FEBRUARY LUNCHEON: Award Winning Teacher Dr. John Merriman on "Terrorism"
MEET THE AUTHOR of "Dynamite Club: How A Café Bombing Ignited the Age of Modern Terror" — A provocative "True Crime" story of the 1894 French "War On Terror" that mirrors our own. Bombs lead to deaths of French and USA Presidents...in 1901.
February Luncheon—Alumni, Guests of Harvard, Yale & Princeton
WHEN: Friday, Feb 7, 2014
TIMES: Register 11:30 am, Lunch 12 pm, Speaker 12:45pm, Q&A 1:30pm
WHERE: Michaels on East, 1212 S East Ave. Sarasota
DRESS: Business Casual.
ENJOY: Lunch, Dessert, Tea, Coffee, Cash Bar for Beer, Wine, Cocktails
Those who think of terrorism as an inexplicable evil produced by an alien culture will have their eyes opened by this fascinating study of 19th-century anarchist terrorists.
Paris in the belle époque was a place of leisure, elegance, and power. Newly electrified, the city’s wide boulevards were lined with posh department stores and outdoor cafés. But prosperity was limited to a few. Most lived in dire poverty, and workers and intellectuals found common cause in a political philosophy—anarchism—that embraced the overthrow of the state by any means necessary.
Yet in targeting civilians to achieve their ends, the dynamite bombers charted a new course. Seeking martyrdom, believing fervently in their goal, and provoking a massive government reaction that only increased their ranks, these "evildoers" became, in effect, the first terrorists in modern history.
On a February evening in 1894, a young radical intellectual named Émile Henry drank two beers at an upscale Parisian restaurant, then left behind a bomb as a parting gift. This incident, which rocked the French capital, lies at the heart of The Dynamite Club, a mesmerizing account of Henry and his cohorts and the war they waged against the bourgeoisie—setting off bombs in public places, killing the president of France, and eventually assassinating President McKinley in 1901.
Yale historian John Merriman (History of Modern Europe) tells Henry's story, a well-educated young man from a politically radical family; an understandable sympathetic figure—a sensitive dreamer whose outrage at the misery of the poor curdled into a fanatical hatred of bourgeois society.
He found a home in Europes percolating anarchist movement, whose adherents celebrated a cult of revolutionary violence and sang hymns to Lady Dynamite; their bombings and assassinations set off a wave of panic and police repression. Merrimans account frames an illuminating study of working-class radicalism in belle époque France and its bitter conflict with the establishment in an age when class warfare was no metaphor. Its also an absorbing true crime story, with Dostoyevskian overtones, about high ideals that motivate desperate acts.
OUR SPEAKER:
John Merriman, who received his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan, teaches French and Modern European history at Yale. Merriman received Yale University’s Harwood F. Byrnes/Richard B. Sewall Teaching Prize in 2000, and was awarded a Docteur Honoris Causa in France in 2002, and the “Medal of Meritorious Service to Polish Education” by the Ministry of Education of Poland in 2009. Two of his courses are available on line and YouTube through Yale—France since 1871 and Europe, 1648-1945.
His books include
• The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848-1851 (1978);
• The Red City: Limoges and the French Nineteenth Century (1985),
• The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier (1991),
• A History of Modern Europe since the Renaissance, 2 vols. (1996); and
• The Stones of Balazuc: A French Village in Time (2002),
• Police Stories: Making the French State, 1815-1851 (2005).
