The Other Paris

by Luc Sante

  Prison tattoos, circa 1910

  A police raid, 1930s

  After the war, the apaches gave way to a new criminal world, the milieu.† The term apparently had its origin in Francis Carco’s play Mon homme (1920; its title derived from the Mistinguett song), the story of an ex-pierreuse who hangs around the bals on Rue de Lappe and falls for a bad boy in a felt hat and spectator shoes. Its look and operational methods came direct from Chicago. Al Capone, tommy guns in violin cases, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre—those things burrowed deep in the Parisian imagination, not just its criminal subset. The term followed suit, spreading rapidly through movies, newspapers, novels—Fréhel’s 1928 song “Il n’est pas du milieu,” for example—out to the streets to stay, until at least the 1950s. Carco wrote, “By 1925 the hard men from the Bastille, the hairy beasts, the vrai de vrai, the pimps, the flat-capped crooks were all knights of old. The underworld [la pègre] had given way to the milieu.” In many ways the milieu was the same old honor-loyalty-virility guff dressed up in new suits and fedoras, a classic instance of gentrification. They didn’t roll their own cigarettes anymore, but insisted on tailor-mades, frequently American. They still liked knives, but they didn’t appreciate blood so much now that they were modern executives, so they worked clean or—what the hell—went for the roscoes. Their old neighborhoods were for chumps; they moved en bloc to Pigalle, Anvers, Place Blanche—Montmartre, the center of the left-hand universe. They spurned public transport, had to have the latest flivvers, also frequently American. They were organized now; they had caïds (from the Arabic for “governor”) and lieutenants, in addition to knife artists, spear carriers, and background muscle; they were now students of management.

  The cover of Auguste le Breton’s autobiographical novel La loi des rues (The law of the streets), 1955

  And whereas the apaches had generally limited their activities to keeping a string of two or three whores on the sidewalk and mugging pedestrians late at night, the new men owned maisons closes, ran contraband liquor and cigarettes, eventually took over the cocaine trade from the Germans, who had been the principal importers since long before the war. They did robberies, too, but street crime was beneath them; nothing less than a bank or a warehouse would do. They were less feared than the apaches by the general population, because they killed only one another. They enjoyed socializing at bals, many of which, such as the Petit Jardin, on Avenue de Clichy, designated special days for them and their top-earning girls, from which ordinary customers were barred. The social aspect of these gatherings was always secondary to their business component—new girls were passed in review, new product lines discussed, the take from recent jobs cut up and distributed. It was all very correct. The trend-setting caïds would not tolerate the presence of any man not wearing a necktie or walking around in imperfectly shined shoes.

  The cast of characters shifted a few times. The top-ranking gangsters of the 1920s were Parisians, such figures as Alphonse Lecroq, a.k.a. Miroir, “the best-looking man in Paris”; Émile Jacquot, a.k.a. Charlot Leather Coat, hijacker of maisons closes; Eugène Charrier, who owned the Bal des Gravilliers; Maurice Jalabert, who owned the Chabanais; Charles Codebo, who owned the Moulin Galant. But right around then there began a major surge of immigration from points south: the Corsicans had arrived. There had long been plenty of Corsican pimps in Pigalle,* but now Montmartre was called the “capital of Corsica.” Important gangsters moved to Paris, including the people who effectively owned Marseille, and they brought along, as muscle, illiterates who a month earlier had been tending sheep in the hills. There were two strains, the Corsicans from Corsica and the Corsicans from Marseille, the former led by Ange Salicetti and including the Preri, Morazzani, Santi, and Stephani families; the latter headed by Philippe Graziani and dominated by the Nicolai and Morganti clans. Despite their free-spending habits, the Corsicans were not necessarily appreciated by the locals; for one thing, they conversed in their own dialect rather than argot. A war between the two strains broke out in 1936, having principally to do with cocaine trafficking—Graziani was killed the following year by Salicetti, who himself would be cut down in 1950. After World War II they battled over the cigarette trade, and two decades later they fought over the heroin business that came to be known worldwide as the French Connection.

