Tom Palaima: The first modern terrorist
[Tom Palaima is Dickson Centennial Professor of Classics at the University of Texas at Austin, where he teaches seminars on the human response to war and violence.]
... In The Dynamite Club, Yale historian John Merriman describes the historical setting and background of what he argues is the first modern act of true terrorism. At 9:01 on the evening of Feb. 12, 1894, 21-year-old French anarchist Émile Henry, who earned his baccalauréat in science from the Sorbonne in 1888, threw a dynamite bomb he had made into the crowded Café Terminus in Paris. A small orchestra had just started playing “the fifth piece of their first set” when Henry threw his bomb.
Merriman’s account enables us to identify the false stereotypes in Sargent’s cartoon. This is no small gain in what we, as citizens, need to know about terrorism.
The chief European anarchist proponents of violent “propaganda by the deed” who influenced Henry—the Russian Peter Kropotkin, fellow Frenchman Paul Brousse and Italian Errico Malatesta—had well-educated minds and, as Merriman makes us see, sympathetic hearts. They would not have been mistaken for waterfront goons. Merriman cites a front-page story from the Feb. 15, 1894, issue of the French republican newspaper Le Matin to show how troubled conservative middle- and upper-class citizens were by the fact that Henry was young, clean in appearance, clearly bourgeois and genuinely intellectual—in short, not a stereotypical “vulgaire brute.”
Understanding terrorists is a first condition for effectively combating terrorism. We have to get to know how terrorists think and act and why they believe, fanatically, what they believe. However, the very process of trying to get inside the hearts and minds of terrorists is stigmatized. Intellectual empathy, even for the purpose of gaining understanding that can ultimately improve our own security, is usually viewed with suspicion. Questioning why terrorists attack people like us may lead to answers that call for us to examine our own roles in creating and maintaining the social, economic or political conditions that give rise to terrorist acts.
This examination is what makes The Dynamite Club so important. Merriman demythologizes Émile Henry and the loosely organized international group of anarchist thinkers who inspired and supported him. Merriman also comments, without being heavy-handed, on the conditions European anarchists were trying to change.
The main thing they were trying to change was the extreme disparity in wealth and power that in Paris alone kept hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in abject, anonymous and inescapable poverty. As one anarchist commented, “What a beautiful society when the budget of the state spends four million francs on the opera each year as a subsidy ... while poor people try to get by in the streets and public places without anywhere to live.” Merriman contrasts the beautiful center of Paris with the “enormous suburbs ... full of sadness and menace.” In those neighborhoods, the rate of tuberculosis was five times greater than in the center. Given the financial scandals of the Third Republic, most workers felt an “[u]tter disgust for parliament” and “ignored elections, which had done nothing to improve their lives.” Anarchists aimed to shake members of the bourgeoisie out of their ignorance about the economic exploitation and intolerable social conditions that made their comfortable lives possible, and to shake downtrodden members of the working class out of their political apathy. Émile Henry believed the comfortable pleasures enjoyed by the thoughtless bourgeois gathered in the Café Terminus were based on the miseries of the working class.
Henry was arrested right after he tossed his bomb, which killed one man, wounded 20 others and, according to Merriman, threw government officials, police and well-heeled Parisians into a panic. Henry was quickly put on trial, found guilty, and guillotined on May 21, 1894. Throughout his trial, he testified rationally and logically. Merriman quotes selectively from Henry’s long, stylish and well-reasoned final statement, admirably withholding explicit judgments. The online Anarchist Encyclopedia reproduces the complete defense. calling it “a very powerful and moving piece of literature.”...
Reading Merriman’s history of Émile Henry may not make us sympathetic to terrorists, but it should make us aware of our role in creating and tolerating conditions that breed what we call terrorist “hatred.” It was not mere moral relativism or radical sophistry that led Émile Henry to reason, “To those who say: Hate does not give birth to love, I reply that it is love, human love, that often gives birth to hate.”
Read entire article at Texas Observer
... In The Dynamite Club, Yale historian John Merriman describes the historical setting and background of what he argues is the first modern act of true terrorism. At 9:01 on the evening of Feb. 12, 1894, 21-year-old French anarchist Émile Henry, who earned his baccalauréat in science from the Sorbonne in 1888, threw a dynamite bomb he had made into the crowded Café Terminus in Paris. A small orchestra had just started playing “the fifth piece of their first set” when Henry threw his bomb.
Merriman’s account enables us to identify the false stereotypes in Sargent’s cartoon. This is no small gain in what we, as citizens, need to know about terrorism.
The chief European anarchist proponents of violent “propaganda by the deed” who influenced Henry—the Russian Peter Kropotkin, fellow Frenchman Paul Brousse and Italian Errico Malatesta—had well-educated minds and, as Merriman makes us see, sympathetic hearts. They would not have been mistaken for waterfront goons. Merriman cites a front-page story from the Feb. 15, 1894, issue of the French republican newspaper Le Matin to show how troubled conservative middle- and upper-class citizens were by the fact that Henry was young, clean in appearance, clearly bourgeois and genuinely intellectual—in short, not a stereotypical “vulgaire brute.”
Understanding terrorists is a first condition for effectively combating terrorism. We have to get to know how terrorists think and act and why they believe, fanatically, what they believe. However, the very process of trying to get inside the hearts and minds of terrorists is stigmatized. Intellectual empathy, even for the purpose of gaining understanding that can ultimately improve our own security, is usually viewed with suspicion. Questioning why terrorists attack people like us may lead to answers that call for us to examine our own roles in creating and maintaining the social, economic or political conditions that give rise to terrorist acts.
This examination is what makes The Dynamite Club so important. Merriman demythologizes Émile Henry and the loosely organized international group of anarchist thinkers who inspired and supported him. Merriman also comments, without being heavy-handed, on the conditions European anarchists were trying to change.
The main thing they were trying to change was the extreme disparity in wealth and power that in Paris alone kept hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in abject, anonymous and inescapable poverty. As one anarchist commented, “What a beautiful society when the budget of the state spends four million francs on the opera each year as a subsidy ... while poor people try to get by in the streets and public places without anywhere to live.” Merriman contrasts the beautiful center of Paris with the “enormous suburbs ... full of sadness and menace.” In those neighborhoods, the rate of tuberculosis was five times greater than in the center. Given the financial scandals of the Third Republic, most workers felt an “[u]tter disgust for parliament” and “ignored elections, which had done nothing to improve their lives.” Anarchists aimed to shake members of the bourgeoisie out of their ignorance about the economic exploitation and intolerable social conditions that made their comfortable lives possible, and to shake downtrodden members of the working class out of their political apathy. Émile Henry believed the comfortable pleasures enjoyed by the thoughtless bourgeois gathered in the Café Terminus were based on the miseries of the working class.
Henry was arrested right after he tossed his bomb, which killed one man, wounded 20 others and, according to Merriman, threw government officials, police and well-heeled Parisians into a panic. Henry was quickly put on trial, found guilty, and guillotined on May 21, 1894. Throughout his trial, he testified rationally and logically. Merriman quotes selectively from Henry’s long, stylish and well-reasoned final statement, admirably withholding explicit judgments. The online Anarchist Encyclopedia reproduces the complete defense. calling it “a very powerful and moving piece of literature.”...
Reading Merriman’s history of Émile Henry may not make us sympathetic to terrorists, but it should make us aware of our role in creating and tolerating conditions that breed what we call terrorist “hatred.” It was not mere moral relativism or radical sophistry that led Émile Henry to reason, “To those who say: Hate does not give birth to love, I reply that it is love, human love, that often gives birth to hate.”