This was a difficult book for me to read, as the questions it ultimately raises are not easily answered. The time is the late 19^th Century, the place, primarily, is Paris, and the book’s primary focus is a young man named Emile Henry. The overriding reality (a reality seen in countless places) that determined much of Henry’s feelings, thoughts and actions was the sometimes severe disparity in living standards among people living on different levels of society. Product of a family upbringing likely to foster socialist sympathies, Henry would find inspiration among local and foreign radicals and anarchists, some of them quite violent.

The development of electric lighting and the invention of dynamite were just two of the many advances in science in the late 19^th Century, and they figure largely in Henry’s story. The recently dismantled and reconstructed Paris was transformed from an ill-lit city of narrow lanes into a spacious, well-lit and elegant city, The City of Light. This transformation, however, would throw into further relief the chasm between the haves and the have-nots, as the increased visibility of the lives of the more prosperous segments of society can be seen to have made the more marginalized members of society feel that much more so. This gulf between the haves and have-nots has always been with us, but, with the invention of dynamite, the more violent of the anarchists had made targets of politicians, rich industrialists and the police, the more obvious emblems of the established order, to make plain their position.

What Emile Henry did one day in 1894 was to indiscriminately throw dynamite into the middle of a crowded café, and this act was seen as taking things to an unusually appalling level. But is that really so? How is the life of a restaurant patron more valuable, or more innocent, than the life of a politician, industrialist or policeman? On the other hand, how is the life of, say, an industrialist more valuable, or more innocent, than the life of, say, one of his employees? Is a life worth anything or not? Is violence the answer to anything? And what answer is to be made to violence? Core questions, I think, with no simple answers.

Mike C.

The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (Hardcover)

By John Merriman

$26.00

ISBN-13: 9780618555987
Availability: Usually Ships in 1-5 days
Published: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2/2009

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