2010年6月18日星期五

国足输球的原因总结

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2010年6月16日星期三

2010年6月12日星期六

words 2010.6.13

Vindicate 证明有效

Maneuver 策略

Consternation 惊愕

Chant 咏唱

Hurl 掷,大声叫骂

Clinch 解决,达成协议

Chortle 哈哈大笑

Horrendous 可怕的

Reconciliation 和解

Mollify 安抚

Showdown 摊牌,一决胜负

Sleight 诡诈

Subterfuge 花招

Paltry 可鄙的

Quark 夸克

Gale 大风

Hatchway 舱口

Cave in坍塌

Capsize 倾覆

Chime钟敲响

Napoleon Bonaparte

Adolf Hitler

Raw 生的

Bleak 寒冷刺骨的

Unequaled 无比的

Retreat 退却

Bog 陷入泥潭 be bogged down

Crucial 至关重要的

Gamble 赌博 Take a gamble/risk

Press on/ahead

Rightfall = dusk 黄昏

Truce 停战

Czar 沙皇

Bide one's time 等待时机

Hit-and-run

Cannon 大炮

Swollen 肿胀的

Tattered 衣衫褴褛的

Straggler 掉队者

Blitzkrieg 闪电战 lightning war

Scorch 烤焦

Siege 围住

Turn the tide against 扭转时局

Be reckoned with 被加以考虑

Toll 伤亡人数;通行费

Take its/a toll 造成损失

Prussia普鲁士

Joseph Stalin

Volga River

Ukraine

Franchise 特许经营业 franchisor

CEO – Chief Executive Officer

ICI – Imperial Chemical industries, Ltd

Subsidiary 附属机构

Fragrance 香水

Conglomerate 企业集团

?Supersedt 去掉

Kit 装备

Rucksack

Flick

Contract

Pox

Pockmarked

Visage

Hue

Notoriety

Savage

Pluck

Attest

Eclipse

Alchemist

Meteoric

Outshine

Occupational

Hazard

Chimaerase

Immerse

Estrange

Cordial

Awe

Obituary

Serene

Venerable

Impertinent

Tuck

Elaborately

Wiggle

Ferocious

Vat

Gossip

Clamore

Gaga

Tread-trod-trodden

Hippogriff

Turbulent

Dabble

Murky

Live up to

Dimple

Licorice = liquorice

Pasty

Corned beef

Tenpin bowling

Ensemble

Quartet

Stray

Sidle

Sruidess

Tear away

Bandit

Spnach

Tripe

Booger

Sprout

Coconut

Curry

Nibble

Snooze

Take aback

Daisy

Mellow

Stunned

Dazed

Dud

Flop

Dumb founded

Thickset

Mean

Tinge

Rub off

So much as

Knock out

Go over to

Scowl at

Sniffy

Purple

Lurch

Turret

Tower

Stow

Manicure

Bramble

Elaborate

Wrought-iron

Yew

Muffle

Rustle

Peacock

Snort

Fountain

Gravel

Sumptuously

Surmount

Gilded

Silhouette

Palpably

Ferocity

Trail

Susceptible

Infiltrate

Squat

Wheezy

Giggle

Resentfully

Subside

Enchantment

Eschew

Apprehensively

Thwart

Wreacker

Scurry

Hoarse

Robe

Elm

Snigger

Repress

Thigh

Lot

Profess

Inert

Constrict

Rigid

Impassive

Tilt

Well with

Jeer

Jubilant

Blotchy

Mirth

Brat

Catcalls

Hilarity

Deadpan

Imperceptibly

Resume

Implore

Prune

Canker

Snout

Hunch

Gagged

Corrupt

Dwindle

Contempt

Slither

Crunch

Tramp

Quill

Desiccate

Flicker

Retrieve

Sneakoscope

Grit

Upsurge

Cauldron

Parchment

Stern

Shuffle

Tape measure

Armpit

Flit

Crumple

Beech

Beach

Maple

Ebony

Supple

Holly

Holy

Bravo

Gawk at

Laden

Single out

Tick off

Count down

Barking = demented

Ruddy

Dump

Talk into

Strand

Pack with

Call after

Gangling

Freckle

Trolley = cart

Jostle

Smash

Wrough-iron

Disgruntle

Dreadlock

Shove

Ickle = icicle

Prefect

Hang on

goggle at

tarantula

blurt

accountant

ledger

hurtle

maze

hornet

stalactite

stalagmite

plunge

billow

faster than blinking

ravine

crame = tuck

infernal

squat

mauve

drag off

smuggle

drawl

gamekeeper

duffer

jelly

befuddle

bewitch

barrel

slimy

unicorn

minuscule

scoop

sneeze

rustling

tinkle

spindly

prickle

tingle

gloom

creepy

pliable

mahogany

misty

yew

spot

oak

puncture

draw oneself up

bungler

bungle

bump

cramble

parking meter

knit

canary

stitch

spore

jigger

pewter

phial

scales

bustling

cook up

grubby

shabby

sherry

pipe

bartender

walnut

buckle

scrap

flutter

vampire

babble

boke

hag

archway

cobble

collapsible

plump

apothecary

sickle

hoot

emporium

tawny

nimbus = halo

swarthy

heed

scribble = scrawl

witchcraft

wizardry

sorcery

gallope

clamp

ashen

grunt

lay eyes on

dratted

spawn

land with = get stack with

scuttle

gargoyles

head boy

foghorn

tosh = nonsense

clench

sticky end

flatten

wallop

bide

trance

count on

stump

clout

political dout

bully

warty

crackpot

swish

clasp

ruefully

snap

kip

dormice

wriggle

money is tight

be tight with money

humbug

teabag

iron-gray

ration

spray

rations and quarter

seaweed

shrivel

splatter

hut

moldy = musty

moth

lumpy

curl up

ferocious

rumble

smash

creak = crunch

fall in

slap your face

crumble

bolt upright

hinge

shaggy

mane

skid row

stoop = bend down

you great lump

crinkle

breaking and entering

prune poor prune 可怜虫

grate = hearth

sag

poker

amber

swig

sizzle

fidget

gulp

cower

growl

and stuff

wimble

quail

witch

wizard

warlock

whelk

snatch

clutch

croak

scruff

promptly

quiver

mutter

take sb in

stamp out

tortoise

strangle

confuse

wheeze

steal

tread-trodden

squashy

shuffle

fall/drop into sb's lap

nail up

Mind You! 听着,你要知道,请注意

Tiptoe

Dairy

Shred

Duck

Pelt

Tuft

Wrench

Sniffle

Hold up

Shake off

Musty

Stale

Cornflake

Snowflake

Snivel

Plow

Hanger

Shack

Amble

Rowboat

Bob

Whine

Budge

Smartly = quickly

Snooze

Tap ->rap 轻拍——>连续拍

Moan groan

Intently

Wink

Jab

Peer at

Boa

Constrict constrictor

Specimen

Rib

Amigo

Gibber

Squeeze

Blinding

Crutch

Secondary school

Primary school

Talcoat

Straw hat

Boater

Brim

Flat=topped

Fruffly

Tub

Rag from rags to riches ragged

Dye

Wrinkle

Slot

Flop

Dodge

Isle of Wight

Elastic band

Twang

Snort

Flip over

Brass

Carousel = merry-go-round

Fair

Rap

Stove

Get a move on

Scotch tape

Wig

Tantrum

Wolf down

Scent

Video camera & videocassette Recorder(VCR)

