Café Terminus attack

On the evening of February 12, 1894, this location was the site of a violent transformation in the history of global conflict. A young anarchist named Emile Henry entered the bustling Café Terminus, which stood just across from the Saint-Lazare train station, with a bomb concealed in his coat. He sat for a time, listening to a Romani orchestra play, before lighting the fuse and hurling the device toward the musicians and the patrons. While the explosion killed only one person that night, it shattered the established norms of political violence. Before this attack, radicals typically targeted specific figures of power like presidents or magistrates. Henry broke this pattern by choosing ordinary civilians, declaring that there were no innocent bourgeois, and explicitly aiming to strike at the public itself. This act is now recognized as a pivotal moment in the emergence of modern, indiscriminate terrorism.