The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  Apaches and Other Hooligans

  Les aliénés, the alienated, is the French term for the mentally ill. As a new and industrial society was emerging throughout the West, a society whose workings were based on professional expertise (on engineers and chemists, civil servants, statisticians, doctors and lawyers), those who were not and perhaps could not be integrated into this new, rational and orderly commonwealth became a special concern. At a moment when science appeared to promise a solution lying almost within reach of civilized mankind, for every ill and evil, outsiders - the insane and the criminal in particular - were not only inconvenient, their very existence threatened the validity, the self-image, of rational civilization.

  Parallel to the phenomenon of neurasthenia in Europe and the United States, the rise of violent crime also became a constant preoccupation in the popular imagination. The world was becoming an increasingly dangerous place, the argument went, and particularly younger criminals were becoming more reckless and more brutal with every passing year. Newspaper stories of famous and gory misdeeds were one expression of the public fascination with crime and violence. The million-selling Petit journal in Paris devoted around 12 per cent of its print space and many of its illustrated title pages to stories on murders, muggings and rapes, and from the London Daily Mail to Austria’s Wiener Zeitung sensational crime was omnipresent.

  No gang and no horror story was more beloved by the popular press than the spectacular apaches stalking the streets of Paris. A loose conglomeration of rival youth gangs, the apaches and their leaders became famous for their ruthless and violent muggings and gang fights at the heart of the French capital. ‘Their’ streets in the Marais and in the outlying workers’ areas had become no-go areas for the police, and at night their rule of the urban territory appeared complete. The young gangsters had come to prominence in 1902, after a bloody spate of warfare between competing groups.

  It was Victor Moris, a journalist, who had named these youth gangs ‘apaches’. War had broken out between two groups after the beautiful prostitute Marie-Hamélie Hélie had changed protectors and allied herself to a young man nicknamed Leca, the chief of the Popincourt apaches. Her slighted former boyfriend embarked on a campaign of retribution. The two clans clashed and several members were knifed before the two protagonists could be arrested and sentenced to banishment in Cayenne. By then, however, their war had become a piece of urban legend. The Paris theatre Les Bouffes du Nord put on a revue show featuring the apache story and offered the main role to the real-life Marie-Hamélie Hélie, who almost became the protagonist of her own story on stage - but she was never to appear in this role. The police prefect forbade her appearance, on reasons of public morality.

  The apaches, the ‘last rebels against industrial discipline’, were becoming a symbol of everything that was perilous in France. ‘All of France is at the mercy of the apaches’, headlined the Journal de Roubaix in 1907, while the socialist Humanité complained in 1910 that ‘the apaches are masters of the street. They injure, brutalize, and hurt passers-by [with impunity]’. The mass-circulation Le Matin, meanwhile, offered a solution in a dramatic appeal to Mother Guillotine herself: ‘She is profoundly asleep, lethargic … wake up! This is the cry of all juries in France, the clamour of the popular classes, exasperated by the recent crimes!’

  The newspapers were quick to create a whole apache folklore, detailing the lives and characters of their leaders and even particular methods of committing robberies, like the coup de père François, a tactic that involved asking a well-to-do passer-by for the time and then calmly going through his pockets while an accomplice who had approached the victim from behind was strangling him with a silk scarf.

  By 1910 the original apaches were overtaken, in the French public imagination at least, by a new Paris gang whose leader, Jules Bonnot (1876-1912), quickly came to national notoriety as the country’s most brutal criminal. Bonnot, who ironically had once during his chequered career worked as chauffeur for Arthur Conan Doyle, was perfect for the role of public enemy number one. A committed anarchist and a mechanic who stole cars for use in his spectacular and bloody robberies, he was the ideal incarnation of public fears.

  It was the first time that cars were used as getaway and drive-by vehicles in crimes, and the public response was extraordinary. As Bonnot and his accomplices launched into a crime spree unprecedented in French history, the country’s newspapers followed his every step.

