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

by Merriman, John

In the London anarchist refugee communities of the early 1890s, suspicion of police spies became a veritable obsession. As in Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent, a novel about the underbelly of anarchism in the back streets of London, it became difficult to tell real anarchists from undercover agents, informers, or even provocateurs. In the novel, Conrad's agent Verloc, whose shop attracts a variety of anarchists, is in the employ of a foreign embassy—obviously Russian. He is summoned to that embassy and told to organize, in the space of a month, a bomb attack that would be blamed on anarchists. So Verloc decides to blow up Greenwich, the point of Greenwich Mean Time: "Go for the first meridian. You don't know the middle classes as well as I do. Their sensibilities are jaded. The first meridian. Nothing better, and nothing easier, I should think." Such an outrageous attack would force the British police to put the squeeze on Russian anarchists in the capital.

  Anarchists living in London developed their own counter-strategies. Malatesta eventually created a code, replacing letters with symbols, to communicate safely with colleagues. Because virtually every anarchist exile barely could scrape by, many looked suspiciously upon comrades who seemed to live well, despite having no obvious source of income. When an Italian infiltrater was discovered in 1889, Malatesta used the Italian newspaper in London to warn other anarchists. The Italian anarchist Rubino at one point tried to convince colleagues that he was not a police informer by asserting that he had tried to assassinate King Leopold of Belgium with a pistol bought using funds provided him by an undercover policeman serving as an agent provocateur.

  While London police were not allowed to cooperate directly with foreign police, occasionally Scotland Yard or even the London metropolitan police worked informally with embassy-based authorities, who operated a wide network of police informers. However, police in London, as in Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Brussels, and other major European centers of anarchism, sometimes had to depend on reports that were misleading, exaggerated, or simply invented by paid informers—whose most intriguing stories often surfaced when they were pushing for pay raises. Yet the spies collected useful information as well, particularly concerning anarchist publications that were to be smuggled abroad.

  In the end, British police did succeed somewhat in monitoring the activities of foreign anarchists living in London. Nicoll, the British anarchist, called Inspector Melville, the chief police inspector, "a really remarkable and astute man." He admitted that Melville was "on terms of perfect intimacy with the police agents of foreign governments ... he and his gang [had] dogged the steps of the foreign refugees for years." In January 1892, six anarchists were arrested in London and Walsall, a town in the West Midlands near Birmingham, after a small bomb factory was discovered, its products perhaps intended for use in Russia. One of the men was a French Breton, picked up outside the Autonomy Club on Windmill Street in London and found to be carrying a paper bag containing chloroform; another of the apprehended was an Italian shoemaker. Although four of those arrested were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms, two men were acquitted when it became clear that a French agent provocateur named Auguste Coulon had encouraged the operation and then denounced it. The Italian shoemaker also belonged to the Autonomy Club. Another was in possession of a tract called "An Anarchist Feast at the Opera," in which several anarchists bring a bomb to the opera and then leave after the first act, enjoying the anguished screams of their victims. Émile, who was in London during this period, almost certainly read this pamphlet, which was reprinted in 1892.

  Many French anarchists, like Louise Michel, lived in Soho (dubbed "La Petite France") or to the north around Fitzroy Square. During this time, Fitzroy Square was far from the exclusive address that it would become (though at the time, George Bernard Shaw lived at number 29, an address subsequently occupied by Virginia Woolf). Still, it was somewhat less shabby than the more proletarian Soho neighborhoods nearby. Small firms of cabinetmakers and upholsterers were located in and around its stucco façades. The London Skin Hospital stood on one corner of the square. People of means had abandoned Fitzroy Square for more chic addresses, leaving behind properties that were divided and then subdivided. Rents were relatively low and the neighborhood attracted political and artistic outsiders. Fitzroy Square and its surroundings thus earned a reputation as a small oasis of left-wing politics and bohemian lifestyles.

