The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (8 page)

The meetings of most anarchist groups were relatively small but swelled in size when speakers from other groups were invited, or debates, sometimes with socialists, were planned. When the Père Lachaise group met in June 1886, eleven members showed up. The same number attended a meeting in the Salle Bourdel, rue de Belleville, in late June 1888 to discuss opposition to the celebration of Bastille Day at a time when about 200,000 workers in the capital were unemployed. Unlike the format of socialist gatherings, presiding officers did not lead meetings of anarchists. The idea of having officers, even for one gathering, was totally antithetical to the anarchist principle of "individual initiative."

Anarchists organized "family evenings" and "popular discussions," usually on Sunday. At times they offered soup or something else to eat in exchange for listening to speeches. Amid boisterous singing, they put small coins in a passed hat to help anarchists and their families who were struggling to make ends meet, such as those whose husband or father had been jailed. On these occasions, crowds of one hundred, four hundred, or even more were not uncommon. In December 1892, more than two thousand bowls of soup, along with anarchist newspapers, were distributed at a
soupe-conference
in the Salle Favié, amid occasional shouts of "Death to the cops!" and "Death to the pigs!"

Anarchist songs reached an ever larger popular audience. Adrienne Chailley was one of the better-known anarchist singers. Twenty-six years old, she went by the name "Marie Puget," a poor soul who sang in various Left Bank brasseries while living in an attic room in a cheap hotel on the Left Bank near the Seine. This "hysterical madwoman" was denigrated by a conservative newspaper as a "priestess of anarchy" who, with short brown hair and a snub nose, sang rough, vulgar anti-bourgeois tunes, "her blouse open, hair blowing in the wind, eyes lit up by alcohol ... while wiggling in the middle of the hall, wearing herself out amid a chaotic uproar which often concludes with some major act of imprudence."

Henry Leyret, the Belleville bar owner, did not believe that "the people" were anarchist, even if most occasionally read anarchist newspapers. Yet Leyret remembered in particular two workers standing at the counter, drinking their absinthe and coolly, with considerable perception, discussing and comparing the literary talents, merits, and weaknesses of two anarchist journalists. Leyret's customers in general did not like anyone associated with the authorities and resented the uneven application of the law. They hated the police, who, they perceived, had it in for them. So the enemies of the police, whoever they might be, automatically became their friends. Even if these customers did not know much about anarchism, they approved in principle of the anarchist struggle, often forgiving the deeds of the anarchists, whom they viewed as the righters of wrongs.

Émile Henry plunged into the world of Parisian anarchism. It soon became clear to him, and to others, that despite the movement's emphasis on individual autonomy, anarchists would have to work together to build the revolution. Thus anarchists were part of an informal corporation (
compagnonnage
), which provided moral and sometimes material assistance for
compagnons
—the word itself stemming from the idea of sharing bread. Some anarchists served as "midnight movers," helping poor families move in silence from their apartments without paying the rent while their landlord or concierge slept. The anarchist Augustin Léger described one very rapid move in the dark of night. At the agreed-upon time, his anarchist pals showed up, hauling a little wagon, which they parked in an alley to avoid attracting attention. Then they quietly went upstairs, carrying their friend's belongings back down. On at least one occasion, a property owner or concierge was gagged, tied up, and left on his bed. Midnight moves could be enacted swiftly, since most anarchists owned very little.

Newspapers provided some cohesion to the anarchist cause, underlining its international character while solidifying anarchism's informal network and keeping
compagnons
informed of debates concerning theory and tactics. At the base of rue Mouffetard behind and below the Panthéon, near the misery of the faubourg Saint-Marcel, Jean Grave published
La Révolte.
Grave, whose father was a miller and then a farmer in central France, had become a shoemaker before turning full-time to the anarchist cause. He had taken over publication of the newspaper's predecessor,
Le Révolté,
in Geneva in 1883, after its founder, Peter Kropotkin, was permanently expelled from Switzerland. In the wake of harassment from Swiss authorities, Grave moved the newspaper to Paris. With a slight change in its title,
La Révolte
became a weekly in May 1886. From the workshop of "the Pope of rue Mouffetard" also appeared anarchist pamphlets, sold in anarchist bookshops, particularly in Montmartre, but also in the Latin Quarter, where the first group of student anarchists was formed in 1890.

