He had paid for his drinks as they were brought to him. In a café, such a detail scarcely attracts notice: a patron settles his bill, a waiter clears the glass, the orchestra plays on. On 12 February 1894, at the Terminus, near the Gare Saint-Lazare, Émile Henry sat down among people who knew nothing of him. He surveyed the room. Later, before his judges, he would explain that he had waited for it to fill. Patience, here, served neither an assignation nor the pleasure of the music; its sole purpose was to swell the number of those his act would strike.
The young man was twenty-one years old. Born in Spain into a family marked by exile following the Commune, he had received a scientific education and held commercial clerkships. His trajectory does not conform to the convenient portrait of an outsider entirely estranged from the society he attacked. He knew its scholastic promises, its offices, its modest stipends, and its hierarchies. In the declaration he was to read at his trial, he would recount his rupture with the values he had been taught. This political autobiography was itself a careful construction: he selected the disillusionments that lent coherence to his violence, presenting them as the inevitable stages of a reasoned progression.
Before the Terminus, there had been the Rue des Bons-Enfants. In November 1892, an explosive device intended for the offices of the Carmaux Mining Company had been conveyed to the local police station, where it detonated, claiming several lives. Henry would claim responsibility for this outrage during the judicial inquiry opened after his arrest in 1894. He linked it to the miners’ strike and his hatred of the company. Yet his indictment did not halt at the directors of the firm: he deemed enemies all those whose office or social standing placed them in the camp he had resolved to fight.
This broadening of the target lies at the very heart of the affair. It explains how a second bomb could be hurled into a café. Henry invoked the repression directed against anarchists, the house searches, the arrests, the execution of Auguste Vaillant following the bombing at the Chamber of Deputies. In his eyes, society struck a collective group without distinguishing between individuals; he therefore arrogated to himself the right to strike in turn without weighing individual guilt. The reasoning converted a denounced injustice into a license to kill. The patrons of the Terminus had not been interrogated concerning their deeds, their convictions, or their lives: their mere presence in the hall was sufficient to condemn them.
At the appointed moment, Henry rose and made for the exit. The bomb was flung toward the orchestra. It struck a chandelier before crashing down and detonating. The explosion, the flying shards, and the wounds transformed the café into a station of emergency relief. One man would succumb to his injuries, and scores were wounded; contemporary reports and subsequent reckonings do not all offer the same figures. Reality cannot be reduced to this tally. People who had come to pass an agreeable evening had now to be carried away, bandaged, brought home, or placed under the care of physicians, having understood nothing, at first, of the purpose that had struck them down.
Henry attempted to flee. His design assumed he could reach the railway station and vanish among the travelers. He was pursued by a waiter from the café and several patrons who had witnessed his gesture. Other men joined the chase. The indictment names in particular Étienne, a railway clerk with the Compagnie de l’Ouest; Maurice, a barber; and Police Constable Poisson. Several revolver shots were discharged by the fugitive. A pursuit that might have ended with a simple arrest a few streets away now imperiled those striving to prevent his escape. Several pursuers were struck.
Poisson pressed on despite his wounds and threw himself upon the fugitive. The two men fell to the pavement; other officers arrived and overpowered Henry. He had, moreover, to be shielded from the fury of the crowd. This swift sequence of actions brought back into the case concrete persons whom his political manifesto would later seek to dissolve into abstract categories: a waiter, a clerk, a barber, a policeman. They had not waited to be designated as representatives of a social order before acting. They had seen a man hurl a bomb, then take to his heels, and they had sought to stop him.
The prisoner initially gave a false name. The search for his true identity led to his lodgings in the Rue des Envierges. The inquiry revealed that persons had entered the premises following the attack and that certain items had been removed. The investigation thus addressed a question distinct from that of the perpetrator himself, now in custody: who had known, assisted, or spirited away the traces? The prosecution mentioned its suspicions, yet conceded that the magistrate had failed to establish all the acts of complicity it sought to uncover. The author of the outrage was known; the interventions that had taken place in his rooms left behind questions the investigation was unable to answer.
Before the Assize Court in April, Henry made no attempt to construct a defense of innocence. He acknowledged his acts and sought to impose his own meaning upon them. The presiding judge questioned him regarding his choice of the café, his lingering wait, his flight. The recorded answers reveal a fierce determination to vindicate that which, for the prosecution, constituted the very gravity of the crime. Then came the declaration: a text in which hatred of bourgeois society, denunciation of poverty, and the justification of reprisals were woven together with an assurance that deeply impressed his contemporaries. Yet the eloquence of this edifice restored no justice to those he had chosen as targets.
Henry claimed to speak in the name of collective suffering. He admitted, nevertheless, that many workingmen would fail to comprehend his deed, and that fellow anarchists disavowed him. This admission fractured his posture as a natural spokesman: the men and women whose misery he invoked had never entrusted him with their voices, nor had they authorized his bombs. The trial thus bore witness both to an accused who claimed his crimes and to a militant seeking to usurp their historical significance. The court condemned him to death.
On 21 May 1894, Henry was guillotined near the prison of La Grande Roquette. Georges Clemenceau witnessed the execution and penned an account hostile to capital punishment. One had no need to condone the outrage to be gripped by horror at death administered in the chill of dawn. Clemenceau’s stance renders this history more difficult, and more deeply human, than a simple divide between those who would mourn the condemned and those who would remember the victims. It was possible to abhor Henry’s crime while refusing that justice should reply with the same irrevocable destruction of a human life.
At the Terminus, tables had been arranged to welcome patrons. Henry had seen only a mass. The entire affair resides in part within this transition: individual lives become a collective entity that one permits oneself to strike. The names recorded during the chase, the wounded, the dead, the witnesses restore living persons to that hall. They prevent the prisoner’s declaration from remaining the only voice heard after the music was silenced.