Crimes of Paris_ A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection - Dorothy Hoobler [13]
Two months later, Émile Henry set off a bomb in a hotel café. It ripped through the crowd, killing one person and wounding twenty others. Running from the scene, Henry shot at a pursuing policeman but stumbled and was caught. Both Vaillant and Henry were convicted and guillotined. Nevertheless, Paris remained in a state of siege, with residents looking suspiciously at any package.
The greatest outrage of the anarchists was the assassination of French president Marie-François-Sadi Carnot in 1894. This time the culprit was an Italian named Sante Caserio, who had been booted from his homeland for distributing anarchist pamphlets. When he learned that Sadi Carnot was to go to Lyons to open the Colonial Exhibit, Caserio decided to assassinate him there. On June 24, as the president rode by in his carriage, Caserio pushed his way through the crowd, carrying a knife. While the noise of celebratory fireworks distracted the president’s security guards, Caserio lunged inside the carriage and stabbed the president in the stomach. Shouting, “Vive l’Anarchie!” the assassin tried to run away, but spectators captured him and turned him over to the police. Caserio was unrepentant, declaring from his cell, “I am an anarchist and I have struck the Head of State. I’ve done it as I would have killed any king or emperor, of no matter what nationality.” 37 Though his lawyers argued that he was insane and should not get the death penalty, he was guillotined on August 16.
Despite the violence and outrages, many artists and writers sympathized with anarchism, feeling that they shared the anarchists’ aim of breaking down society’s repressive rules. The cafés of Montmartre were particular hotbeds of support; entertainers there sometimes glorified the anarchists in song. Maxime Lisbonne, a former Communard who had returned from New Caledonia in 1880, ran a cabaret where the doors had bars, the tables were chained to the floor, and the waiters were dressed as galley slaves, dragging shackles behind them as they served customers. Lisbonne tried to take advantage of the anarchist outrages by advertising that his establishment was “the sole Concert sheltered from the Bombs.” 38 This claim in fact brought to his establishment a slew of police informers who filed regular reports about the goings-on there.
Another cabaret associated with anarchism was Le Zut, owned by Frédéric “Frédé” Gérard and affiliated with the anarchist paper Le Libertaire. It was one of Picasso’s favorite hangouts in his early years in Paris, and he decorated its walls with murals. After police shut down that establishment, Frédé went on to open a new place, which became famous as Le Lapin Agile. (Previously it had been called the Cabaret of Assassins because portraits of murderers were hung on the walls.) The new name came from a pun on the name of the sign painter André Gill, who painted over the entrance a rabbit hopping out of a stew pot (le lapin à Gill). Le Lapin Agile became a gathering place for anarchists and criminals as well as the artists and poets who patronized it for the cheap Burgundian food. Here, as late as 1910, informers were reporting on the anarchist clientele. In 1911, the owner’s son was gunned down on the threshold of the café. His murderer was never found.
Anarchist newspapers continued to be published, and antigovernment sentiments remained active. In 1911, a Russian émigré named Victor Kibalchich, later known as Victor Serge, took over editorship of the newspaper l’anarchie and urged his comrades to resume the active struggle to overturn the state. His words caused a spark that would burst into flame when they reached Jules Bonnot, a onetime chauffeur. A series of disappointments in love and in his career had embittered him, and he had turned to stealing the cars of wealthy people. Now, embracing anarchism, he would make his own contribution