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

confiscated the family's possessions.
    Following the amnesty of the Communards in 1879, the Henry family returned to France, settling in Brévannes, where they owned a small piece of property. During the Commune, in order to prevent the government from seizing Henry's property, an uncle, Jean Bordenave, arranged its transfer to Fortune's sister-in-law, a diminutive hunchback who lived with Fortune's older sister, the marquise de Chamborant, in elegant Passy on the western edge of Paris. The Henrys were able to reclaim the property, though they had to threaten legal action against their relatives before doing so.
    Brévannes was part of the commune of Limeil-Brévannes, two villages less than two miles apart, located nine miles southeast of Paris. From the crest of Limeil, Paris could be seen in the distance. The view from lower-lying Brévannes was blocked by a big hill. Limeil had a thirteenth-century church, but Brévannes only a small chapel, served by a chaplain. Brévannes had no public school until 1867. In September 1870, as Prussian troops began their siege of the capital in the war of 1870–71, virtually all the inhabitants of Brévannes fled to Paris. When they returned, following France's capitulation in late January 1871, they found their houses pillaged.
    Late in 1881, Fortuné Henry published the first volume of a collection of songs and dances for children. (There would be no sequel.) He dedicated the book to mothers and teachers. The song "Peasants and Workers" celebrated the riches of France's fields and workshops, ending with "It is work that brings us together / work that tomorrow can / bring happiness to the entire human race!" Fortuné's radical politics and contempt for the army—which had, after all, massacred thousands of Communards—is clear in another composition, "The Two Malbrough" (a misspelling of Marlborough), sung to the tune of a song written by French soldiers to mock the English general John Churchill, duke of Marlborough (an ancestor of Winston Churchill), against whom they had fought.
    Fortuné Henry had returned from Spain with mercury poisoning, which he contracted either from vapors from veins of mercury discovered in the copper mines or from a hat factory, where he had also worked. He began to suffer "attacks of brain fever." He met up with an old acquaintance, a doctor and former Communard named Goupil. The latter found him poor but hardworking and hired him as his secretary. Yet Fortuné died in 1882, when Émile was just ten. Two years later, Émile contracted typhoid fever. He could not see for several months, though he eventually recovered.
    Madame Henry struggled to make ends meet, at first working as a dressmaker. Dr. Goupil offered to seek public contributions in order to help the family. Madame Henry's sister-in-law, the marquise de Chamborant, convinced her not to agree to this, fearing public humiliation. But things got worse, and the widow and her three sons had neither food nor heat in Brévannes. Through the intercession of someone on the Paris municipal council, a former Communard, the Henry family received one hundred francs as public assistance.
    At times, Rose Caubet Henry had little good to say about her more well heeled relatives, most of whom had turned their back on her family. Her sons had been "abandoned by those in our family who could have helped them. There was no humiliation that they were not made to suffer." However, relations with her husband's family improved, and overall her children could not complain about their relatives. The marquise took an interest in her nephews; she indulged and even spoiled them. Émile, in particular, often spent his school vacations with his aunt's family.
    A village of fewer than a thousand people, with small tile and cotton factories, Brévannes remained very much a country place. Fields of potatoes stretched along the central avenue de la Planchette, although phylloxera had killed the village's grapevines. Rose Henry,