  The 21st of December 1911: a young money courier was attacked and severely injured in the rue Ordener; 31 December: surprised during an attempted car theft, Bonnot and an accomplice killed the car’s chauffeur and a night watchman; 3 January: two members of the gang killed a wealthy couple during a break in; 27 February: a policeman was shot dead after an argument about a ticket for speeding in front of the Gare Saint-Lazare; the next morning the gang attempted to steal the contents of a safe, but were forced to flee; 25 March: the gang attacked and killed a car driver and owner before deciding to break into the Société Générale in Chantilly, where they shot three employees before escaping.

  This campaign of violent crime had been more than enough to send the French press into a frenzy, particularly after one of the gang, Octave Garnier, coolly wrote to Le Matin to issue a public challenge to the police: ‘I know very well that I will be overwhelmed and that I am the weaker party, but I will make you pay a heavy price for your victory.’

  On 28 April 1912 the gang’s luck finally ran out. Holed up in a house in Choisy-le-Roi, close to Paris, the wounded Bonnot and an accomplice were betrayed and encircled by fifteen policemen, soon joined by local men with hunting rifles. Having tracked the criminals for more than six months, the prefect of police, Louis Lépine, was not going to take any chances. A regiment of artillery with a heavy machine gun was dispatched on his order. Soon, hundreds of armed men were participating in the siege.

  News of the siege had spread rapidly throughout the capital, and tempted by the chance of watching bloody history in the making, thousands of Parisians took the train to Choisy-le-Roi to watch the events for themselves. By mid-afternoon, thirty thousand spectators were watching the siege and the sporadic exchanges of gunfire. From a safe distance, they observed a courageous lieutenant sneak up to the house, protected by a cartload of hay, and place sticks of dynamite outside it. Two detonations shook the building, which was stormed by police soon afterwards. Inside, the attackers found Bonnot bleeding heavily and protected by two mattresses. He had waited for the attack. With the cry ‘Salauds!’ (‘Bastards’) he emptied the magazines of his guns and was fatally wounded in the shoot-out.

  By now almost all members of the gang had been killed or arrested. The two survivors still at large, both young men in their early twenties, were shot in May after a second siege, even more dramatic than the first and involving a battery of machine guns, two regiments of soldiers, hundreds of policemen and 40,000 spectators. In the pockets of one of the criminals, the publicity-seeking Octave Garnier, was a note: ‘Our women and our children are crammed together in slums while thousands of big houses stay empty. We are building palaces and we live in hovels. Worker, develop your life, your intelligence, your strength. You are a sheep; the cops are dogs and the bourgeois are the shepherds. Your blood pays for the luxuries of the rich. Our enemy is our master. Long live anarchy.’ Arrested before the sieges, three remaining members of the ‘automobile apaches’, as the press were quick to call Bonnot’s men, were condemned to death and executed by guillotine on 21 April 1913.

  The fame of the apaches spread throughout Europe and became a byword for a new, particularly violent kind of crime, seen in Vienna as much as in St Petersburg and London. But was there, in fact, a wave of new crime? There is no clear indication that there was, though any attempt to answer this question invariably becomes mired in questions about statistics. The brief answer is that statistics show not crimes committed, but charges brought and sentences passed, and that some increase in these was certainly due to more efficien
t policing, changing sentencing policies, and to the general rise in population. On the whole, there was even a slight decline in crimes against property in France, Britain and Germany, while violent crime rose slightly.

  There was one spectacular exception to this rule. In Russia, and particularly St Petersburg, a wave of ‘hooliganism’ put even the Nevsky Prospect out of bounds after nightfall for all but the bravest. Imperial St Petersburg, always precarious with its mixture of tough repression and utter lawlessness in certain quarters of the city, had felt this crime wave from the early 1900s, when journalists noticed a marked rise in violence and insolence on the part of youth gangs: ‘every passerby risks attack by hooligans. Demands for money and assaults on those who refuse to comply have already been reported in the [crime] chronicle. People are afraid to walk the streets alone.…Hooligans do not ponder consequences - if need be, they are quick to use their knives and other weapons.’

