The Mystics Of Anarchy - Part 4

But if the Anarchists are poets and proud poets too, above all they are mystics, religious people. That is the dominant trait of their character.

So it is that Catholic and conservative journals are strangely blinded by their political passions when they accuse the Republic and the secular schools of Anarchy’s crimes. Of course, it’s not a question  -  we do not wish to copy our opponents  -- of making religion responsible for the crimes of Cyvoct and the others, but it should be said that Cyvoct, Ravachol and Vaillant have been brought up in Catholic Schools. Six months before the bomb was placed at the Theatre Bellecour, Cyvoct was a regular participant of a Catholic circle in the town of Lyon. It is this education in mysticism that has given a number of them this spiritual bent which society sadly had cause to regret in crying for the victims of their fanaticism. It is from this religious and mystical teaching that they have got hold of the idea of making the masses happy by killing a certain number of them. It is the old and ancient tendency of the Inquisitors of the Middle Ages that these primitives, these Anarchists are applying to the 19^th century. Cyvoct, Vaillant, Emile Henry all had something of Saint Dominic and Torquemada.

If Emile Henry is not the direct product of religious education, he was nonetheless soaked in supernatural, superstitious and mystic ideas. Indeed, his mother, speaking to Parisian newspaper reporters, spoke in these terms of her son’s state of mind.

“For two or three years,” she said, “he had given himself over to superstitious practices which would frighten his aunt and me. He was on a high. Then sometimes he would plunge into deep meditation which for all my complaining I could not get him to snap out of. One evening when his aunt was making up his bed in his room for him, he took out of his pocket a picture of Saint Louis which he proceeded to nail to the wall.

‘What are you doing with that?’ his aunt asked him.

‘Saint Louis is my guide,’ Henry replied, ‘When I have made up my mind to do something, when I want to calm down my sorrow, I invoke the memory of the saintly king and I act according to his commands.’”

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From this time onwards Emile Henry’s character changed. Every evening he would spend in Paris at public meetings and amongst people given over to spiritualism.

Certainly it is not the spirit of the Saint-King who has inspired his devotee to throw a bomb at the Hotel Terminus, but rather that mysticism, that sort of madness of the soul, which has strengthened Henry’s criminality. This bourgeois déclassé, this proud failure, who neither repents nor asks for mercy, hopes that his punishment will render ‘an immense service’ to the cause, this ‘proud cynic’ as he was called by the magistrate in charge of the process. At the assizes, indeed everywhere, Emile Henry wanted to give himself the air of a martyr whose death will revolutionize the world. Henry is a mystic in his dreams, in his aspirations, in the way that he views death.