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

by Merriman, John

  Émile became a darling at the Autonomy Club, which was favored by the "individualists," whose cause Émile had defended in his letter attacking Malatesta in L'Endehors. A French group, Free Initiative, met there, and they accused the anarchist grocer Richard and his friends of being soft "associationalists." Members of Free Initiative produced pamphlets in French, fiercely attacking their fellow anarchists who disagreed on the use of violence. Following Ravachol's execution, meetings at the club became so stormy that Charles Malato said, with some irony, that it was not unlike being in the Chamber of Deputies.

  To the police, however, most members of this club appeared to fit into one general group, "foreigners of the lowest class" among whom resided anarchists willing to use bombs to further their cause. The police had developed a profile of the typical bomber. He was "a solitary and fanatic individual who has thought about and noted the fault of contemporary society until the moment that his mind becomes demented." He would invariably tell only one or two friends of his plans to launch an explosion. He then would execute his scheme "with unmatched composure and audacity." Even if he knew with certainty that the ultimate sacrifice lay ahead, he would never back down—"he walks to his death with courage and no regrets."

  In November 1892, around the time Émile had arrived in London, the French police in that very city were watching the girlfriend of a certain Pomati, who received mail from Fortuné and Émile as well as from Constant Martin in Paris. Now she saw Émile and Martin together in London. The Henry brothers had moved considerably higher on the police's list of suspected potential bombers; they were considered "audacious and determined, and at the point of preparing to strike." These officers also knew that Émile was adept at chemistry, could assemble explosives, and was "cooler and more experienced than his brother."

  Almost inevitably, a few compagnons in London suspected Émile of being a police informant. Martin noted as much to an anarchist who had recently arrived to interview Louise Michel at Richard's grocery store. The compagnon knew Émile and asked Richard to give him his greetings because he had worked with him, and the two were "even somewhat intimate." Richard replied that he did not know Émile Henry, which seemed unlikely.

  In fact, Richard, for one, desperately wanted to know whose bomb had blown up the police station on rue des Bons-Enfants. An anarchist brought Émile to the back of the grocery, a place that Émile had avoided because the police closely watched who came and went. Richard was so pleased with Émile's deed that he gave him three hundred francs "to demonstrate his satisfaction and eagerness that he would continue his work." According to the story, Émile was indignant that the sum was so small.

  In the meantime, the French police were getting closer to Émile. An anarchist informer offered to provide information about him in exchange for cash. This man was almost certainly the "friend" who had mailed the letter to Dupuy from Orléans. Now he wanted five hundred francs in exchange for Émile's letter. The police wanted to know if Émile "was involved in the affair" at rue des Bons-Enfants. The informant's answer was an emphatic yes. He had found out on the Saturday before the bombing that it would occur.

  The "betrayer" also revealed that Émile tended to lay low and generally avoided the most prominent anarchists in London. Martin had tried to hide the details of Émile's flight from Richard, whose store was constantly under police surveillance. And clearly, Émile was not in England simply to dodge the draft; if so, he would be content to stay in London, rather than move on to America, which he had mentioned to his "friend." The informer reminded the police of the enormous risk he was taking, because if certain compagnons learned of his betrayal, he would not be long for this world. To prove that he was well informed, he provided the number of the street where the French anarchist Gustave Mathieu was hiding under the name of Dumont (he could not remember the exact name of the street, only that it was near Oxford Street).

  Rochefort had his own view of Émile's involvement in the bombing:

  Well! Although he was the son of a former member of the Commune, he was so little in touch with the anarchist party that nobody believed his story, and it was greeted either as a young man's boasting, or else as an imaginative romance invented to get money out of those who might be stupid enough to credit it. I recollect Malato saying to me one day—"There is a fellow going all over London saying that he is the author of the Rue des Bons-Enfants explosion; he is evidently taking people in."

  As the French police investigated Émile, the anarchists turned their attention to Spain, where their movement had grown during the 1870s, particularly in Barcelona (which became known as "the city of bombs") and in Andalusia. Some 4,000 vineyard workers had entered the town of Jerez to free 157 anarchists arrested the previous year. The Spanish Civil Guard responded as if this action constituted a full-fledged insurrection. The guards arrested, beat, and tortured many anarchists, whom they accused of belonging to a secret society known as the Black Hand. Four men who had confessed under torture to planning the insurrection were garroted in Jerez on February 10,1892. These executions angered and preoccupied Émile.

