by Luc Sante
In the early years of the twentieth century, the anarchists hunkered down. They only rarely put up posters anymore they claimed had been printed by the Imprimerie Nationale or the Ministry of State, but they still organized house moves à la cloche de bois (to skip out; literally “by the wooden bell”), still held their meetings on the cheap by walking in on meetings of other political groups and simply hijacking the podium. But now the anarchists were younger, more ragtag, more personally troubled, less in public view, less grounded in tradition. Until his early death in 1908, their most visible spokesman was a man who called himself Albert Libertad, an orphan whom early illness had left with withered legs and who propelled himself on two crutches, which he could use as formidable battering instruments. He was generally accompanied by the sisters Armandine and Anna Mahé, both of them his lovers, one or both of them the mothers of his sons, Minus and Diamant. He was a cynic, bitterly sarcastic, famous for haranguing a priest in the pulpit during a service at the Sacré-Coeur. Among his followers, according to Victor Méric, an early adherent, “you found every sort: very studious quasi-intellectuals, poets, and also—necessarily—informants and provocateurs. And then there were the ‘scientific’ types, confirmed in their ignorance, smart alecs always on the hunt for some scheme.”
Albert Libertad
They were attempting to refashion the rules of life from its essential principles. Most were vegetarians, even vegans (végétaliens), and drank only water. They read Darwin and Huxley and sought a scientific rationale for an ideal existence freed from unthinking adherence to social norms.
The autonomous social cell bows to no law and no prejudice … The right to life justifies everything! The lives of others are no longer sacred for us; only what matters to our “I” can have any value in our eyes. If in order to survive I have to crush thousands of troglodytes, I’ll do it with no remorse. If we have to cut down everything that surrounds us, let’s not hesitate! As Émile Henry put it, there are no innocent victims. Let’s hit hard! Let’s be strong! That is the true moral law of life, as biology teaches us! That’s how to be a real revolutionary—nothing to do with the mystical and redundant babble of the workerist charlatans. It’s galling to think that, with no knowledge of anatomy or astronomy, nor psychology, nor zoology, nor embryology, idiots presume to address the social question!
There was always, on every issue, someone with a more radical stance. If it was agreed that marriage was legalized prostitution and the family an incubator of misery, someone might say, “Cohabitation—that’s our worst enemy! It can’t be engaged in without compromises and consequent servitude. Anarchism must give the social cell—the individual—complete autonomy. It would be idle to abolish marriage only to substitute for it a bond that is equally as servile, for all that it isn’t legalized.” At the communal house in suburban Romainville where the editorial offices of L’ Anarchie were located, a sign on the door to the library read, IDLERS, CROOKS, DRUNKS, STINKERS, CLIMBERS, SNOBS, HYSTERICS, EGGHEADS, GASBAGS OF EVERY DESCRIPTION, DO NOT PASS THROUGH THIS DOOR. DEATH AWAITS YOU! Painted on the library wall was a motto: IF YOU WANT TO LIVE, BE YOUR OWN BEST FRIEND.
The Romainville commune, headquarters of L’Anarchie, circa 1911
Left to right, top to bottom: Édouard Carouy; Raymond Callemin, a.k.a. Raymond-la-Science; Élie Monier, a.k.a. Simentoff; Octave Garnier
It was from this milieu that the Bonnot Gang emerged. It was a misnomer from the start. Jules Bonnot was an excellent driver—he was a professional chauffeur, who had driven Arthur Conan Doyle and the prolific true-crime hack H. Ashton-Wolfe, among others, so he was a known quantity the press could latch on to, and he was also, at thirty-five, by far the oldest—but he was really only a driver. The rest were all young working-class autodidacts, quite a number of them orphans, all of them laboring since age twelve or thirteen. Édouard Carouy, twenty-eight, a Belgian, had worked in a sugar refinery. Octave Garnier, twenty-two, from Fontainebleau, was a baker. René Valet, twenty-one, from Verdun, was a locksmith and typesetter. André Soudy, nineteen, from near Orléans, was a grocery clerk. Eugène Dieudonné, twenty-seven, was a carpenter’s apprentice from Nancy. Raymond Callemin, twenty-one, called Raymond-la-Science, was a typesetter from Brussels. Élie Monier, twenty-two, called Simentoff, was a peasant from the Pyrénées-Orientales. On December 11, 1911, a bank messenger was making his way down Rue Ordener, in Montmartre north of the hill, to the local branch of the Société Générale, carrying a bag containing 318,772 francs in securities and another bag with 5,266 francs in coins, while in an inner pocket of his coat a wallet held 20,000 francs in banknotes and a bit of gold. He wore the uniform of his trade: a sky-blue frock coat and a Napoleon hat. A car stopped and a man got out. Without a word he shot the messenger twice and grabbed his bags, while a second man went through the messenger’s pockets. The automobile took off. It was the world’s first getaway car.
