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

by Merriman, John

  Living in the suburb of Choisy-le-Roi, his family wracked with hunger, Auguste Vaillant decided to strike a blow that would call France's attention to the plight of poor people like him. He purchased materials to make a small bomb, which he filled with green powder, sulfuric acid, tacks, and small nails, enough to hurt but not to kill. He obtained a pass that allowed him to observe a session of the Chamber of Deputies, where he sat in the second row of the balcony. Soon he stood and threw the device, tossing it over the head of an astonished lady in the first row. When the small bomb exploded, the president of the Chamber of Deputies merely announced, with memorable calm, "The session continues."

  A few spectators, including a priest, and several deputies suffered only light injuries. Vaillant himself suffered some kind of wound while throwing the bomb and sought assistance at the Hótel-Dieu (the central hospital). There the staff discovered traces of gunpowder on his hands. He was arrested and readily admitted guilt, saying that he had acted alone. Indeed, he had not told any of his anarchist acquaintances about what he was planning. All the deputies were the same, he insisted, and he had wanted to attack society itself.

  In Henry Leyret's bar, Le Déluge, in Belleville, a worker arrived at 7 A.M., laughing and shouting, "Here's some news. 'The Aquarium' blew up!" The news met with little surprise. People had expected it. No one expressed any sympathy for the injured deputies. After all, they were paid twenty-five francs a day for doing nothing. A worker in the bar suggested that President Sadi Carnot decorate the person who threw the bomb, another adding that the anarchists were indeed "tough guys!"

  On December 11, the police obtained information about anarchist plans to blow up the entire Palais-Bourbon, and possibly even the Palais de l'Élysée, the residence of the president. The Parisian anarchist groups known as Compagnons of the Fourteenth Arrondissement and No Country favored the first proposal, as did anarchists in London, who believed that the bombing of the Chamber of Deputies would be a particularly effective symbolic attack, since financial scandals had more than tarnished "The Aquarium."

  Public opinion turned against the intelligentsia—particularly writers and some journalists—for being sympathetic to anarchism, giving it a measure of respectability. The book On Intellectual Complicity and Crimes of Opinion: The Provocations and Apologies for Crimes by Anarchist Propaganda, quickly published in the wake of the most recent anarchist attacks, claimed that intellectuals were in part responsible for the remarkable increase in the number of anarchists in France. The book's author called Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment"an admirable manual for assassination" and argued that the Spanish anarchist Santiago Salvador, who bombed the Liceo Theater in Barcelona, had been nourished by the work of Malatesta and other anarchist theorists. Cheap newspapers and subversive posters polluted Paris with dangerous ideas, which had a "hypnotic" effect on people already weak from alcoholism. A magistrate equated propaganda "by ideas" with "propaganda by the deed," the former equally as criminal, in his view; the theoreticians of anarchy were every bit as dangerous as the murderers who actually wielded the dagger.

  How would France, and the rest of Europe, respond to terrorist deeds? Following acrimonious debate, the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, on December 12 and 18, passed laws so controversial and deemed so unfair by their critics that socialists dubbed them the "scoundrelly" or "shameful" laws—because these statutes could be used against them too. Under the new laws, anyone who wrote anything sympathetic to anarchism could be prosecuted on the grounds that such writing indirectly provoked crimes. The law of December 12 toughened existing legislation (the law of 1881) related to the media: it was first applied not against an anarchist but against the author of an article in a socialist paper who appeared to express sympathy for the plight of Auguste Vaillant. This signaled to many that the legislation was indeed aimed at all political opposition from the left. The law permitted the seizure of newspapers and preventive arrests. It criminalized any expression of sympathy for anarchist attacks, or for murder, pillage, arson, or any other violence, as well as for antimilitary propaganda.

  The second law, which followed six days later, codified the concept of an association of malefactors, or "evildoers," suggesting a massive anarchist plot against people, property, and the public peace. It authorized harsh penalties, including execution, for anyone convicted of building or keeping an explosive device—or any product used to make one.