Ruffle

Slug

Put in

Have a go

Blow up

Snarl

Screw up

Scrany / scrawl

Fling

Wail

Barker

Bangs

Shear

Revolting

Puff puff and blow puffed food 膨化食品 puffed rice 爆米花

Shrink-shrank-shrunk/shrunken

As much

Maniacs

Beet

Fall back on

Knicherbocker

Reptile

Crocodile

Slither

Crawl

Cobra

Python

Pebble = cobble

Blissfully

Doorway

Drone

Smudge

Jolt

Ruff

Mute

Move along

Sandy

Tranquility

Specify specific

Vest

Ordain

Treason

Domestic

Supremacy

Clause

Veto

Restrain

Explicitly

Imply

Intent

Resolve

Precedent

Noteworthy

Restrict

Specifically

Dynamic

Appoint

Approve

Impeach

Appropriate

Override

Recommend

Resolution

Tenure

Appeal to = petition

Overtrun

Convention

Reverse

Revoke

Proposed

Contend

Repeal

Beverage

Desecration

Observe

Encounter

Sentiment

Virulence virus

Convince

Furiously

Publicity

Crucial

Loom

Evaluate

Assess

Sufficient

Bias

Adequate

Emancipation

Derive

Composed

Requisite

Empower

Importation

Beverage

Hereby

Inoperative

Submission

Remainder

Constitute

Entitled

Unprecedented

Consecutive

Concern

Confirmation

Pro tempore

Discharge

Resume

Principal

Disagnate

Vary

Intervene

Subsequent

Submit

Session

Withholdrecognition

Ordain = make

Diminish

Continuance

Equity = fairness

Equity

Consul consulate

Party

Jurisdiction

Appellate court

Appeal

Exception

Adhere

Overt

Forfeiture

Forfeit

Mutual

Immunity

Extradition

Fugitive

Formerly

Construe

Prejudice

Convene

Insurrection

Deem

Prose

Convention

Mode

Suffrage

Apportioned

Pursuance

Thereby

Notwithstanding 尽量

Hereunto

Unanimous

Subscribe

Deputy

Sttest

Illustrious

Pivotal

Abridge

Redress

Grievance

Guarantee

Infringe

Seizure

Jeopardy

Limb

Compel

Due

Compensation

Eminent domain

Eminent

Prosecution

Ascertain

Accusation

Confront

Compulsory

Obtain

Proceeding

Lawsuit

Inflict = experience

Disparage

Retain

Commence = begin

Respective

Distinct

Inhabitant

Quorum

Devolve

Abolitionist

Servitude

Duly

Convict

Involuntary

Convict

Convene

Immunity 免除

Confederacy

Validity

Incure

Pension

Bounty

Suppress

Obligation

Security

Patent

Tribunal

Inferior

Infidelity

Piracy

Felony

Misdemeanor

Marque = make

Reprisal

Commit

Appropriation

Cession

Fort

Arsenal

Dock-yard

Writ

Habeas corpus

Attainder

Capitation

Income tax

Preference 优惠

Revenue

Obliged

Obliging

Receipt

Expenditure

Emolument

Grant

Emit

Obligation

Impair

Coinage

Overlap

Revision

Tonnage

Imminent

Certify

Transmit

Quorum

Prestige

Crucial

Ultimate

Presumably

Discharge

Devolve

Reprieve

Civilian

Expire

Expedient

Convene

Recommend

Intern

Persian

Harass

Waive

Expire

Strike down

Rule

Exempt

Notify

Oppression

Persecution

Inscribe

Plaque

Exile

Extend

Beacon

Pop

Huddle

Wretched

Refuge

Teeming

Tempest

Prevail

Distinct

Legislate

Kinship

Handicapped

Convict

Pauper

Exclusion

Participate

Decade

Drastic

Institute

Quota

Compute

Assign

Hemisphere

Amnesty

Subsequent

Consistent

Groundwork

Incorporate

Toll

Realm

Clergy

Crucial

Tenant

Astonishingly

Dissent

Vitality

Perish

Array

Carboxylic

Amide

Conformational

Polyhedral

Eakazyotic Cell

Primary transcript

Precursor

Precursor messenger RNA

Splicing

Exon

Intron

Adenylation

Motion picture

Arthouse 艺术电影

Bottom half 下半部

Ambiguity

Ingenuity

Prucrient

Staple

Be inferior to

Handsomely

Headliner

Be ignored by

Sequel

Controodictory

Minimal

Uninhibited

Unburdened

Putatively

Anarchist

Denote

Distinct

Infiltrating

Espionage

The Berlin Blockade

Provoke

Bait

Red-baiting

Blacklisting

Atomic bomb

URRS

Aggravate

Kuomintang

Client state

Client

Intelligentsia 知识界

Zenith

Affliliate with 交往

Foreign national 外侨

Deploy

Bund

Hjyphenated

Detrimental

Trotskyist 托派分子

Chaplain

Parockial

Contend

Secular

Uphold

Projector

Inhabit

Entanglement

Blur

Release

Regent

Compose

Denominational

Thy

Dissent

Sponsor

Recitation

Observe

Meditation

Reference

Endorse

Stance

Bitlerly

Consider

Overturn

Overwhelming

Doctrine

Menorah

Candelabra

Nativity

Note

Susceptible

Indoctrination

Justify

Polygamy

Abridge = limit

Rite

Outweigh

Intimate

Undermine

Graven

Patriotic

Infringe

Flourish

Spontaneous

Unflattering

Estimate

Institution

Convinced

Constrained

Synthesize

Integrate

Synagogue

Tempt

Cherish

Verbal

Passionately

Obstruct

Trespass

Draft

Outlaw

Seditious

Espionage

Utter

Profane

Scurrilous

Abusive

Ordinarily

Substantive

Lenient

Acknowledge

Presume

Position

Application

Fairly

sediton

Expire

Revolution

Overturn

Merely

Incite

Imminent

Concrete

Defamatory slander libel

Commissioner

Reckless

Disregard

Televangelist

Infliction

Intentional

Provoke

Constitute

Derisive

Curriculum

Lewd

Obscene

Profane

Libelous

Utterance

Inflict

Incite

Breach

Indecent

Theatrical

Redress

Unanimously

Parade

Advocate

Engage

Municipality

Inconsistent

Jail

Courthouse

Dedicate

Evenly

Ordinance

Picketing

Patrolling

Convince

Establishment

Convert

Outraged

Holocaust

Extermination

Bond

Post

Heckler

Curb

Dilemma

Disperse

Legion

Hostile

Pit

Malicious

Scandalous

Grafter

Injunction

Outline

Prominent

Sensational

Practically

Restrain

Isolate

Sequester

Custody

Publicity

Gag

Pending

Testify

Confidential

Surrender

Valid

Shield

Disclose

Observe

Doctrine

Footage

Prescription

Invalidate

Desecration

Eloquent

Spangle

Delay

Prevent

Emblem

Observe

Bombardment

Replica

Gigantic

Billow

Fidelity

Occupant

Paraphernalia

Trash

Exclusionary

Incriminate

Defective

Inevitable

Marijuana

Suspend

Juvenile

Wiretapping

Matrimonial

Specialist

Surveillance

Countermeasure

Consultation

Eavesdrop

Wiretap

Tap

Bootleg

Gambler

Booth

Reverse

Bug

Virtually

Practivally

Torture

Brainwashing

Regime

Totalitarian

Cart

Amnesty

Detention

Counsel

Counselor

Acquittal

Assault

Indecent

Reverse

Illiterary

Incompretence

Drifter

Verdict

Adversary

Hale

Petty

Bear

Extorte

In effect = in fact

Headquarter

Interrogation

Retain

Retainer

Coerce

Firearm

Inmate

Informant

Jeopardy

In danger/jeopardy

Limb

A criminal conviction

A civil conviction

Arbitrary

Flatly = absolutely

Outlaw

Short of

Clarification

Approach

Mandatory

Eliminate

Mitigating

Sanction

Deem

Rational

Mental

Lash

Prophetically

Unadulterated

Refer to

Embrace

Potent

Reverend Christian Clergy

Tragic

Assassination

Scrutiny

Presumption

Explicity

Intend

Impact

Motivate

Recruit

Verbal

Crucial

Issue

Badlands

Evacuation

Designate

Evacuate

Curfew

Jarring

Odious

Confine

Dordinance

Dissent

Tribunal

Chip away

Implication

Overrule

Desegregate

Concentration

Deliberately

Lunch counter

Baptist

Baptism

Dramatize

Stir

Conscience

Seek

Comprehensive

Profoundly

Profound

Affirmative

Affirmative action

Remedy

Quota

Reverse discrimination

Dispatcher

Historically

Estate

Mandatory

Substandtially

Lane

Stow

Briskly

Bramble

Flap

Elaborate

Enrollment

Widow

Widower

Bar

Draft

Reluctant

Lobbyist

Revoke

Exclusion

Detention

Resort to = use

Inherent

Racism

Evacuation

Abide by

Mere

Parchment

Mutual

Grave

Detain

Essence

In essence = in fact

Tragic

Incumbent

Busybody

Devise = invent

Outmaneuver

Prominent

Subliminal

Editorial

Semantic

Expedite

Peculiar

Invert

Dialectic

Apparatus

Manifestation

Exacerbate

Integrity

Wage

Wield

Paraphernalia

Authoritarian

Theocracy

Islamic

Muslim

Overbearing

Baneful = harmful

Decline

Banner

Dominate

Tarrif

Shatter

Split

Align

Whig

Signal

Overlap

Exclusively

Cease

Irrelevant

Ideological

Libertarian

Drastic

Splinter

Notable

Occurrence

Memorabilia

Convey

Suffragist

Suffrage

Unfurl

Pennant

Sport = decorate/wear

Elaborate

Bug

Whereas 然而(but),鉴于(compared with the fact that)

Dedicated

Publicize

Canvass

Cavans 帆布

Poll

Commercial

Degree

Unit

Precinct

Adjoining

Comprese

Recommendation

Study

Era

Regard

Tout

Recruite

Stuff

Bumnper = large

Sticker

Literature

Elderly = old(senior) 指代年老的长者更委婉

Sponsor

Deliver = achieve

Analogy

Shortcut

Partisanship

Facilitate

Affiliation

Despense

Patronage

Sympathetic = supporting

Compromiss

Revolt

Topple = fall down

Romanian

Assumption

Reliable

Prediction

Caucus

Buck = dollar

Supervise = watch over

Plurality

Circulate

Back

Appeal

Suck up 榨干

Tap = use

Ammunition

Blast

Contender

Emerge


 

Lecture 15 Imperialism and Boy Scouts

European Civilization, 1648-1945: 

Lecture 15

Imperialism and Boy Scouts

Transcript

October 27, 2008

<< back

Professor John Merriman: All right. I'm going to talk about imperialism today. This complements the chapter in the book. The main topic is the New Imperialism, and the lecture is very much about the culture of imperialism. Part of the age of mass politics in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, before World War I, involved massive support for the New Imperialism. What was new about the New Imperialism? What period do we talk about as having had the New Imperialism? It's really from the mid-1880s, just say the 1880s, to 1914. It's at that point, as you can see from the maps in the book and you can see from the discussion, that the European powers really conquer the world. There's no other way to put it. There's a frenetic, wild chase even to the South Pole as part of that.

The African continent, of which there were huge blanks in the maps of Africa, by 1914 virtually the entire continent was not only charted but had been conquered. Europeans really control the globe. The Americans, in a smaller way, are part of the New Imperialism. Let me just start out by posing the question, and I sent all this stuff around to you, so I don't have to scribble on the board and you don't have to try to figure out what it is that's written on the board, because it's hard to see from here. If you were going to point out or to claim that there was a central reason for the New Imperialism, why even Bismarck, who described colonies as an albatross around the neck of Germany while he gets into the kind of feeding frenzy himself, it's been put rather cleverly by a guy called Baumgar a long time ago, that it comes down to God, gold, and glory.

There were those who interpreted the mad quest for colonies as being the missionary impulse. A sort of subset of this would be the French idea that there was a civilizing mission going on and trying to give indigenous peoples access to French culture. Basically it argues that Dutch Calvinist ministers, and Lutheran ministers, and Catholic priests, and other denominations encouraged states and their own church people to bring to their religion indigenous peoples all over the place. Well, we can dispense with that one. That was part of it, of course. You can't distinguish any of these three and say that any of them are nul. But that is a rather small part of the quest for yet more colonies in the New Imperialism, and indeed for all of the well-meant, however condescending in many cases, quest for religious conversion.

Most of the Lutheran ministers and Dutch Calvinist ministers in Southeast Asia, and Catholic priests all over the place such as Vietnam--my friend Charles Keith just finished a dissertation on Catholic Vietnam in the 1920s--most of those priests in areas such as Africa were there to tend to the religious needs of the European communities. It was particularly true of, for example, Lutheran ministers in German Southwest Africa and in other places. The drive to convert peoples to organized European religions was probably greatest, and the Vietnam case is a very good one, and the role of the Catholic Church is extremely interesting in Vietnam and the origins of Vietnamese nationalism. But that is another story.