Bonnot Gang exhibits in the courtroom, 1912
The car was found abandoned the following day in Dieppe, on the coast. As soon as the news hit the press, the bandits were seen everywhere in Europe, but at first nobody thought of the anarchists, although many lived just up the hill from the robbery. Two days after the New Year, a ninety-one-year-old rentier and his housekeeper were found murdered in the southeastern suburbs; around 20,000 francs in securities and gold pieces were missing. Witnesses in the neighborhood who were shown photographs identified Garnier, and after his name appeared in the newspapers, the bank messenger, who had survived, also pegged him. In addition he claimed to identify Dieudonné, who was irrefutably in Nancy on December 21. The police tossed the Romainville house and arrested everyone there, then let everybody go except Rirette Maîtrejean, twenty-four, and Viktor Lvovitch Kibaltchiche, twenty-one, despite the fact that they had no demonstrable connection with the case. Meanwhile, a crime wave had broken out: there were car thefts and robberies of stores, post offices, factories, and armories all over France and Belgium. The police were objects of widespread ridicule.
Chez les loups: Moeurs anarchistes (Among the wolves); a roman à clef about the Bonnot Gang, by André Lorulot, 1922
On February 28 a car running down Rue d’Amsterdam almost hit a bus, knocked over a woman, then was blocked by the bus and had to stop. A traffic cop who happened to be named Garnier started writing a ticket, but the car took off with him clinging to the running board; he was shot three times from inside the car, and died soon after. The police, in hot pursuit, hit a pedestrian and had to stop; the car vanished. Eyewitnesses identified the shooter as Garnier and the driver as Bonnot, with Callemin in the back. A wave of arrests swept up Dieudonné; Garnier wrote an open letter to the newspapers, taking responsibility and clearing him. A month later, six of the gang stole a car and killed the driver, then drove to Chantilly and raided the Société Générale. The employees resisted; one was killed. The bandits emptied the coffers to the tune of 47,555 francs. A witness pegged Soudy. Hysteria ensued, with denunciations and false leads galore—the prosecutor received as many as seven hundred letters a day. Thirteen associates of the gang were indicted. Soudy was arrested in a coastal town, Carouy in the suburbs, Callemin in Paris, loaded down with three Brownings.
Bonnot got away from the cops once and then, on April 22, was tracked down to a garage in Choisy-le-Roi, in the southeastern suburbs. The police, who didn’t know he was alone, called in reinforcements: firemen, two companies of the Garde Républicaine, a cordon of volunteer sharpshooters. Taking in the scene were the attorney general, a party of judges and VIPs, and a film crew from Pathé. The house was soon riddled with bullets, but Bonnot kept firing, so the police dragged in a cart loaded with explosives. After an initial misfire, there followed two explosions. Somehow the house was still standing, although there was no sign of life from within. The cops broke in, shielding themselves with mattresses, and found the mortally wounded Bonnot, also wrapped in mattresses. According to legend, he shot at them, although by that time he had put two bullets in his head
. He died on his way to the hospital. A piece of paper was found in which he exonerated Dieudonné and four other people; it is said that he died exclaiming, “Dieudonné is innocent!” Newspapers pointed out that Bonnot alone, equipped with just one revolver with a fifty-foot range, his other arm paralyzed from a wound received in a previous encounter with the police, had managed to hold at bay an army equipped with Lebel rifles and dynamite. Léon Bloy wrote, “The newspapers are full of heroes. Everybody was heroic except Bonnot. The entire population, flouting laws, took up arms and fired away while shielding themselves … I confess that all my sympathy goes to the desperado giving his life in order to scare them, and I think that God will judge them more harshly.”
Police dragging the nearly dead Bonnot down the stairs, Choisy-le-Roi, 1911
A few days later, Garnier and Valet were tracked to the eastern suburb of Nogent-sur-Marne, to a house in a densely populated area. Gendarmes, firemen, and Republican Guards surrounded the house, while Zouaves stood on the viaduct above and rolled boulders down, aiming at the house. As riflemen fired from surrounding rooftops and bombs were thrown to no effect, spectators showed up, some in evening dress, some with picnic baskets. The gun battle went on for hours. Sometime after midnight a huge explosion shook the house, and when the wall of smoke cleared, Garnier and Valet were found dead in a pool of blood. In 1947, Léo Malet wrote a novel, La vie est dégueulasse (Life sucks), that featured a character loosely modeled on Garnier. As a teenage runaway, Malet had been taken in by veterans of the Romainville commune, acquaintances of the gang, who in the 1920s ran a vegan cooperative on Rue de Tolbiac. His character, Jean Fraiger, a member of a revolutionary gang inspired by the teachings of a sinister oracle called Christ, is on the run from the police following a motorized caper. Along the way he has met and fallen in love with Gloria, who doesn’t know his true identity. He is itchy and paranoid, as well as jealous; disturbed by Gloria’s periodic absences, he follows her to the house of friends. The husband of the couple is a psychoanalyst, who notes Fraiger’s anxieties and persuades him to unburden himself, serially. During their second session, the women rush in from an adjoining room: the newspapers have reported that one of Fraiger’s comrades has given him up. Fraiger takes out his revolver and holds the three captive, while the analyst coolly continues the session. “There’s your penis,” he says, pointing to the gun. “Like Lacenaire, your life has been nothing but a long, artful suicide.” Twitching, unsure if he will kill the others or kill himself, Fraiger says, “I would so much have liked to live,” and rushes out. Two weeks later he bursts into a precinct house, on the point of death from starvation, but waving his gun and begging the cops to shoot him in the crotch. They oblige.
