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

by Merriman, John

  Barrés and his friend Charles Formentin, armed with cards that identified them as journalists, passed through the police barriers. Place de la Roquette could accommodate only about 150 people. The politician Georges Clemenceau was there, as well, with his felt hat pulled over his ears, discussing in animated fashion the upcoming event with journalists. Some people of "dubious" appearance had managed to pass through the barriers without proper credentials. Formentin was a novice observer. He had heard dramatic tales of the assembly of the guillotine—the arrival of the cavalry, the sound of sabers being drawn, all amid the flickering of lights piercing the predawn fog. He awaited "a solemnity of horror and majesty" but found only "the absolutely coldest and most disgusting performance."

  Peering into the night, Barrés could see the lights of the prison shining through a single door, the one that would lead Émile to his death. Gradually he could see small groups of policemen assembling. Above the square, windows of apartment houses were lit up, providing a perch for well-placed residents. Could Émile's anarchist friends be planning an attack? At the corner of rue de la Roquette and rue de la Folie-Regnault, "Monsieur de Paris" was playing cards with his assistant, the same game that Émile had enjoyed with his guards.

  The door of a nearby café had been shut to protect Deibler from gawkers, and policemen were posted outside. Yet at 2:30, relatively few people had gathered. Émile was not well known to the petty criminals who sometimes showed up at executions to express sympathy and solidarity. He was a mere "aristocrat of crime," whose death would be witnessed by a carefully chosen public. In a neighborhood bar, hardly fifty people had assembled. The owner of the bar complained. Vaillant's execution had not brought him much business either. Some executions brought in more than eight hundred francs. Tonight, the take would be about forty. "Don't talk to me about anarchists," he snarled.

  Five hundred policemen, four companies of municipal guards, and two squadrons of cavalrymen arrived to take up their positions. A platoon of twelve gendarmes and their commander marched in at precisely 3 A.M., accompanied by a cold wind from the north. Plainclothes policemen placed themselves here and there, ready to record in writing any interesting conversations they might overhear. Shadows began to appear in the windows of nearby apartments. One Englishman tried to force his way into the reserved viewing space, finally settling for a dangerous spot on a nearby roof, for which he paid three francs. The chaplain of the prison, l'Abbé Valadier, arrived in a carriage, soon joined by an investigating magistrate sent by a judge to take down any last-minute revelations offered by Émile Henry.

  Only high-ranking functionaries from government ministries and journalists who had managed to get official passes were allowed into the reserved area on place de la Roquette. The latter included Madame Yver, a female reporter, who was believed to be the first woman authorized to witness an execution in France—at least up close—since the Revolution.

  As they waited, people spoke little, and their words were soft, almost inaudible. Then, at 3:15 A.M., lights appeared in the distance, and the sound of wheels on pavement indicated that two wagons, escorted by guards, were approaching from the direction of Pére Lachaise Cemetery farther up the hill. The first carried Deibler's principal assistant, the second, the "the wood of justice." At first sight, they could easily be taken for the wagons of traveling entertainers arriving for a provincial fair. They stopped to the left of the short avenue that led to the square, in front of the prison itself, where the scaffold would be placed on the five famous stones. The executioner and several of his assistants left the café to go to work, dressed in frock coats and tall hats. Drivers and ordinary workmen in blue overalls joined them. A sense of horrific anticipation settled over the small square. A horse began to whinny, and continued to do so about every five minutes. The assistants stepped forward, cigarettes between their pursed lips.

  The workmen laid the pieces of the guillotine near the sidewalk. Under the executioner's watchful eye, the structure was assembled like a giant toy. Not a single nail was needed. The red leather sheath containing the huge triangular blade leaned against a post. A new light suddenly appeared, a lantern held by Deibler, who was overseeing all. He wanted the barriers moved back. "I need space and air and I don't have any," he said. In good form, although grumpy as always, "Monsieur de Paris" barked out expert orders left and right. The soles of his shoes scraped against the cobblestones as he hobbled along, occasionally leaning on his cane.