The second one was gold. Gee, I put a "d" for the "o" in gold, but it's spelled G-O-L-D usually. I said in what you're reading that if you get Karl Marx, if he ever sat together with Hobson, a very major economic thinker whom I describe in there, if they were having dinner, there would be a lot that was uncomfortable about the dinner. But they would really agree. They would say that the New Imperialism, of which obviously Hobson was a great critic, emerged out of the quest for riches, for resources. Part of Marxism and part of Leninism, an important part was that imperialism is sort of the final stage of the development of capitalism, and that states need new markets. They need new resources. Therefore, they set out to, at a time of economic crisis--nothing like now, but there is a depression that lasts from 1874 to the mid-1890s--they set out to find new riches.

The people going up the Niger River, for example, where I've been in Mali, they expected to find gold around the next bend, or more peanut oil, or diamonds, because of the diamonds in South Africa, which was the equivalent of the gold rush in the U.S. in about 1848 in California. Hobson was no Marxist at all. And he was a critic of the brutality of the New Imperialism, which I'll talk about in a minute. But he said, "If you want to find out where this all began, you look at high finance in the City," the City being the City in London, Westminster, where the high rollers, and the bankers, and the big capitalists are. There are the origins of the New Imperialism.

Now, there were critics of the New Imperialism. Most of them, but not all, were in Britain. Many of them opposed the New Imperialism because of the brutality exerted on indigenous peoples by the imperial power. There was a real wave of opposition, for example, to imperialism that swept through Britain and London in 1900 in what they called the Khaki Election, khaki because it was the color of the uniforms of many of the British soldiers in hot climates. Some of the opposition in the liberal party were opposed, ran on a campaign of anti-imperialism. They were just wiped away. They were just absolutely swept away in the elections of 1900. Ordinary people in Britain thrilling to the accounts of colonial exploits voted overwhelmingly for the conservatives who just blow the liberals out of the water, and the labor party exists in 1900, but is not yet a major force.

Imperialism carries the day. The big parades in London of returning soldiers from the Boer War in South Africa and from other wars, from all the wars, they are greeted as conquering heroes nowhere more frenetically, enthusiastically, exuberantly than the City, because there is a link between big finance, big capital and imperialism. Besides that, we have a category we call social imperialism. The imperialist power saw imperialism as part of the overall strategy of conquests. They said, "Look, if you've got economic problems at home and you've got a lot of unemployed workers--also in France--if you've got a lot of unemployed workers who happen to be socialists, or in Italy, that you could kind of export your problems, because you can point people in the direction and say, 'Hey, times are tough here. But if you go to Algeria, we'll rip off some Arab land for you and you'll be just fine.' Or 'You can go make it rich in Vietnam.' Or 'You can go to Kenya or to Ghana,' (or what would become Kenya or Ghana). 'You can export your social problems.'"

This is sort of what New Imperialism meant. A classic case would be the insurrection of 1851. This is backing up before the New Imperialism. What do they do with the people who are arrested after the insurrection of 1851? A lot of them are sent to Algeria. You export your "social and political problems." The irony there, amazing delicious irony, is their great, great, great, great, great grandchildren end up being right-wing supporters of the National Front, and before that of various right-wing groups that believe in French Algeria and who try to keep the French from leaving Algeria in the early 1960s, after the Algerian war of independence.

So, social imperialism is seen by sort of the economic canon, that is, the way of thinking about the political economy of these countries, as a way of keeping things calm at home. They say, "Give people opportunities. Send them to these foreign places." Geez, in the case of France I remember reading these gripping, just pathetic stories of these people who just can't make it in the area in which we live in the south of France. They pack up all their stuff and they walk. They walk or they get little push carts, try to get to Avignon, try to get to Marseilles, try to get a boat to get to Morocco, or Tunisia, or Algeria, to try to make a living there. This, too, is part of social imperialism and is part of the idea that somehow social imperialism is economically determined. That it's the final stage of capitalism. Is that the biggest reason? No. But it's damn important.

The biggest reason has to do with the entangling alliances and great power rivalries. It's represented best by Fashoda, at the end of the 1890s, where a British force stumbles into a French force in the middle of Sudan and they say nasty things to each other, finally toast each other with what drinks they had brought along and their countries almost go to war, because the flag would be tarnished by losing out to the craven reptiles that you just stumbled into in the Sudan. The New Imperialism is one of the fundamental causes of World War I, period. That is the biggest reason. Now, don't get rid of the gold

interpretation completely, because obviously as Britain and Germany become huge economic rivals, big economic rivals, as the Germans are not only nipping at the heels of the city, British industrial production and British naval production, but passing them in things like chemistry, and production of steel, and the production of big battleships. All this stuff runs together. Your victory is your craven reptile opponent's loss. That's the way they viewed it.

Most people, I'll talk about this on Wednesday. It's fun to talk about, sad but also fun. Most people in the 1890s thought that the next war would involve France and Britain. They'll be fighting again and their rivals here and there. Or they thought that maybe the British and the Russians would fight because they're rivals in what was called the "Great Game" for north of India, and Afghanistan, and all of that. Basically, glory and the great power rivalries is the biggest reason that Germany gets into the imperial game, for example. Bismarck--it's the famous Bismarck story--a really awful man. But when there's an imperial lobby comes racing along and says, "Look, Herr Chancellor, we really need to have the troops go and protect our merchants." People like the sort of freelance guy, Karl Peters. He said at one point, he slams down a map of Europe on the table and he says, "That's my map of Africa. Here we are and we're surrounded by Russia and France." But toward the end of his career was completely different. He's backing up German merchants with expeditionary forces. Plant the flag and then you'd better defend it.

The big issue there is rivalry with France and with Russia. Bismarck says, "Geez, if we can get the French interested in all these colonies in Africa, then they won't be dreaming of re-conquering Alsace and much of Lorraine." At the end he says, "Well, we'd better be out there, too." And they're all out there. As some wag once puts it, Italy gets into the game, too, with Libya and Ethiopia, with "a huge appetite and bad teeth," as someone once put it. Of course, they get defeated in the battle in 1896. Then they will pay them back with poison gas and cascades of bombs in the 1930s, and just destroy everybody and kill them all, if they can, to pay them back for their defeat in 1896. I am eventually going to talk about the culture of imperialism and give you the example, which I find telling, of Robert Baden-Powell and the origins of the Boy Scouts. You didn't associate the Boy Scouts with imperialism, but you will in a minute.

First, let me just say that this is not some sort of '70s radical guy saying--there he goes again, "it's really nasty to be slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people." But it is nasty, and that's what they did. That cannot be forgotten. It doesn't just start with the famous case of the Germans in Southwest Africa. More about that in a minute. Bugeaud, the name is quite forgettable but who's a general from Limoges. The French conqueror Algiers anyway in 1830 is a political diversion. Gradually they expand their control over Algeria. Algeria becomes a colony. It becomes an integral point of view--from the point of view of the French, in a different way than Tunisia, and Vietnam, or Morocco, and other places of France, even though it's not part of metropolitan France.

Bugeaud and his successors kill about 850,000 people during the campaign, very unequal battles. Bugeaud comes up with the idea of simply putting men, women, and children into these huge caves and caverns, and then simply throwing bombs in and so they all die. He did that over and over again. It's easy to say, "Well, the demons of the twentieth century, they come in the twentieth century, don't they?" But, as I suggested before in terms of the Commune, this stuff is out there in the nineteenth century as well, and so racist ideology is out there in the nineteenth century. There's no doubt about it. It wasn't that way in every place, but the French experience was pretty terrible.

In the very well-documented case of what happened in what now is Congo and Zaire, which were sort of the private colony of the king of Belgium, the atrocities there are well-known. One could go on all day talking about these atrocities. The most well-known, certainly, and most well-documented, and, in a way because of what comes later in the twentieth century, is that of the conquest and indeed genocide. Here I'm borrowing an appropriate term, I think, in this case-that's not a term you throw around very loosely--of my friend and colleague, Ben Kiernan, whom some of you know, in his big book on genocide, which Yale Press published recently. They begin conquering Southwest Africa in 1885. So, Bismarck still has a few years to go. In their way, as they would see it, among other people were the Herero, H-E-R-E-R-O, a Bantu group of about 75,000 cattle herders who were in the center of what would become the German colonial territory.

Again, European powers are putting things like borders there, boundaries, and that has nothing to do with the way that, particularly nomadic people--they don't have any sense of borders. Mali, where I've been because my daughter was just studying in Touareg in northern Mali, north of Timbuktu. The Touareg are a people who had no sense of borders. There were Touareg across other borders, too. Borders are something that were artificially constructed by these powers to say, "Here. Our empire goes there and yours doesn't start until there." And, so, as these people rise up to defend their own territory, they are systematically massacred. They basically first decide to crush the uprising at all costs.

There is in 1904 an extermination order. That's literally the German translation from the German. The proclamation of the local military commander is that, "The Herero people must leave this land. If they don't I will force them to do so by using the great gun," that is artillery. "Within the German border," that is defined as now German, "every male Herero armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot to death. I shall no longer receive women or children," that is spare them, "but will drive them back to their people or have them shot. These are my words to the Herero people."

Now, I couldn't make this up. It's easy to say how terrible this is, but it is terrible. It was part of the enterprise and has remained part of the imperialist enterprise. It wasn't the goal of every imperialist to exterminate the people who were there, but if they got in the way in a very equal fighting. In India there were various cases of soldiers complaining it was too easy shooting down the rebels because it was just like hunting. It was a very British, upper-class analogy. It was just like hunting. Basically what they do if they don't shoot them they chase them out into the desert and then they cement over the wells in the oases so they die. Basically they exterminate about two-thirds of the people.

There's a very excellent book on this written by a former graduate student here many moons ago called Isabel Hull that was published four or five years ago. The origins of this, and again there are people now writing and saying, "Well, it wasn't that bad. They brought trains to India, ended the huge disparities in prices." Certainly lots of good things did come. But looming in the background were these massacres. The edition that I'm working on now, that I'm just finishing of the book that you're kindly reading, there's a whole recent spate of interesting literature on the end of the British empire in Kenya in the 1950s. History of the Hanged is one. There's another one by a woman called Caroline Elkins at Harvard. The title escapes me at the moment, but these are just fantastic, just gripping, just chilling accounts of essentially the mass murder, incarceration, and murder, and shooting, under the guise of "trying to escape" and all of this of hundreds of thousands of people. This was hidden from the British public, just systematically by the government. It's a long story and it's one that we have to wrestle with.

