The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  In Paris there are streets as dishonored as any man guilty of infamous deeds. There also exist noble streets, and merely honest streets, and young streets the relative morality of which has not yet been determined by public opinion. Then there are murderous streets, and streets older than the oldest dowagers, and reputable streets, streets that are always clean, streets that are always dirty, laboring streets, diligent streets, mercantile streets. The streets of Paris possess human qualities, and as a consequence of their physiognomy they impress certain ideas upon us against which we are defenseless.

  There was, for example, the old Rue Pierre-Lescot, erased by Haussmann, which, lying very near the side of the Palais-Royal that opens onto Rue Saint-Honoré, metaphorically acted as “a sort of drain, a type of canal into which flows all the trash on the surface of the water.” Its other end was clogged with heaped debris from construction work on the Louvre, and its desolate emptiness “rendered it favorable to all the crimes and ignominies that require silence and darkness. There thieves held their nocturnal parleys; there the ignorant child, the obscene monk, the old man devoured by sterile lust all came to seek shameful satisfaction of their impure desires; there theft and murder were so to speak endemic … The history of Rue Pierre-Lescot can be summed up in four words: murder, theft, poverty, prostitution. Did the street ever enjoy innocence?” More than sixty years later, well after Haussmann’s revisions, the same area was still subject to similar sorts of criminal conventions: “In the summer the gardens of the Palais-Royal are the site of meetings of dangerous prowlers who chase away honest folk. It is there that advantageous burglaries of nearby jewelers’ shops are planned, there that those fearsome gangs of ‘wall borers’ are organized each year.”

  “Bell ringer.” Illustration by Théophile Steinlen for Aristide Bruant’s Dans la rue, vol. 1, 1889

  Rue Pierre-Lescot. Illustration by Honoré Daumier, 1840s

  A similar criminal genealogy could be drawn up for Porte Saint-Denis, where “it is not so much that the most crimes have been committed in that neighborhood as that in every era, perhaps more in the first half of the nineteenth century than in our day, crime has been more frequent there than in most parts of the city … Its criminals are petty, the riffraff of crime, disorganized and penurious, with no money or plans, not criminal by nature but driven to criminality by their laziness, stupidity, or bad luck.” On the nearby boulevards, meanwhile, were always gathered “the greatest number of youths desirous of wrongdoing and of learning its means, as well as of the less young eager to instruct them.” And a bit farther south was the Plateau Beaubourg, where “most of the dives shelter the lowest rung of the Parisian underworld, the sole occupation of which appears to involve fingering greasy cards and handling slimy stacks of dominoes. Much of the money earned from thefts, from rolling johns, from small-time swindles is spent there; some of the nastiest tricks in Paris are planned in their back rooms.”

  Rolling a drunk, 1870s

  Given that all these places lay within a few blocks of more favored streets—Rue Pierre-Lescot was in spitting distance of the Banque de France, for example—you would think that observant Parisians would have had some idea of who those criminals were, and might have taken general note of their habits. But whether they were deluded by their fear or influenced by the Manichean outlook of religion or the stratifying inclinations of society, they were unable until sometime past the middle of the nineteenth century to see how crime was the result of material conditions, and how much of it was desperately opportunistic and hastily improvised. Instead, even people as clever as Balzac and Hugo—even the pioneering detective Vidocq, who had begun as a criminal himself—seemed to think of crime as an organized alternative society. While it is true that criminals had their own language to an extent—it was shared with hucksters and street performers and market workers and many others who were not necessarily dishonest or violent—and also true that some specific branches, such as that of pimps, maintained a form of internal government, writers in the early nineteenth century tended to vastly exaggerate the organizational and hierarchical aspects of crime. Balzac wrote that “thieves are a separate nation within the nation … [They] comprise a republic with its own laws and customs; they do not steal from one another, scrupulously hold to their oaths … Thieves even have their own language, their own leaders, their own police.” Above all, writers were fixated upon the idea that criminal society, just like theirs, had its different classes, its high and low orders. If ordinary footpads were dangerous nuisances, how much more lethal were the aristocrats of this society! Jules Janin explored the conceit in an 1827 novel:

  One day I saw a man in rags, horrible to see, enter a little pothouse on Rue Sainte-Anne; his beard was long, his hair a mess, his whole person filthy. A moment later I saw him emerge decently dressed, his chest bristling with medals of honor, his face venerable. He was on his way to dine with a judge. This sudden transformation frightened me, and I thought tremulously that perhaps it was thus that the extremes of society were linked.