Grave's office was in the attic of a four-story building. Four flights of stairs and a narrow ladder led there. A small sign on the door indicated the newspaper's presence, but since there was no bell, a visitor had to knock. A large room that had once served as a place to dry laundry now accommodated piles of papers and newspapers. Grave's desk consisted of a board resting on two supports, next to which lay his shoes. Four pages long and printed on good-quality paper,
La Révolte
included a literary supplement and appeared each Saturday.

Grave struggled to keep the publication going. Raising money from a generally impoverished clientele was not easy; printing 6,500 to 7,000 copies each week cost 320 francs. A few intellectuals and artists helped Grave along with small gifts of cash. The paper provided a forum for the philosophy of anarchism, with articles on "property," "anarchism and terrorism," "the noxious influence of industrialization," "anarchy and order," and so on. Other pieces described incidents of state repression in France, crackdowns on demonstrations, or other actions against anarchists, including raids that began with the sudden arrival of jail wagons in working-class neighborhoods.

For all this,
La Révolte
was relatively staid compared to Émile Pouget's
Père Peinard.
Père Peinard was the name of a fictitious cobbler, a straight talking soul who exuded common sense and in the name of justice went after corrupt politicians, officials, and magistrates, with the imposing leather strap of his trade. After trying to organize department store employees, the well-educated, twenty-two-year-old Pouget, the son of a notary in Dordogne in the southwest, was sentenced to prison for "provocation to pillage." (This followed the incident in the Parisian bakery in 1883.) After his release three years later, he joined an anarchist group, the Revolutionary Sentinel, in Montmartre. In 1889, he began to publish
Père Peinard.

Defiantly vulgar and profane, Pouget appealed to the emotions of ordinary people, using familiar slang—some of which was virtually unintelligible to outsiders—to considerable advantage. That the speech of ordinary workers differed so markedly from that of the elite reinforced the distance, both cultural and geographic, that separated rich and poor in the City of Light. Some popular argot was borrowed from the language of criminals at a time when court convictions seemed to be reaching new heights.
Père Peinard
helped convince many upper-class Parisians that the "dangerous classes" were perched on the edge of the capital, ready to strike. At the same time, Pouget's newspaper reinforced popular solidarity and the sense of being separate from and opposed to the state and its urban elite. At a cost of
cinq ronds
("five round ones," or coins, still common parlance),
Père Peinard
grew to eight pages. About eight thousand copies, and sometimes even more, were printed each week in 1892. Police estimated that each copy reached an average of five people.

If Pouget himself was soft-spoken, his pen was not. Considering "militarism ... a school for crime,"
Père Peinard
noted that despite the nominal goal of "civilizing" the Vietnamese, French troops had committed five times more atrocities on that southeast Asian land than had their Prussian counterparts during the war of 1870–71. Factories were almost always referred to as prisons—and the Palais de Justice became the "Palais d'Injustice," the clergy became "clerical-pigs," the rich "
les richards
" (a term still in use), supporters of the Republic "
la républicanaille,
" and so on. These coinages were interspersed with salty phrases such as "goddammit," "be damned," or "
kif-kif"—
meaning "it makes no difference" or "it is all the same." The latter was the caption for an illustration showing a poor peasant in 1789 and a late-nineteenth-century worker standing in front of a statue that depicted the republic, suggesting that this form of government had done absolutely nothing for the poor of either era.

A constant theme of
Père Peinard
was that ordinary people needed to act for themselves. The Communards had missed an opportunity to "burn down all the old residences where the bandits live who govern us, as well as the edifices of mindlessness: churches, prisons, ministries—the whole mess ... It's easy, a thousand bombs! ... We await
la Belle,
" the beautiful days that would surely follow revolution and the destruction of the state. During a miners' strike in Decazeville,
Père Peinard
proclaimed, "First of all, goddammit, it is never a bad thing to attack the good-for-nothings when one gets the opportunity, as did the good chaps of Decazeville with Watrin" (a foreman in the mines of that town who was killed and castrated). After a worker murdered a boss who had been giving him a hard time, Pouget commented, in a piece titled "One Less," that this murder demonstrated what goodwill could accomplish. It all came down to this: "It will be by the force of a violent Revolution that we will expropriate the rich and we will throw the old society onto the trash heap ... The land to peasants! The factory to workers!! Lodging, clothing, and food for all!" Pouget's newspaper suffered seven judicial condemnations from April 1890 to November 1892.