  A lantern marked the place the guillotine was to be set. Pulleys would raise the blade above the cradle, on which the condemned man's neck would be positioned, awaiting the blade. The way Deibler checked each piece of the apparatus reminded viewers of the scrupulousness of a watchmaker or a surgeon, although Deibler was in more of a hurry. There was nothing remotely "judicial" about him. He greeted any attempt to draw him into the conversation with a dismissive grunt. Asked if his clients usually died well, he replied, "They generally are thugs—you have to drag them!" When someone bumped into a pail, he snarled, "Why are you fucking around with my accessories?" An assistant removed the blade from the sheath. The executioner tried out the guillotine blade twice, expressing satisfaction with the dry, metallic thud it made after plunging down along the grooves of the frame. The equipment needed for the aftermath was also in order: the body would be rolled down a plank into a large box, alongside the basket that would accommodate the head. "Everything is ready," Deibler announced to no one in particular, while his young, chubby, red-cheeked assistant looked on. To Clemenceau, "Monsieur de Paris" was "as miserable as his machine."

  Some of the workmen, their tasks completed, went back to the wagons to change into their regular clothes. They would now become part of the audience. Many in the crowd had witnessed several executions: they followed the preparation of the guillotine, silently checking off each step.

  Dawn arrived slowly, another gray Parisian day. The trees growing here and there on place de la Roquette seemed sickly, with only scrawny tufts of leaves. The gas lamps, which had put an end to night executions by torchlight, were extinguished. Deibler's lamp alone still shone, moving slowly about. Some of the assistants stacked sponges and cloths, placing nearby a basket with small pieces of absorbent wood. An "awful brute, sort of a stable hand," arrived with a broom. Deibler checked that several buckets had been filled with water and that a broom had been left nearby. The ground would be covered with blood. In the distance, a dog barked incessantly.

  Émile could see nothing of these preparations. He had gone to bed at 9 P.M. He too would be getting up very early and needed some sleep. He had written several letters, which he left in the drawer of the table in his cell. When various magistrates, the prison clerk, Abbé Valadier, and the chief policeman for the neighborhood entered his cell, Émile was sound asleep, his head resting against the wall next to his bed. The guard Brun tapped him lightly on the shoulder and offered him the traditional stiffening word: "Courage!" Telling the condemned man that his appeal had been turned down by the president of the Republic seemed pointless. Émile dressed while sitting, pulling on the pants he had worn on the day of his arrest and a large red belt. He said only that he did not need courage because he had always had that; he would not be a coward in the face of death. He did not want to speak with the prison chaplain and refused the traditional offer of a glass of brandy. Louis Deibler, with one or two of his assistants, had entered the prison door, over which was inscribed LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY. Led to the office of the prison clerk, Émile greeted the executioner: "It's you, Monsieur Deibler." Outside, all eyes rested on the door, including those of five little girls who sat close together on a nearby roof to watch. Gendarmes mounted their horses.

  The executioner pushed down the collar of Émile's shirt, while his assistants bound his hands tightly, so tightly that Émile asked several times if they could loosen the bonds a bit. They shackled his legs, so that he could walk only in tiny steps, and with great difficulty. The object of their attention pointed out that h
e had no intention of trying to escape. But there was almost certainly another reason for ensuring so much discomfort: to make it difficult for Émile to appear too brave. A magistrate asked if he would care to make any revelations about accomplices "at the supreme hour." Émile noted that this was at least the thousandth time he had been asked the same question. For the last time he affirmed that he had acted alone. The small procession walked toward the prison door.

  At precisely 4 A.M., the silence on the square was broken by the sound of the interior gate opening beyond the prison door, followed by the roll of drums and the rifles of soldiers snapping into position. Deibler led Émile, his chest largely uncovered, toward the guillotine. With his hands folded in front of his stomach, he was being pulled more rapidly than his shackled legs could move. In the first light of the new dawn he could see spectators perched on roofs and a photographer pointing a camera in the direction of the apparatus, which Émile could not yet see. He saw the mounted cavalry of the Republican Guard, and the gendarmes, with sabers drawn, in a semicircle. Someone said, "The poor lad! You wouldn't think him more than fifteen years old." Another witness remembered how incredibly calm his face looked. Conversations stopped and hats came off, as if a religious service were about to begin. The chaplain was two steps behind Émile, with nothing to do. Émile looked quickly right and left, as if looking for someone he knew in the crowd. He had been contemplating his final moments for three weeks and wanted to project a noble image. Twenty steps from the guillotine, his face became paler. After a few more steps, he stopped and shouted what everyone expected to hear: "Courage, comrades! Long live anarchy!" As he reached the scaffold, he repeated, "Long live anarchy!" Deibler's aides then grabbed him, pushed him down brutally against the plank so that he lay flat, and shoved his head through the little window, which resembled the porthole of a ship.

