Emile Henry (anarchistic)

Family

His/her father, Fortunate Henry, had fought in the rows of the communards. Condemned to died by Contumacious, it had succeeded in escaping the repression which followed the defeat while taking refuge in Spain where were born its two sons. It had returned to France only in 1882 after the armistice. Later he collaborated in the newspaper In-outside .

Acts

The November 8th 1892, a bomb intended to make jump the offices of the company of the mines of Carmaux is brought by the caretaker of the building for the police station of the street of the good children. It explodes there killing five person; a sixth will be victim of an heart attack. Emile Henry escaped, continued by a coffee boy and policeman, to which a railwayman united on which it drew, but by missing it. A little further, it seriously wounded an agent, before being made take.

The February 12th 1894, at 9 o'clock in the evening, a fair boy penetrated in the Terminus coffee, at the Saint-Lazare station. Having sat down with a free pedestal table, Henry suddenly drew from a pocket of his cardigan a small tinplate pot faggot of explosives and launched it in the air. It ran up against a gloss, burst and pulverized all the ices like some marble tables. It was a general stampede. There was a score of wounded of which one was to succumb to its wounds.

Lawsuit

The April 27th 1894, Emile Henry compared before the Court of Assizes of the Seine. He is condemned to death. While leaving he exclaims: " Comrades, courage! Live the anarchie" .

With the audience of the Court of Assizes, it had shingling counterparts: The president of the Court of Assizes. - " You tightened this hand (...) which we see today covered with sang." Emile Henry. - " My hands are covered with blood, like your dress rouge."

With the jury, it lute a declaration of which here extracts:

(...) I am anarchistic recently. It is hardly but about the middle of year 1891 that I launched out in the revolutionary movement. Previously, I had lived in the mediums entirely imbus of current morals. I had been accustomed to respect and to even like the principles of Fatherland, Family, Authority and Property.

But the teachers of the present generation too frequently forget a thing, it are that the life, with its fights and its vexations, its injustices and its iniquities, undertake well, the indiscreet one, of dessiller the eyes of the ignoramuses and to open them with reality. It is what arrived to me, as it arrives at all. It had been said to me that this life easy and was largely opened with intelligent and the energetic ones, and the experiment showed me that only the cynical ones and crawling can be made good place with the banquet.

One had said to me that the social institutions were based on justice and the equality, and I noted around me only lies and cheatings. Each day removed me an illusion. Everywhere where I went, I was pilot same pains at the ones, of the same pleasures at the others. I was not long in including/understanding only the great words that one had learned how to me to venerate: Honor, Devotion, Duty, were only one mask veiling most ashamed turpitudes.

the usinier who built a colossal fortune on the work of his workmen, who, them, missed of all, was an honest Mister. The deputy, the minister whose hands were always opened with the bribes, were devoted to the public property. The officer who experienced model new rifle on some seven year old children had made his duty well, and, in full Parliament, the president of the Council addressed his congratulations to him. All that I live revolted, and my spirit stuck to the criticism of the social organization. This criticism was too often made so that I start again it. It will be enough for me to say that I soothsayers the enemy of a company which I considered criminal.

One moment attracted by socialism, I was not long in moving away me from this party. I had too much love of freedom, too much respect of the individual initiative, too much loathing to incorporation, to take a number in the matriculée army of the fourth State. Moreover, I live that at the bottom socialism does not change anything with the current order. It maintains the principle authoritative, and this principle, in spite of what can about it say of alleged free thinkers, is not that an old remainder of the faith in a higher power.

(...) In this war without pity that we declared with the middle-class, we do not ask for any pity. We give death and we must undergo it. This is why I await your verdict with indifference. I know that my head will not be the last which you will cut (...) You will add of other names to the bloody list of our deaths.

Hung in Chicago, decapitated in Germany, garrottés in Jerez, shot with Barcelona, guillotines in Montbrison and Paris, our deaths are numerous; but you could not destroy Anarchy. Its roots are deep: it was born within a rotted company which subsides; it is a violent reaction against the established order; it represents the aspirations of equality and freedom which come to beat in breach current authoritarianism. It is everywhere. It is what makes it untameable, and it will finish by you overcoming and you tuer."

Emile Henry was guillotine the May 21st 1894 at the 21 years age. Witnessed its execution Maurice Barrès and Georges Clémenceau which, although both not very suspect of sympathy to anarchism, was shown moved by the fate of the young man. Crowd greeted the van which transported the body torture victim of Emile Henry as reported it same the Bars in the edition of the newspaper the Morning of the May 22nd 1894.

An anarchistic section located at the Quebec bears this name.

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