The third major anarchist publication was
L'Endehors,
a cerebral, literary, and artistic weekly newspaper. It was the inspiration of "Zo d'Axa," born Alphonse Gallaud in Paris in 1864, the son of a railroad official of the Orléans Railroad Company. Looking like "a gentleman buccaneer," he turned to anarchism after deserting the army in Algeria. He fled to Jerusalem, was extradited to France, and took refuge in Belgium. Zo d'Axa then became a journalist. The meaning of the name
L'Endehors
reflected the anarchist story: "on the outside." Zo d'Axa sought converts to anarchism with irony and sarcasm, defending strikes and aggressively chronicling stories of army officers who brutalized soldiers. Such articles brought him repeated court convictions, leading one wag to comment that he went to prison "as one goes to the telephone, when it rings."

Sold on the boulevards by some of the editors themselves,
L'Endehors
published as many as six thousand copies per issue. Each had an editorial, "First Shout," on the first page, which announced the latest injustice: "It is rare that M. Carnot goes a fortnight without guillotining someone." Or "Riols, the head of the police in Saint-Nazaire, was gravely wounded by a rock thrown by a likable sailor. The night before, the policeman in charge of the neighborhood of Marceau was equally badly treated by seamen. The navy is obviously improving."

One day during the spring of 1892, Émile Henry showed up in the cellar offices of
L'Endehors
near Montmartre, saying simply that he wanted to work for anarchism. The newspaper office was a gathering place, of sorts, for artists, intellectuals, and bohemians. It was there that Émile met the art and literary critic and anarchist Félix Fénéon, a dandy sporting a greatcoat, a full cape, dark red gloves, and black patent-leather shoes. Fénéon became attached to the young anarchist, seven years his junior, with his wide eyes, pale complexion, and close-cropped hair. Quite taken with Émile's youthful intelligence, "the mathematical precision of his thinking, and the intense way he identified with the suffering of the people while maintaining a cool and detached exterior," Fénéon lodged Émile on several occasions in his apartment in Montmartre.

Émile's friendship with Charles Malato, another anarchist, developed during this same period. Malato's father, Antoine (called Cornetto), had been born in Sicily and fought with the Italian patriot Garibaldi and in the Commune, after which he had been exiled to New Caledonia in the South Pacific. His son had worked for the French government there, remaining at his post even after several of his colleagues had been massacred by the indigenous Kanaks (Canaques). The clever Malato offered the reassuring aspect of an Anglican clergyman, careful not to alienate anyone. A wonderful orator and writer, Malato spoke four or five languages.

Malato introduced Émile to a small, recently formed group of anarchists, whose members had tired of "the noisy, vapid, and often dubious individuals who invade the larger groups, paralyzing all activity." The young Émile became one of the most active and enthusiastic members of the group. Malato remembered that Émile would stay up virtually all night with his new anarchist friends, and then despite the lack of sleep, go off to work. During this period of feverish initiation, Émile rarely went to Brévannes. His mother did not really know what he was doing. All she could see was that he no longer seemed to enjoy himself, or even smile.

Malato too saw a transformation in Émile and believed that it was caused by the appalling social injustices he saw every day. Despite his rather frail appearance, Émile's "indomitable will" seemed even more prominent than his "superior abilities and a burning enthusiasm for lofty ideals." The American anarchist Emma Goldman asserted that it was not anarchist theory that created terrorists but rather the shocking inequalities they saw around them, which could overwhelm a sensitive nature and indeed, a person's very soul. This rang true for Émile, who once said, "To those who say: hate does not give birth to love, I reply that it is love, human love, that often engenders hate."