Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [61]
Public hysteria mounted. When, at a theatrical performance, some scenery back stage fell with a clatter, half the audience rushed for the exits screaming, “Les Anarchistes! Une bombe!” Newspapers took to printing a daily bulletin under the heading, “La Dynamite.” When the trial of the bomber of the Café Terminus opened on April 27, the terrible capacity of the Anarchist idea to be transformed from love of mankind to hatred of men was revealed.
The accused turned out to be the same Emile Henry who had been suspected of setting the earlier bomb in the office of the Mines de Carmaux which had ultimately killed the five policemen. Already charged for murder in the Café Terminus, he now claimed credit for the other deaths as well, although no proof could be found. He stated that he had bombed the Café Terminus to avenge Vaillant and with full intention to kill “as many as possible. I counted on fifteen dead and twenty wounded.” In fact, police had found in his room enough equipment to make twelve or fifteen bombs. In his cold passion, intellectual pride and contempt for the common man, Henry seemed the “St. Just of Anarchism.” A brilliant student who had been admitted to the arcane Ecole Polytechnique and had been expelled for insulting a professor, he had been left to occupy his mind as a draper’s clerk at 120 francs a month. At twenty-two he was, along with Berkman, the best educated and best acquainted with Anarchist theory of all the assassins, and of them all, the most explicit.
In prison he wrote a long, closely reasoned account of his experience of the cynicism and injustice of bourgeois society, of his “too great respect for individual initiative” to permit him to join the herd-like Socialists, and of his approach to Anarchism. He showed himself thoroughly familiar with its doctrines and with the writings of Kropotkin, Reclus, Grave, Faure and others, although he affirmed that Anarchists were not “blind believers” who swallowed whole any or all the ideas of the theorists.
But it was when he explained his choice of the Café Terminus that he suddenly set himself apart. There, he said, come “all those who are satisfied with the established order, all the accomplices and employees of Property and the State,… all that mass of good little bourgeois who make 300 to 500 francs a month, who are more reactionary than their masters, who hate the poor and range themselves on the side of the strong. These are the clientele of the Terminus and the big cafés of its kind. Now you know why I struck where I did.”
In court, when reproached by the judge for endangering innocent lives, he replied with icy hauteur, in words that should have been blazoned on some Anarchist banner, “There are no innocent bourgeois.”
As for the Anarchist leaders, he said, who “dissociate themselves from the propaganda of the deed,” like Kropotkin and Malatesta in the case of Ravachol, and “who try to make a subtle distinction between theorists and terrorists, they are cowards.… We who hand out death know how to take it.… Mine is not the last head you will cut off. You have hung in Chicago, beheaded in Germany, garroted at Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Paris, but there is one thing you cannot destroy: Anarchism.… It is in violent revolt against the established order. It will finish by killing you.”
Henry himself took death staunchly. Even the caustic Clemenceau, who witnessed the execution on May 21, 1894, was moved and disturbed. He saw Henry “with the face of a tormented Christ, terribly pale, implacable in expression, trying to