The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror Read Online Free PDF Page A

work hard and who suffer." But that was all. The partisans of violence had missed "a wonderful occasion!" There were no chiefs ready to lead. Yet study groups and political organizations had proliferated. Public meetings and debates filled the halls of the periphery. The socialists, who now had organized political parties, were profiting from all this, swelling their ranks. To some, they at least seemed to offer some hope.
    But then there were those who sank into despair. They hated the wealthy, who danced about, seemingly oblivious and indifferent to the misery of much of the working population. From his hospital bed, M.L., a porcelain worker, wrote a letter that spoke for many. The disease of consumption was killing him, and there was nothing left for the doctors to do. He did not know how much time he had left, perhaps a year at best. He felt himself dying. His chest burned. "Accursed society," he wrote, "you are responsible for my illness." Before he died, he wanted to "spit out again his hatred." It was the organization of French society that was killing him: "it is because of you that the unfortunate die of misery, if they do not first take their own lives in a cowardly and useless way." A worker and the son of workers, he had married "an unhealthy job," entering the factory at too young an age. When he had become ill, he was let go and told to head for the sidewalk, "old broken-down machine!" Bourgeois politicians and social re-formers would only talk on and on about improving the situation of workers and leading the battle against misery, encouraging it "savings."
    But the only remedy, according to M.L., was destruction, violent if necessary, of the existing order, so as to replace it with a society "free of bourgeois lies, laws, judges, police, and executioners. Ironically, the ruling classes had succeeded in persuading the masses that property is immutable and that authority is indispensable, and that one has to wait for improvements. They had emasculated the masses, annihilated its healthy feelings, proclaiming that these are the way things have always been, and will always be." Did not bourgeois society understand the evil that someone like him could do—someone who would not in any case live much longer? The comfortably off should not doubt "the power of a single man, fully resolved, master of himself ... Thoughtless and cruel bourgeois, do you not sense that I can transform myself into someone who can right wrongs, an avenger of the innumerable existences that your society has massacred, an avenger of all those who have revolted and live as outlaws, and those who have been tortured or eliminated?" He would soon die, to be sure, but not alone. "Bourgeois ... I want to take with me at least some of those who are responsible for my death."
    In Émile Zola's novel
Germinal,
published in 1885, the Russian anarchist Souvarine blows up a mine. Zola warns "the masters of society to take heed ... Take care, look beneath the earth, see these wretches who work and suffer. There is perhaps still time to avoid the ultimate catastrophe...[Yet] here is the peril: the earth will open up and nations will be engulfed in one of the most appalling cataclysms in history." In the Paris where Émile Henry lived, this prophecy seemed to be coming true.

CHAPTER 2
The Exile's Second Son
    ÉMILE HENRY WAS BORN into political militancy but not into terrorism. His father, Sixte-Casse Henry (always called Fortuné), the son of a furrier, was born in Nîmes in 1821. When he was about nine, his teacher, a priest, accused him of stealing a loaf of bread, calling him a "little thief." The boy grabbed the loaf of bread back and smacked the priest in the face with it. At age sixteen, he left his family to seek adventure, which he found on the barricades in Paris during the Revolution of 1848, an uprising of republicans and some socialists that led to the Second French Republic (1848–51). That regime was swept away in a wave of reaction and