Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [58]
In France meanwhile there had been no pause in the assaults. On November 8, 1892, at the time of a miner’s strike against the Société des Mines de Carmaux, a bomb was deposited in the Paris office of the company on the Avenue de l’Opéra. Discovered by the concierge, it was taken out to the sidewalk and carefully carried off by a policeman to the nearest precinct station, in the Rue des Bons Enfants. As the policeman was bringing it in, it burst with a devastating explosion, killing five other policemen who were in the room. They were blown to fragments, blood and bits of flesh were splashed over shattered walls and windows, pieces of arms and legs lay about. Police suspicion centered on Emile Henry, younger brother of a well-known radical orator and son of Fortuné Henry who had escaped to Spain after being condemned to death in the Commune. When Emile Henry’s movements during the day were traced, it appeared impossible that he could have been in the Avenue de l’Opéra at the right moment, and for the time being, no arrests were made.
The bomb in the police station threw Paris into a panic; no one knew where the next bomb would hit. Anyone connected with the law or police was regarded by his neighbors—since Parisians live largely in apartments—as if he had the plague and was often given notice to leave by his landlord. The city, wrote an English visitor, was “absolutely paralyzed” with fear. The upper classes “lived again as if in the days of the Commune. They dared not go to the theatres, to restaurants, to the fashionable shops in the Rue de la Paix or to ride in the Bois where Anarchists were suspected behind every tree.” People exchanged terrible rumors: the Anarchists had mined the churches, poured prussic acid in the city’s reservoirs, were hiding beneath the seats of horsecabs ready to spring out upon passengers and rob them. Troops were assembled in the suburbs ready to march, tourists took flight, the hotels were empty, busses ran without passengers, theatres and museums were barricaded.
The time was in any case one of public rancor and disgust. Hardly had the Republic warded off the Boulanger coup d’état than it was put to shame by the nexus of corruption revealed in the Panama scandal and in the official traffic in decorations. Day after day in Parliament during 1890–92 the chain of Panama financing through loans, bribes, slush funds and sales of influence was uncovered, until, it was said, 104 deputies were involved. Even Georges Clemenceau was smeared by association and lost his seat in the next election.
In proportion as the prestige of the State sank, Anarchism flourished. Intellectuals flirted with it. The buried dislike of government and law that exists in most men is nearer to the surface in some. Like the fat man who has a thin man inside crying to get out, even the respectable have a small Anarchist hidden inside, and among the artists and intellectuals of the nineties his faint cry was frequently heard. The novelist Maurice Barrès, who at one time or another tried every position in the political spectrum as a tribune for his talents, glorified Anarchist philosophy in his l’Ennemi des Lois and Un Homme Libre. The poet Laurent Tailhade hailed the future Anarchist society as a “blessed time” when aristocracy would be one of intellect and “the common man will kiss the footprints of the poets.” Literary anarchism enjoyed a vogue among the Symbolists, like Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. The writer Octave Mirbeau was attracted to Anarchism because he had a horror of authority. He detested anyone in uniform: policemen, ticket-punchers, messengers, concierges, servants. In his eyes, said his friend Léon Daudet, a landlord was a pervert, a Minister a thief, lawyers and financiers made him sick and he had tolerance only for children, beggars, dogs, certain painters and sculptors and very young women. “That there need be no misery in the world was his fixed belief,” said a friend; “that there nevertheless was, was the occasion of his wrath.” Among painters, Pissarro contributed