  The spiderweb of crime, in a typically striking centerfold layout from Détective, 1930

  It was not the Corsicans, however, who were the prime beneficiaries of the German occupation of Paris—not that they minded it, since many of them owned cathouses requisitioned by officers, from which they made out very well. But the black market was run by Parisian gangsters, the same people who operated as the Carlingue, the French Gestapo. Equipped with official papers, they were free to roam the city and beyond, to manufacture and sell documents of all sorts, to collect and market the contents of apartments belonging to Jews, and to torture and kill Resistance members in the cellars at 93 Rue Lauriston. After D-day, many made last-minute attempts to change their spots and join the Resistance themselves; in any case a startling percentage of them managed to evade the postwar cleansings, official or otherwise, and went right back to business. Jo Attia, who seems to have played a double game during the war, acting on behalf of both sides, was arrested by the Germans and would have been executed if his Carlingue pals hadn’t stepped in. Upon being released from Mauthausen he reunited with his former colleagues Pierre Loutrel, Abel Danos, and Georges Boucheseiche, all of them active at Rue Lauriston, and formed the Front-Wheel-Drive Gang, named in honor of their favored Citroën 15 Six. They specialized in serious armed robbery: banks, armored cars, freight trains, factory payrolls. They did very well for about a year and a half, operating at a rapid clip, until Loutrel went out of control. Known to newspaper readers as Pierrot le Fou, he was France’s first Public Enemy Number One, an alcoholic given to psychotic violence, first distanced by his gang and finally dumped by the milieu. He operated on his own until one night in 1946 when, following a failed break-in at a Paris jewelry store, he accidentally shot himself in the bladder while drunkenly stowing his gun. After his agonizingly slow death, his colleagues buried him in secret. He was routinely pinned for seemingly any unsolved crime until his body was finally found three years later by the police. The picture circulated by the police to prove their identification of the remains, a photo montage of Loutrel’s skull laid over a portrait taken in life, is an image of criminal destiny more potent than any tattoo.

  Police detectives at the scene of a jewelry store robbery, 1930s

  Pierre Loutrel, a.k.a. Pierrot le Fou, before and after death, 1946

  Had he been caught he would have been guillotined. Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin (1738–1814) intended the device to relieve the sufferings of the condemned by ensuring them a quick and painless death, and to impart capital punishment equally, without class distinction. It wound up serving for not quite two centuries, and provided the nation and the world with a nonpareil graphic representation of fatality. Before that, on Place de Grève, where executions were held for five hundred years, the means were sloppier and defined by class. Plebeians were hanged, the gentry were decapitated by ax or sword, and criminals guilty of lèse-majesté were drawn and quartered. From the sixteenth century to the revolution, brigands and murderers were afforded the martyrdom of the wheel, which is to say that they were strapped to a rough St. Andrew’s cross; the bones of their arms, legs, thighs, and chest were broken with iron bars; and then they were attached to a large horizontal wheel, their broken limbs tied under them, their faces turned to the sky. They remained there for as long as the deity saw fit to keep them alive. The phrase coup de grâce originally referred to the mercifully terminal blow the executioner could administer with the iron bar. Executions were always holiday occasions, and indeed they were frequently held on June 23, St. John’s Day and the eve of the solstice, when the festivities would be topped off by a feast and a dance. In the sixteenth century, additional entertainment was provided by bur
ning cats alive, in a sack or a barrel.

  Dr. Guillotin did not invent the instrument named after him, which was perfected by Antoine Louis and Tobias Schmidt—the latter, a German engineer, proposed the angled blade. Its first victim, in 1792, was Nicolas Jacques Pelletier, who assaulted and robbed people on the street; its last, in 1977, was Hamida Djandoubi, a killer who tortured his victims. (He was guillotined in Marseille; France abolished capital punishment in 1981.) There were a total of nine headsmen after the revolution, seven of whom were officially designated national executioners, an office whose top-hatted tenant was often referred to as Monsieur de Paris; Louis and Anatole Deibler, father and son, between them served for sixty years. The Widow was moved from Place de Grève to the Barrière Saint-Jacques in 1832; to the front of the Grande-Roquette prison, on Rue de la Roquette, in 1851; to the front of the Santé prison, on the corner of Rue de la Santé and Boulevard Arago, in 1909; and finally to an inner courtyard of that prison after 1939. To go to the guillotine was to marry the widow, to go to the barber’s, to sneeze in the sawdust, to be shortened by thirty centimeters, to stick your head out the window, to get yourself photographed—the executioner’s aide who positioned the victim’s head in the lunette was called “the photographer.”

