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

repression orchestrated by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, its first and only president. During the Second Empire, Fortuné was a republican and then a socialist. He joined the First International Workingmen's Association, a socialist organization founded by trade unionists and political militants in London in 1864. In 1857 Fortuné married Rose Caubet, who also came from the Midi, from French Catalonia, the Pyrénées-Orientales. Both retained a strong southern accent. Elegant and proper, with a rosy face and a shock of white hair, Fortuné was intelligent and educated. He wrote poetry and edited a radical newspaper in Carcassonne, where he was arrested for outrages "against the Catholic religion" and "against public morality" in 1861, as well as in Montpellier, for similar charges, that same year. He then moved to Bré- vannes, a village southeast of Paris, where he labored in quarries. In 1863 he was again arrested for political militancy, spending several months in prison then, and once more in 1867.
    Fortuné Henry became a prominent figure in the Commune. Elected to its leadership, representing the plebeian tenth arrondissement (including the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l'Est), Fortuné signed authorizations for sending machine-gunners and munitions to the western suburb of Neuilly, a "certificate of indigence" for a very poor person, a requisition for one hundred Chassepot rifles for the Committee of Public Safety, an order to "put into effect the decree concerning the hostages," and another ordering the railroad stations of western Paris "to not let anyone leave for Versailles." Fortuné also put his name to an order that three hostages drawn from the clergy, the judicial authorities, the army, or the bourgeoisie "be executed for each Parisian civilian killed by shellfire from the attackers."
    As troops from Versailles gunned down Parisians, Fortuné managed to escape, disguised as a painter. He made it to Zaragosa in Spain, and then to Barcelona, where his wife had already found refuge. The Versailles government condemned him to death in absentia for "insurrection."
    At first the Henry family prospered in Spain. Fortuné worked in a copper mine in Catalonia, and then a coal mine in Bayarque, near Cartagena. He rose to the position of manager in one of them. Life was difficult in a new place, though, with a new language, Catalan, to learn (at least for Fortuné—Rose Caubet Henry probably already knew some Catalan because of her place of origin). Fortuné Henry faced the challenge of earning enough money to take care of his family, while dreaming of returning to France, where his first son, Jean Charles Fortuné—he too was always known as Fortuné—had been born in 1869. Émile ( Joseph-Émile-Félix), Fortuné's second son, was born in 1872 in Sant-Marti-de-Provensals, part of Poble Nou, on the edge of Barcelona, which was then becoming industrialized. The official witnesses at the baby's baptism were a welder and a locksmith. The expansion of Barcelona made Poble Nou essentially part of the Catalan city, adding its textile and chemical plants to the increasingly industrial landscape. A third son, Jules, would be born in 1879.
    When Émile was six, he did so well on the obligatory examination given in the primary school of Sant-Marti-de-Provensals that he was awarded a certificate of merit, proclaiming that the boy had demonstrated "a great proof of his hard work and talent." The citation was presented in the name of King Alphonso XII by the governor of Barcelona on June 1,1878.
    But things began to fall apart for the Henry family. "Several reverses overtook us," Madame Henry would later recall. Anarchism was finding an increasing number of adepts in Spain, particularly in Catalonia, where the Italian anarchist Giuseppe Fanelli had arrived to propagate his creed. The elder Henry stood accused of involvement in the Catalan anarchist movement, as one of the troublemakers in Cartagena and Murcia. The Spanish government