  Twenty seconds later, the dull sound of the guillotine reaching the end of its rapid descent could be heard. Émile's head fell to the ground and was quickly tossed into the awaiting basket just as casually as one would throw a large wad of paper into a small bin. An almost inaudible gasp of horror rippled through the crowd; some people turned on their heels and moved rapidly away. Several of Deibler's assistants had not even bothered to watch the blade fall. They had seen it many times before and had already begun to organize their departure. Two assistants pushed the body into the waiting box and then carried it quickly to the executioner's wagon.

  The death certificate read that Émile had died at 4:10 in the morning on May 21, 1894, at 168, rue de la Roquette, that special address. A band of young drunks staggered by, singing obscene songs. The wagon left with the body, escorted by mounted gendarmes. The crowd departed quietly. The police arrested three men. One had shouted "Long live the Commune!" when the wagon with Émile's body went by, adding that it was not Émile who should have been guillotined but rather President Carnot and his ministers. By 7 A.M., newspapers were already being hawked on the boulevards of Paris relating the details of Émile's execution only three hours earlier.

  The politician and journalist Georges Clemenceau left place de la Roquette horrified by the "crude vengeance" of French society that he had just witnessed. Émile's terribly pale face disturbed him: he saw the young man as a tormented Christ, "trying to impose his intellectual pride upon his child's body." Émile's ideas could not be cut off as easily as his head. In an article, Clemenceau expressed hope for "a humanization of customs ... Let those for the death penalty go, if they dare, to smell the blood of La Roquette. We'll talk about it afterward."

  The wagon carrying the remains of Émile headed toward the cemetery of Ivry-sur-Seine, a corner of which, popularly known as "the turnip field," was reserved for those who had been guillotined. Police stood guard. A grave had been dug, near the tomb of Vaillant. Émile's body, with his arms still tightly bound behind his back and his fists blue from the tautly cinched rope, lay in a casket of white wood. He was pale, his eyes closed, his lips slightly parted. Bloodstains here and there besmirched his white shirt. The body and head were placed in a simple wooden coffin, the head situated between the legs. Abbé Valadier prayed briefly. Following a simulated burial in front of the policemen and gendarmes on duty, Émile's remains were taken to the medical school near Odéon to be examined, despite his mother's wish that he be buried immediately in the family plot in Brévannes-Limeil.

  At 11 P.M. a journalist had informed Madame Henry's aunt of the impending execution. Three hours later, she had seen troops moving toward place de la Roquette, so she immediately departed for Brévannes to tell Madame Henry. Hornbostel had already left for a vacation in the country.

  Newspapermen raced to see who could first reach Brévannes following the execution. One managed to get there by 7:30 A.M. He knocked on the door. He asked the elderly cook if Madame Henry was available. The cook replied that she was ill. The dishwasher asked if the news was true. Yes, the journalist replied, he had been there. In another room, Jules Henry looked away because he had been crying. Workers employed across the way at the hospice began to arrive, to talk and drink. No one mentioned what had happened a few hours earlier. Did Madame Henry know? The cook thought so, but she was in bed. Several workers chatted away, trying without success to converse and joke with the boy. The mailman arrived in good humor. He had a letter for a workman renting a room at the auberge.

  Elisa Gauthey had entered the house through the garden. Since Émile's arrest, she had enjoyed the public attention, particularly spending time in the offices of the big papers to tell the story of the bomber's passion for her. She did not know how to keep quiet, even on this dreadful morning, babbling about Émile's love for her and relating intimate details of their "relationship." Elisa had treated him like a child, but in the end "he had shown himself to be an extraordinary man." Again, she expressed regret that she had not given herself to him. It would have made an even bigger story.

