“Great ideas that influence intellectual and aesthetic movements are…first introduced to the community of writers and artists through philosophy. Philosophical texts codify the definitions and boundaries of concepts that have influenced Western thought, art, science, and politics since the times of Plato and Aristotle…” -Art Berman, Preface to Modernism. John Merriman's Dynamite Club manages to represent the decadence and injustice of a turn-of-the-century Parisian society of bourgeois capitalists, which fueled the expansion of anarchist ideology and even tinged its destructive creed with shades of virtue and righteousness. However, an apparent infatuation with the vindication of the brilliant Émile Henry and the so-called 'Dynamite Club' terrorists – which he cleverly achieves by overemphasizing the grueling socioeconomic conditions that organized the advent of this terrorism – leads him to ignore an account of the philosophical framework that founded this specific form of anarchism in this specific historical moment. Therefore, a number of questions remain fundamentally unanswered. Where - in addition to purely irrational revenge - did the anarchist morality "of the deed", which legitimized the killing of innocents, acquire intellectual authority and appeal? Why did anarchism preach the absolute destruction of the capitalist state instead of mere restructuring? How did the obsession with a post-state utopia gain relevance in an intellectual class? The following article attempts a solution, in echo of Art Berman's introductory words, what can be called a "genealogy of fin de siècle Dynamite Club anarchy." France', through the exploration of the intellectual sources for their morality...... middle of the sheet ......p.: np, 1846. N. pag. Print.• Berman, art. Preface to Modernism. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1994. Print.• Călinescu, Matei. Five faces of modernity: modernism, avant-garde, decadence, kitsch, postmodernism. Durham: Duke UP, 1987. Print.• Grier, Michelle. “Kant's Critique of Metaphysics.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford University, 29 February 2004. Web. 02 April 2014.• Klein, Richard J. Literature and Revolution. vol. No. 39. Np: Yale French Studies, 1967. Print.• Leighten, Patricia. "The World Turned Upside Down: Modernism and Anarchist Strategies of Inversion in L'Assiete Au Beuvre." The journal of modern periodical studies. 2nd ed. vol. 4. Np: Penn State UP, 2014. N. pag. Print.• Merriman, John M. The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Turn-of-the-Century Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. Print.