The Crimes of Paris

by Dorothy Hoobler; Thomas Hoobler

  Your inability for the noble offices you exercise is so obvious that a few days ago I had a mind to present myself at your offices in order to give you some fuller information and correct a few of your errors, whether intentional or not.

  I declare Dieudonné to be innocent of the crime that you know full well I committed. I refute Rodriguez’ allegations; I alone am guilty.…

  I know there will be an end to this struggle which has begun between me and the formidable arsenal at Society’s disposal. I know that I will be beaten; I am the weakest. But I sincerely hope to make you pay dearly for your victory.

  Awaiting the pleasure of meeting you.

  Garnier16

  Just to prove the letter was no hoax, Garnier enclosed a sheet onto which he had carefully placed his fingerprints, along with an inscription taunting Bertillon to put on his glasses and “watch out.” Bertillon duly checked the prints and reported that they were indeed Garnier’s.

  As if that were not bold enough, Bonnot personally marched into the offices of a major newspaper, Le Petit Parisien, to complain about mistakes in one of the stories it had printed about the gang. At first no one recognized him — blond, without facial hair — until he sat down with a reporter named Charles Sauerwein and placed a 9-millimeter Browning automatic on the desk in front of him. Bonnot declared, “We’ll burn off our last round against the cops, and if they don’t care to come, we’ll certainly know how to find them.” 17 (The Demon Chauffeur intended to deliver on his promise. He had obtained four Winchester repeating rifles, accurate and deadly. By contrast, the French police were armed only with cavalry revolvers.)

  Just as calmly, Bonnot strode out of the building without interference. Sauerwein claimed journalistic ethics prevented him from notifying the police, or perhaps he hoped he would get another such sensational scoop sometime. Sauerwein and Le Petit Parisien showed their gratitude by henceforth calling the criminals La Bande à Bonnot, which somehow stuck, probably to Garnier’s annoyance.

  Other events must have convinced the gang that their dream of overturning the government was drawing nearer. Paris’s taxi drivers had been waging a strike for more than four months. The cab companies had brought in scab drivers from Corsica (who, unsurprisingly, were unable to comprehend the Paris street system), and the strikers began to bomb taxis. A striker leaving a union meeting was shot by one of the scabs, further raising tensions in a city already apprehensive about anarchist murderers who could apparently carry out their crimes with impunity.

  Though the newspapers reported that the Bonnot Gang had scores of members, in reality it was quite small. For its next crime, however, it would be augmented by René Valet, Élie Monier, and a shy, tubercular eighteen-year-old named André Soudy, who had decided he was soon to die anyway because he could not afford treatment for his illness, so why not go out with a bang? Soudy defiantly flaunted his nickname, Pas de Chance (“Out of Luck”). Though publicity about the gang’s exploits had frightened Parisians, it also made it increasingly difficult to find unguarded automobiles waiting to be stolen outside the houses of wealthy citizens. The gang still wanted to accomplish their original goal of robbing a bank, so they developed yet another tactic: carjacking. Now six in all, they camped out all night in the Forest of Sénart, on the road between Paris and Lyons. By 7:00 A.M. on March 25 they were awake and waiting for their prey, another luxury car: a blue and yellow De Dion-Bouton limousine, just purchased from a showroom on the Champs-Élysées. A De Dion employee was chauffeuring it to the Côte d’Azur, where its new owner, the comte de Rouge, was vacationing. The only passenger was the comte’s male secretary, who had come to Paris to make the eighteen-thousand-franc purchase. The De Dion company was known for the high quality of its engines; if Bonnot had somehow gotten wind of the delivery and chosen this car on purpose, it may have been because of his dissatisfaction with the way the previous Delaunay-Belleville had broken down.