  An eighteenth-century guillotine

  A guillotined head, circa 1900

  Louis-Ferdinand Céline called the guillotine “the Prix Goncourt for murderers.” That would have applied especially well to Pierre-François Lacenaire, played by Marcel Herrand in Children of Paradise with exactly the right combination of wit and menace, even though his actions in the picture are all fictitious. Lacenaire, born in a suburb of Lyon in 1803, was a brilliant but unruly student expelled from a string of schools for insubordination. He wanted to be a famous writer, or maybe a lawyer, but after moving to Paris in 1829 he soon lost all his money gambling, and contemplated suicide.

  I sat on the parapet, considering my options. Drowning? No, the pain would be too great. Poison? I don’t want to be seen in agony. The blade? Yes, that must be the sweetest death. Since then, my life has been one long suicide. I was no longer my own master; I belonged to the blade. But instead of a knife or a razor I chose the great ax of the guillotine. I wanted it to be a vengeance. Society would have my blood, but I would have the blood of Society.

  He decided on a scheme to lure a bank messenger, kill him and take his money, then remove the corpse to the countryside, dismember it, and cook the pieces so that no trace would remain. Since he couldn’t find a promising accomplice, he had himself arrested so that he could recruit in prison—he stole a carriage and fenced it so ineptly that he was caught at once and sentenced to a year. He passed through the Dépôt, La Force, Bicêtre, and finally the suburban prison of Poissy, where he met Pierre-Victor Avril, who was to be his inseparable companion (and who also turns up as a character in Children of Paradise). When they both got out in 1834, word got to them that someone they had known in prison, a swindler named Chardon, known as Tante Madeleine because of his moeurs particuliers, who dressed as a priest and preyed on the pious and stupid, had threatened to inform on them. They killed him with a triangular file and an ax, and then Lacenaire beat Chardon’s aged mother to death. Lacenaire then sought to lure a bank messenger to his room by means of a forged draft on a Lyon bank, but when the messenger eventually showed up he caused such a ruckus that Lacenaire was forced to flee. Two months later, he was arrested for forgery. Eventually brought before a judge, he dismissed the charge as a trifle and admitted to killing Chardon and his mother. Over the following eight months, before and after his trial, Lacenaire finally achieved the glory he’d sought. He wrote his memoirs (which have never gone out of print) as well as songs and poems, and word got around in Paris concerning his philosophy of crime and his epigrams. The infirmary at La Force became his salon; duchesses and literary arbiters came to call and succumbed to his mesmeric sway. Finally, on January 9, 1836, he inserted his head in the lunette, but the blade was misaligned and got stuck on the way down. Lacenaire then had a chance to turn around and watch the blade as it fell the second time.

  Literature had been awaiting Lacenaire. He was the romantic criminal, a role that many had wishfully claimed for themselves, but he was the first to turn his words into deeds. He is inescapable in French literature thereafter, discussed or alluded to by Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Gautier, Baudelaire, Laforgue; absorbed and recast by Isidore Ducasse in the sixth of the Chants de Maldoror. He is included in André Breton’s Anthology of Black Humor, and Breton described Bonnelier and Arago’s prison interviews with him as “an illustration of thought in the nineteenth century.” Breton also wrote, famously, that “the simplest Surrealist action consists of going into the street, guns in hand, and shooting at random into the crowd,” an allusion to Lucien Morisset, a law clerk in Tours fired for theft who did just that, in 1881—one dead, four wounded—explicitly under the influence of Lacenaire. (He was sentenced to forced labor for life.) It is necessary to recall that this was something that hadn’t been done before, and was rare for a long time after.