  While this fiction, which Chevalier qualifies as a “parodie sérieuse,” may be fantastic, rooted in ambient fears and worries, it was probably also inspired by the career of Eugène François Vidocq (1775–1857). Vidocq was an incomparable shape-shifter, with a penchant for disguises, who slipped easily from one side of the law to the other. He came from a relatively bourgeois family in the Pas-de-Calais, and enjoyed a picaresque early career, high in color, filled with duels, daring escapes, wide-ranging travels, amorous interludes, battlefield action, and prison time—it is impossible to gauge how much of it actually occurred, since the only source for most of it is Vidocq’s Memoirs (1828), which itself was written mostly by ghosts. In any event, Vidocq was arrested in 1809, faced a long stretch in prison from accumulated previous sentences, and made a deal to become an undercover agent; freed two years later, he initiated a plainclothes force he named the Brigade de la Sûreté, which Napoléon certified in 1813 as the Sûreté Nationale, which still exists. Vidocq quit the force in 1827 owing to a changed political climate, and a few years later opened the Bureau de Renseignements, which may have been the world’s first detective agency. He went to prison one last time, for fraud, in 1849. His story, and his proclivity for hiring ex-cons in his various enterprises, seems to have inspired the character of Jean Valjean in Les misérables. He definitely inspired his friend Balzac’s character Vautrin—in his youth he apparently was nicknamed Le Vautrin (local patois meaning “Wild Boar”). Vautrin first appears in Le Père Goriot, where he is unmasked as the escaped convict Jacques Collin, and reappears in Illusions perdues in the guise of the priest Carlos Herrera, who saves Lucien de Rubempré from drowning and makes him his ward. In Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes he gives himself up in exchange for the exculpation of two of his former associates, destined for the guillotine. The deal involves his becoming an undercover agent; we learn in an aside that he headed the Sûreté for fifteen years.

  Men of the milieu, 1930s

  The police prefecture before Haussmann’s demolition, 1850s

  Fantômas comes to Times Square, circa 1914

  Janin’s fantasy had another issue, direct or indirect: a long line of evil geniuses in popular literature, including Ponson du Terrail’s Rocambole (nine novels, 1857–71), Colonel Bozzo-Corona in Paul Féval’s Les habits noirs (eleven novels, 1844–75), and Erik, the Phantom of the Opera, in Gaston Leroux’s 1910 novel. The apotheosis of this tendency, though, was Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre’s Fantômas (thirty-two novels, 1911–13; in addition to eleven by Allain alone [1926–63]; as well as five films by Louis Feuillade in 1913–14, numerous other adaptations, radio and television series, a song cycle by Kurt Weill and Robert Desnos, a long-running Mexican comic strip, and much more). Fantômas is the consummate genius of evil, virtually an invisible government unto himself, a one-man conspiracy. Whereas Vidocq and Vautrin could fully incorporate both sides of Janin’s character, the terrifying wild man and the venerable
sage in one, Fantômas merely impersonates benevolence, albeit with such success that he can insinuate himself into every realm of power and undermine it from within as well as attacking it from without.

  He kidnaps a king and holds him in a cell under Place de la Concorde, his cries from below causing the fountain to sing. He methodically strips the gold from the dome of the Invalides. He replaces the contents of department store perfume dispensers with sulfuric acid, and he causes an enormous chandelier to fall on the clientele. He makes a Métro car vanish at the point where the number 2 line goes underground between Barbès and Anvers. His confederates crash a city bus through the wall of a bank. He nearly blows up the reservoirs in Montmartre, flooding the city. The books, indifferently written and absentmindedly plotted, are somewhat less than the sum of their parts—the set pieces are everything. Nevertheless the scale and daring of those set pieces succeeded in tunneling directly into the subconscious of their readers, and the slapdash construction of the novels may actually have assisted in the process by erasing the distinction between reverie and literature; they were authentically oneiric. Feuillade in his film adaptations could not hope to replicate the more grandiose spectacles, but on the other hand he could situate the action in real locations, immediately identifiable by Parisian viewers: the henchmen plot in La Villette, the prostitute Joséphine rides the métro aérien running west toward Montmartre, Fantômas and police inspector Juve stage their gun battle among the casks in the wine depot at Bercy. The terror, the movies said, lived just outside the door.