  Newspapers were full of reports about random violence. Street stabbings, in which the assailants left their victims bleeding on the ground, became an almost daily event, and there were other disquieting facts. The criminals were often as young as twelve, and they were not just disgruntled workers, as the Peterburgskii listok reported in 1903: ‘They are a motley lot, and not only in external appearance. On the contrary, their social diversity is no less sharp. Here one finds everything: government scribes, telegraph clerks, post office and customs agents, metalworkers, printers, apprentices, tavern and café waiters.’

  In the aftermath of the 1905 revolution, Russian society appeared to plunge towards disintegration, and the young hooligans (some newspapers called them ‘Russian apaches’) were the most conspicuous symptom of this tendency. The newspapers brimmed with horrifying reports:

  On May 27 at 8:00 P.M. two extremely drunk hooligans were walking along Nevskii Prospekt. Every minute they knocked into a man or offended a women. One of them, brandishing an iron pole, threatened to break open the skull of each passerby. The other was swearing unrestrainedly…Cries and demands that the scoundrels be taken to the police station came from all sides. Mocking the public’s indignation, one of the hooligans spat right in the face of a well-dressed man.

  Not only the seat of government, but the entire country seemed to be sinking under a wave of crime. Reports about criminal incidents arrived ‘from Arkhangelsk to Yalta’, and even in the countryside, peasants showed a terrifying lack of respect for their superiors:

  In the village N., a young noblewoman was calmly walking down the road when a hooligan, well known to everyone, approached and began to pester her, asking for her handkerchief. When she refused him, he threw her to the ground, held her down with his knee on her chest, took off her dress, and stripped her entirely. As a crowd gathered he shouted, ‘Look, guys, at the intelligentka.’ After this, he got up, hit her on the back of the head, and walked away as if nothing had happened.

  If many poorer Russians appeared to be walking away from their own society, the rise in crime was not as dramatic as the papers would have their readers believe. The number of juvenile convictions rose steeply, from 1,113 in 1900 to 2,848 in 1910, but in absolute numbers it remained tiny, certainly if compared with the more than 51,000 young men and women convicted in 1910 in Germany, a country with less than half of Russia’s population. Even relative to other age groups, the problem of youth crime appears less dramatic than was reported in the press: at no time before the War did the juvenile conviction rate exceed 5 per cent of the total.

  The Science of Crime

  While Russian observers believed that society could not long withstand the ‘mighty floods of popular resentment that were barely restrained by the feeble dikes of civilization and a decaying state’, the situation was not actually as desperate as perceived. Still, the mere perception of a dramatic rise in youth violence and anarchist threats matched the fears of the period all too well: a once-great civilization undermined by ‘degenerate elements’ from the lowest classes, overwhelmed by the forces of anarchic plebs alienated from a healthy, traditional way of life by the big city and the machine.

  Just as the bourgeois ailments, neurasthenia and psychosis, had led to the rise of psychiatry, violence and crime committed by the most disadvantaged elicited their own scientific response focused on understanding, managing and preventing the problem. Criminology was born. The Italian anthropologist Cesare Lombroso (1835-1909) was the acknowledged father of this new discipline.

  Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Genoa, Lombroso had studied literature, linguistics and archaeology but later chose to become an army doctor. During his service he was intrigued by the correlations between soldiers’ discipline, their mental health and social conditions, and their heredity. His fascination led him to psychiatry, and having practised both as an academic and as director of an asylum, he published his magnum opus L’Uomo delinquente (Criminal Man, 1876, with several updated and augmented re-editions), which presented the best and most comprehensive statistical evidence ever assembled for factors leading to crime. Lombroso correlated the most diverse factors with incidence of crime: weather (everywhere in Europe most murders were committed in summer), geology and landscape, confession, birth rate, living conditions (the urban poor, unsurprisingly, led the charts), alcoholism and the price of alcoholic beverages (in France, every rise in the price of wine led to plummeting murder figures, and vice versa), immigration (bad news), education, income and public wealth (in Italy, most murders were committed in the richest cities), illegitimacy, working conditions.

