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Title: Émile Henry’s Defense Author: Émile Henry Date: 1894 Language: en Topics: history, propaganda of the deed Source: Retrieved on March 3rd, 2009 from http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/Encyclopedia/HenryEmile.htm Notes: Émile Henry's defense during the trial after Henry had thrown a bomb at Paris’ Café Terminus, killing one and injuring twenty.
It is not a defence that I present to you. I am not in any way seeking
to escape the reprisals of the society I have attacked. Besides, I
acknowledge only one tribunal — myself, and the verdict of any other is
meaningless to me. I wish merely to give you an explanation of my acts
and to tell you how I was led to perform them.
I have been an anarchist for only a short time. It was as recently as
the middle of the year 1891 that I entered the revolutionary movement.
Up to that time, I had lived in circles entirely imbued with current
morality. I had been accustomed to respect and even to love the
principles of fatherland and family, of authority and property.
For teachers in the present generation too often forget one thing; it is
that life, with its struggles and defeats, its injustices and
iniquities, takes upon itself indiscreetly to open the eyes of the
ignorant to reality. This happened to me, as it happens to everyone. I
had been told that life was easy, that it was wide open to those who
were intelligent and energetic; experience showed me that only the
cynical and the servile were able to secure good seats at the banquet. I
had been told that our social institutions were founded on justice and
equality; I observed all around me nothing but lies and impostures.
Each day I shed an illusion. Everywhere I went, I witnessed the same
miseries among some, and the same joys among others. I was not slow to
understand that the grand words I had been taught to venerate: honour,
devotion, duty, were only the mask that concealed the most shameful
basenesses.
The manufacturer who created a colossal fortune out of the toil of
workers who lacked everything was an honest gentleman. The deputy and
the minister, their hands ever open for bribes, were devoted to the
public good. The officer who experimented with a new type of rifle on
children of seven had done his duty, and, openly in parliament, the
president of the council congratulated him! Everything I saw revolted
me, and my intelligence was attracted by criticism of the existing
social organization. Such criticism has been made too often for me to
repeat it. It is enough to say that I became the enemy of a society that
I judged to be criminal.
Drawn at first to socialism, I was not slow in separating myself from
that party. I have too much love of freedom, too much respect for
individual initiative, too much repugnance for military organization, to
assume a number in the ordered army of the fourth estate. Besides, I
realized that basically socialism changes nothing in the existing order.
It maintains the principle of authority, and, whatever self-styled
free-thinkers may say about it, that principle is no more than the
antiquated survival of faith in a superior power.
Scientific studies gradually made me aware of the play of natural forces
in the universe. I became materialist and atheist; I came to realize
that modern science discards the hypothesis of God, of which it has no
need. In the same way, religious and authoritarian morality, which are
based on false assumptions, should be allowed to disappear. What then, I
asked myself, was the new morality in harmony with the laws of nature
that might regenerate the old world and give birth to a happy humanity?
It was at this moment that I came into contact with a group of anarchist
comrades whom I consider, even today, among the best I have ever known.
The character of these men immediately captivated me. I discerned in
them a great sincerity, a total frankness, a searching distrust of all
prejudices, and I wanted to understand the idea that produced men so
different from anyone I had encountered up to that point.
The idea — as soon as I embraced it — found in my mind a soil completely
prepared by observation and personal reflection to receive it. It merely
gave precision to what already existed there in vague and wavering form.
In my turn I became an anarchist.
I do not need to develop on this occasion the whole theory of anarchism.
I merely wish to emphasize its revolutionary aspect, the destructive and
negative aspect that brings me here before you.
At this moment of embittered struggle between the middle class and its
enemies, I am almost tempted to say, with Souvarine in Germinal: ‘All
discussions about the future are criminal, since they hinder pure and
simple destruction and slow down the march of the revolution...’
I brought with me into the struggle a profound hatred which every day
was renewed by the spectacle of this society where everything is base,
everything is equivocal, everything is ugly, where everything is an
impediment to the outflow of human passions, to the generous impulses of
the heart, to the free flight of thought.
I wanted to strike as strongly and as justly as I could. Let us start
then with the first attempt I made, the explosion in the Rue des
Bon-Enfants. I had followed closely the events at Carmaux. The first
news of the strike had filled me with joy. The miners seemed at last to
have abandoned those useless pacific strikes in which the trusting
worker patiently waits for his few francs to triumph over the company’s
millions. They seemed to have entered on a way of violence which
manifested itself resolutely on the 15^(th) August 1892. The offices and
buildings of the mine were invaded by a crowd of people tired of
suffering without reprisals; justice was about to be wrought on the
engineer whom his workers so deeply hated, when the timorous ones chose
to interfere.