Having said that, I want now to talk about the culture of imperialism--this is sort of shifting gears rather rapidly--and talk about Robert Baden-Powell and the origins of the Boy Scouts. Again, because I was once asked to leave the Boy Scouts in Portland, Oregon because I was of no use and never accumulated a single badge, this is not the origins of this lecture. There's lots of stuff written on Baden-Powell. He's an easy person to mock. He's an easy person, I suppose, to have some sort of respect for, too, in a way, depending on your point of view. I'm not dissing the Boy Scouts. Once I had people running up. There was a woman who came up who was a Girl Scout. She says, "Oh, this is so cruel what you're saying about scouting. It's not like that." I know it's not like that now. But having had some relative who had the very strange idea of giving me, of all people, Boys' Life as a birthday present. I remember reading that and all this kind of over-the-top Americana publications, I suppose I'm reacting a little bit against that, too.

But there is a point to all of this, so the rest of this is about Baden-Powell and the Boy Scouts. Robert Baden-Powell was a soldier. He came up with the idea of scouting as a way of preparing British youth for imperialism and for the next war. The origins of the Scouts, in terms of its timing, that is the first decade of the twentieth century, has to be seen in terms of these international conflicts, these international great power rivalries with which we began. It comes at the time of the Moroccan Affair, the first Moroccan Affair and the second Moroccan Affair in 1905, 1911, when it seems like the French and the Germans will go to war against each other and they will bring in the other great powers. More about that.

Robert Baden-Powell was a professional soldier. When he went back to England he thought that British youth were cigarette-smoking, heavy-drinking, flabby weaklings, whether they were upper classes and, even worse, his few lower classes, because they were underfed and therefore smaller. He hated the Oxbridge common rooms; he said, "With its town life, buses, hot and cold water laid on, everything is done for you." The British working classes, like the upper classes, tended to drink a lot. He was sure that there'd be a war fought in the lifetime of these same people, and he came to the idea of scouting.

Now, America has a role in all of this. This country has always believed in the frontier. Those of you who had Glenda's course in American history and other people know about the Turner Thesis, about always you can expand to the west. You can diffuse your social tensions in the east by giving people access to land further on and get rid of the Indians in the way, etc., etc. Now, we have friends in France who still read The Last of the Mohicans. There's just a fascination with the American frontier. This is extremely important in the end of the nineteenth century in Europe. Baden-Powell borrows the uniform of the Boy Scouts from the frontier uniform as he imagined it in America--the cowboy hat, the flannel shirt, their neckerchief, the short pants. He said, "The shape of a face gives a good guide to a man's character," this sort of firm face. He loved that. Square jaw, compared to working-class "loafers" and "shirkers," as he called them. It's this cult of masculinity. This comes at a time, one must say, when you've got very aggressive movement for female suffrage by the suffragettes who want the rights of women to vote in Britain, one of whom throws herself in front of a horse at a horse race, and sacrifices her life to make a point. It comes at a time as the famous Oscar Wilde trial. Oscar Wilde, of course, was gay.

There was a sense that the virility of English manhood was being tested by women--Baden-Powell did not like women, he referred to women as "silly women," "silly girls"--and by gays, whom he saw as effeminate and therefore not really British, and wouldn't be there. What good could they do in the next war? Also it's a time where in Germany particularly, but not only in Germany, men were dueling. There's sort of that test of masculinity. If you're lucky you'll end up with a dueling scar and not actually get killed. Most of them don't get killed. But they're dueling all over the place. They're dueling in the woods outside of Paris. They're dueling almost everywhere in Germany. They're dueling still in Britain. That sort of reaffirmation, according to Bob Nye and lots of other people, and all sorts of people have written on this. Ute Frevert, , my colleague, is now gone from Yale, unfortunately. This is part of the reaffirmation of virility.

The tendency is to say, looking back, "Well, they're taking it out on animals, blowing the hell out of them and indigenous people, etc., etc." So, scouting for boys takes off. It spreads from Britain to Australia to Canada to New Zealand to India to Chile to Argentina to Brazil. In 1910 it starts in the United States. In 1910, Baden-Powell resigns from the command of a division of the Territorial Army to spend the rest of his life involved in scouting. Again, what I'm saying is that involves this sort of grafting on this idea of the American frontier. You're going to create your new frontier. Your new frontier is going to be in Africa. Your new frontier is going to be in Afghanistan. You create your frontiers, and then you hold the frontiers and you train these boys, these young men to hold the colonial frontier.

He finds sponsorship in the Daily Telegraph, which was a big conservative newspaper. All of the big newspapers are conservative. The 60,000 scouts--I think I sent this around--by 1909 there's 60,000 scouts in Britain. In 1910 there are 107,000. In 1913, 152,000, and in 1917, 194,000. Why was there such a short gap? Not that much of a leap between 1913 and 1917? Because they're dead. They get killed in the war. They're going off to fight. Scouting is finished rather early. You've got these big rallies, enormous in London, and scouts coming from all over the empire. Girl Scouts are created in 1914, but Baden-Powell didn't care much about that. Now, there had been groups of frontier-inspired youth organizations that existed in Scotland, particularly. They're called things like The Sons of Daniel Boone, The Woodcraft Indians, The Boys' Brigade in Glasgow in 1883. Some were church sponsored.

Again, this is the sort of moralization of the working classes. You get them into groups. They won't smoke cigarettes, which is a good thing not to do. They won't drink. They won't hang out with the wrong people. They will go to work and become cogs in Britain's industrial empire. They, too, can look at maps of Africa being increasingly painted red, which was the color of the empire. So, nature remains a part of this. Again, to repeat, the cult of the American frontiersmen, let me say a little bit more about that, is part of this. The idea of the frontiersmen, the buckskin man. Rudyard Kipling is not my kind of poet, but anyway, he expresses often this idea. There's something hidden; go and find it--what's happened? I must have pushed something. I pushed something. It doesn't matter. I'm not easily alarmed--Go and find it. Go and look behind the ranges, something behind the ranges is lost and waiting for you. Go!

Baden-Powell described the frontiersman whose manhood is strong and rich, of a pure life. Now, his own predilection is that for him a life would not involve "silly women," as he put it. The other idea, and this is not at all, I'm not saying anything about his sexuality, but the reality of the situation is that he preferred the company of young men to anyone else. This is involved in the way he lived his life. The idea is that the free man must earn independence with his gun. This is, again, part of this old American western idea, but you apply it to indigenous people. Now, you have aggressive models coming from the American West.

William "Wild Bill" Cody, from my wife's state of Nebraska, had killed thousands of buffalo. He had dueled. The duels that they do with the German dueling fraternities, you've got the equivalent in Dodge City, and all of this, where you're dueling, and the classic kind of Clint Eastwood western. He'd killed thousands of buffalo, dueled, and he's a killer and scalper of Indians. He was his own publicist and he had enormous influence in Britain. At the Battle of Little Big Horn in 1876, he kills Indian Chief Yellow Hand. In 1887 he crosses the Atlantic. He goes to London, Paris, and Berlin. Queen Victoria came out of her extended period of decades of mourning for her dear husband, Albert, to attend the Wild Bill Cody Show. She wants to go. And she's there with all the others. She hadn't been to an event like that in twenty-six years. The irony is that Wild Bill Cody runs these fake combats between the Indians and the cowboys in the equivalent of stadiums in Britain. One of the ironies of this about art and reality merging is that some of the people he brought across the Atlantic were Indians who'd actually fought in a battle against him in the Dakotas, and he hires them as extras and he takes them to Paris, to London, and to Berlin. They are a big, huge success.

It's the Wild West program. At the same time in Canada, those of you who are Canadian know about the Mounted Police and all that business. The Mounted Police become a powerful, though somewhat tamer, more acceptable, more vanilla equivalent of that, of keeping order in Saskatoon and all of these places like that. I've actually been to Saskatoon. It's a pretty nice place. The idea of these mountain men--now the mountain men get uniforms. The mountain men are no longer sort of taking pot shots at people in Kentucky on the frontier or scalping Indians in the Dakotas. They're wearing sort of freelance scalpers. They're wearing the uniform of these countries and they're big-time imperialists. That's really the point. Here's a verse, I can't remember where I got that.

Our mission is to plant the right of British freedom here.
Restrain the lawless savages and protect the pioneer. (It rhymes.)
And 'tis a proud and daring trust to hold these vast domains,
But with 300 mountain man

You've got to kind of make it rhyme a little bit--mountain man, pronounce it as if you were a mountain man. But anyway, and that's a little harder to do if you have an Oxbridge accent, which I clearly don't. Also, this is part of the whole--I don't have time to do it now. I spent a fair amount of time in Australia, but it's also part of the idea of being Australian, too. Anyway, that's another thing. Kipling's Lost Legion is really just awful, but here we go:

There is a legion that was never listed
That carries no colors or crest
But split in a thousand detachments
Is breaking the road to the rest
[I'm supposed to be more respectful when I do this, but anyway]
Our fathers, they left us their blessing
They taught us and groomed us and crammed
But we're shaking the clubs and the messes
To go and find out and be damned, dear boys
To go and shot and be damned, dear boys.

[Virility, adventure, loyalty--loyalty to boys, loyalty to young men, and brotherhood, and so it starts like that. Can I barely go on?]

Out from the woods of the Great Northwest
Under the austral sky
From the south and the north, they'll come forth
At the sound of the mother's cry
And each at his post where the danger is most
Will stand as a sentry then
Britishers all to stand or to fall
The Empire's frontiersmen.

Now, Baden-Powell is his own best publicist, even better than Wild Bill Cody had been. He helps plant newspaper articles about him. Here's one from 1900. "It has been suggested that Major-General Baden-Powell's unrivaled skill as a cavalry scout forms a quite remarkable inheritance of heredity that he's descended from Pocahontas, the American Indian princess," which he was clearly not. But how does he become so popular? How do these God-awful poems that I've just read, how do they become popular? They become popular because they become the stuff of boys literature of the culture of imperialism. They were the British equivalents of Boys' Life. I'm not knocking Boys' Life. I don't know if that existed. I strongly preferred Sports Illustrated and the sporting news to that. They become the stuff that people are reading as they're looking at these maps of Africa gradually becoming painted British.

