Émile Henry (anarchist)

Émile Henry

Émile Henry (26 September 1872 – 21 May 1894) was a French anarchist who engaged in several terrorist attacks. First, he bombed a police station, in 1892, killing 5 people, then, on 12 February 1894 detonated a bomb at the Café Terminus in the Parisian Gare Saint-Lazare, killing one person and wounding seventy.

Though his activity in the anarchist movement was limited, he garnered much attention as a result of his crimes and of his age. He was also seen as one of the first people of a growing group of revolutionaries (largely anarchist) who subscribed to the doctrine of the "propaganda of the deed", which would later take the life of many governmental figures.

Biography

Early life and studies

Joseph Félix Émile Henry was born on 26 September 1872 in a small town near Barcelona. He was born in Spain because his father, Fortuné Henry, a former Communard now a coal miner, had been sentenced to death in absentia and had taken refuge there to escape French justice. His mother, Rose Caubet, who had worked as a seamstress before their exile, decided to follow him, and the couple settled in Catalonia. Émile was the youngest of his siblings; he had several brothers, including Jean-Charles Fortuné Henry, who would later become an anarchist activist like him, and a sister, Marie Constance Gabrielle Henry, who died in infancy. Taking advantage of a general amnesty in 1880, the family returned to Paris and settled at 5 Rue de Jouy in the fourth arrondissement of the capital. However, Fortuné Henry died a few months later from mercury poisoning, forcing Caubet to seek income to support her children and granting Henry the status of a ward of the city of Paris. This was done by setting up a drinking establishment on the ground floor of their home, called 'La Buvette de l'Espérance'.

Their family was relatively well-off, and Henry excelled in his studies at the Lycée Jean-Baptiste-Say, passing his baccalauréat in sciences a year early, at the age of seventeen. Destined for a promising career, he pursued scientific studies in preparatory classes and was eligible for admission to the École Polytechnique. However, he decided not to take the oral entrance exam, justifying his choice to his professors by citing, first, his reluctance to pursue a military career and, second, an opportunity offered by a family member—a wealthy industrialist—who had proposed that he become his private secretary. Henry was deeply influenced by the memory of the Paris Commune and the legacy of his father, who had a significant impact on him. He attempted to take part in a few spiritualism sessions to communicate with his father's soul but quickly deemed it a useless practice, less precise than the sciences he was studying.

Politicization and radicalization

It was in this first job as a personal secretary that Henry became aware of the harshness of society. He quickly resigned, refusing to oversee workers in Italy on behalf of his industrialist relative. Upon returning to Paris, he spent three months unemployed, and during this period, he became increasingly conscious of the social inequalities dividing French society. Henry wrote about this time:

Everywhere I went, I witnessed the same suffering among some, the same pleasures among others.

Henry also wrote about other issues, such as the monopolization of intellectual knowledge by the bourgeoisie and the morality of his society. Thus, he opposed the view that a bourgeois, being an exploiter in his view, could be considered an 'honest man'. In 1891, he experienced a personal romantic setback. He experienced a romantic disappointment in 1891, but this should not be considered the cause of his radicalization. More broadly, Henry perceived the society he lived in as profoundly shocking and revolting.

Moreover, his elder brother, Fortuné, became involved in the anarchist movement, where he established himself as a recognized speaker at anarchist meetings. Émile assisted him in organizing these gatherings and gradually embraced anarchist ideas through his contact with and influence from his brother. Henry likely joined anarchist circles around November 1890 and quickly became an active and 'able to act' militant. Well integrated into the anarchist network of the French capital, he spent the year 1891 engaging with Parisian anarchist circles.

Era of Attacks

Main articles: Carmaux-Bons Enfants bombing and Terminus bombing

During the Era of Attacks (1892–1894), which began with the Saint-Germain bombing on 11 March 1892, carried out by Ravachol, Henry was initially opposed to anarchist terrorism and to Ravachol himself, according to Merriman and Badier, who provide some of his writings. He later would have changed his stance. They argue that Henry's thinking evolved, and he gradually came to support the use of propaganda by the deed after Ravachol's execution.

Conversely, Bouhey contends that while Ravachol's execution may have further radicalized Henry and pushed him to take action, he was already on this path by March 1892. At that time, French police informants had already noted acid marks on his hands several times, suggesting that he was preparing explosive material. In reality, according to Bouhey, the idea that Henry was gradually radicalized during this period overlooks two key elements: the fact that he had planned his first attack long in advance and that he was assisted by other anarchists in carrying it out.