  In retaliation, an anarchist named Paulino Pallas, who had earlier traveled with Malatesta, tossed two bombs at a Spanish general, killing a soldier and five civilians, but not the officer. Pallas too was executed. Vengeance was not long in coming. On November 7, 1893, an anarchist dropped two bombs, made of mercury fulminate, from a balcony onto the main floor of Barcelona's elegant Liceo Theater during a performance of William Tell, killing twenty-two people and wounding about fifty others. Police rounded up hundreds of well-known anarchists, charging them with conspiracy, and then executed four of them. The Spanish police arrested the bomber himself, Santiago Salvador, two months later. Claiming conversion to the church—a last-ditch effort to save his life—he was executed in 1894.

  Similar attacks had occurred in the United States as well. There Alexander Berkman, who had immigrated five years earlier, tried to assassinate Henry C. Frick, who managed the Carnegie Steel Company, the object of a violent strike in Homestead, Pennsylvania, in 1892. In January of that year, anarchists planned, but could not carry out, simultaneous bombings in London, Paris, and Berlin.

  Malato, who had been in London since his 1890 conviction in France, observed that Émile changed dramatically at this time: "The bombs of Barcelona hypnotized him: the only thing he thought of was to strike a blow and die. 'Today is the anniversary of the dancing-lesson,"' he said, alluding to the explosion of the rue des Bons-Enfants. He was proud of having killed five enemies. Malato added, "He grew in his own eyes; he said to himself that his role of avenging angel had only just begun."

  On December 21,1892, two men turned up at an auberge in the Norman village of Fiquefleur-Équainville, along the estuary of the Seine, about five miles from Honfleur. One introduced himself as an English businessman, eager to start up a factory. Both asked about local properties and industries. About a week later, another man joined them, and the three expressed interest in a property owned by a wealthy elderly lady named Postel. They turned up at Mass on January 1, one of the rare occasions in which the woman left her house, where she lived with a domestic servant. Then, on the night of January 7, the same three men, carrying stiletto knives, broke into the lady's house. Wearing long black coats and masks, they subdued the woman by placing a chemical-infused handkerchief over her nose; then they tied her up, along with her servant. Before leaving, they forced the woman to give them keys to a safe and took more than 1,000 francs, some jewelry, and receipts acknowledging the deposit in a local bank of items worth about 800,000 francs. (The slip of paper was, of course, worth nothing.) On January 16, the woman received a threatening letter, telling her to send 30,000 francs to Victor Richard's grocery store on Charlotte Street in London; some of the deposit receipts were tucked into the envelope. A second letter, written five days later, reflected some panic on the part of the thieves, as it suggested that a lesser sum would do.

  Later, several people claimed to have seen Émile
in Fiquefleur, posing as the English businessman. The second man may have been Léon Ortiz, and the third Gustave Mathieu but more likely Placide Schouppe (the two men looked quite similar). Schouppe was involved in another theft in the town of Abbeville and had been arrested in Brussels at the end of May. Émile may have written the extortion letter; his friend the Egyptian-born anarchist Alexandre Marocco, a London dealer in stolen goods, probably was involved, though not in the heist itself. Matha, who was in London at the time, at least knew about it. The list of suspects was long.

  A few months later, in February 1893, Émile seemed to be back in Paris. Police heard that he had met with the anarchist typographer Achille Étiévant in a bar in Clichy. They believed the two were plotting a new dynamite deed, perhaps with explosives that had been hidden nearby when compagnon Francis went on trial at the Assize Court in April 1893 for blowing up Le Very.

  The word then went out that Étiévant and another anarchist planned to bomb "The Aquarium," the Chamber of Deputies in the Palais-Bourbon. Reportedly in contact with various groups of anarchist revolutionaries, Émile had told someone that he would be in Paris until May 1 and then return to England. The police knew that his mother lived in Brévannes on avenue de la Planchette and believed that Émile went there from time to time to visit her. But no word of Émile's whereabouts surfaced in any of the anarchist groups the police had infiltrated. He was almost certainly on occasion staying with several of his classmates from the J.-B. Say school.