Now, how did he become well known? Well, because he's an imperialist. He's fighting. In 1896 he fought in the Matabele War, which I sent around, not the war but the name, a skirmish against about 1,000 indigenous fighters. It's at that point where he starts coming up with his own freelance uniform that would become that of the Boy Scouts. In military units people that were scouts, again the idea of tracking. You're tracking, you're seeing where the Indians have been. The Indians can see where you've been now. You learn how they do it. How the blades of grass turn and all of that. I couldn't scout anything. You see how they do it. They become known as scouts, which is sort of an Americanization of a term. This is what he likes to do. Teddy Roosevelt, there's a good example of that. Talk about that kind of narcissism of the colonial imagination and the imperial imagination, "Rough, rough, we're the stuff. We want to fight and we can't get enough." Whoopie! That's the song of the Rough Riders from the Cuban-American War of Teddy Roosevelt, so it's part of the hysteria of the U.S. Spanish War. But again, it's the frontier spirit.

Baden-Powell helps create his own myth, which I've said. He drew pictures of the people that he had allegedly shot. These pictures end up being in the tabloid newspapers. Again, the role of the tabloids in spreading all this stuff is terribly important. I said before there's twenty-one daily newspapers in Paris at the time. I don't remember how many there are in Britain, but there are an awful lot of them. He sketched a last stand of eight people, supposedly until they get rescued, against the indigenous people. He claimed that the Zulus, against whom the British War, the Zulus called him, this sounds unlikely, "the man, he who likes to lie down to shoot." The Ashanti called him, in awe, this was his term for himself, "he of the big hat." And that in this war in 1896, they called him "the wolf," in awe again, his opponents. "The beast that does not sleep but sneaks around at night." So, he became "the wolf who never sleeps." There's a slight problem with this invention of a term to describe himself as "the wolf who sneaks around," is there aren't any wolves in Africa. There are not any wolves at all. He made it up and made it up rather badly, having taken it out of some book somewhere else. But that doesn't stop the tabloids from referring to him as "the wolf who never sleeps."

The Boers understand that in the Boer War, that is the Dutch Afrikaner opposition opponents, who by the way--the British created the term "concentration camp." Again, I'm not looking back from history. They're separating children and women from the men, and trying to avoid that they receive provisioning out in the bush. They create the term "concentration camp" in the Boer War. The Boers actually lived there and had for a long time, though they're not an indigenous people. They know there aren't any wolves there. So, they start mocking Baden-Powell. But "he of the big hat" did not slow down at all.

So, in 1899, he has the good luck to be at the siege of Mafeking, where they are surrounded by a force, but not a terribly aggressive force. Again, he draws pictures of people on duty and all of that, night duty. And the town had resisted 217 days stationed on the railway line that runs between the Cape and Rhodesia. This was a big takeoff for his reputation. Just the name Baden-Powell, the initials B.P. become identified with British imperialism. B.P, "He loves the night and after his return from the hollows of the veldt, where he has kept so many anxious vigils, he lies awake hour after hour upon his camp mattress in the veranda tracing out in his mind the various means and agencies by which he can forestall the Boer move, which unknown to them he has personally already watched. He is the wolf who never sleeps."

Now, B.P., those initials also become British Pluck, the idea that the British are mudders. This is kind of the image that would come out of the very heroic Battle of Britain under the bombs of German Luftwaffe in World War II. British Pluck, also B.P., British Peerage, British Peers, the upper classes, the title British Peers. He becomes identified with all of this, the wolf who never sleeps. His advice to his own garrison is to "sit tight and shoot straight. All is well here," he writes. They were able to get messages out to the newspapers who are covering this. Now, again, the British newspapers covered another siege which ends rather badly, which is at Khartoum, with the death of Charles Chinese Gordon. He was called Chinese Gordon because he slaughtered the Chinese, and he gets his at Khartoum. Of course, school children, there's an enormous, enormous outpouring of tears over the death of this man. The newspapers, because of these modern techniques, they can follow all of this stuff pretty much how the siege is going, etc., etc.

So, B.P. the prince of good fellows, prince of scouts, here we go. They emphasize his youth. He's forty-three but he's youthful. He's cheerful. He's always whistling and telling stories, even when things are going bad. He loves pranks, childish pranks. This is from some of the newspapers. "Life was a game, but you have to play it honorably." It was a game that silly women, as he called them, could not play. He becomes known again as sports, mass sports is starting just at this time. The Olympics are starting just at this time. Again, there's a reassertion of virility in these Olympics. He's called "the gallant goalkeeper," "the goaltender of Mafeking." So, a sports analogy becomes part again of this imperial thrust. They print patriotic letters to him, which can be signed and can be sent. You can send a postcard. You could send a postcard home. Your parents have left after parents' weekend, if they came. You can send them the following postcard:

Dear Parents, 
Dear Mom and Dad,

We have shouted "Rule Britannia!" We have sung God Save the Queen. We have toasted gallant Baden a half a score. We have sent our best respects to Plucky Mafeking and we have hoisted flags and bunting in galore. With a wild and frenzied madness born of joy the empire cheers, while we Britishers rejoice through the land. In this hour of jubilation I am sending you a line with the wish that I could warmly shake your hand. Yours exultantly.

Then you sign your own name to it. So, scouting, as someone said, I can't remember whom, was an attempt to make these "values" of Mafeking permanent and to trace them on the map of these countries of these peoples all over the world. A 1909 newspaper said:

It may be that he is not a great soldier of the sort which Napoleon, or the Maltese, or the Kitcheners are made. He is the frontiersman, the born leader of irregulars, a maverick, and the empire has need of such. Furthermore, he has the knack of seizing the imagination of boys and a deep sympathy with them. He is doing his day's work for the empire by training a number of manly little fellows to keep their wits about them and their eyes skinned. We shall profit another day in a much greater affair than Mafeking.

That, of course, is preparing for the war against those other peoples who might contest British domination, not the indigenous peoples, but the other powers in Africa. So, be prepared, B.P., the same thing, the same initials. Anybody here a scout? I had to memorize that stuff. I didn't get a single badge, but a scout. Be prepared. You're supposed to do that. The jamborees. He creates these jamborees. Also, at the same time, and I don't have time to talk about this, but this is the same time when Arthur Conan Doyle, the idea of sleuthing, but it was sort of an urban sleuthing for evildoers in London. It kind of merges with all of that. Of boys who risked their life, he says, "I said to one of these boys on one occasion when he came through a rather heavy fire, 'You will get hit one of these days riding about like that when shells are flying.' And he replied, 'Sir, I pedal so quickly, they'll never catch me.' Those boys don't seem to mind the bullets one bit." Of course, millions of them would catch bullets that ultimately they minded. "I will do my best to God and the king. I will do my best to help others. Whatever it costs me. I know the scout law and I will obey it."

Again, I am not knocking doing good things for people. Please do understand. But I'm just trying to place the origins of whatever you think of the Boy Scouts in the context of the culture of imperialism, because that's where it belongs and that's where it started. In 1912 in August a boat capsized off the coast of Devon, I think. Nine boys from eleven to fourteen drown. They were scouts. There was an enormous, enormous national funeral service in London in which millions of people saw at least parts of it. This helped. Their deaths, and many more deaths would follow, helped tie together the idea of scouting with service to the nation. A magazine called The Captain--again, this is part of the culture of imperialism and of aggressive nationalism--had a troop of mobile scouts on bikes fitted with a rifle bucket and a clip to carry a carbine, a rifle.

So, it shifts. The image of all of this shifts from Africa, where much of the fighting was already over, and indigenous people destroyed or pacified, to the European enemies against whom the next war would be fought. There's a famous cartoon in the British magazine Punch which showed a Boy Scout complete in uniform being prepared, taking Mrs. Britannia, that is the image of Victoria who was dead, but the female image of the empire, by the arm. It says, "Fear not, grandma. No danger can befall you. I, after all, remember I am with you now." Boy Scouts played an enormous role in 1914 and in the subsequent years. "Goodbye, I'm off to war." There was a caricature in the newspaper as Boy Scouts joined up along with lots of other people who weren't scouts in the war. As you well know, they don't come back, or a lot of them don't come back.

It's part of the mood of nationalism and of imperialism, of the New Imperialism. Those two things are tied together and the expectation, indeed in many cases, as in the case of Baden-Powell, joyous expectation. You could test your virility in a more meaningful combat than simply slaughtering indigenous people, or picking off Boers with greater numerical superiority. By the way, Robert Baden-Powell died in Kenya, in 1941, from which he had just sent his last patriotic message to the Boy Scouts, in what was a very different war. Thank you. I'll see you on Wednesday.

[end of transcript]

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Lecture 14 Radicals

European Civilization, 1648-1945: 

Lecture 14

Radicals

Transcript

October 22, 2008

Professor John Merriman: So, what I want to do today is resist the temptation to talk about anarchism the entire time. I sent around the terms for today of which I only forgot one or two. What I think I'll do at the beginning is I'm going to talk very quickly about socialism, and the difference between revolutionary socialism and reform socialism. Add syndicalism to the mix, and these are all terms that I sent to you, so I'm not going to write them on the board, because I need the board. Then for most of the lecture I'm going to talk about anarchism. Anarchists didn't want to reform the state. They didn't want to seize control of the state either by revolution or by electoral process. They wanted to destroy the state. So, I'm going to talk about those guys for a while.

Most anarchists were not terrorists, but at the end I'm going to talk about a guy that I followed around for four or five years who was a terrorist, and arguably--it's a book I just finished--one can find the origins of modern terrorism in this guy, who is called Émile Henry. This will fit into Paris. It's obviously sort of a sub-theme in this course, and so is the state and capitalism. This particular person, Émile Henry, set out to bomb and to kill. His targets changed the name of the game for terrorists. That's obviously what I can't wait to talk about. But first I'm going to just review briefly for you, it's getting briefer every second that I think about this, the socialist stuff, which you can read about. With the rise of mass politics in Europe in the 1880s and 1890s, there was the rise of mass socialist parties.

