Free The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror by John Merriman Page B

Parisian bakery in 1883.) After his release three years later, he joined an anarchist group, the Revolutionary Sentinel, in Montmartre. In 1889, he began to publish
Père Peinard.
    Defiantly vulgar and profane, Pouget appealed to the emotions of ordinary people, using familiar slang—some of which was virtually unintelligible to outsiders—to considerable advantage. That the speech of ordinary workers differed so markedly from that of the elite reinforced the distance, both cultural and geographic, that separated rich and poor in the City of Light. Some popular argot was borrowed from the language of criminals at a time when court convictions seemed to be reaching new heights.
Père Peinard
helped convince many upper-class Parisians that the "dangerous classes" were perched on the edge of the capital, ready to strike. At the same time, Pouget's newspaper reinforced popular solidarity and the sense of being separate from and opposed to the state and its urban elite. At a cost of
cinq ronds
("five round ones," or coins, still common parlance),
Père Peinard
grew to eight pages. About eight thousand copies, and sometimes even more, were printed each week in 1892. Police estimated that each copy reached an average of five people.
    If Pouget himself was soft-spoken, his pen was not. Considering "militarism ... a school for crime,"
Père Peinard
noted that despite the nominal goal of "civilizing" the Vietnamese, French troops had committed five times more atrocities on that southeast Asian land than had their Prussian counterparts during the war of 1870–71. Factories were almost always referred to as prisons—and the Palais de Justice became the "Palais d'Injustice," the clergy became "clerical-pigs," the rich "
les richards
" (a term still in use), supporters of the Republic "
la républicanaille,
" and so on. These coinages were interspersed with salty phrases such as "goddammit," "be damned," or "
kif-kif"—
meaning "it makes no difference" or "it is all the same." The latter was the caption for an illustration showing a poor peasant in 1789 and a late-nineteenth-century worker standing in front of a statue that depicted the republic, suggesting that this form of government had done absolutely nothing for the poor of either era.
    A constant theme of
Père Peinard
was that ordinary people needed to act for themselves. The Communards had missed an opportunity to "burn down all the old residences where the bandits live who govern us, as well as the edifices of mindlessness: churches, prisons, ministries—the whole mess ... It's easy, a thousand bombs! ... We await
la Belle,
" the beautiful days that would surely follow revolution and the destruction of the state. During a miners' strike in Decazeville,
Père Peinard
proclaimed, "First of all, goddammit, it is never a bad thing to attack the good-for-nothings when one gets the opportunity, as did the good chaps of Decazeville with Watrin" (a foreman in the mines of that town who was killed and castrated). After a worker murdered a boss who had been giving him a hard time, Pouget commented, in a piece titled "One Less," that this murder demonstrated what goodwill could accomplish. It all came down to this: "It will be by the force of a violent Revolution that we will expropriate the rich and we will throw the old society onto the trash heap ... The land to peasants! The factory to workers!! Lodging, clothing, and food for all!" Pouget's newspaper suffered seven judicial condemnations from April 1890 to November 1892.
    The third major anarchist publication was
L'Endehors,
a cerebral, literary, and artistic weekly newspaper. It was the inspiration of "Zo d'Axa," born Alphonse Gallaud in Paris in 1864, the son of a railroad official of the Orléans Railroad Company. Looking like "a gentleman buccaneer," he turned to anarchism after deserting the army in Algeria. He fled to Jerusalem, was extradited to France, and took refuge in Belgium. Zo d'Axa then became a journalist. The