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The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (2009)

di John Merriman

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Distinguished historian John Merriman maintains that the Age of Modern Terror began in Paris on February 12, 1894, when anarchist Emile Henry set off a bomb in the Café Terminus, killing one and wounding twenty French citizens. The true story of the circumstances that led a young radical to commit a cold-blooded act of violence against innocent civilians makes for riveting reading, shedding new light on the terrorist mindset and on the subsequent worldwide rise of anarchism by deed. Merriman's fascinating study of modern history's first terrorists, emboldened by the invention of dynamite, reveals much about the terror of today.… (altro)
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En su cuarto en la periferia parisina, Émile Henry coloca un cartucho de dinamita en el interior de una tartera metálica de obrero. Luego, guarda la bomba en uno de los bolsillos de su abrigo y, armado con su pistola, un cuchillo y un profundo anhelo de libertad, sale por la puerta. Poco después, los cristales del escaparate del sofisticado Café Terminus se hacen añicos, un burgués pierde la vida y otros veinte resultan heridos. Era 12 de febrero de 1894 y acababa de estallar la era del terrorismo moderno.

El club de la dinamita es el magnético relato de quienes se alzaron contra el poder establecido, de aquellos que culpaban al capitalismo, a la religión, al Ejército y al Estado de las desgracias de la clase obrera a finales del siglo xix. Su autor, el distinguido historiador John Merriman, muestra cómo el terrorismo moderno comenzó en París aquel 12 de febrero, cuando Émile Henry cometió un ataque contra personas inocentes. Desde entonces, vivimos bajo la amenaza permanente del terrorismo, de ataques que no tienen necesariamente como blanco ni a jefes de Estado ni oficiales de uniforme, sino que cualquiera puede ser el objetivo. Como Merriman demuestra, en el pecho del terrorista pueden latir las más nobles causas y luchas, pero no por ello dejará de ser inmisericorde y terrible.
  meltxor | Oct 18, 2022 |
While I felt it could have benefited from tighter editing, it was nonetheless an interesting and informative read. ( )
  heggiep | Feb 20, 2021 |
An interesting survey which benefits from detailed pockets within the narrative that aren't exactly crucial to the instance of one Emile henry, anarchist, but are valuable in a broader cultural and historical context. ( )
  jonfaith | Feb 22, 2019 |
Maybe there is something to metempsychosis. The soul of Émile Henry seems to have turned up in Theodore Kaczynski, John Hinckley, Eric Harris, and Dylan Klebold – and will probably appear again, John Merriman’s The Dynamite Club is a surprisingly thorough biography of Henry (surprising because so much is known about his life). Merriman links Henry with the anarchist movement of the 20 years on either side of 1900, and Henry’s public statements and private contacts certainly connect him with anarchism and he claimed to be an anarchist; I think an equally good case could be made for Henry as the first in a series of sad cases like the men listed above – self-destructive losers, of above average intelligence, who blame their problems on “society” and strike out more or less randomly, getting their 15 minutes of fame through murder self-justified by vague political beliefs.


Henry was caught after throwing a bomb into the Café Terminus in Paris on February 12, 1894, killing one. Two years earlier he’d planted a bomb outside the offices of a French mining company, also in Paris; the suspicious package was taken to a police station, where it exploded and killed five police officers. In jail, Henry first refused to reveal any information about himself but gradually began to get more and more talkative, eventually bragging about his bomb and voluntarily confessing to the 1892 bombing as well. His defense statement at his trial was reminiscent of the “Unibomber Manifesto”, indicting society; he was guillotined on May 21st 1894.


Contemporary writers spent quite a bit of ink noting that Henry, unlike other anarchists, was bourgeois himself, and Merriman concurs; I think this is a little exaggerated. Henry’s father had been a mine foreman in Spain and something of a political radical (he had to flee to Spain after the communard repressions in 1871); after his father’s death, his mother ran a small auberge in a rural French town. Henry had done quite well in the equivalent of high school, but failed the oral part of the admission examination for the École Polytechnique – blaming a hostile examiner. About this time he developed an unfortunate passion for a friend’s wife, writing embarrassing love poems and obtaining a lock of her hair (he was wearing it in a locket when captured). Nevertheless, in 1889 he got an excellent job with his uncle, a civil engineer working in Venice – but unaccountably left and returned to France, working at series of marginal clerking positions for various employers. Thus he was bourgeois only by a considerable stretch of the term.


Henry did have a few anarchist contacts, but most of his knowledge of anarchism seems to have come from the newspapers. His radicalization may have been triggered by a widely publicized coal mine strike – perhaps remembering his father’s mining days and death from “brain fever” (Merriman speculates it was mercury poisoning) – and his first and most successful attempt at “propaganda by the deed” was the bomb at the Paris offices of the mining company. The police did consider him a possible suspect but didn’t think he could have planted the bomb in the brief time he was away from work; Henry fled to London anyway. The Café Terminus attack was ostensibly revenge for the execution of a worker who had detonated a small, nonlethal bomb in the Chamber of Deputies – this was the first time since the Terror when someone had been guillotined for a crime that didn’t involve murder. However, Henry’s target was not a government building or industrial site like previous anarchist attacks (including his own) but simply an upscale restaurant. Coupled with the supposed bourgeois status of the bomber, this created a major public stir – suddenly no one was safe from anarchist attacks.