  Le cercueil vide (The empty coffin), Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain’s twenty-fifth Fantômas novel, 1914

  Since Souvestre and Allain were writing in the years before the First World War, they supplied Fantômas with accomplices that included two gangs of apaches, the Ténébreux (Shadowy) and the Chiffres (Numbers), both of which were headquartered in dives in the Nineteenth Arrondissement. The popular imagination was already then luxuriating in fear of an “army of crime”—the phrase coined in 1890 in a tract of the same name by one Ignotus (Félix Platel) that employed blood-and-thunder rhetoric to argue against the abolition of the death penalty. There had of course always been gangs, but the novelty of the apaches was in large part an invention of the press, the term itself coined in 1902 by a journalist, either Arthur Dupin or Victor Morris. The Native American tribe of that name—in actuality a complex of tribes that did not necessarily have much in common apart from the structure of their languages—surrendered to the U.S. Army in 1886; by 1902 their leader, Geronimo, had become an attraction at fairs around the country. The French had long had a fascination and wishful identification with Native Americans, initially spurred by the popularity of Fenimore Cooper’s novels, which led, for example, to Alexandre Dumas’s dull and interminable Les Mohicans de Paris (1854). The apaches, though, caught the imagination of the wider world, resulting in such miscellanea as a 1912 book by Alfred Henry Lewis confusingly titled The Apaches of New York—it was a collection of reported pieces on gangsters—and the “Apache dance” (a sort of tango, with the male, invariably wearing a striped jersey, a neckerchief, a flat cap, and espadrilles, sometimes with a rose between his teeth, dragging the female, in low-cut black, around the floor), which you could still witness at supper clubs in disparate locations as late as the 1960s.

  A bunch of apaches, or possibly actors, circa 1910

  Actors playing apaches in a Gaumont film, circa 1910

  The item that made the Parisian apaches jump from local faits-divers to a worldwide sensation was the story of Casque d’Or. In January 1902 a corpse was found on Rue des Haies, southeast of the Père-Lachaise cemetery, loaded down with two high-caliber revolvers, a knife with a ten-inch blade, a switchblade, and a hatchet; his cap bore two bullet holes. An inquiry led the police to a man of Corsican origin named Leca, in the hospital with two bullets in his side, who, however, wouldn’t talk. A visitor was observed, a woman named Amélie Hélie, known to be a gigolette, who sported a crown of strawberry-blond hair. She told him that their enemies, a gang called Les Orteaux, led by someone called L’Homme—the rivalry between the gangs was said to be “hereditary”—were lurking in wait behind the mairie (the borough hall) of the Twentieth Arrondissement. Leca told her to gather his troops, Les Popincourts, and to hire a coach. Hélie, familiarly known as Casque d’Or (Golden Helmet), was to board the coach, with the Popincourts dissimulated within. Sure enough, the Orteaux emerged; one jumped on the carriage step; knives and guns flashed and barked; Casque d’Or fled.

  Amélie Hélie, alias Casque d’Or, circa 1902

  She had met L’Homme, whom she knew as Manda, four years earlier, at the Bal des Vaches on the Left Bank, but his job as a brass polisher proved insufficient to support her in style, so he became head of Les Orteaux. But then Casque d’Or fell in love with Leca, who apparently was more handsome. She told him that his mistress, La Panthère, was having an affair with L’Homme, and then laughed in his face at his inadequacy. The next day, the battle was joined on Rue des Haies. Not long after the carriage incident, Manda located Casque d’Or, who told him they were through. He was on the point of leaving for England when he read in a newspaper of her impending marriage to Leca, and decided to massacre everyone in the wedding party, but the police caught wind of the plan. Under arrest, Manda/L’Homme turned out to be Joseph Pleigneur, twenty-six. The charges didn’t stick, but as soon as Manda was released the war resumed, climaxing in a battle in a café on Place de la Bastille that left two dead. Leca fled to Belgium.

