Émile Henry (26 September 1872 – 21 May 1894) was a French anarchist, who on 12 February 1894 detonated a bomb at the Café Terminus in the Parisian Gare Saint-Lazare killing one person and wounding twenty. Though his activity in the anarchist movement was limited, he garnered much attention as a result of his crimes and of his age. He was also seen as one of the first people of a growing group of revolutionaries (largely anarchist) who subscribed to the doctrine of the "propaganda of the deed", which would later take the life of many governmental figures. Early life Henry grew up in a liberal, aristocratic family with anarchist sympathies. They lived in exile in Spain for a time because his father, Fortuné Henry, had been a communard. He was condemned to death in absentia in 1873, and the family did not return to France until the amnesty in 1880. As a result, Henry was born in Barcelona and regaled from an early age with stories of state oppression. These anti-state attitudes were confirmed when the Spanish authorities confiscated the Henry family's property due to their political beliefs. Henry's father was forced to take a miserable factory job and died of mercury poisoning when Henry was only 10 years old. After the family returned to France, Henry's brother, an anarchist, eventually helped him establish connections with French revolutionary circles. Henry passed the writing portion of the entrance exam for the prestigious École Polytechnique, but he failed his oral exams and went on to find work as a trainee for an engineering firm. Motivated by "a profound feeling of injustice", Henry became an anarchist in 1891 or 1892. He was at first opposed to violent actions that had the potential to cause harm to ordinary people, such as Ravachol's bombings of the living quarters of government officials, where workers and children could also be present. However, police repression of anarchists following Ravachol's capture soon convinced him otherwise. Bombing of the Café Terminus Henry was furious over the state execution of fellow anarchist Auguste Vaillant. Motivated by the French Third Republic's endemic political corruption and the execution of Ravachol, Vaillant carried out a bomb attack on the French Chamber of Deputies on 9 December 1893. Although there were no fatalities, twenty deputies were injured. Henry took it upon himself to avenge Vaillant's death. Historian John Merriman has suggested that the bombing