  Louise Michel, the anarchist known as "the Red Virgin" who had been a leader in the Paris Commune, fell in love with London, "where my banished friends are always welcome." Kropotkin wanted to organize a lecture for her, but she did not speak English. After arriving in the British capital in 1890, she started an anarchist school on Fitzroy Square for the children of political refugees (it lasted until 1892, when police discovered explosives in the building, stored there by a compagnon). Michel always wore black in honor of the Communards who had been slaughtered in 1871.

  A Parisian journalist described the French anarchists in London as "a collection of poor devils more needy than ferocious." Compagnons helped each other, and like immigrants in any city, relied on their fellows as they learned to navigate a foreign place. Zo d'Axa described his time living near Fitzroy Square in London as simply "vegetating," completely cut off from Londoners. For him "isolation compounded the dense sadness of the fog." The lucky ones found work in their trades—tailoring, cabinetmaking, shoemaking. When he was in London, Émile's friend Constant Martin worked for a tailor. Several French anarchists sold flowers to survive, and it was rumored that several were working for a company that manufactured torpedoes for the Royal Navy. A few were burglars. At least two French anarchists worked at swindling people in the wine trade.

  The small grocery shop Le Bel Épicier, operated by Victor Richard, a fifty-year-old philanthropic political militant and refugee from the Commune, became a port of entry and gathering place for French anarchist refugees. Richard was something of a local celebrity and well known to the police. He proudly sold only "red" beans, not the "reactionary" white ones, on Charlotte Street, near Fitzroy Square. Some French anarchists and store patrons lived on that street, which parallels Tottenham Court Road and is now so elegant. (Richard almost certainly was the inspiration for Conrad's character Verloc—Conrad also lived near Tottenham Court Road.) On at least one occasion Richard provided funds so that an anarchist sought by the police could get out of England. Nearby, the anarchist bookstore on Goodge Street provided a gathering place for compagnons lacking the money to frequent the pubs.

  Most of the exiles knew only a smattering of English. Malato, who learned English fairly well, recounted the challenges of heading off into different parts of London armed only with two English words, street and fish. A raid on Richard's grocery store in 1894 turned up a list of phrases intended, for better or for worse, to help French anarchists get along in London. Along with ferry timetables to and from England and France, Malato's The Pleasantries of Exile included the following crib sheet.

  French Written English Spoken English (how to pronounce)

  Ma jolie fille? My pretty girl? Maille prêté guile?

  Donnez-moi un shilling. Give me a bob. G'hive mi é bob.

  Je vous tirerai le nez. I will pull your nose. Aille ouil poule your nose.

  Je vous mettrai mon pied dans le derrière. I will put my foot on your bottom. Aill ouille poute maille foute one your botome.

  Fermez ça! Shut up! Chotte ap!

  Je vous ferai des bleus sur le corps. I'll make rings about your body. Aill'le mêke rin'gse abaoute your bode.

  Ma femme me bat. My wife strikes me. Maille waill'fe straïkse mi.

  London played an extremely important role in the dissemination of anarchist propaganda and thus anarchism's global reach. Pamphlets, brochures, and newspapers produced there allowed anarchists to communicate across national borders and even oceans, relate inspiring news of anarchist deeds in other countries, and carry on a debate about tactics. Anarchist manifestos arrived in France from London, including "Response to the Gunners," which celebrated the martyrd
om of the anarchists in Chicago and saluted the destruction of the restaurant Le Véry. Anarchist papers published in Britain often reprinted articles from similar publications in Italy, Spain, and France, particularly Père Peinard. The anarchist press, publishing in London, Paris, Ancona, and other cities, spread the subculture of anarchism through songs about "deeds" and executions of compagnons. The French anarchist community in London marshaled enough resources to finance the publication of anarchist newspapers there, including Le Tocsin (The Alarm Bell), edited by Charles Malato, and La Tribune Libre. L'International, another French-language newspaper, published only eight issues in 1890 but managed to include an excerpt from a brochure titled "The Anarchist Guide: The Manual of the Perfect Dynamiter."