  The gang had earlier stopped two horse-drawn carts at gunpoint and forced their drivers to block the road. As the De Dion-Bouton approached, Garnier waved his arms, indicating to the driver that there had been some kind of accident. When the car stopped, Garnier, Bonnot, and Callemin walked toward it, each of them carrying automatic pistols. Shouting, “It’s only the car we want,” Garnier raised his weapon to indicate that the driver should surrender. The driver, prepared for such a situation, drew a pistol of his own, but before he could use it, Bonnot shot him. The secretary, unarmed, raised his hands in surrender, but Garnier fired at him anyway. The bandits rolled both men into the ditch along the road; the secretary, unknown to them, was only wounded and later was able to identify pictures of the men.

  After turning the car around, the bandits were soon heading back toward Paris. Elated at the feeling of power driving always gave him, Bonnot began to sing “Le temps des cerises” (“Cherry Blossom Time”), and the others, recognizing the words, joined in. It had been an anthem of the Communards, a song of eerie poignancy, since it implied that good times were always as short-lived as the spring blossoming of cherry trees — followed by death.

  Bonnot skirted the capital city and took the main road north. By ten o’clock that morning they reached Chantilly, a rather sleepy town famous for its lace making. The bandits were not there to purchase cloth; what interested them was that it was the location of another branch of the Société Générale bank. The car stopped in the town’s main square, and Garnier, Callemin, Valet, and Monier went inside the bank. Outside, Soudy stood on the sidewalk with one of the Winchester rifles and Bonnot sat chain-smoking in the driver’s seat.

  The bank clerks looked up in surprise as the four armed men appeared. Callemin shouted, “Messieurs, not a word,” but one of the clerks dropped to the floor, and Garnier, nervous and trigger-happy, fired six shots into a cashier. Callemin shot a third employee; Valet followed his lead but proved a poor shot, merely hitting a fourth clerk once in the shoulder. Monier remained at the door. Garnier leaped over the counter and ran for the safe. This time, he had said, they would take only cash and leave the worthless bonds alone.

  The bank manager, as it happened, had gone across the street for a coffee. Hearing shots, he started back, and Soudy fired several times at him, missing his target but certainly alerting everyone near the square that something was going on. People from shops and restaurants began to gather outside, keeping at a safe distance, all eyes on the idling automobile and the preternaturally calm man at the wheel.

  Maurice Leblanc, creator of the fictional thief Arsène Lupin, wrote a dispatch for an American newspaper describing the scene:

  But where is Bonnot? At the steering wheel. All the danger centers on him, isolated in the middle of the street, the center of a gathering crowd.… He does not move an inch. My informants have told me he was terrible to look upon. His whole body was contracted under the fearful strain of his muscles, rendered rigid by the anxiety of the moment. His face was distorted, almost disfigured.… His sense of hearing and of sight were concentrated to the last degree. And there he stood, huddled up behind the wheel, his foot on the clutch pedal, his right hand on the gear lever, every tendon straining, ready to spring — the tiger bandit! 18

  The four robbers emerged from the bank with bags filled with money and piled into the car. Soudy, who must have felt even more tension than Bonnot on this, his first job, collapsed on the pavement, and his comrades had to lift him inside before Bonnot could drive off, starting with one of those signature tire-squealing U-turns that astonished everyone who watched.

  Bonnot headed south, once more with guns blazing from the seat behind him to scatter anyone who tried to block the car’s path. Someone in Chantilly used a telephone to alert the police in the next town south, but since their only transportation was a bicycle and a horse, they were unable to stop the powerful De Dion-Bouton as it roared through. The automobile was finally found abandoned in the town of Asnières, northeast of Paris. Because it was near a railway station, the police who discovered it assumed th
e gang had boarded a train. The Sûreté, on receiving this report, sent agents to the Gare du Nord, hoping to meet the bandits as they arrived in Paris. Unfortunately for them, the robbers had stayed on foot. Casually, they walked into the suburb of Lavallois-Perret, which was swarming with police because it was the site of the taxi drivers’ union headquarters. The bandits soon disappeared in the crowds of demonstrators, richer by some fifty thousand francs, the largest haul they had ever made.