Basically just to review: there are two kinds of socialism. There were the revolutionary socialists, of which Marx was an obvious example and his son-in-law Paul Lafargue, a name you don't have to retain, who brought Marxist theory to France, who believed that revolution would come when the proletariat was class-conscious and after a bourgeois revolution, of which he basically thought 1848 had been a good example following in 1789. And the proletariat would rise up and break their chains and bring this brave new world. And, so, there were revolutionary socialists in Italy, in Spain, and in France, and even a few in Germany.

Reform socialists said, "Look, states are becoming stronger and stronger, and can break revolutions very easily. Look what happened to the Paris Commune of 1871 when about 25,000 people are massacred, men, women and children are gunned down, and that the way to bringing social reform and abolishing the abuses of capitalism is through reform." This is the reformist tradition in Germany. It's identified with somebody who's in the book, Edouard Bernstein. And you can see this in the growth of the SPD, the German Socialist Reformist Party, which was the largest party in the Reichstag in 1914 when war breaks out.

What you do is if you organize, you can--legislatures, if you have enough socialists and enough well-meaning other people in the legislatures, in the Reichstag, or in the Chambre des Députés, or the other parliaments in places that had parliaments, then you can vote in laws. You can vote in mine safety regulations, because mining accidents killed so many people. There's one in the Pas de Calais where hundreds and hundreds of people, a thousand people get killed in one accident in about 1910 or 1911. You can pass an eight-hour day or a ten-hour day. You can pass laws making it harder and harder to employ children, particularly in dangerous tasks. You can do things for women. You could do things for families. If you elect the right kind of people, you can have a revolution through reform, through the ballot.

And the great socialist leaders such as Bernstein, whom I just mentioned, or the great Jean Jaurès, whose death on the 31st of July in 1914 was really the end of an era and the beginning of another era, a scary era of the war--people had that sense. He was the one who in France unified the reform socialists and the revolutionary socialists, though there are still fissures in their approaches. Of course, the old revolutionary socialists would become the Communists after 1920, when the French Communist Party is begun in the wake of the Russian Revolution, which seemed to be, even though it was a revolution in a very complex situation, that seemed to say that you can have a revolution. But anyway, reform socialists dominate in Germany. They dominate in France. They dominate in Belgium. The Socialist Party is terribly important in Italy; they become more important in Spain as well. Those are the two big traditions.

Some of the tensions between revolutionary socialists and reform socialists can be seen in the fact that revolutionary socialists said, "Look, if you are working in the Reichstag and you're trying to get better insurance plans," ironically it was Bismarck's Germany that gives really the first substantial insurance program for workers, "what you're doing is you're propping up the bourgeois state. You're buying into it. You're supporting indirectly their armies that crush workers and strikes," and they did in the heroic age of syndicalism, but more about that in a minute, 1895 to about 1907 in France. But in other countries it's about the same thing. "You're propping up the bourgeois state by participating in electoral politics." But lots of revolutionary socialists, and this is all in the book so don't worry about this, but a lot of them say, "Look, if we don't run candidates and elections, how are they going to know about us?" So, they, too, would run candidates and elections. So, they're put at really kind of coincé. They're really sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place, because they're running candidates in elections in which they do not believe.

I'm not here talking about Russia, because that is more complicated with the Bolsheviks, and the Mensheviks, and the socialist revolutionaries, and we will come back to them. I'm talking basically about Western Europe. You have to imagine that Lenin and the other Russian socialists are sort of walking around the lakes of Geneva and of Zurich in exile and trying to imagine this future. But that's the big difference between socialists, reform and revolutionary. Now, to make things even more complicated, you have a group called the syndicalists. The word "syndicalist" is an English word which I sent along on your friendly email from yours truly.

Syndicalist, the word comes from the French word for unions, which is a syndicat. What they said is, "Hang on." They kind of believed with the revolutionary socialists, saying, "If you get involved in electoral process, you are propping up this corrupt bourgeois state. You are propping up this dynamic duo of the state and capitalism." Syndicalists say, "Look, we will organize from the ground up, beginning in the shop floor, the factory. That will be not only a means to obtain a revolution, it's a way of seeing what the future world will be like when everybody tutoies everybody or Dus everybody. The kind of relations, the friendly equal relations of the shop floor become, after the revolution, the way the world will be organized." In the South of Europe, in Italy and in Spain, these folks are called, and I sent this around to you, anarcho-syndicalists.

You see a transition here. Anarcho-syndicalists. Because they're rejecting the state and they're looking in the future, the decentralized organization is part of it. Anarcho-syndicalists have considerable influence in Spain and Italy. They believe in direct action, and sabotage, and strikes, but in union organization. One of the most interesting--I mention him in the book--Fernand Pelloutier, who wrote a book called The Dying Society, was one of the theoreticians of anarcho-syndicalism, of syndicalism. He was dying. He was dying of TB. Though he was not a worker, tuberculosis was a working-class disease. Go to Pennsylvania. Go to West Virginia. Tuberculosis, the ravages of the mines in the United States, were just incredible. In porcelain factories and all sorts of places, glass factories all over the place.

Pelloutier creates these things called labor exchanges. He's one of the people who come to these things called labor exchanges, bourse de travail, you call them in French, which were towns where you had municipal socialists in power at the municipal level--and you did, in some cities, are giving municipal funds to start these labor exchanges which are buildings. You can still see them. When I was invited to Limoges to give a big talk by the Conféderation Général du Travail, we started the apéro, the first round of drinks, about noon in the labor exchange, in the maison du peuple, the house of the people. They were places where workers coming from other places could come and get a meal, get some money and, above all, find out about jobs. So, syndicalists--the way they imagine the future, and preparing for this brave new world of post-revolutionary relationships, that has an important privileged place in the way they view the world.

There was an engineer called Georges Sorel, whose name I should have send around, S-O-R-E-L. He comes to the notion of the general strike. One day all workers will simply put down their tools and say, "Hell with you, capitalism. Hell with you, the State. And they will bring capitalism to its knees." It doesn't really ever work out that way, does it? The capitalists and the State win the day. So, having rushed through all of that, let me talk about what I want to talk about. That is anarchism, of which there is only a couple short, and I hope sprightly, paragraphs in which you're reading. I am not an anarchist. Sometimes when I give talks at various places--I was at St. Louis recently, and other places, people at the end will think--hopefully, they'll never think I'm a terrorist, because I'm certainly not, and when I talk about this guy I do not do so with affection or admiration. But I know him because I followed him around. I followed him around.

Most anarchists were not terrorists. One wants to make that clear. It's not surprising that the great strengths of anarchism are in Spain in Catalonia and in Andalusia in the south of Spain and in southern Italy. Why? Because that's where the Italian and the Spanish states have very limited success in convincing people that they're Spanish or Italian. Why should they believe they're Spanish or Italian? Southern Italians thought that the republic was a monarchy. But the progressive monarchy, so called, was a plot launched by tax collectors and industrial capitalists in the North of Italy. In Andalusia and in Catalonia were the Civil Guard, who tended to be from Galicia, a conservative part of Spain where the odious Franco was from or from Castile, a huge area around Madrid. It was easy to see how they associated the state with something that they didn't want. In writing about anarchism, I tried to put myself and tried to think of how anarchists viewed the world.

I want to tell you a story that's a true story. If you're trying to imagine how anarchists viewed the world, this story is not a bad one. It's about a cork worker making corks for bottles of sherry in the south of Spain. He's dying. He'd been an anarchist his entire life. He hated the state. He hated capitalism. He hated the church. He's dying. He's on his deathbed. He had married a woman from a religiously practicing Catholic family. In the scene in this room in which he's dying, in one part of the room is his family, who hated organized religion, who view it as a prop for capitalism and the state. On the other side of the room are people who are not so sure. They went to church sometimes. They knew the priest.

When he's lying there, the end is near. His wife's family says, "Pedro, don't you want me to bring a lawyer in? A lawyer who will take your last will." Anarchists don't have wills and they don't have very much property. The other side of the room is just utter terror, horror. How can they suggest such a thing, that Pedro is going to make a will? That's a bourgeois thing to do, to make a will. Then somebody else from his wife's family says, "Pedro, the end is near. Don't you want us to get a priest for the last rights?" He'd never set foot in a church and proudly so. Consternation on the other side of the room. How will it all end? How will Pedro end his life? With a lawyer and a priest?

So, Pedro looks up and he says, "Go and get me a lawyer. Bring me a lawyer." Then he says, "Go and tell father," the priest, "to come to see me." Joy--utter consternation. Pedro's lying in a bed in the middle. So, pretty soon the lawyer comes dressed in his little suit. He doesn't yet have a calculator to tote up the bill, but he's got his legal pad. He's never been in that house before. He comes down by the bed and he says, "Pedro, you have a few possessions, a fork, a knife, a couple of plates. Don't you want to give me your will now?" Pedro says, "Wait a minute. Wait a minute, señor. Wait a minute." Then the priest comes. He has his purple--I remember this from Jesuit high school days--thing that they wear on Easter. He has his little case also, which he has the holy oil to bless Pedro and give him the last rights. He comes close and he says, "Pedro, the end is near. You've led a good life, but I haven't seen you in church very much or ever, for that matter. Your children are not baptized. Don't you want to make a confession? You're going to meet your maker soon. Don't you want to make a confession to me right now? Nobody can hear you. Don't you have something you want to tell me? Isn't there something you can tell me?"

Consternation on one side, silent joy on the other. Pedro says to the lawyer, "Come here, señor. I want you to stand on the left side of my bed." He says to the priest, "Father, come here please. I want you to stand on the right side of my bed." Then he smiles a smile of utter contempt. He says, "Now you can all see both sides of the family. Like Christ, I am dying between two thieves." And he died. To imagine the kind of hate that anarchists had of soldiers, and priests, and of officials, and of Castilian Guardia Civil, that was how anarchism was born. When was anarchism born? There's a couple antecedents in the eighteenth century, but they're terribly irrelevant people that hardly anyone read, including a British one.

It really starts with Proudhon, a name a sent around. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. He was from the east of France, from Besançon, in the mountainous Franche-Comté. He believed that if you didn't have the state, the people could live pretty much as with a little bit of prosperity that they had, a few chickens, a little piece of land. People tended to live like that there. It was a place where nobody had very much but everybody had enough to get along. He writes the following. It's in my lecture notes.

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censored, commanded by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed at every operation at every transaction, noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished, under the pretext of public utility in the name of the general interest to be placed under taxes, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, poached, and robbed. At the slightest resistance or the first word of complaint to be repressed, fired, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government. That is its justice. That is its morality.