  Following the highly publicized bomb on rue des Bons-Enfants, many contradictory and often absurd rumors circulated in the anarchist community in London. According to one account, the person responsible for the attack had already reached America, but the police did not take this seriously. Another anarchist asserted that the author of the attack was now in "a little country" where he would never be found. A certain Wagemans, who had turned down an offer to become a police informant, said confidentially that the person was hiding in a convent run by one of his uncles in a large city in provincial England, perhaps Manchester. This also seemed highly unlikely.

  When Émile arrived in London in November 1892, he took a furnished room right off Tottenham Court Road. He spoke some English, although not with ease. He quickly developed a reputation for being a hard-core anarchist, "real, convinced." He spent his time getting to know anarchists in Whitechapel, where many Jewish migrants from eastern Europe had settled. He also was known in pubs around Tottenham Court Road and in Soho. Soon after his arrival, Émile went with Louis Matha, with whom he probably stayed, to the Autonomy Club. A portrait of Ravachol adorned one of its rooms.

  The Autonomy Club, founded in 1886 by a German anarchist who had been expelled from a different group, was first located on Charlotte Street off Fitzroy Square. Its facilities included one long and narrow room, a kitchen, and several rooms on the second floor. The club soon moved to a more spacious house on Windmill Street near Tottenham Court Road, operated by an anarchist who lived there with his family. It offered a restaurant, and for a small sum one could have a meal of soup, meat, and vegetables, as well as plenty of conversation. The club, which published the German anarchist newspaper Die Autonomic, featured a large room in which compagnons presented plays. Ticket sales helped subsidize the families of anarchists in jail or on the run as well as destitute, sickly, or otherwise overburdened supporters of the cause. Proceeds from the bar went to help anarchists unable to find work. On at least one occasion, Melville, the inspector from Scotland Yard, managed to get into the club.

  The Autonomy Club was the unofficial headquarters of the informal network of foreign anarchists in London, what has been called a "shadow circle." In particular, it became the center for French anarchist exiles. The club had enough rooms that compagnons could meet by nationality (although Italian, German, and Scandinavian clubs existed elsewhere in that part of the city). This division certainly seems surprising, given the emphasis placed on internationalism in anarchist writings. But as a French policeman who had become an expert on anarchist doings in London noted, it was one thing to theorize about transcending national boundaries and quite another to turn away from those who shared one's own heritage, language, and culture. By the end of 1885, the International French Language Group formed part of the original Autonomy Club, and two years later the Anti-Patriotic Group began to meet there on Mondays. Yet, to be sure, contacts and friendships developed between anarchists from different countries, despite the language barriers. (French worked best as a common language for most of the multinational community of exiles.) For example, Martial Bourdin, a French anarchist and a member of the Autonomy Club who, like his brother Auguste, worked as a ladies' tailor when he could find work, had many anarchist friends who were Italian.

  The anarchist clubs did the best they could to welcome the newly arrived to teeming, foggy, cold London and introduce them to its strange food, much of which they could hardly afford. (Malato prided himself on producing wine—a touch of home tradition, though he had to use bananas to make it.) They provided a place to talk politics, discuss events back home, and play chess and cards. The Autonomy Club in particular hosted anarchists expelled from the Continent, including a German advocate of the "right of theft," who had most recently been kicked out of Paris, and Bob Hippolyte, a "man of color"; the London police followed both of them to Windmill Street. On occasion, the rooms of the Autonomy Club were transformed into dormitories. It was difficult to find provisions to feed everybody, and the coffers were more often empty than full.

  On one occasion, about thirty Spanish anarchists arrived in London from Buenos Aires without a cent among them. The police shadowed their entire journey from the moment they landed in Liverpool. They marched together from Euston Station to a political club near Tottenham Court Road, where they were provided food and drink and a temporary place to stay. They then were sent off to lodgings in groups of four or five. Within a few months, all but a few had returned to Spain. Not knowing any English, they had found staying in London extraordinarily difficult. Moreover, to the police and to other Londoners who saw them, they seemed "an unwashed, sinister, forbidding crew, and their presence caused a distinct flutter among the other Anarchists, although there were no revolutionary outbreaks."

