This Date in Resistance History: The Trial of Emile Henry

On this day in 1894, Emile Henry was brought to court on charges of murder and insurrection. Henry, born in 1872 in Spain, was the son of a Communard who had been exiled after the collapse of the Paris Commune.

As an adult, Henry traveled to France and studied the history of social justice and the oppression of workers. He had arrived at a point where class warfare was reaching a fever pitch. The gap between the rich and the poor was widening, just as it is today. The wealthy flocked to the grand cafés to be seen and to mingle; to the wedding-cake Parisian opera house for entertainment; and to restaurants for meals of eight courses. Meanwhile, the poor were suffering and invisible. They had no representation in parliament; they were underpaid or living in poverty; and many died young from diseases which spread in the Parisian slums. Child labor was widespread (and is still, amazingly, a serious problem in France today).

As he witnessed this social injustice, Emile Henry’s views became increasingly radical. On hearing of a strike of mine workers in Carmaux, he traveled there to stand in solidarity with the miners. What he found there appalled him.

The mining company was notorious for union-busting, and on August 15 of 1892, the workers took over the offices of the mine and declared themselves on strike. Supposed union sympathizers had arrived on the scene, offering to set up a strike fund and appeal for contributions. The miners allowed these men to collect funds for their ongoing fight against the owners of the mine. But the workers saw only a fraction of the money collected in their names, while the organizers advised the miners to resist peacefully.

Meanwhile, Henry saw clearly that the miners had lost the initiative to attack the financial underpinnings of the mining operation. They could have destroyed already-mined coal, sabotaged machines, and created other damage that would have given them the leverage to negotiate. Instead, the miners held out passively for two months while the company simply sold its reserves of coal. Finally broken, their families starving, the workers returned to their jobs.

The mining company, owned by the wealthy capitalist Baron Reille, continued its punitive work practices, while having suffered no financial loss from the thwarted attempt of the miners to improve their condition.

Enraged, Henry, whose father had also been a miner, decided to bomb the mining company’s offices. The bomb was discovered before it detonated, and inept police officers brought the bomb back to the police station without defusing it first. It exploded, killing several officers.

Henry returned to Paris directly after his bombing attempt, and discovered that a fellow anarchist had bombed the Palais-Bourbon (the French parliament of the time). In the wake of this action, students and other radicals were being indiscriminately rounded up for arrest, often without charges. “Nobody was concerned about what happened to the wives and children of these comrades while they remained in jail,” Henry wrote. Meanwhile, he observed the wealthy enjoying their luxurious “café society” lifestyle, supported by their oppression of workers and the suppression of unions in France.

The Café Terminus was, at the time, the leading café of the elite. Located on the ground floor of a luxurious hotel, the café featured gilded chairs, marble-topped tables, mirrored and gilded walls, and its own orchestra. A meal there cost the equivalent of several days’ wages for a worker. It was located near the Paris Opera House, and so was busy during the day and also before and after opera performances.

Henry packed a metal lunchbox, the type that the miners had carried into the mine shafts, with dynamite and a tube of zinc filled with buckshot. He entered the café, drank two beers, and then threw the activated bomb toward the orchestra stage. It flew up in the air, exploding on contact with one of the café’s huge crystal chandeliers. The force of the explosion shattered the marble tables, punched a crater into the floor, and shattered the mirrored walls.

Later, Henry never attempted to defend himself. He did not declare himself to be innocent. He accepted responsibility for the bombing, which killed one patron of the café and injured twenty. In an explanation of his actions, he wrote in part:

But why, you ask, attack those peaceful café 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….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.

Both at his trial and in his written statement, Emile Henry maintained that nobody who enjoyed a luxurious life at the expense of inadequate pay, inhuman working hours, and unsafe working conditions was “innocent.” He stated:

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.

Emile Henry was executed by guillotine on May 24, 1894. He was 21 years old. In his short life, Henry chose the most extreme of political actions, with which many might disagree. Even so, it is striking to look at the social justice/economic situation to which he responded and see so many parallels to worker struggles today.