He wrote a pamphlet in 1841 called What is Property? His answer is, "Property is theft." He didn't mean that all property was theft. What he meant was too much property was theft, or unearned property was theft. Proudhon had lots of influence among some peasants, but mostly artisans. In the world, by the way, that the great painter, Gustave Courbet painted a lot, in the area around Besançon or Nantes, lots of really marvelous paintings of people at work, the stone breakers and people just working their guts out for very little. Proudhon, in 1848, it's said he went down in Paris and put a brick on a barricade and threw up, nauseated by the thought of violence, of revolution.

His successors, sort of the leaders of the anarchist movements, were Mikhail Bakunin, an enormously tall, bearded, heavy-drinking, heavy-eating, heavy-sweating Russian noble, a prince who was an anarchist who said, "The revolution will come. It will come with a single spark and all the hundreds of millions of toilers, the serfs will rise up, and they will slay their social betters, and create this new brave world based upon their village harmonies." He said, "Destruction is a creative passion," entre guillemets. Destruction is a creative passion. In 1848 he led police on a merry chase. He spent time in the Russian slammer. He escapes through Japan, goes through the United States and ends up back in London, terrified people. His image, this is before photographs or photographs are just starting out, and there are photographs of him.

He met Marx, whom he hated, and Marx hated him. He thought that Marx was ruining class struggle, was ruining revolution by preaching over and over again about waiting for revolution. Class-conscious workers. What you need is peasants to rise up as they had in Pugachev's rebellion, and all the other rebellions in the early seventeenth and eighteenth century. He dies in the early 1870s, a phenomenal character. The other Russian, a gentle man, a geographer, Peter Kropotkin, K-R-O-P-O-T-K-I-N, is in the book. He wrote a pamphlet called The Anarchist Morality. When you get rid of the state, people are basically good. Anarchists believe that people are good. There's a tradition from Rousseau, by the way, there too. Rousseau, who lived in the east of France, or what would become France, around Chambéry, who believed in the primitive.

Anarchists believe that primitive social relations and even primitive ways of producing things, just associations you enter in because you want to, were the future. Kropotkin, who at the end of his life was once toasted by the king of England, and who had turned against the Russian Revolution--he died in, I think, 1921 or 1922. He was terrified, just disgusted by the Russian Revolution, which was already creating a centralized state. That's what he hated. He hated states. "You must destroy the state." But he was a gentle man. Yet he and a guy called Paul Brousse, you don't have to remember, who became a socialist leader and then went nuts later--that's not a very clinical term, but he had big problems later--they create the term "propaganda by the deed." What is a deed? A deed is a bomb. A deed is an attack. It's the murder of an official. The anarchists weren't the only ones doing this stuff.

There was a Russian group, briefly mentioned, called Narodnaya Volya, who believed in kind of a hierarchical post-revolutionary system. What they wanted to do was set out and kill officials. But so did the anarchist terrorists. They killed officials, one of which you've heard of already. You've probably heard of some of the others. President McKinley in 1901, Buffalo, New York, is killed by somebody who received funds from an anarchist organization in Patterson, New Jersey, I think, or is that Bresci? Anyway, Bresci kills King Umberto I of Italy, another anarchist assassination. They kill five or six leaders during this period of anarchist heyday really, the late nineteenth century. King Umberto I of Italy said that he considered assassination a professional risk. There were two attempts on his life and the third one nails him.

Alexander II, who liberated the serfs, is killed when he gets out of a sled to look at a bomb that doesn't work. Elizabeth, the empress of Austria-Hungary, who couldn't stand Franz Joseph and lived apart from him, is assassinated as well. But most anarchists were not killers. Now, if you think of American history, those of you who had Glenda's course, or David Blight's, other people here, you might know about Haymarket, the Haymarket affair in the 1880s. There they hanged four anarchists who were called les pendus in France. They had enormous influence. The les pendus were the hanged, as they're swinging in the breeze in a Chicago prison yard. They were anarchists and they inspire someone like Emma Goldman, who was a Russian-Jewish immigrant to the United States, who becomes an important American anarchist.

Anarchists set off to kill policemen, or to kill heads of state, or to kill generals; propaganda by the deed, the spark that will ignite this revolution. But the man you see before you--and I have become today a very modern man. I want to tell you, because this is my first try at PowerPoint. The person that you see before you is the guy I've been following around. I got interested in him for two reasons. One is that he is the first, really, along with a bombing at an opera in Barcelona, the Liceo to target ordinary people. To say that people of a social class were guilty because they were who they were. The spark does not necessarily have to be lit by killing a head of a state. Sadi Carnot, who would get his in 1894 on the Rue de la République in Lyon, president of France. He takes the decision to kill ordinary people.

Lots of terrorists since then have taken that decision. A classic example is insurgents in Punjab in India in the 1920s, bombing officers' clubs. There's a terrifying scene in that fantastic, but very difficult movie--because of the torture scene, I can't even use it in the French History course, The Battle of Algiers. You are with this woman who's planting a bomb in a café and she sees the people who are going to die. She sees babies with their mothers. She sees people having a drink in the French community there. She takes the decision to place the bomb. I believe that it kind of started with this guy. This is, again, not somebody I admire. I know him. Everywhere he's lived I've been. I guess if you're going to write a book about somebody as a prism on something or other, it's good to pick somebody who only lived to be twenty-one, because it's a shorter book. He was guillotined in May 1894.

Again, I do not admire him, but I'm going to tell you about him anyway. With the help of PowerPoint! How in the hell do I do this? I've got to remember how to do this. All right. That's Émile Henry. His father was acommunard who was condemned to death, somebody who'd fought in the Commune. So, this guy is born in Spain. His father contracted mercury poisoning in Spain, and comes back to France after the amnesty and dies. He has an older brother and a younger brother. What he does is, on a day in 1894, he sets out with a bomb and he walks in the fancy boulevards that, for him, represent all of the class differences between wealthy and poor people, center versus periphery and all of that. He goes down to the Café Terminus, which is on your right. It's those awnings there near the Gare Saint-Lazare.

I've had the rather odd experience of twice, once with friends and once with my son, having eaten in the restaurant that my book subject blew up, because it's still there, and sitting at the same table. He goes to four or five cafes, but there are not enough innocent people in them. So, he goes to the Terminus where there is a gypsy orchestra playing, pays for two beers. That seems a little odd, anarchist paying for a beer, because the right to theft was something that they still believed in, many of them, not all. Most were not terrorists, remember that. He goes into the Café Terminus. He gets a cigar. He lights the fuse. He throws it toward a chandelier and it blows up, killing one and wounding about eighteen people. That's not him. This anarchist is called Malatesta, who doesn't look particularly scary there.

Émile Henry had gone back to the Paris region. His mother had a very pitiful auberge. This is the era of bomb attacks in the early 1890s. That's a marmite, as bombs were sometimes called. He became an anarchist. His brother had already become an anarchist. To put yourself into the early 1890s in Paris, ordinary people, but not so much as the elites, were terrified of anarchist bombers. Ravachol, a name I sent around, who was a poor, pathetic in many ways but extremely poor guy who'd been sent out to beg by his mother. They had almost no money. They're from a place called Saint-Chamond, near Saint-Étienne. Ravachol was a counterfeiter and finally a murderer. He suffocates to death a hermit who had a mini fortune hidden in his bizarre cottage near Saint-Étienne. He escapes from the police and he goes to Paris.

In 1891 police beat the hell out of three anarchists in a march, a rather one-sided brawl. Two of them are condemned to big-time sentences. Ravachol decides to go and to kill the prosecuting attorney. He places a bomb, not knowing where the apartment was, and the bomb blows up. Then he set other bombs, too. After having done this, he goes to a restaurant, and he eats rather well, and he engages a waiter in conversation. He tries to convince the waiter to be an anarchist. The waiter sees he has a scar on his left hand, Ravachol did. Then he stupidly goes back later and eats in the same restaurant. Instead of bringing the second course, the waiter brings the police. After a tremendous struggle, Ravachol is captured, put on trial for his life, and he memorably holds up--how do you work this thing?--anyway, he is guillotined. He's really kind of a bastard. More than that, and he killed other people too, probably. But he finally is guillotined.

Two things happened, not only in Paris but in other places. The people of means living in the fancy quarters are extremely frightened. There are all sorts of death threats that get sent around. Ravachol, to those anarchist terrorists, he becomes a martyr. Look, here his head is framed by the guillotine. Ravachol, who had been betrayed by an anarchist friend, dies at age thirty-three. Christ died at age thirty-three, betrayed by a friend. So, he becomes this sort of, for radical anarchists, he becomes a vision of how life should be. There are songs called La Ravachol. There's another one called The Dynamite Polka, being sung.

Dynamite, from the point of view of anarchists, leveled the playing field. They viewed dynamite rather as the way in which muskets helped end the domain of feudalism. It levels the playing field. Dynamite, after all, was invented by whom? By Nobel, as in the Nobel Prize. So the people who support dynamite in French are called the dynamitards, the dynamiters. The Dynamite Polka. In Montmartre, where you have a lot of anarchist writers and artists. Pizarro is an anarchist. The literary and art critic, above all art, Félix Fénéon, who was a friend of Émile Henry, is an anarchist as well. So, it's into this world that the young Émile Henry. Here you go. Here's this one. I've read hundreds of these things that said, "You've always been hard with your domestics. You're going to be blown up. Death to the riches." There are hundreds of these things. They're sent all over Paris, not just the fancy neighborhoods.

There, hundreds and hundreds of times, at the airports you hear these explosions sometimes as they blow up suitcases that haven't been claimed. That's the first known machine that blows up suspect items, including lots of bad jokes--sardine cans with a little bit of powder left in them, and that kind of thing. It's in this world that Emile Henry learns to hate, and that he certainly does. That's where his mom had her auberge. Ironically, it's near Euro Disney now, but then it was a village. That's not the one. It was up the street a little bit. I did follow him around, you can see. There's his mother there. Up on the right is one of the places he lived, always around, except for one occasion, Montmartre.