Nothing like this really came to pass. There was a revenge attack for Henry – an Italian anarchist stabbed the President of the French Republic to death while he was riding in an open carriage in Lyon – but there was no more random bombing in public places. The French passed a series of extremely repressive laws, and most anarchists themselves felt Henry had gone too far. Henry’s supposed love interest, Élisa Gauthey, made a short career for herself talking to journalists, and Henry’s mother had a brief spurt of notoriety business in her auberge.


Merriman is pretty clearly more sympathetic to the anarchists than to the bourgeoisie, sometimes getting maudlin over the pathetic condition of the Parisian poor; to be fair, it was pretty pathetic but no worse than anywhere else in West. Besides, in a few short years many of the poor were to have their misery permanently relieved in the trenches. Merriman criticizes the cruelty of binding Henry’s hands painfully tight and shackling him with hobbles on his way to the guillotine, apparently not realizing this was standard operating procedure and is intended as kindness rather than cruelty – the idea is that if your wrists hurt and you have to concentrate hard on walking your mind will not be brooding on the fact that it’s about to be separated from the rest of you. If Merriman’s description of the execution is true, an actual cruelty was that there was a 20-second delay between getting Henry’s head in the lunette and dropping the blade, which, under the circumstances, is a long time to be staring into a basket; in moist post-Terror guillotining is was a point of pride to the executioner that the interested party contemplated his situation for the shortest possible time. Merriman’s not familiar with anarchist technology; we learn, for example, that Henry possessed an “8-caliber” revolver and that he once used “potassium chloride” when making bombs, and there’s the claim that dynamite is made by mixing nitroglycerine with black powder. In a particularly amusing error – although I suspect this is due to an overenthusiastic automated spell checker rather than Merriman – some London anarchists are described as belonging to “The Astronomy Club” rather than the actual anarchist organization “The Autonomy Club”. Oddly, there is an astronomy connection; the Royal Greenwich Observatory was the target of an 1894 anarchist bombing attempt, only three days after Henry’s attack on the Café Terminus, but the bomb blew up in the bomber’s hand and killed him (the supposed motive being the bourgeoisie “worship” of science). The incident inspired Conrad’s The Secret Agent, which turns out to have been Theodore Kaczinsky’s favorite book – to the extent that he sometimes used Conrad as an alias. I enjoy synchronicity.


Worth a read. I suppose I did become a little sympathetic with Mr. Henry – but if there was similar detail about the lives of his victims I would probably feel even more for them. ( )
  setnahkt | Dec 21, 2017 |
Restitution impeccable de la vie d'Emile Henry et du milieu anarchiste français de la fin du XIXe siècle.
La figure d'Henry est fascinante : bourgoisvanti-bourgeois, intellectuel prônant la violence par les actes, meurtrier sans repentir, mais en même temps seulement un gamin d'une vingtaine d'années (son âge transparaît souvent dans ses paroles, qui restent celles d'un jeune passionné) qui voulait bel et bien devenir un martyr.
L'auteur laisse le lecteur tirer ses conclusions sur la façon dont Henry en est venu à faire ce qu'il a fait. Merriman part d'une question simple (pourquoi a-t-il lancé cette bombe dans ce café?), il nous donne les faits, l'atmosphère sociale et politique, les attitudes et la personnalité du jeune homme, le microcosme anarchiste international/parisien/londonien avec ses tensions et ses dissidences, le milieu policier, et il restitue bien toutes les ambiguïtés de l'affaire.

Je n'avais jamais bien compris avant ce cycle de violence allant notamment de Vaillant jusqu'à Carnot et voilà un pan de l'histoire du XIXe que je saisis enfin.
Il est intéressant que l'apogée de ce cycle ait lieu 20 après la Commune - à l'âge où les fils deviennent adultes (ce qui est précisément ce qui se passe pour Henry) et diminue ensuite. La violence revient contre l'Etat une génération après. J'aurais ainsi aimé plus sur les rapports qu'entretenaient les anarchistes avec le souvenir de la Commune.
Il est également intéressant que cette bombe lancée dans ce café soit à la fois l'apogée du cycle mais aussi le début de la fin : Merriman montre bien dans le dernier chapitre à quel point cet acte a embarrassé les anarchistes eux-mêmes.

Le livre dresse enfin des parallèles subtils avec notre époque et cette subtilité (chacun est libre de tirer conclusions et parallèles nuancés) est une de ses grandes forces.

Quant au livre lui-même, il est très bien écrit et très vivant, et pourtant je n'aime guère les livres d'histoires à la plume littéraire trop emphatique, mais Merriman, grand historien s'il en est, évite les écueils et reste subtil et rigoureux.
Il est à la fois abordable pour le novice en histoire et passionnant pour celui qui s'y connaît mieux.
J'aurais néanmoins aimé que l'appareil critique, comme les notes, soit visible. De plus, certains rappels "grand public" n'ont pas toujours un rapport avec le sujet. Je regrette surtout que cette édition "grand public", si elle est très abordable, a visiblement obligé à alléger les passages les plus complexes, laissant quelque peu sur sa faim. ( )
1 vota comtso | Aug 6, 2009 |
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Distinguished historian John Merriman maintains that the Age of Modern Terror began in Paris on February 12, 1894, when anarchist Emile Henry set off a bomb in the Café Terminus, killing one and wounding twenty French citizens. The true story of the circumstances that led a young radical to commit a cold-blooded act of violence against innocent civilians makes for riveting reading, shedding new light on the terrorist mindset and on the subsequent worldwide rise of anarchism by deed. Merriman's fascinating study of modern history's first terrorists, emboldened by the invention of dynamite, reveals much about the terror of today.

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