  v

  That was the high point of the auto bandits’ career. Their exploits had thrown the government into turmoil and the population into panic. Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré (a cousin of the mathematician) called an emergency meeting of his cabinet to discuss how to deal with the situation. After conferring with President Fallières, Poincaré announced that the police would be given additional powers and better equipment. For the first time, they would have a motorized unit, consisting of eight automobiles and armed with automatic pistols and repeating rifles. Two hundred men were added to the Sûreté and six hundred to the Parisian police force — all assigned to hunt down what was in reality half a dozen men. Equipped with lists of the addresses of known anarchists, even the most peaceful ones, police swooped down on working-class neighborhoods, rounding up suspects. The Société Générale offered a 100,000-franc reward for information leading to the gang’s capture. Hundreds of reports flowed into the Sûreté from all over Paris and the countryside. Faced with the necessity of checking them out, the police were continually chasing phantoms. As in the Mona Lisa case, they had too many potential suspects.

  Aware of the intense manhunt, the gang had split up. Each of the members found hiding places, sometimes changing them every night. Despite the huge reward on their heads, they found no lack of sympathizers and comrades who would shelter them. But of course the more people who knew of their whereabouts, the greater the likelihood that someone would betray them.

  André Soudy, who had taken part in only one of the gang’s robberies, fled to the coastal town of Berck. There he found a haven in an isolated cottage, home of Bartholémy Baraille, an elderly man who had lost his job on the railway when he joined a strike in 1910. Baraille was well known to the local community for his anarchist sympathies — he subscribed to l’anarchie — and apparently someone informed the Sûreté of his visitor. (Soudy’s description, given by those who had seen him with a rifle in Chantilly’s main square, had been widely circulated.) Inspector Jouin and some of his associates arrived from Paris and staked out the cottage. When Soudy emerged, they followed him to the railway station. After he purchased a ticket, they placed him under arrest. He surrendered meekly, even though the police found on him a loaded Browning automatic and a vial of potassium cyanide, along with a thousand francs, presumably from the Chantilly heist. But Soudy refused, or was unable, to give the police any information on the whereabouts of the other gang members.

  Meanwhile, Raymond Callemin found a hiding place in a small apartment occupied by two friends in the nineteenth arrondissement. Having turned twenty-two the day after the gang’s most recent theft, Raymond-la-Science bought himself a birthday present with his share of the loot: a new bicycle, specially built for racing, and a cycling outfit that suited his taste in elegant dress.

  Jean Belin, a young detective at the Sûreté (who would one day be the agency’s head), later wrote admiringly of Inspector Jouin, who was leading the effort to find the bandits.

  Jouin… had great personal charm — especially for women.… Perhaps it was because he had an eye for a pair of pretty ankles that he first stumbled on the track of the nefarious Callemin.

  He greatly admired a very attractive young woman who was in the habit of flirting under the trees of the outer boulevards with a commonplace man altogether unworthy of her obvious charms. The couple turned out to be Callemin and his current inamorata. 19

  Jouin followed them home and then called a squad of detectives to stake out the place. When Callemin left the apartment with his new bicycle, he found himself surrounded and swiftly handcuffed by Jouin and the detectives. Though the police found two Browning automatics and ninety-five bullets in his saddlebag, Callemin had not been able to get off a shot. Even so, he taunted his captors as they took him away: “My head’s worth a hundred thousand francs, and yours just seven centimes — the price of a bullet.” 20

  Garnier had also come to earth in Paris, with another old comrade, in the eighteenth arrondissement, the site of the working-class insurrection of 1871. Compelled to remain inside, he set down on paper some justifications for his actions. “If I became an anarchist,” he wrote, “it’s because I hated work, which is only a form of exploitation.”

  Answering the criticism from some anarchist circles that the gang had killed ordinary employees, potential comrades in the struggle, Garnier wrote, “Why kill workers? — They are vile slaves, without whom there wouldn’t be the bourgeois and the rich.