  In March 1893, the police thought Émile to be back in London. They were wrong. Two months later, Gustave Babet, an anarchist shoemaker living in central Paris, a regular propagandist, and an intimate friend of Ravachol, told an undercover policeman that the "affair" of rue des Bons-Enfants had been the work of Émile. Moreover, he claimed to have been aware that the attack was in the works and that a woman he did not know had placed the bomb. Émile was on a list of those who seemed ready to "carry out criminal projects" in April.

  Early that month, Émile called on his wealthy conservative aunt, the marquise de Chamborant, in Passy. He seemed at ease, clean shaven and well dressed in a frock coat, vest, black pants, and a nice white shirt with a stand-up collar. He asked for five hundred francs, which he said he would use to start a small business. A man named Duthion, then employed by the marquise, later noted that he appeared unhappy when he left the house empty-handed.

  Émile then traveled to Brussels and remained there until May 1. At this time, Belgian workers were staging massive demonstrations to demand the right to vote. When, on April 11, the parliament rejected a bill for general manhood suffrage, the Belgian Workers' Party declared a general strike. The movement spread rapidly. Small bands of men, including anarchists, broke windows in central Brussels, outraging merchants and the public at large. A state of siege was declared, and gendarmes charged at the workers, with swords drawn. Troops killed demonstrators in two Belgian towns. Would the revolution begin in Belgium? On April 18, the Belgian parliament offered a compromise, a cumbersome system of plural suffrage, awarding extra votes to fathers of families, various "qualified" voters, and those men who owned property. Many workers remained dissatisfied.

  Living under the name of Martin or Meurin, in a hotel on a main street in the suburb of Saint-Gilles, Émile would later claim that he had taken an active part in the fighting in Brussels, firing a pistol in fact, and was amazed that he was not arrested. Although universal manhood suffrage was not an anarchist cause, Émile supported any action, such as the riots in Belgium, that could ultimately contribute to the revolution. His probable presence there underlines the international character of anarchism. He sent Père Peinard an article from a Brussels newspaper denouncing the "treason" of the Belgian socialists for having caved in. In late April, he returned to the hotel to find that a French policeman had been asking about him. He immediately left for Paris, arriving in time to watch the demonstrations on May 1.

  From May 20 to July 12, 1893, Émile lived in a tiny room on boulevard Morland, between the Bastille and the Seine, taking the name Louis Dubois. He was apparently learning the locksmith's trade in the Marais, but he earned nothing. When Félix Fénéon brought Émile home to introduce him to his mother, the latter was carrying a tool kit. Fénéon's mother exclaimed, "Ah! You didn't tell me that he was an artisan." Émile was carrying a fine new cane that he had almost certainly stolen from a man of means. Madame Fénéon understood that he was hard up, but nonetheless expressed alarm at the theft. In any case, the fact that Émile desired something as bourgeois as a cane reflects a certain conflicted identity, even as he lived among down-and-out anarchists.

  In Paris, Émile slept on occasion in Constant Martin's dairy shop a few steps from the Bourse. There Martin seemed to be the instigator and chief organizer of thefts, as well as the receiver of stolen goods, particularly jewels and precious stones that could be easily unloaded. Yet Émile expressed pride that he was not a thief—if the lifting of a nice cane from a wealthy man could be conveniently forgotten.

  A friend of the family, Charles Brajus, a Breton beret maker, with whom Émile, his mother, and younger brother had stayed on occasion, saw Émile in Paris in early July 1893. That month, during student demonstrations in the Latin Quarter, a police inspector recognized him. Émile later expressed contempt for the disturbance caused by the students but admitted that he had been tempted to throw a bomb into a group of policemen who had arrived on the scene. On July 12, he left his room on boulevard Morland without paying his rent. Later that month, Émile was spotted several times in London.