  In the eyes of the law, anarchism took on a new, specific definition; "the anarchist sect" constituted "a veritable association." No matter that it lacked official statutes or constitution—it existed by virtue of a "pre-established agreement" by which it recruited and protected its members. This conception of anarchism resembled the compagnonnages (although that reference was not made), which offered lodging and food to skilled artisans who traveled from town to town to hone their skills. In like manner, when anarchists went from Paris to provincial cities or arrived from other countries, they received assistance from local anarchists. To exemplify how the anarchists' network of mutual aid functioned, the police cited the small fund Jean Grave kept in the offices of La Révolte on rue Mouffetard, distributed to anarchists in need of a little assistance or to subsidize propaganda. And though a good amount of internal debate characterized the movement, lawmakers argued that all anarchists shared a single goal: to abolish the state through violence. The fact that anarchists often signed their propaganda collectively was cited as proof that all members of the movement acted as one. Thus the government came to a rather sweeping conclusion: that any anarchist who attended a meeting was complicit in this destructive plan. Furthermore, anarchism was to be excised from public debate, in speech and in print. Anarchist newspapers, or any paper that spoke well of anarchism, were "lit matches thrown into the middle of explosive materials."

  Thus anarchism itself became a crime. By virtue of the law of December 18, associations of "evildoers" could be indicted not only for committing an offense, but also for appearing to plan, anticipate, or express sympathy for or interest in such an act. Thus, anyone who knew an anarchist or discussed anarchism could be prosecuted, as could members of any anarchist organization, presumed by its very existence to be criminal in nature, a threat to public peace.

  According to this aggressive new legal initiative, a person could be considered an accomplice to a serious crime without participating in it at all. One critic provided this possible scenario as a warning: Say an anarchist commits a crime and then is given lodging by a friend. The criminal writes something on a piece of paper given to him by his host, who is not necessarily an anarchist. Thus both the "criminal" and the person he is visiting, who had provided both a bed and a piece of paper, could be prosecuted as members of an anarchist conspiracy and subject to a harsh sentence. Similar examples abounded. A prosecutor could assume that a knife used in any way by the printers of the anarchist newspaper La Révolte actually served as a weapon. And in fact, a social reformer who organized meals for the poor was prosecuted because speeches were given as people ate. Police also seized documents about Sicily from the geographer Élisée Reclus, sure that they had found proof of a secret society. Even jokes about anarchism could lead to jail sentences.

  The harsh crackdown in France was replicated in Italy and Spain. In Italy, emergency legislation in June 1894 in response to anarchist attacks banned newspapers and parties considered "subversive." The government shipped three thousand anarchists to penal colonies, and hundreds of their colleagues went abroad as exiles. In Spain, the police began to persecute labor organizations, considering them "revolutionary" and therefore dangerous by definition. Any leftist political activity became identified with anarchism. Police harassed socialists and even shut down anarchist cultural publications.

  In the meantime, more suspicious objects were being discovered around Paris. Just before Christmas, the city's chief chemist, Girard, examined a dead rat that had been wrapped in paper and sent to a wine merchant. Girard determined that the object was not a bomb.


  Waves of police raids and searches targeted all kinds of anarchists. The police drew up a list of more than five hundred of them in Paris, putting together a separate list of foreigners. Fortuné Henry's address was listed as unknown although he was in prison, and Émile could not be located. Beginning at six in the morning on January 1, 1894, French police carried out an especially ambitious 552 searches. During January and February, 248 people were arrested on suspicion of being anarchists, and 80 of them were still in jail after two months had passed, although the police complained that the most recent searches and arrests—the sudden arrival of police wagons with bells clanging, the police waving guns—gave anarchists time to destroy compromising papers or simply disappear. Meanwhile, anarchist bombs in Spain had caused widespread panic. A journalist related that bombs "hang as a menace over the entire bourgeoisie ... there is no person who does not worry about dynamite, nitroglycerine, and detonators ... Satan has made himself a dynamiter and tries to be equal with God." In Paris, anarchists were not the only people seething at these systematic roundups. Nothing like this coercive police activity had been seen since the final days of the Commune.

