Beau geste! (On the Readability of Terrorism)

Yale French Studies

Volumn 101, Issue , 2002, Pages 79-99

  Lay, Howard G ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 67249084847     PISSN: 00440078     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (42)

1. Cited in Paul de Man, Aesthetic Ideology, ed. Andrzej Warminski (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1.
2. Anon. , La Ravachole, published in Almanach du père Peinard pour 1894 - an 102 (Paris: Le père Peinard, 1893), 43.
3. For a description of the explosion and the resulting damage to both the restaurant Foyot and surrounding buildings, see "Nouvel attentat. L'explosion du restaurant Foyot," Le matin, 5 April 1894.
4. See also "Une bombe. Un attentat anarchiste au restaurant Foyot," L'éclair, 6 April 1894.
5. "La bombe Foyot," Le matin, 6 April 1894. Bertillon was called upon to make crime-scene photographs at the sites of each of the terrorist bombings in the early nineties. The images, some of them quite gruesome, are in the collection of the Archives de la préfecture de police, Paris.
6. This is not to suggest that "speaking" and "acting" are somehow antithetical (since speech itself is an act), nor that terrorism manages to signify "extra-linguistically. " On relations between cognitive and performative orders of language, see Paul de Man, "Kant and Schiller," in Aesthetic Ideology, 132-34.
7. On the convergence of "saying" and "doing," see J. L. Austin, "Performative Utterances," in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 220-39.
8. On the so-called "ère des attentats" in Paris (1892-94)
9. see Jean Maitron, Le mouvement anarchiste en France, 2 vols. (Paris: François Maspero, 1983), vol. 1, 206-50.
10. See also, Henri Varennes, De Ravachol à Caserio (Paris: Gamier frères, 1895).
11. As this issue of Yale French Studies goes to press, an important new book on fin-de-siècle anarchist terrorism has appeared in France; see Uri Eisenzweig, Fictions de l'anarchisme (Paris: Christian Bourgois éditeur, 2001).
12. The day after the Foyot attentat, a police informant reported considerable agitation among habitués of the "cafés du boulevard," as well as frustration with the Republic's inability (despite additional taxes levied to aid police investigations) to effectuate "la décourverte et l'éxtermination des anarchistes" [the apprehension and extermination of the anarchists]. See Archives de la préfecture de police (hereafter APP), B A/142 (125), unsigned report of a secret agent. For a brief summary of newspaper commentary, see "Les journaux de ce matin," Le matin, 5 April 1894.
13. "Nouvel attentat. L'explosion du restaurant Foyot," op. cit.
14. For depositions of "eye witnesses," see APP, B A/142 (97-115).
15. On Fénéon's difficulties with the police, see "Les anarchistes. Arrestation de M. Félix Fénon [sic]; interview de Mme Fénon [sic]; l'anarchiste Meunier," Le jour, 28 April 1894
16. and "L'arrestation de M. Félix Fénéon," Le temps, 28 April 1894. The police also discovered cartes de visite from Camille Pissarro and Octave Mirbeau, both of whom were well-known anarchist partisans.
17. Le journal, 6 February 1894, 1. According to a police informant, socialist activists from the 18e arrondissement suspected that Tailhade, "un homme ambitieux qui ne cherche qu'à faire parler de lui" [an ambitious man who wants only to attract attention], was himself the author of the Foyot explosion.
18. See APP, B A/142 (127), 6 April 1894, report signed "Argus. "
19. Anon. [Paul Brousse], Bulletin de la fédération jurassienne, 5 August 1877.
20. Cited in Maitron, Le mouvement anarchiste, vol. 1, 77.
21. See Jehan Le Vagre [Jean Grave], Organisation de la propagande révolutionnaire (Paris: Publications du groupe des 5e et 13e arrondissements, 1883), 10.
22. "Déclaration d'Emile Henry," L'écho de Paris, 30 April 1894.
23. For Octave Mirbeau (who had voiced his support of Ravachol in 1892), Henry's assault on the café Terminus was incomprehensible (Le journal, 19 February 1893): "Un ennemi mortel de l'anarchie n'eût pas mieux agi que ce Emile Henry, lorsqu'il lança son inexplicable bombe, au milieu de tranquilles et anonymes personnes, venus dans un café, pour y boire un bock, avant de s'aller coucher . . . [A mortal enemy of anarchism could not have acted more effectively than did this Emile Henry, when he threw his inexplicable bomb amid a crowd of tranquil and anonymous people gathered in a café to drink a beer before going home to bed . . . ].
24. Paul Adam, "Éloge de Ravachol," Entretiens politiques et littéraires 5/28 (July 1892), 28.
25. Fénéon, who reviewed the exhibition for L'endehors, praised Maurin's Ravachol for its "sentiment apothéotique [sic] et populaire" [apotheosizing and popular sentiment]. See Anon. [Félix Fénéon], "Peintures: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec et Charles Maurin, chez Boussod et Valadon, 19, boulevard Montmartre," L'endehors, 12 February 1893.
26. The image was published in Almanach du père Peinard pour 1894 - An 102, 45.
27. Pouget made clever use of the insolently off-color revolutionary argot first deployed a century earlier in the pages of Jacques Hébert's notorious Le père Duchêne (1790-93).
28. The police estimated in 1891 that each issue of Pouget's anarchist weekly, Le père Peinard (1889-1900), reached as many as one hundred thousand working-class readers.
29. See APP, B A/77 (22), "Les anarchistes. Bulletin de quinzaine," 5 November 1891, report signed "4. "
30. The collected articles appear in Jean-Baptiste Faure, Au pied de l'échafaud. Souvenirs de la Roquette (Paris: M. Dreyfous, 1893).
31. For related reflections on an "outside" to language, see Gilles Deleuze, "He Stuttered," in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 107-14.
32. See "Les journaux de ce matin," op. cit.
33. "L'arrestation de l'auteur de l'attentat du restaurant Foyot," L'intransigeant, 15 April 1894.
34. André Picard, "M. Laurent Tailhade et l'anarchie. Interview de M. Laurent Tailhade," Le gaulois, 6 April 1984.
35. Stéphane Mallarmé, "La musique et les lettres: lecture d'Oxford et de Cambridge," La revue blanche 30 (April 1894): 307.
36. Police informants reported (on 25 June 1894, and again on 26 March 1895) rumors among anarchist partisans that the propagandist Armand Matha had engineered the explosion. See APP, B A/142 (168-69).
37. See L'ordre, 13 and 28 April, and 13 May, 1948.
38. Jean Maitron, Le syndicalisme révolutionnaire. Paul Delasalle (Paris: Les éditions ouvrières, 1952), 42-48.
39. André Salmon, Le terreur noir (Paris: J. -J. Pauvert, 1959), 356-67.
40. Joan Ungersma Halperin, Félix Fénéon: Aesthete and Anarchist in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988), 3-4, 276.
41. Cited in John Rewald, "Extraits du journal inédit de Paul Signac," Gazette des beaux-arts 6/36 (December 1949): 113.
42. On phenomenality and signification, see de Man, "Hegel on the Sublime," in Aesthetic Ideology, 111.