  In early August 1893, an unidentified anarchist arrived in London from Paris. He asked for chemical tubes that could be used to make bombs. He wanted four of them, between five and seven inches in diameter, two of which would be divided in the middle by a copper plate, with a hole through which acids could be added. Such material could be used for "reversal bombs," apparently destined for various Parisan financial institutions. In the margin of the police report, detailing the anarchist's inquiries, the officer had written, "Émile Henry?"

  By late summer, the Parisian undercover policeman "Thanne" concluded that Émile had indeed been the source of the bomb that blew up the police station on rue des Bons-Enfants, and that Bonnard, known as Père Duchesne, had been an accomplice and had bragged about it. Thanne believed that the anarchist singer Adrienne Chailley had been the woman seen by the law student on the stairs. She now seemed to have renounced anarchism, hoping to avoid further suspicion. A French police report of August 22, 1893, had Émile leaving London for Paris with Matha. In the fall, Émile was back in London with Matha at the Autonomy Club and could be seen strolling with Marocco on Dean Street almost every day. He was last sighted in the British capital in early December 1893.

  In Paris, on November 13, 1893, a young anarchist shoemaker from the Alps named Léon-Jules Léauthier was broke and despondent. He went to a nice Parisian restaurant, the Marguery, spending what money he had left on a hearty meal that included quail, méconnais wine, and champagne. The nineteen-year-old worker then jumped up and plunged a knife into a well-dressed diner, gravely wounding the man, who turned out to be the Serb ambassador to France. The day before the attack, Léauthier had written Sébastien Faure that rather than die of hunger or kill himself, he would kill a prosperous person: "I would not be striking an innocent person in attacking the first bourgeois who comes along." At his trial, he explained that he had been "at the end of my resources. I did not want to live submissively. I spotted a bourgeois of haughty and ornate appearance, and I planted my dagger in his throat."

  The police intensified their campaign against anarchists. They undertook searches, seized newspapers (French and foreign), made arrests for little or no reason, and intimidated employers into firing anarchist workers. Magistrates used existing laws to expel foreigners, including Germans, Austrians, Belgians, Italians, and a Spaniard. The crackdown had greatly reduced the number of known anarchist meetings, and a number of key militants left for
London, weakening some organizations. Anarchists no longer met in sizable gatherings, where undercover police agents or informers could report on what was said. Realizing this, the police focused their attention on the compagnons espousing "individual initiative," like Émile. These were the ones who disappeared into the shadows. The police continued to watch Martin's dairy store and, in Brévannes, À l'Espérance. Madame Henry had received no letters, and her comings and goings appeared perfectly normal. Where was her second son, Émile Henry?

  CHAPTER 6

  Two Bombs

  ON DECEMBER 9, 1893, Auguste Vaillant, an unemployed worker distraught at being unable to feed his family, tossed a small bomb into the Chamber of Deputies. Born in the Ardennes near the Belgian border in 1861 and abandoned by his father when he was about ten, Vaillant started an apprenticeship with a pastry cook. However, he was let go when he got hungry one day and made a cake for himself. He worked for a time in a sawmill and then briefly as a laborer demolishing a rampart in Charleville. He was arrested for eating a meal in a restaurant for which he was unable to pay. At the age of twelve, an aunt put the young Vaillant on a train for Marseille, although he had no ticket. He was arrested again, and his father, who was a gendarme on the island of Corsica, paid the fine of sixteen francs.

  From that day on, Vaillant was on his own. He walked all the way to Marseille. Desperately hungry, he stole food in order to survive as he wandered from place to place. He was jailed four times for theft and for begging.

  After working as a quarryman in Algeria, Vaillant left for Argentina in 1890 to try to start a new life. There he tried his hand at farming in Chaco Province for two and a half years. But everything went wrong, and he complained that his situation amounted to a kind of slavery. After returning to France in 1893 and living at first in Montmartre, Vaillant married, and soon his wife gave birth to a baby girl, Sidonie. He got a job as a leatherworker in Saint-Denis. When his employer refused to pay him more than twenty francs a week, Vaillant reminded him that he had a wife and a child to feed. The boss replied, "I don't give a damn about your wife. I hired you." After flirting with socialism, Vaillant became an anarchist, meeting with the groups the Independents and the Equals in Montmartre.