  Those arrested in Paris included some familiar faces, including Léveillé, the locksmith arrested and battered in Clichy two and a half years earlier; Achille Étiévant, the anarchist typographer suspected of knowing the whereabouts of the stolen dynamite; and Élisée Bastard, a well-known anarchist orator. Alexander Cohen, a Dutchman who had translated a play for the Odèon theater, was arrested and deported. In Toulouse, a man was charged with "apology for the crime of murder" for shouting "Long live anarchy! Long live Ravachol!" An anarchist received two years in prison for having preached anarchist theory to a man who later stole something from his boss. An anarchist called Rousset was put on trial for having organized evening gatherings that fed up to five thousand people and received contributions from respected writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Émile Zola, and Alphonse Daudet. The minister of the interior, David Raynal, requested lists of all people who were not anarchists but had some sort of relationship with one or more members of the movement and who therefore might "come to their aid by personal friendship." Police forbade kiosks from selling Père Peinard, La Révolte, Revue Libertaire, and even some socialist papers. Émile Pouget, fearing arrest, left for London in January 1894. (There he may have been involved in a swindle, selling to a collector some teeth supposedly extracted from Ravachol, along with forged autographs of the famed revolutionaries of 1789—Robespierre, Marat, and Danton.) The police shut down Père Peinard on February 21, 1894.

  Even then, the press continued to document the overreaching efforts of the police. A news dealer named Desforges, who had a kiosk on place Clichy, was detained with his seventeen-year-old son, who had never been in any kind of trouble. Louis Bouchez, a sculptor, was arrested at his parents' house because he had expressed sympathy for anarchism, though he had done nothing else. Charles Paul, an upholsterer, had joined a gymnastic organization on rue Lepic in Montmartre and was accused of being the friend of a well-known compagnon in that center of anarchism. This was enough to get him arrested.

  Upon his return to Paris on or shortly before December 18—he had been seen in London at various points that fall—Émile could already see the results of the draconian measures taken against anarchists—spying, searches, and imprisonment of the innocent. The anarchist had become "a beast tracked everywhere, with the bourgeois press ... calling for its extermination." Police even stooped to underhanded methods; their spies, for example, entered a suspected anarchist's room and hid packages of tannin there, which were then "discovered" in a police search the next morning. In this way an anarchist whom the police wanted to put away would be sent to prison for three years. (This had happened to Émile's friend Mérigeau.) And then Raynal, the minister of the interior, could triumphantly announce in the Chamber of Deputies that the laws they had passed had "thrown terror into the anarchist camp."

  The press promoted a rather fanciful idea about how to capture anarchists: each one could be trailed more or less continuously by a policeman "staying at his side and grabbing his arm at the critical moment." Yet there were many anarchists, and not enough police to follow all of them. Undercover agents could stake out known gathering places and monitor the buildings in which anarchists lived, but there were limits. Not everyone could be watched all the time, and many whom the police sought with special effort, such as Émile, proved difficult to find.

  Auguste Vaillant went on trial on January 10. He offered a rambling defense full of heartfelt but vague references to the philosophes of the Enlightenment and the playwright Henrik Ibsen, among others. He condemned imperialism and, above all, "this accursed society where one can see a single man uselessly spend enough to feed thousands of families ... while one comes upon a hundred thousand unfortunate people without enough to eat." He was condemned to death.

  Vaillant's life of deprivation and the plight of his young daughter, Sidonie, attracted great attention in the poor neighborhoods of Paris. How could President Sadi Carnot not pardon her father? "Who knows?" they said at Le Déluge. "Perhaps if he had always had enough to eat for little Sidonie, Vaillant never would have re-sorted to his little bomb! In any case, he had not killed anyone, and the wounded were healing rapidly. Why cut off his head?" A group of socialist deputies and the moderate politician Georges Clemenceau were among those who asked President Carnot to spare the man's life. A letter from Vaillant's young daughter, Sidonie, to Carnot's wife achieved nothing. The duchesse of Uzés, a monarchist, offered to adopt the girl; the anarchist Sébastien Faure ultimately took charge of her, at Vaillant's request. Paris awaited the execution. The police received an anonymous warning that anarchists renting a room right at place de la Roquette, the site of executions in Paris, planned to throw a bomb in protest. Rumors had anarchists leaping out to stab the chief executioner, Antoine-Louis Deibler, and spirit away his intended victim. The police wondered if anarchists whom they sought might show up at the execution to hear Vaillant's final words.