  A dime novel about Lacenaire, 1931

  Jean-Jacques Liabeuf may never have heard of Lacenaire, much less read him, but he carried out an act of vengeance upon society that Lacenaire would have understood. Liabeuf was an apprentice shoemaker from Saint-Étienne who kept getting into minor scrapes with the law, racking up stints in jail, and then was sentenced to serve in the Bats d’Af. Upon his release in 1909 he moved to Paris, where he fell in love with a young prostitute, Alexandrine Pigeon, whose pimp was a police informant. Very soon he was arrested for pandering by two vice cops who had seen him with her. His lawyer failed to show up at his trial, and Liabeuf was given three months in prison, followed by an interdiction de séjour; caught on the street in Paris after his release, he was sent back to serve another month. He swore that he would exact revenge upon the police for framing him. On January 8, 1910, three days before his twenty-fourth birthday, he walked through the parish of Saint-Merri armed with a revolver and two shoemaker’s blades and wearing, under a short cape, leather armlets and shoulder braces of his own manufacture bristling with sharpened steel points. In a dive on Rue Aubry-le-Boucher he yelled, “I want to take out two cops!” and rushed outside, where he was immediately set upon by a passing patrol. They quickly released him, their fingers bleeding. He stabbed one of them in the chest and shot another before being brought down with a saber thrust in the hallway of the hotel next door.

  Liabeuf’s weapons and handmade spiked armlets and braces, 1910

  He was sentenced to death in May, the execution set for July 1. In the meantime the story circulated, and his cause was taken up by the combined forces of the left. A journalist called his case “the Dreyfus Affair of the working class.” The militant socialist newspaper La Guerre Sociale wrote that Liabeuf gave “a lesson in energy and courage to the mass of ordinary folk, and to us, revolutionaries, he set an example”; for this the editor was sentenced to four months in jail and a thousand-franc fine. Miguel Almereyda, Jean Vigo’s father,* warned that there would be more blood around the guillotine than under it. Tens of thousands of people, protesters and curiosity-seekers, massed around the Santé prison on the night before Liabeuf’s execution:

  Excited couples came straight from the bal-musette: a whore and her mack, somewhat sinister themselves, the girl a bit too happy, her eyes enormous with makeup, the man making a throat-cutting gesture with his hand. Some came by taxi from the nightclubs, in evening dress, plumes in the hair of the poules de luxe—hisses and threats were tossed their way … Militants from every faction were there, driven back by lines of black-clad police. Rioting erupted when the wagon bearing the guillotine arrived, escorted by a cavalry squadron. The pitched battle lasted for hours, charging police driving us into the darkness of the side streets and then the crowd surging back a minute later. Jaurès was spotted at the head of one wedge and nearly killed. Almereyda tried in vain to force his way through the barrica
des. There were many injuries and some blood—one cop was killed. At dawn, fatigue overtook the crowd. When the blade fell on the furious head, still protesting his innocence, an impotent delirium took hold of the twenty or thirty thousand protesters and became one long roar: “Murderers!”

  As Victor Serge notes, Liabeuf died still shouting that he was not a pimp. On the scale of one-person insurrections, he and his betrayed innocence lie at the opposite end from Lacenaire, the romantic fatalist, acte-gratuit aesthete, and pioneer of suicide by cop. Directly in the middle falls Jacques Mesrine, dead now for thirty-five years but still an unquiet symbol and cause of contention in the Francophone world. Mesrine,* born in Clichy to a bourgeois family in 1936, separated himself from his upbringing very early, started hanging around Pigalle as a teenager, signed up for the military, and served in Algeria; he was decorated for valor by de Gaulle. The experience, by his own admission, formed him, and likely unhinged him. Although he dispatches the subject of his military service in about five fairly bland pages of his memoirs, he is said to have participated in summary executions of civilian prisoners, and at some point joined the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète. Back in civilian life he became a thief, carried out burglaries in Spain and Switzerland as well as France, was jailed twice, then was arrested in 1968 when he tried to hold up a couture house in Paris. He managed to flee to Canada with a girlfriend, and it was at that point that he went from small-time crook to major media spectacle, eventually becoming Public Enemy Number One.