Who were these men? The same who cause the miscarriage of all
revolutionary movements because they fear that the people, once they act
freely, will no longer obey their voices; those who persuade thousands
of men to endure privations month after month so as to beat the drum
over their sufferings and create for themselves a popularity that will
put them into office: such men — I mean the socialist leaders — in fact
assumed the leadership of the strike movement.
Immediately a wave of glib gentlemen appeared in the region; they put
themselves entirely at the disposition of the struggle, organized
subscriptions, arranged conferences and appealed on all sides for funds.
The miners surrendered all initiative into their hands, and what
happened, everyone knows.
The strike went on and on, and the miners established the most intimate
acquaintance with hunger, which became their habitual companion; they
used up the tiny reserve fund of their syndicate and of the other
organizations which came to their help, and then, at the end of two
months, they returned crestfallen to their pit, more wretched than ever
before. It would have been so simple in the beginning to have attacked
the Company in its only sensitive spot, the financial one; to have burnt
the stocks of coal, to have broken the mining machines, to have
demolished the drainage pumps.
Then, certainly, the Company would have very soon capitulated. But the
great pontiffs of socialism would not allow such procedures because they
are anarchist procedures. At such games one runs the risk of prison and
— who knows? — perhaps one of those bullets that performed so
miraculously at Fourmies? That is not the way to win seats on municipal
councils or in legislatures. In brief, having been momentarily troubled,
order reigned once again at the Carmaux.
More powerful than ever, the Company continued its exploitation, and the
gentlemen shareholders congratulated themselves on the happy outcome of
the strike. Their dividends would be even more pleasant to gather in.
It was then that I decided to intrude among that concert of happy tones
a voice the bourgeois had already heard but which they thought had died
with Ravachol: the voice of dynamite.
I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that henceforward their pleasures would
not be untouched, that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that
their golden calf would rock violently on its pedestal until the final
shock that would cast it down among filth and blood.
At the same time I wanted to make the miners understand that there is
only one category of men, the anarchists, who sincerely resent their
sufferings and are willing to avenge them. Such men do not sit in
parliament like Monsieur Guesde and his associates, but they march to
the guillotine.
So I prepared a bomb. At one stage the accusation that had been thrown
at Ravachol came to my memory. What about the innocent victims? I soon
resolved that question. The building where the Carmaux Company had its
offices was inhabited only by the bourgeois; hence there would be no
innocent victims. The whole of the bourgeoisie lives by the exploitation
of the unfortunate, and should expiate its crimes together. So it was
with absolute confidence in the legitimacy of my deed that I left my
bomb before the door to the Company’s offices.
I have already explained my hope, in case my device was discovered
before it exploded, that it would go off in the police station, where
those it harmed would still be my enemies. Such were the motives that
led me to commit the first attempt of which I have been accused.
Let us go on to the second incident, of the Cafe Terminus. I had
returned to Paris at the time of the Vaillant affair, and I witnessed
the frightful repression that followed the explosion at the
Palais-Bourbon. I saw the draconian measures which the government
decided to take against the anarchists. Everywhere there were spies, and
searches, and arrests. A crowd of individuals were indiscriminately
rounded up, torn from their families, and thrown into prison. Nobody was
concerned about what happened to the wives and children of these
comrades while they remained in jail.
The anarchist was no longer regarded as a man, but as a wild beast to be
hunted everywhere while the bourgeois Press, which is the vile slave of
authority, loudly demands his extermination.
At the same time, libertarian papers and pamphlets were seized and the
right of meeting was abrogated. Worse than that: when it seemed
desirable to get one comrade completely out of the way, an informer came
and left in his room a packet which he said contained tannin; the next
day a search was made, on a warrant dated the previous day, a box of
suspicious powders was found, the comrade was taken to court and
sentenced to three years in gaol. If you wish to know the truth of that,
ask the wretched spy who found his way into the home of comrade
Merigeaud!
But all such procedures were good because they struck at an enemy who
had spread fear, and those who had trembled wanted to display their
courage. As the crown of that crusade against the heretics, we heard M.
Reynal, Minister of the Interior, declare in the Chamber of Deputies
that the measures taken by the government had thrown terror into the
camp of the anarchists. But that was not yet enough. A man who had
killed nobody was condemned to death. It was necessary to appear brave
right to the end, and one fine morning he was guillotined.
