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February 4 - February 4, 2019
Most obviously, their aims are very different. Anarchist terrorists — and it is essential to remember that the vast majority of anarchists were not terrorists — wanted to destroy the state.
Henry had made a similar, murderous decision a century before.
Second, both the anarchist terrorists and Islamic fundamentalists today cut across social lines.
Third, Émile Henry and his predecessors sought revolutionary immortality.
Fourth, both sets of terrorists target a powerful enemy,
a structure they set out to destroy,
Fifth, dynamite and bombs became weapons of choice, more accessible ways to penetrate the defenses of well-armed states.
Sixth, terrorists fervently believe in their ideology, and remain confident that their numbers will grow and that eventually they will win.
Seventh, in dealing with terrorism, both the French government of the fin de siècle and American officials during the Iraq War debacle tended to look for a centrally organized, massive conspiracy instead of acknowledging the role of small groups or even isolated individuals undertaking locally organized or freelance operations.
Terrorism has thus become part of the political process, sort of a danse macabre between states and their fiercest opponents.
This book is motivated by a very simple question: why did Émile Henry do what he did?
He blamed capitalism, religion, the army, and the state for the plight of the underclass, who struggled to get by as the rich lived it up. In the city of lights, Émile Henry felt dislocated, alienated, and angry. It made him a perfect recruit for anarchism.
Napoleon III wanted Haussmann to plow new boulevards through and around some of the most traditionally revolutionary neighborhoods, quartiers that had risen up during the French
Revolution of 1789, the Revolution of July 1830, and the Parisian civil war of June 1848.
To staunch Catholics, France’s shocking defeat in the war and the subsequent rise of the Paris Commune seemed to be divine punishment meted out to “a nation fallen from grace,” set right by a “sword brandished by a vengeful God.”
between the “People’s Paris” of the east and the increasingly chic neighborhoods of the west.
The term boulevardiers came into use to describe men who turned up “at the proper moment in the proper café.”
The press played a decisive role in the mass politicization of this period, and each newspaper had a particular political slant.
The Eiffel Tower commemorated the Revolution and France’s Third Republic.
unemployment kept about half of the working population on the edge of economic disaster.
aroused apprehension, even fear, among the upper classes. Henry Leyret, a journalist, bought a shabby estaminet, Le Déluge, in Belleville, to observe for himself the life of ordinary people in Paris.
Leyret recalled a discussion with a muscular worker, who exclaimed, “Goddammit, there are real men in Paris, who could take up their rifles, tools, pickaxes, and other things.
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.
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.
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).
The Versailles government condemned him to death in absentia for “insurrection.”
Workers sat around the table, or, when the weather permitted, in the garden. The second room served as a small store offering a few grocery items and drinks.
Yet, rebelling against “the frauds,” as he discovered them to be, Émile soon abandoned the quest, which lacked
In Paris, he was increasingly appalled by the omnipresence of grinding poverty. Every day he encountered the miserably poor, the jobless, the hungry, the desperate. They became his passion.
Early in 1891, Fortuné broke with the socialists and embraced anarchism.
Anarchism reconciled the Henry brothers, giving them something they could both believe in.
“Property Is Theft.”
He viewed peasants as revolutionaries who did not yet know
After all, Marx was not interested in destroying the state but in replacing it with another one, socialist in character.
The imperial Russian police crushed People’s Will, but its tactics came to be adopted by some anarchists worldwide.
Émile Henry could not help but soak up the charged atmosphere of fin-de-siècle Paris.
The plight of ordinary people was growing ever more serious. Someone would have to carry the mantle of visionaries like Proudhon and Bakunin.
Sunday. At times they offered soup or something else to eat in exchange for listening to speeches.
The budding anarchist sent a third of his wages to his mother. He could not afford to eat lunch on many days, and may for a time have stayed with the singer Adrienne Chailley.
Terrorism became a European, then a worldwide, phenomenon beginning in the 1880s.
(1) on any occasion that workers left their workshops and factories to demonstrate in the street, anarchists should be there to win them over to the cause of social revolution; (2) May 1 was no more important than any other date, but because “people have a tendency to think about revolution on that day, it would be strange and even pitiful if anarchists advised them to stay at home to rest”; (3) even if May 1 was to be a political demonstration in which socialist leaders sought to make the masses follow them, proletarians had the capacity to go further than their “so-called representatives”
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FRANÇOIS-CLAUDIUS RAVACHOL,
“propaganda by the deed,”
Ravachol, aided by his young friend Cookie, set out to avenge the “martyrs” of Clichy. He would do so with an explosive that was leveling the playing field for terrorists intent on striking against the state: dynamite.
The Haymarket riot was a touchstone for anarchists in Europe and in the United States, where the trials and subsequent executions pushed Emma Goldman, an immigrant from Russia, to anarchist militancy. The events in Chicago demonstrated three things to anarchists: that anarchism had international appeal, that anarchists could mobilize workers, and that the repressive power of the state, serving the interests of high finance and big business, remained strong. The image of the bodies of four men hanging in the Windy City in the United States, supposedly a progressive republic, became etched in
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From the heights of the Montmartre butte, stairs still lead down rue des Abbesses to rue Véron, a narrow street of cobblestones beneath Sacré-Coeur.
and leaks, some of which were purchased. The success of memoirs
and would leave London in four or five days. The place bored
Émile came to be known as the hero of the explosion at the police station on rue des Bons-Enfants.
The holy grail of those anarchists inclined to violence was the assassination of President Sadi Carnot, who had refused to pardon Vaillant.
