for possible military conscription. A gendarme had come to the auberge in Brévannes with a letter summoning him to the military lottery. Émile's mother showed the gendarme a letter she had received from her son, who claimed to be working in Berlin for a wholesale merchant. The police could not find him in Paris. Émile's mother believed that he had gone to Berlin to sell merchandise purchased in Paris. But Émile was never in Germany. The letter to his mother was probably posted in Berlin by a German anarchist. In it Émile made clear that he had no intention of serving in the army and did not plan to return to France in the near future: "You know that if I fled France, it was because I will never be in the army." At the lottery, the mayor drew the number fifty-one for Émile. This meant that he was to serve in the 148th Infantry Division, beginning in September 1893. Émile would be officially declared a deserter in February 1892.

At about the same time, Émile left socialism behind, believing that its intrinsically hierarchical nature (there were party leaders, for one) rendered it incapable of changing the existing order of things. His study of science had gradually led him to materialism and atheism. Structure and authority, inherent in all religions and political philosophies, had to disappear. How else could one reconcile morality with the laws of nature, in order to "regenerate the old world and give birth to a happy humanity"? He considered the anarchists whom he had met in Paris the finest people he had ever known because of their integrity, sincerity, straightforward nature, and contempt for prejudice. An anarchist environment, in which "individual ownership" would be replaced with communism, and "authority with liberty ... will raise humanity's moral standards. Man will grasp that he has no rights over a woman who gives herself to someone else, because that woman is simply acting in conformity with her nature." The "selfish bourgeois family" would be eliminated.

When Émile went to Brévannes, he took his anarchist theories with him. A family friend, Madame Denaples, who worked in a restaurant in Paris, tried in vain to dissuade him from his newfound passion. Jules, the younger Henry brother, was quickly taken with his brother's new ideas and began reading anarchist tracts. In 1892, when he received a prize for his schoolwork, he shouted, "Long live the Commune!"

A half-century earlier, in 1840, a printer from Besançon in the mountainous Franche-Comté in eastern France had been the first to call himself an anarchist. The bookish Pierre-Joseph Proudhon started his studies wearing wooden sabots, lacking enough money to purchase books. A painfully shy man who preferred solitude, Proudhon was horrified by what he had seen in Lyon and Paris, those centers of luxury that represented the "royal rule of gold." And he hated the state. "Whoever lays a hand on me to govern me is a usurper and a tyrant. I declare him to be my enemy," he insisted. According to Proudhon,

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted, squeezed, hoaxed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sold, betrayed, and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Proudhon became well known for his 1840 pamphlet called "Property Is Theft." (He was being provocative—what he actually believed was that
too much
property was theft.) Proudhon and his followers saw universal manhood suffrage as a constitutional tyranny in which the people nominally ruled but did not really govern, a sham perpetuated by the powerful. The seeming "disorder" of anarchism would in reality lead to a natural economic order based on equal social relationships, organized into cooperating mutual associations without the hindrance of the state. And because people were basically good, a truly just society could then be constructed, permitting individuals to reach their full potential. As Proudhon put it, "Anarchy is order; government is civil war."

The influence of the Enlightenment can be seen here, particularly the writings of the philosophe Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had celebrated the primitive as something of an ideal. He imagined that people learned from each other by embracing nature, cooperating freely, and living happily ever after. Proudhon insisted that anarchy was an "organized, living society," offering "the highest degree of liberty and order to which humanity can aspire." Everybody would have enough to get along.

In part, anarchism was a reaction to the rapidly expanding power of governments following the creation of nation-states in the nineteenth century. On one hand, the nation had become an object of allegiance for an increasing number of ordinary people in France, one of the consequences of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic period. Primary schools taught French in regions in which other languages, dialects, or patois had long dominated. Maps of France, and of its colonies, took on a symbolic role. At the same time, states extracted more taxes and military conscripts from the people. Expanding bureaucracies, police forces, and armies manifested state power. Like France, Prussia, Russia, and Austria had crushed the revolutions of 1848, which had broken out in these conservative states on behalf of nationalism, political liberalism, and the rights of workers.

To be sure, there was a decidedly millenarian (as well as upto pian) quality to anarchism, which resembled certain political movements of previous centuries. Anarchists were confident that a new, improved society could exist one day, but they believed that violent revolution was a prerequisite. The French Revolution (1789–99) had offered a similar hope. Ordinary people had overthrown the monarchy. Moreover, several radicals (including Jacques Roux and Gracchus Babeuf) had then called for social revolution, including the redistribution of property. Despite their relatively short lives (the former committed suicide, the latter was executed), they left the legacy that revolution could be fomented by conspiracy.

Proudhon's followers maintained considerable influence among artisans in France during the Second Empire and the Commune. When a laborer asserted to an anarchist during the Commune that this time, unlike 1848, the workers would not be cheated of their victory, the anarchist replied, "They have already robbed you of your victory. Have they not named a government?" The fierce repression that followed the Commune made it very difficult for anarchists (or for that matter, socialists) in France.

The cause to which Émile now pledged himself was dominated by two Russian figures, Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin. And they would affect events on the world stage for years to come. Both were of noble origin, examples of the "conscience-stricken" Russian gentry aware of the fact that they were well-off because others were poor. Born in 1814, Bakunin, the consummate rebel, was an enormous man with a huge beard and a hearty appetite for food, drink, and cigars, which he smoked incessantly. After leaving Russia in 1840, he traveled, a mobile revolutionary, to the German states, Switzerland, and then France, from which he was expelled when the Russian ambassador complained about his activities. He went to Paris after the Revolution of February 1848 drove King Louis-Philippe from the throne. Borrowing money from the new provisional republican government, he headed toward Russian Poland to try to foment revolution there. During the "Springtime of the Peoples," a period of optimism for many ordinary people following the liberal and nationalist revolutions that took place in 1848 in the German states, the Habsburg Empire, the Italian states, and France, he led police in several countries on a merry chase. He set up various anarchist groups, some real, some imaginary, before ending up in a Russian prison for six difficult years. Undaunted, he then resumed his career as a professional revolutionary.