The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (review)

On February 12, 1894, Emile Henry, a young Anarchist, hurled a bomb into the Café Terminus in Paris killing one person and wounding others badly. This is the story that John Merriman tells. The subtitle signals the book's central thesis: This bombing "was a defining moment in modern history...the day that ordinary people became the targets of terrorists" (p.5). In short, the author links the Anarchist attacks of the 1890s in France and the current age of terrorism because the targets are innocent civilians. Merriman seeks to resolve "a very simple question: why did Emile Henry do what he did?" (p.3).

The historical context for Henry's assault against bourgeois society was Paris' division into "two cities" (p.10). Opulent Paris featured the Grand Opera, the "grands boulevards," the new department stores with their cornucopia of consumer goods, and fancy restaurants. In the same city, as many as one-quarter to one-half of workers suffered unemployment in bad economic times (p. 18), many facing destitution. Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann tore down the popular districts replacing them with wide boulevards ("To Haussmann" became a "verb" and Merriman dubs this process "imperialism of the straight line") (p.8). They re-divided the city into "center and periphery" (p.17). Merriman offers a powerful image: in the morning, unable to afford horse-drawn public transportation, thousands of workers walked from the outskirts into the center city, and they walked home at night (p.19). This social polarization sparked Emile Henry's wrath.

Merriman elucidates a range of factors that shaped Henry. His father had been a leader during the Paris Commune of 1871, who had escaped massive executions by fleeing to Spain, where Emile was born in 1872 and spent his first years before the family returned to France. After his father died when he was ten, his mother operated an auberge in Brévannes, a small town southeast of Paris. Middle class (but not well-off) and intellectually gifted, Henry might have pursued a bourgeois career, but made other choices. He refused to report for military service. He developed an acute sensitivity to the inequities of his time and became an Anarchist immersed in Anarchist culture. He obsessively dwelled upon bombings by an Anarchist, François-Claudius Ravachol, and his execution, and a strike by coal-miners in Carmaux crushed by the mining company. He became a proponent of "propaganda of the deed." To anarchists who disagreed, he declared, "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" (pp. 203, 96, 60). Merriman summarizes Henry's alienation, "The extremely sensitive Emile had evolved into a fanatic who believed that only terrorism could solve the deep problems of society" (p.101). On November 8, 1892, using the weapon of the moment, dynamite, Henry placed a bomb in front of the Paris offices of the Carmaux Mining Company. It detonated at a Paris police station killing five. Henry fled to London, but later returned to the French capital. Auguste Vaillant threw a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies (nicknamed by the Anarchists the "Aquarium"). A desperately poor worker who could not feed his family, he designed his bomb to protest conditions, not to kill, only lightly wounding a small number. Yet Vaillant suffered a harsh fate on February 5, 1894, according to Merriman "the first person in nineteenth-century France to be executed, even though he had not killed anyone" (p.145). One week later Henry exploded his bomb in the Café Terminus. Merriman presents riveting accounts of Henry's subsequent trial, and execution on May 24. A month later, Santo Caserio assassinated Sadi Carnot, the President of France, to "avenge" Henry (p.206).

Panic characterized French responses to Anarchist bombings. The transformed popular...