Henry's capture

Historian John Merriman has suggested that the bombing of the Café Terminus, along with the Liceu bombing in Barcelona in 1893, was the first militant anarchist attack to target ordinary people, rather than representatives of the state itself. Henry saw the café as a representation of the bourgeoisie itself and his intent was to kill as many people as possible in the bombing. When brought to trial for these acts, he was asked by the courts why he had needlessly harmed so many innocent people, to which he replied, "…there are no innocent bourgeois", adding that his acts caused the "insolent triumphs" of the bourgeoisie to be shattered, and "its golden calf would shake violently on its pedestal, until the final blow knocks it into the gutter and pools of blood."

This was not Henry's first terrorist act; already on November 8, 1892, he had placed a time bomb at the offices of the Carmaux Mining Company, which had exploded when the police removed it, killing five officers in the commissariat on the rue des Bons-enfants. Indeed, after his arrest for the Terminus bombing, Henry took credit for a series of other bombings in Paris, and in his apartment was found material to make many more explosive devices.

Henry was executed by guillotine on 21 May 1894. His last words were reputed to be "Courage, camarades! Vive l'anarchie!"

Excerpts of Henry's address to the jury

I became an anarchist only recently. It was no longer ago than around mid-1891 that I threw myself into the revolutionary movement. Previously, I had lived in circles wholly permeated with the established morality. I had been accustomed to respecting and even cherishing the principles of the nation, family, authority and property.

But those educating the present generation all too often forget one thing – that life, indiscreet with its struggles and setbacks, its injustices and iniquities, sees to it that the scales are removed from the eyes of the ignorant and that they are opened to reality. Which was the case with me, as it is with everyone. I had been told that this life was easy and largely open to intelligent, vagarious people, and experience showed me that only cynics and lackeys can get a good seat at the banquet.

I had been told that society’s institutions were founded on justice and equality, and all around me I could see nothing but lies and treachery. Everyday I was disabused further. Everywhere I went, I witnessed the same pain in some, the same delights in others. It did not take me long to realize that the same great words that I had been raised to venerate: honor, devotion, duty were merely a mask hiding the most shameful turpitude.

The factory-owner amassing a huge fortune on the back of the labor of his workers who lacked everything was an upright gentleman. The deputy, the minister whose hands were forever outstretched for bribes were committed to the public good. The officer testing his new model rifle on seven-year-old children had done his duty well, and in open parliament the premier offered him his congratulation. Everything I could see turned my stomach and my mind fastened on criticism of social organization. The criticism has been voiced too often to need rehearsing by me. Suffice it say that I turned into an enemy of a society which I held to be criminal.

Momentarily attracted by socialism, I wasted no time in distancing myself from that party. My love of liberty was too great, my regard for individual initiative too great, my repudiation for feathering one’s nest too definite for me to enlist in the numbered army of the fourth estate. Also, I saw that, essentially, socialism changes the established order not one jot. It retains the authoritarian principle, and this principle, despite what supposed free-thinkers may say about it, is nothing but an ancient relic of the belief in a higher power.

(…) In the merciless war that we have declared on the bourgeoisie, we ask no mercy. We mete out death and we must face it. For that reason I await your verdict with indifference. I know that mine will not be the last head you will sever (…) You will add more names to the bloody roll call of our dead.

Hanged in Chicago, beheaded in Germany, garroted in Xerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and in Paris, our dead are many; but you have not been able to destroy anarchy. Its roots go deep: its spouts from the bosom of a rotten society that is falling apart; it is a violent backlash against the established order; it stands for the aspirations to equality and liberty which have entered the lists against the current authoritarianism. It is everywhere. That is what makes it indomitable, and it will end by defeating you and killing you.

Bibliography

• Badier, Walter (2010), "Émile Henry, le « Saint-Just de l'Anarchie »" [Émile Henry, the 'Saint-Just of Anarchy'], Parlement[s], Paris: Revue d'histoire politique
• Merriman, John M. (2016). The dynamite club: how a bombing in fin-de-siècle Paris ignited the age of modern terror. Yale University Press. ISBN 978-0-300-21792-6.
• Merriman, John M. Merriman (2018), "The Spectre of the Commune and French Anarchism in the 1890s", The Palgrave Handbook of Anarchism, Palgrave Macmillan Cham, pp. 343–352{{citation}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)

External links

• Was this man the first terrorist of the modern age? at BBC News
• Émile Henry Reference Archive at Marxists.org