From Boston.com - By Chuck Leddy</p>THE DYNAMITE CLUB: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror By John Merriman
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 259 pp., illustrated, $26

Terrorist bombings of nightclubs, restaurants, and hotels are, unfortunately, the stuff of today's headline news. But the bombing of Paris's Café Terminus in 1894 was a new, stunning phenomenon made possible by a violent philosophy and the development of dynamite. Yale historian John Merriman does many things in "The Dynamite Club," his book about the bombing, and does them quite well, from explaining the intellectual and social underpinnings of anarchism to detailing the invention of dynamite to taking us inside the murky underworld of extremist Émile Henry, who built and then set off the 1894 bomb.


"This book is motivated by a very simple question: Why did Émile Henry do what he did?" In seeking an answer, Merriman meticulously details the massive socioeconomic inequalities of 19th-century Paris, and the rest of Europe, which created alienation and resentment, especially among impoverished intellectuals such as Henry. Merriman shows us the dual worlds of Paris, the conspicuous consumption of the relatively few haves and the desperation, sickness, and want of the majority have-nots. Henry's radical father had been forced to flee France after the 1871 Paris Commune, and young Henry adopted an extreme anarchist philosophy that advocated violence to destroy the social and political order.read more



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