  On the morning of the execution, Vaillant refused to speak with the prison chaplain. When asked if he wanted to drink the traditional glass of eau de vie before being executed, he replied, "I am not a murderer. I do not need to drink alcohol in order to have courage." Dr. Guillotine's blade fell at dawn on February 5, 1894. Auguste Vaillant became the first person in nineteenth-century France to be executed, even though he had not killed anyone.

  News of the event spread rapidly through working-class Paris on that gray day, with thick clouds contributing to "a glacial and dark atmosphere of grief." To the working poor, it seemed that society had once again proved itself "implacable." In Henry Leyret's bar, a general sense of bewilderment reigned, "a desolate stupefaction, with shouts of anger about the future, and the expectation of vengeances that were sure to follow." Vaillant's death was appalling, especially in the darkest, shortest days of winter, when many people, such as construction workers, could not find employment and were short on credit. If he had killed people, as Ravachol had, perhaps Vaillant's execution could be understood. But Vaillant was an honest man, pushed to the limit by his misery. The hard times were responsible. In January, a Parisian family of three died in abject poverty, unable to pay their rent or even eat. In an exceptionally cold winter, such intimate hard dramas multiplied.

  In the factories, workshops, and bars of Belleville, Vaillant's execution recalled the early Christian martyrs, echoing the image of Ravachol. Leyret overheard someone say, "They wanted to pulverize him in the name of property, and the faubourg does not have any property ... anarchism is extending its influence, infiltrating." Hundreds of arrests "among the humble" gave the impression that the government and its police force were persecuting the poor on behalf of the rich. People reasoned that Vaillant had been a victim of the bourgeoisie, and many more workers became attracted to the anarchists, while remaining indifferent to much of their political theory. Instead, they shared their bitternes
s, misery, and "gloomy despair." Here was something that could threaten the ruling classes even more than "propaganda by the deed": "the anarchism of feeling!" Two of Leyret's clients almost came to blows when one referred to the anarchists as "bandits," before the latter adroitly explained that he did not mean Vaillant, but rather men who used anarchism as an excuse to steal. More than one worker said that he would not want to be in President Carnot's shoes. It had also been "in the air" of the faubourgs that "The Aquarium" would explode. Anything could happen next. Parisians of means, as well as the police, waited to see how Vaillant's execution would be avenged.

  On about December 15, 1893, Émile went to the watchmaker's shop where he had apprenticed for a month in the summer of 1892. He asked if there was any work for him, saying that he had been in London but would remain in Paris if he could find employment. He tried to sell the watchmaker a watch that was missing a minute hand, but it was worth nothing.

  On December 20, Émile appeared at the Villa Faucheur (named after the owner of the property) on rue des Envierges in Belleville. Saying that he was a mechanic and providing a reference from a previous landlord (which turned out to be a forgery), he took a small room. The rent would be 120 francs a year, and he gave 5 francs to the concierge as a tip. He gave his name as "Émile Dubois" (he had used the name "Louis Dubois" when he lived on boulevard Morland). Despite its rather grand-sounding name, the Villa Faucheur was a modest residence, an immense cité ouvrière on a street lined with workers' residences. There were two large entryways at numbers 1 and 3, each with an imposing iron gate. A few bourgeois of modest means lived in the complex, including seven or eight policemen. Poorer residents, like the so-called Dubois, lived farther back in the complex. His room was in the middle of path number 1, about halfway back, on the left, across from a small empty lot. On each side of the small building stood a wall about a yard high, topped by a small iron fence, alongside a tiny garden. On the fourth floor, Émile's room stood across from the stairs, between the lodgings of a copper turner and an older man who was a jeweler.