  Simone Signoret in Jacques Becker’s Casque d’Or, 1952

  Casque d’Or immediately became a celebrity. She acquired an impressive wardrobe; postcards were published bearing her image; a portrait of her by a certain Depré was exhibited in the Salon; she was engaged to perform in a revue, Casque d’Or et les Apaches, at the Bouffes du Nord. However, when she made her singing debut at the Cabaret Alexandre, the two gangs showed up and battled, whereupon the police prefect banned the revue and had the portrait taken down. Manda, who testified in court that his criminal career was due to love, was sentenced to forced labor for life, Leca to eight years in the penal colony, and the two served side by side in the bagne on the island of Saint-Martin-de-Ré, although they never quite made up. Casque d’Or milked her notoriety for a few years, passing through a succession of wealthy lovers, then became an animal tamer in a circus. By the time she died, in 1933, she had been so completely forgotten that no obituary appeared, and the date became known only when her husband, fifteen years her junior, lodged a complaint against Jacques Becker’s 1952 film. It’s hard to see what he could have faulted, since Simone Signoret invests the title role with an epic sexuality, as if playing Aphrodite rather than a small-time whore. Claude Dauphin is a reptilian Leca, and the young Serge Reggiani a very moving and credible Manda. The story is simplified and considerably romanticized, but then, it may as well have been designed for that purpose. It is all but impossible not to cry at the end.

  The apaches were modern gangsters, which is to say that they were violent poseurs, fully attuned to the image they cut, on the street and in the press. They were poor, and their clothes were lousy (shapeless jackets, workmen’s blouses, patched trousers), but they invested whatever profits they accrued in exquisite handmade yellow boots. Chevalier quotes a retired criminal addressing a class of apprentice apaches in a café called La Guillotine, near Place de la République: “A man uses a knife, not a revolver. Guns and such are fine for women. Women can produce their weapon from their sleeve or from under their skirts—a revolver for society dames, acid for everybody else. But you have to have blood. A gun makes a barely visible hole, sometimes without a drop of blood. And only blood is for real.” Besides knives, the apaches made use of savate, a form of kickboxing that had been around for centuries and was exclusively identified with guttersnipes; the word also means an old, broken-down shoe. And they were experts in le coup du Père François (the garroting of someone from behind with a scarf).r />
  Le coup du Père François, circa 1900

  The apaches were also pioneers of tattooing. Gangs had their own distinctive marks. The man who tattooed Manda, who claimed to be the inventor of the apache tattoo, was interviewed on the subject. “The Hearts of Steel? Oh, they’re just ragpickers, despite the flaming heart on their left wrists. And the Linked Hearts? They’re on their way out, just like the Beauty Marks, who had a mole tattooed under their lower lip. Now those were genuine tough guys.” When fifteen members of a gang called Les Tatoués were arrested in 1902, they all turned out to be completely covered with designs of every sort: guillotines, hearts pierced with arrows, the words “Child of Misfortune”—and also portraits of Paul Kruger, who led the Boers against the British in South Africa from 1899 to 1902, because Anglophobia was very much alive in the streets. Apaches tended to sport a blue dot under their left eye. Many gangsters bore the initials P.L.V., meaning pour la vie (a vow of commitment for, rather than an affirmation of, life), and many had a dotted line around their necks, to guide the blade of the guillotine. Three stars signified service in the Bats d’Af; three dots between thumb and index meant mort aux vaches (the equivalent of “death to the pigs”), although many simply inscribed that phrase. Five dots—four in a square and the fifth in the center—meant solitary confinement. And then: Reserved for the Ladies. Faucet of Love. Long Live Love. Born Under an Evil Star. Fatalitas. No Luck. Hatred and Revenge.*