  As important as the clubs were for fostering social cohesion among anarchists in exile, they fueled the myth of a centralized international Dynamite Club, based in London. In Paris, the prefect of the Seine in 1893 described a central anarchist committee that included Kropotkin, Malato, and Matha, who gave orders to the faithful. Kropotkin, to be sure, was of sufficient reputation (he was a friend to William Butler Yeats and Oscar Wilde, among other literary personalities, and also knew George Bernard Shaw) to seem capable of organizing such a motley group. Indeed, he provided the entry on anarchism for the 1910 Encylopaedia Britan-nica. The British press presented anarchist clubs as Conspiracy Central, the very architecture of their meeting places conducive to dastardly plots: complicated entrances that allowed all visitors to be observed without their knowing it, back doors facilitating easy, discreet escape, should the police arrive—as they did, at the Autonomy Club, in 1892 and again two years later. Londoners' obsessive belief in an anarchist plot was an extension of the paranoia that swept Paris in the early 1890s. Malato described how the mainstream press portrayed the modest Autonomy Club as a center of conspiracy for social revolution. According to Malato, journalists "out of ideas and paid by the line were delighted to be able to speculate on bourgeois terror, plots being hatched and ready to go to strike the continent ... preparing dynamite, potassium chlorate, nitrobenzene, rack-a-rock, and green powder." At a time of rapid technological progress, the public was fascinated by the developing wonders of science but at the same time uneasy about the dangers that might lurk in them. The Morning Post in 1892—the year of Ravachol's bombs—claimed that four hundred French "desparatos [sic], thieves, counterfeiters, and murderers" had swooped down on England. Their goal? To kill all of the wealthy, not only in London but throughout Great Britain, by suffocating them with chloroform. A London magazine described the arrival in 1892 of a well-heeled French anarchist who had come to speak in an anarchist club. Purportedly, he stated that anarchists lived near virtually all major government buildings in Europe and planned to use dreadful new killing machines, invented by one of their own and rigged to explode in such a way that the culprits would have time to escape. The press exaggerated the number of women present in the anarchist clubs, implying that many were prostitutes responsible for the rampant syphilis that supposedly afflicted anarchist men.

  The French journalist Henri Rochefort—an arrogant, provocative anti-Semite resplendent in his role as the "prince of the gutter press"—was also living in London. (Rochefort create
d a parody of what might be stated in an "anarchist constitution." Article 1: There is no longer anything. Article 2: No one is charged with enforcing the previous article.) He had been forced into exile because of the part he played in the Boulanger affair of 1889, when the dashing general Georges Boulanger seemed on the verge of overthrowing the republic and establishing a military dictatorship. Rochefort had served as a correspondent for L'Intransigeant, the Boulangist newspaper. Although sometimes unreliable, he offered a perceptive assessment of the London-based anarchists—for whom he had some respect and occasionally even affinity. He understood that Parisians, among other Europeans, believed that London was the center of a worldwide anarchist movement. But Rochefort said, "This is a complete error. The anarchists in London never constituted themselves into secret societies. They retained their complete independence, and only met in very small groups, while all sorts of characters were collected under their banner."

  Soon after he arrived in the British capital in November 1892, Émile came to be known as the hero of the explosion at the police station on rue des Bons-Enfants. He seemed to have made it clear that he intended to blow up various public places in Paris. The "associationalists" ("fraternistes") considered him "insane," as did some anarchists who revered Ravachol. Émile's presence in London accentuated the hostility between those who rejected "propaganda by the deed" and those who wanted to lash out by using bombs. Thus, the passionate debate unleashed by Ravachol's violent deeds and execution continued around Tottenham Court Road and Fitzroy Square, in French, German, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, Russian, and Italian. A London detective remembered Émile very well, especially his audacity and arrogance. Those who knew him sensed that he would meet his end at the guillotine. While this surmise might have stopped anyone else, Émile, in the detective's opinion, was not even conscious of his acts. He was as unsettled and volatile as a Parisian street urchin. At other moments, he was shy and insolent, an overgrown boy.