That's his girlfriend. He had unrequited love. She had the disadvantage of being married to another anarchist. He writes her clumsy poems. He falls in love with her. She blows him off. But in the end, she wanted to take full credit before the press for having been the lover of Émile Henry after his deeds, his bombs, but he wasn't. That's one of the places he worked in Paris. I love that. That's a beautiful sign and that company hasn't existed since World War I. But you can follow him around. In 1892, Émile Henry, two years earlier, he had killed before. There was a strike in the south of France, glassworkers in Camaux. The third block on the left is number eleven and that's where the company is. They found a bomb there placed about 11:00 in the morning. Right there. That's not the way it looked then. I've gotten in there twice to see where he placed the bomb. My son gets a little tired. "Dad, do we have to look at another one of these places?" They find the bomb and they carry it down to the police station, which is still there. It was a reversible bomb, which means when the chemicals run together, boom! It kills five people terribly, five policeman and a secretary among them. Body parts all over the place.

Emile Henry, that's one of the places he lived. He is eliminated from the list of suspects because they said he could not have gone on the two errands his boss sent that day from near the station of the north, down toward the center of Paris, then up toward the Arc de Triomphe, gone back to Montmartre and gotten the bomb, placed the bomb, and gotten back in two hours and fifteen minutes. When he went on trial for his life in 1894, a detective said, "Yes, he could have done that in two hours and fifteen minutes." So, being a bit of an empiricist, I did it. And I replaced tramway and Omnibus with a bus and with a Metro. I never take cabs, but I took, instead of a carriage--of course I didn't take that--I took a cab and I subtracted eleven minutes when my cab couldn't turn left on the Avenue de l'Opéra. He did it. There's no question about it. In fact, when they did the reconstitution of this building, he knew every single part of this building. He did it. There's no question about it.

Why did he hate so? Part of it again, this is the theme we've talked about before, was the social geography of Paris. Everywhere he lived, with one exception that you just saw, was in people's Paris. All of the facades are still there. That's where he lived on the Rue Véron, on the very top floor. That's where the poor lived. He gets the bomb there in 1892. They hated Sacré-Coeur, for reasons you already know. It was a symbol of penance for the Franco-Prussian War and penance for the commune. His father was one of the people condemned to death, who was lucky enough to get out and not be executed.

In a Zola novel that's very underappreciated called Paris, published in 1898, it's about a priest who, to take an REM song, is "losing his religion." His brother is an anarchist, Guillaume. He has fantasies about blowing this place up. I think it's ugly as hell. I once went with my wife to see where they cast the huge bell that would drive people nuts and still does, called la Savoyarde. But that bell wasn't there. But as a symbol, you can't walk around Montmartre and not see it from various places. He becomes a terrorist because the people that he sees around him are very, very poor, and he convinces himself, even though he's an intellectual, he's a bourgeois. He could have gotten into the École Polytechnique, which is a super, Grande École. It's a big engineering school. He's a great student.

He's an intellectual. That's the other thing. Besides picking "innocent people." All people are innocent, but you know what I mean. The other thing is he is not a sad sack or a dangerous one like Ravachol. He is not a guy called Vaillant, who places a little, teeny tack bomb and throws it in the Chamber of Deputies to call attention to the plight of the poor, and is guillotined. The first person in the nineteenth century guillotined who did not kill somebody. This guy goes out to kill. There's a scene in an old Balzac novel called--all Balzac novels by definition are old, obviously--Old Goriot, Père Goriot, in which Rastignac, who was sort of this down-and-out noble who wants to make the big time in Paris by sleeping with all the right people. After Goriot dies, he's up in the northeast quadrant of Paris at Père Lachaise cemetery. He waves his hand down toward the fancy quarters, down ironically near where Café Terminus would be. The fancy quarters, even before there are boulevards, and he says the equivalent of, "It's war between you and me now, baby." That's a rough translation, but that's what he said.

Émile Henry, walking around on the hills and seeing people walk down to be domestics, because they couldn't afford to take the tramway or the Omnibus, horse-drawn carriages. He waves his hand and says, "It's war between you and me, baby, and I will ignite the spark that kills you MFs right away." That's what he does. When he walked out of his apartment, he looked down and happily he didn't have to see the Tour Montparnasse, which hadn't been built after huge payoffs in the early 1970s. Disgusting! But what he could see were these symbols of capitalism, the state, and the church. What did he see? He saw the Eiffel Tower, which was five years old, a symbol of the republic and the bourgeois revolution, as he saw it. He sees the Pantheon, where they buried all these Napoleonic marshals who basically got a lot of people killed if they didn't get themselves killed. And he sees Notre Dame. He says, "It's war between you and me."

This is the façade. I love this stuff. The inside building where he lived isn't there anymore. Now it's kind of an area that's a little bit sketchy. There's a lot of drug dealing. When I got myself into there, I had to kind of--I didn't want to look like a plainclothes policeman. Do I risk looking like a plainclothes policeman? No. I didn't want to look like a tourist sort of slumming. I don't look like that much, either. When I went by these guys who were sort of hanging out there, I said, "Salut les gars," or "Hi guys, what's up?" I got myself in there to see where he once had lived. The point of that is that you can see what he saw. That gate is exactly the same as that day when he walked out to kill for the second time.

His bomb that he threw into the Terminus--this is back in 1894, this is where we started. It hit a chandelier and exploded. He said at his trial that he threw it too low. He should have thrown it higher; it would have killed more people. Only one died. He'd already killed five before. People are terrified. They run all over the place. It was speculated that his was sort of an indirect suicide, because his unrequited love, this lady who lived in the Boulevard Voltaire, whose name was Elisa. But no, because he tries to escape in order to kill again. They chase him and they catch him. A barber helps catch him. A controller on the tramway hits him with the control mechanism that punches tickets, just like in the old days on those things, not that I ever was in a horse-drawn carriage. They get him and they take him.

He's arrested for murder, Émile Henry, and is put on trial. That's where he's writing his mother. We know a lot about him, because they kept all these documents. It was so fun doing this. I love stuff like that. His mother was devastated, as you can well imagine. She cannot believe that her Émile could have done this. He was her pride and joy after the death of the father. Those of you who have been to Paris will recognize this. This is the Conciergerie. This is where Louis XVI, Danton, Robespierre, Marie Antoinette, and others awaited, they put their head between the little window, as they used to say, la petite fenêtre, to be guillotined. It's also got one of the three most magnificent gothic halls anywhere in France.

His guards took notes every single day about what he said and the anarchist songs. They want to prove that somebody else was involved in this. There probably was somebody else in the 1892 attack who helped him close the bomb. So, Emile Henry goes on trial in April of 1894. He makes the famous declaration in which he says, "You have hung us in Chicago," Haymarket; "You have garroted us," that's slowly strangling us, "in Barcelona." When Franco was croaking in 1975, they were garroting an anarchist even at that time, 1975 in Barcelona. "You have shot us in Germany." I don't know how they killed them in Italy, but, "You've killed us in Italy." He says, "You, the bourgeois, who are in this café, you are not innocent. It's because of you, the petty bourgeois. You support les gros," the big ones, "on every possible occasion. You forget about us when your factory owners throw us out when we can no longer work any longer, or women workers happy not to have had to prostitute themselves in order to pay their rent and their husbands' rent by the end of the month. But what you can never do is destroy anarchism. Its roots are too deep."

On the 22nd of May 1894--that's what I said about writing a book about somebody that doesn't live very long--he is executed at Place Roquette in Paris, which was, by intent, the place where the state meted out justice, right in the heart of working-class Paris. That was not an idle selection of a space. We have his notes up to the very end of his life. This guy, Deibler, is the executioner. Monsieur de Paris. This is the executioner meting out, in quotes, "justice." Public execution, by the way, in France, maybe I said this already, was in 1936 at Versailles--the last execution was in 1974. I'm constantly asked by people all sorts of political opinions in France, where executions, public capital punishment is repudiated by most everybody, how that we still have it here. This is not a political diatribe, so I won't say anything about that.

Anyway, Deibler, his son was the last public executioner, did the last public execution back when. There he is. There's somebody else putting their head through the little window. That's what I mean by that. That's the equivalent of his mug shot. So, he was wrong about the roots of anarchism being too deep. What clearly happens is that there was a trial during that same summer where they put a lot of intellectuals on trial who did nothing except to say that they were anarchists or to criticize the state. What my book--it's really a book also about state terrorists. It's about the overreaction of states. Our state is a good example of that, and the tendency to try to denigrate anyone who doesn't agree with us as being terrorists, whether they were or not.

The intellectuals, the jury sees through it in 1894 and only a couple thieves are condemned and them not to death. There's anarchists in 1968 in Paris. There's a band of anarchists in about 1909, 1910, 1911, that hold up stores with most modern tools, shotguns and things like that. The anarchist attacks were over. There was no question about that. That doesn't make Émile Henry less interesting. As an intellectual, the cross-class kind of--you see this in Middle-Eastern terrorism, too. My book is also about state terrorists. What stops anarchist attacks in Spain is the fact that the public becomes aware that the police were hideously torturing people who did not agree with the politics of the State. They were torturing them. You see where one could go in a political diatribe, which this isn't. In Italy when the state overreacts, anarchist attacks virtually end.

Now, anarchism does not end in Spain. It does not end also for reasons that are perfectly clear already in Buenos Aires. There's still a huge anarchist community of exiles from these Western European countries from all over the place living in London, ironically in one of the more chi-chi parts of London which was then very poor, around Charlotte Street, where you can't afford to have a pint of beer anymore. That's where they live. So, he was wrong about that. The roots of anarchism were too great. But the connection that I want to make, obviously, especially since this is being filmed it's not the place to do it, but when states, including our own, overreact, what they tend to do is to lash out in ways, and imprison unjustly, and torture, and don't give legal rights. What they do is tend to increase the number of those people who despise us.

If you look back, and again the commune is not a bad way of thinking about this, somebody figured out that of all the victims of terrorist attacks, no matter how you define them, the ratio between victims of overreaction by states to victims of anarchist terror--and I'm not apologizing for anarchist terror. I hate it. I'm not apologizing for terror of any kind. I hate it. But the ratio was 260:1. I suppose there's a lesson to be learned there somewhere. But it was fun to follow Emile Henry around, even though I don't admire him, and to try to give you a sense of how people felt when they hated in the 1890s. Their answer was not the same answer as socialists, which are to take power mostly through electoral processes, but to smash the state by blowing it up. See you on Monday.

[end of transcript]

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