  -“It’s in killing such contemptible slaves that slavery will be destroyed.” 21

  Bonnot, whose photograph as the mastermind of the gang appeared almost daily in the newspapers, had holed up in the back of a secondhand-clothes shop. Like Garnier, he avidly read l’anarchie, which was still printing provocative sentiments. On April 4, one of its writers lectured the bourgeoisie: “If you apply your wicked laws, then too bad for you; social violence legitimates the most bloody reprisals, and following on from the muffled voice of Brownings, you will hear another, more powerful voice: that of dynamite!” 22

  Bonnot composed a letter in response to sentiments like these, reflecting on what life had brought him: “I am a famous man. My name has been trumpeted to the four corners of the globe. All those people who go through so much trouble to get others to talk about them, yet don’t succeed, must be very jealous about the publicity that the press has given my humble self.

  “I am not appreciated in this society. I have the right to live, and while your imbecilic criminal society tries to stop me, well too bad for it, too bad for you!”

  He recalled some of his life’s few happy moments, the times when he made love to Judith in the cemetery at Lyons: “I didn’t ask for much. I walked with her by the light of the moon.… It was there that I found the happiness I’d dreamed about all my life, the happiness I’d always run after and which was stolen from me each time.”

  Unlike Garnier, his partner in crime, Bonnot expressed some regrets: “At Montgeron I didn’t intend to kill the driver, Mathillet, but merely to take his car. Unfortunately when we signaled him to stop, Mathillet pointed a gun at us and that finished him. I regretted Mathillet’s death because he was a prole like us, a slave of bourgeois society. It was his gesture that was fatal.

  “Should I regret what I’ve done? Yes, perhaps, but I will carry on.…” 23

  vi

  The police were slowly tightening the net around the fugitives. Élie Monier, who had been identified by bank clerks as one of those who had taken part in the Chantilly robbery, was unwise enough to meet one of the editors of l’anarchie for dinner. Since the staff members of the radical paper were under continual surveillance, Monier’s cover was blown. Instead of making an immediate arrest, the tail on the newspaper editor followed Monier to his hideout — the Hôtel de Lozère on the boulevard de Menilmontant, near the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

  Jouin, the agency’s second-in-command, had now been appointed to head the “flying brigade” created to use the motor bandits’ own tactics to bring them down. He lost no time in apprehending Monier. In a predawn raid, he led his squad to the hotel, where they burst into Monier’s room, catching him asleep. There were two more loaded Brownings on the night table, but Monier was unable to reach them. Jouin triumphantly released the news that yet another member of the gang had been apprehended.

  Among Monier’s effects were some letters with addresses of other possible hiding places, including the secondhand shop in Ivry where Bonnot had gone to ground. It was, recalled Belin, “a desolate region of the city�
�� dotted with hundreds of tumble-down shacks where criminals, and down and outs, and every kind of undesirable used to live. In this melancholy region of huts and ruined houses… was a miserable second-hand clothes store.” 24

  Antoine Gauzy, the owner of the shop, was an unlikely anarchist: middle-aged, with a wife and three children to feed. His political inclinations were indicated only by the fact that he had named his youngest child Germinal, after Zola’s novel about a coal miners’ strike. Unluckily for him, his brother had been a friend of Monier’s, which was how Bonnot had come to be staying in one of the tiny rooms above Gauzy’s shop. Gauzy had sent his wife and children to the countryside, a wise precaution, though Bonnot said he planned to move on soon.

  Four men whose bowler hats marked them as plainclothes policemen arrived while Gauzy was talking to a friend downstairs. Jouin, who led the group, said they had come to search the premises for stolen goods. Leaving one of his men downstairs with the visitor, Jouin led the way to the upper floor. Finding the door to the bedroom locked, he ordered Gauzy to open it. The shutters over the single window were closed, and Jouin, the first one through the door, saw only a vague shape in the darkness, which suddenly stood up and revealed itself as a man. Jouin carried a stick and struck out with it, seemingly stunning Bonnot. But as a second policeman, Inspector Colmar, entered the room, Bonnot managed to pull a small revolver from his pocket. At close range, he shot Jouin three times, once through the neck, killing him. He then turned his weapon on Colmar, who managed to shout, “Attention, c’est Bonnot,” before being cut down as well. 25