But, gentlemen of the bourgeoisie, you have reckoned a little too much
without your host. You arrested hundreds of men and women, you violated
scores of homes, but still outside the prison walls there were men
unknown to you who watched from the shadows as you hunted the
anarchists, and waited only for the moment that would be favourable for
them in their turn to hunt the hunters.
Reynal’s words were a challenge thrown before the anarchists. The
gauntlet was taken up. The bomb in the Cafe Terminus is the answer to
all your violations of freedom, to your arrests, to your searches, to
your laws against the Press, to your mass deportations, to your
guillotining. But why, you ask, attack those peaceful cafe guests, who
sat listening to music and who, no doubt, were neither judges nor
deputies nor bureaucrats? Why? It is very simple. The bourgeoisie did
not distinguish among the anarchists. Vaillant, a man on his own, threw
a bomb; nine-tenths of the comrades did not even know him. But that
meant nothing; the persecution was a mass one, and anyone with the
slightest anarchist links was hunted down. And since you hold a whole
party responsible for the actions of a single man, and strike
indiscriminately, we also strike indiscriminately.
Perhaps we should attack only the deputies who make laws against us, the
judges who apply those laws, the police who arrest us? I do not agree.
These men are only instruments. They do not act in their own name. Their
functions were instituted by the bourgeoisie for its own defence. They
are no more guilty than the rest of you. Those good bourgeois who hold
no office but who reap their dividends and live idly on the profits of
the workers’ toil, they also must take their share in the reprisals. And
not only they, but all those who are satisfied with the existing order,
who applaud the acts of government and so become its accomplices, those
clerks earning three or five hundred francs a month who hate the people
even more violently than the rich, that stupid and pretentious mass of
folk who always choose the strongest side — in other words, the daily
clientele of Terminus and the other great cafes!
That is why I struck at random and did not choose my victims! The
bourgeoisie must be brought to understand that those who have suffered
are tired at last of their sufferings; they are showing their teeth and
they will strike all the more brutally if you are brutal with them. They
have no respect for human life, because the bourgeoisie themselves have
shown they have no care for it. It is not for the assassins who were
responsible for the bloody week and for Fourmies to regard others as
assassins.
We will not spare the women and children of the bourgeois, for the women
and children of those we love have not been spared. Must we not count
among the innocent victims those children who die slowly of anaemia in
the slums because bread is scarce in their houses; those women who grow
pale in your workshops, working to earn forty sous a day and fortunate
when poverty does not force them into prostitution; those old men whom
you have made production machines all their lives and whom you cast on
to the waste heap or into the workhouse when their strength has worn
away?
At least have the courage of your crimes, gentlemen of the bourgeoisie,
and grant that our reprisals are completely legitimate.
Of course, I am under no illusions. I know my deeds will not yet be
understood by the masses who are unprepared for them. Even among the
workers, for whom I have fought, there will be many, misled by your
newspapers, who will regard me as their enemy. But that does not matter.
I am not concerned with anyone’s judgement. Nor am I ignorant of the
fact that there are individuals claiming to be anarchists who hasten to
disclaim any solidarity with the propagandists of the deed. They seek to
establish a subtle distinction between the theoreticians and the
terrorists. Too cowardly to risk their own lives, they deny those who
act. But the influence they pretend to wield over the revolutionary
movement is nil. Today the field is open to action, without weakness or
retreat.
Alexander Herzen, the Russian revolutionary, once said: ‘Of two things
one must be chosen: to condemn and march forward, or to pardon and turn
back half way.’ We intend neither to pardon nor to turn back, and we
shall always march forward until the revolution, which is the goal of
our efforts, finally arrives to crown our work with the creation of a
free world.
In that pitiless war which we have declared on the bourgeoisie, we ask
for no pity. We give death, and we know how to endure it. So it is with
indifference that I await your verdict. I know that my head is not the
last you will cut off; yet others will fall, for the starving are
beginning to know the way to your great cafes and restaurants, to the
Terminus and Foyot. You will add other names to the bloody list of our
dead.
You have hanged in Chicago, decapitated in Germany, garroted in Jerez,
shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Montbrison and Paris, but what you
will never destroy is anarchy. Its roots are too deep. It is born in the
heart of a society that is rotting and falling apart. It is a violent
reaction against the established order. It represents all the
egalitarian and libertarian aspirations that strike out against
authority. It is everywhere, which makes it impossible to contain. It
will end by killing you.
Emile Henry
April 1894