  The journalist Madame Yver immediately went to Brévannes. She told Madame Henry, who was with Dr. Goupil, that she wanted to offer her consolation. She informed the grieving mother that her son had died bravely, walking to the guillotine with a sure step, his head held high. Madame Henry asked whether Émile had spoken of his mother before his execution. Madame Yver did not reply. Said Madame Henry, "What madness! Him, dying for the workers! But he was bourgeois to his soul. You understand, it was bad advice that lost him, as in the case of my other son." She then asked the journalist if she had actually watched the decapitation. No, said Madame Yver. She had turned away.

  On May 24, Émile was buried in the cemetery of Limeil. Jules Henry and several compagnons later returned to plant a shrub at the tomb. In Belleville, as news of the execution spread, people looked at each other and asked, "Who is next?"

  CHAPTER 8

  Reaction

  "To those who say: hate does not give birth to love, I reply that it is love, human love, that often gives birth to hate."

  —ÉMILE HENRY

  A WEEK AFTER Émile Henry's bomb exploded in the Café Terminus, the anarchist art and literary critic Octave Mirbeau wrote, "A mortal enemy of anarchy could not have done more than Émile Henry against his cause when he threw his inexplicable bomb into the middle of quiet, anonymous people who had gone to a café to drink a beer before going home to go to bed." Charles Malato shared this view. Émile was an anarchist of great intelligence and courage, but his bomb "had above all struck anarchism." Malato approved any and all violence aimed at the enemy—the state and its props—but "not that which lashes out blindly," as had the bomb of his former friend. Émile Pouget, whose violent language in Pére Peinará had helped set the tone for "propaganda by the deed," viewed the recent attacks as an embarrassment to the anarchist cause.

  At Leyret's Le Déluge in Belleville, the reaction to Émile's Café Terminus bombing was mixed. Unlike Vaillant's bombing of the National Assembly, there was no great joy about Émile's "deed." Why strike ordinary people sipping drinks in a café after work? That Émile was not a
worker, like Vaillant, or "vulgar" like Ravachol, but rather an "intellectual born into the bourgeoisie" became a topic of conversation and reflection. There was something disconcerting about Émile's throwing away his diplomas and going on the attack. Yet there was also perhaps grudging admiration. Those frequenting Le Déluge had paid close attention to what Émile said during his trial, hanging on every word, repeating what he said, and taking pleasure in the way that he seemed to dominate his inquisitors. Leyret knew few workers, even socialists who remained inflexible adversaries of anarchists, who had not read and reread Émile's "Declaration." Émile, this self-proclaimed "resolute avenger, deliciously full of hate, supremely contemptuous," impressed even his critics in "People's Paris," with his learning and "by the precision of his tough reasoning." Still, Émile's execution brought considerably less sadness and anger than that of Vaillant. It had seemed inevitable.

  Ordinary workers now pondered their fate. Would the state and bourgeois society triumph? The future would tell. Some workers who had suffered greatly over the past years seemed to be licking their wounds, perhaps preparing for vengeance. The faubourgs had once placed their hopes in the Third Republic, but they had been let down. The Panama Canal scandal had enriched some well-placed politicians and further fueled contempt for the upper clases and the state that defended their interests. Despotism and corruption had dashed workers' hopes for true fraternity and equality.

  The conservative press generally approved of the execution of Émile. To L'Écho de Paris, Émile entered History, carrying, like Saint-Denis, his young head in his hands. It was shameful and even grotesque that this mere boy had already become a historical personage, complete with his legend and his apologists. The anarchists had succeeded in making society tremble. Most people living in cities and towns would have wanted to spare his life, not out of sympathy, but out of terror. This particular writer found the state of the contemporary French soul "nauseating." Too many people had already forgotten Émile's victims. Foreign visitors had packed up and fled the epidemic of dynamite in Paris. Industry and commerce had slowed, and winter, usually bustling, had been a dead season. And despite all of this, Émile had his adherents. The anarchists had become "our emperors: Hail, Caesar! The bourgeois about to die salute you!" A new era seemed to have dawned: Émile had not chosen prominent figures of state and capitalism as his targets, but rather peaceful citizens selected randomly by his "monstrous hatred."