Anarchists!

THE DYNAMITE CLUB: How A Bombing In Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited The Age Of Modern Terror
by John Merriman Boston, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: 2009 363.325 MER

The heyday of anarchism ended with the beginning of World War I. During the years 1880-1914, attacks in sixteen countries, including the attempted bombing of the Paris Bourse (stock exchange), Greenwich Observatory (in protest against the enforced regularization of time schedules), and the assassinations of the president of France, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and, in 1901, the execution of President William McKinley in Buffalo horrified the world.
The “dynamite club” as fearful bourgeois Parisians dubbed it was, in the event, not a well-organized group, but merely a small number of individuals who accepted the same rationalizations for violence to ameliorate the desperate living conditions of the poor in rapidly industrializing societies. More often working in isolation from one another than in any kind of disciplined formation, they terrorized millions.
Anarchists became locked in a push-me pull-you battle with the authorities. Every time that governments responded with massive force, that created new martyrs and inspired fresh recruits. Merriman details the life and trial of one Emile Henry, a talented and conscientious young man, stymied at every turn in his life, who turns to dynamite.
Though remembered today as the designer who gave shape to modern Paris with its grand boulevards, Baron Georges Haussmann’s commission from Emperor Napoleon III involved not only fostering the free flow of commerce, but isolating poor neighborhoods, likely to be the sites of social unrest in the growing city.

The Dynamite Club makes fascinating reading, wearing its meticulous research gently, and it is to Merriman's credit that he allows the reader to draw parallels with current events if they choose to. As for the Anarchist movement, it lost steam when competing events and social forces drew its energies elsewhere. In the event, the actions of the authorities were just as violent and irrational, and not always very useful, which brings us to...

THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY by G. K. Chesterton

New York, Dodd-Mead: 1958 (1908) FIC CHE

Written in 1908, The Man Who Was Thursday is Chesterton's best novel. Orson Wells admired '"its shamelessly beautiful prose." It would be a mistake to overlook it because its "subject"seems dated. Gabriel Syme is rather poetic sort of detective. Nevertheless, his mission is to infiltrate the European Dynamiters, a shadowy Anarchist group that is surely up to no good. His counterpart is Lucien Gregory, a poetic bomber.

The novel takes its name from the aliases of the anarchists: each man is known only by a day of the week and, when Syme gets himself elected to the group, he becomes "Thursday." In a nice bit of irony, Syme has joined the High Council of Anarchists, an organization of the supremely unorganized. Satirizing the frenzy of fear set off in London by refugee communities (then, from continental Europe) was a daring thing to do a century ago and may be again today, giving fresh impetus to the story. One feature that dates the novel in a charming way is the naming of the individual chapters. Chesterton makes you want to keep reading; who could resist "In Which the Crooks Chase the Police"?

The novel has been called a book of Revelation, as one after another, disguises fall, astonishingly.

Image: La Bande a Bonnot, from the collection of the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilization, Paris