Home > Lectures > Dynamite Club: The Anarchists

Dynamite Club: The Anarchists

By John Merriman - Yale
get flash player

Lecture Description

Anarchists, unlike syndicalists and other leftists, seek to destroy the state rather than to capture state power for themselves. Emile Henry and other late nineteenth-century radicals inaugurated the modern practice of terrorism in their individualism and their indiscriminate choice of civilian targets. Despite the terrifying consequences of individual acts of terrorism, these pale in comparison to the consequences of state terrorism.

Course Description

Related Resources

Lecture Transcript and Reading Assignment

Course Index

  1. Introduction to France Since 1871
  2. The Paris Commune and Its Legacy
  3. Centralized State and Republic
  4. A Nation? Peasants, Language, and French Identity
  5. Workshop and Factory
  6. The Waning of Religious Authority
  7. Mass Politics and the Political Challenge from the Left
  8. Dynamite Club: The Anarchists
  9. General Boulanger and Captain Dreyfus
  10. Cafes and the Culture of Drink
  11. Paris and the Belle Epoque
  12. French Imperialism
  13. The Origins of World War I
  14. Trench Warfare
  15. The Home Front
  16. The Great War, Grief, and Memory
  17. The Popular Front
  18. The Dark Years: Vichy France
  19. Resistance
  20. Battles For and Against Americanization
  21. Vietnam and Algeria
  22. Charles De Gaulle
  23. May 1968
  24. Immigration