  While Lombroso held all these factors partly responsible for the rise of crime or implicated all of them, he believed that the central reason lay elsewhere: evolution could reverse as well as progress, and it would produce ‘atavists’, throwbacks to previous, more brutish stages of human development, a dangerous subclass of savages. These, Lombroso claimed, were at the heart of the problem: ‘scientific examination … [demonstrates] the existence of a type of human dedicated to crime by his innermost organization, of born criminals who form great battalions in … the “army of crime”.’

  A kindly and intellectually conscientious man, Lombroso was a product of the nineteenth century. With pure, ardent faith in positivist science he fought for the dignified treatment of criminals, for social rehabilitation and abolition of the death penalty. Society’s attitude to crime must be based on knowledge, he argued:

  The philosophy of penal law [we have inherited] from ancient time now causes us pity. Free will and vengeance are a very fragile foundation [for law] and a miserable goal. We know that whatever happens man always and fatally obeys the strongest motive. We therefore believe that if society incontestably has a right to defend itself it is never worthy of society to wreak vengeance. Penal repression cannot and must not be dictated by anything else than scientifically proven usefulness.

  The anthropologist relied on piles of statistics collected around the world and supplemented his data by measuring thousands of skulls of criminals and collating tens of thousands of biographical data to arrive at a definitive answer to his questions about hereditary crime. Following the early nineteenth-century physiologist Franz Josef Gall, Lombroso was convinced that activities in different centres of the brain would cause the organ to swell or shrink like a muscle that was developed or atrophied, and that such outgrowths would manifest themselves in the form of the skull. By measuring heads, he believed he would be able to create a strictly scientific typology of evil, incontrovertible proof for criminal tendencies in an individual. Apart from cranial measurements, the typology also included external signs such as large jaws, low forehead, unusually good eyesight, high cheekbones, a fleshy, flat or upturned nose, large ears, scanty growth of hair, insensitivity to pain, and unusually long arms. Born criminals, in effect, had to be contained, but could not be blamed. Atavism, hereditary alcoholism and epilepsy were all signs of decayed biological characteristics. It would be society’s goal to eradicate the biological basis for this crime by sterilizing those who
could only give birth to more misery, Lombroso argued. Civilization, he implied, was a fragile thing, based on discipline and education, all too easily jeopardized:

  What should we conclude if not that the most hideous and barbarous crimes have a physiological, atavistic point of departure. These animal instincts can be blunted for a while in man, thanks to [the influence of] education, of the environment, and the fear of punishment; but they are reborn suddenly under the influence of certain circumstances such as illness, weather, imitation [of peers], and an intoxication with sperm, the consequence of an overly long period of abstinence. It is because of this, no doubt, that it makes itself known at puberty ... and in individuals who lead a life of celibacy or great solitude, such as priests, shepherds and soldiers.

  In contrast to many others who were dedicated to creating a new morality based on race, heredity and science, Lombroso wrote without hatred. Nature itself was immoral, he believed, and culture was, after all, nothing but a flower on the dung heap of history: ‘The criterion for merit does not change if most virtues and vices are recognized as results of a molecular change ... A diamond has no more reason to sparkle than coal, but which woman would cast them away because they are nothing but coal?’ A Jew himself, Lombroso was sensitive to the stupidity and cruelty of prejudice, but scrupulously fair-minded. He also despised antisemites and argued they were inferior minds, acting from impulses still engrained in them since the Middle Ages.