Léo Malet’s Trilogie noire, of which La vie est dégueulasse is the first part (1969 edition). Illustration by René Magritte
A Little of the Bandits’ Soul, by Émile Michon, 1914
Eight months elapsed before the surviving gang members went on trial. Carouy, Callemin, Soudy, Monier, Dieudonné, Maîtrejean, Kibaltchiche, and seven other people faced charges ranging from murder to receiving stolen property and harboring fugitives. During their time in the Santé, seven of the bandits were examined by Émile Michon, the prison psychologist, who questioned them on every possible topic. In the resulting book, with its improbably lovely title, A Little of the Bandits’ Soul, he never identifies them by name—with the sole exception of Kibaltchiche, “because I will never be able to consider him an evildoer”—the result being that they become a blurry mass, bugs in a jar. Still, Michon’s ambivalences add up to a convincing group portrait. They intellectualized their emotions; they were so invested in their “I” that they were often ignorant of the most basic facts about others; they were ascetics even in matters of the heart; they had excellent memories. Most of them could lecture endlessly on Spinoza, Lamarck, Schopenhauer, the sciences. They were slobs.
They seem to want to attach themselves to nothing, and they dread all discipline, even that of habit. They are inconstant in every sense of the word: they come and go, move, travel, are always leaving someone; when they arrive somewhere they go away again almost immediately. They settle nowhere. Since they are always wanted for some infraction or violation they change names as easily as they change addresses, and they sleep with one eye open.
Extrapolating a bit from his account, you can figure that Monier, from the Midi, was the warmest and most passionate, Raymond-la-Science cold and pedantic. Carouy was stolid and slow, Dieudonné earnest and deliberate. Jean De Boë, who got ten years, was poetic and a gifted artist. Michon refers to only one of them as a psychopath. By process of elimination that would leave Soudy, who had himself photographed aiming a rifle at the camera.
André Soudy takes aim, 1911
Before even being sentenced Carouy had bit down on a cyanide capsule he’d obtained somehow. Seven, including Rirette Maîtrejean and the two other women, were acquitted. Three were sentenced to prison terms, including Kibaltchiche, who served his five years, then changed his name to Victor Serge—he fought in revolutions in Spain and Russia, was among the first to warn the West about Stalin, wrote extraordinary books. Dieudonné, despite all the efforts to exonerate him, was sentenced to death, and then the sentence was commuted to life in the bagne. Soudy, Callemin, and Monier all married the Widow. On his way, Monier said, “Farewell to you all, gentlemen, and to society as well”; Callemin said, “It’s a beautiful sight, isn’t it, a man who’s about to die”; Soudy said, “Brr … it’s cold.” Callemin and Monier left their bodies to science: Monier to surgical anatomy, Callemin to biochemical research—his disembodied hands remain preserved in formaldehyde at the Medico-Legal Institute in Lille. Soudy left his brain to the dean of the medical faculty at the University of Paris, his burglary tools to the Ministry of War, his skull to the Museum of Anthropology—that it be exhibited and the profits given to soup kitchens—his hair for the barbers’ union to sell to benefit the cause, and his autograph to L’ Anarchie, so that “priests and apostles of philosophy can use it to further their cynical individualism.” Instead he was buried in Ivry.
12
The Game
The flâneur, exemplar of this book, was notable for making use of the whole city. For centuries, hardly anyone else did. When Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Restif de La Bretonne began plying the streets of Paris in the eighteenth century, and even when Privat d’Anglemont and Alfred Delvau took their strides in the mid-nineteenth, the city was still a collection of villages arrayed around a narrow band of common use, of fairs and executions and ten-day wonders. Even after public transport and the centralization of jobs began to take people out of their neighborhood villages, most people carved ruts from home to work, with only the occasional weekend ventures to parks and attractions, usually the same ones again and again. If you lived in Grenelle, you might know of Montmartre more from hearsay than from experience, and vice versa.
That wasn’t due to lack of imagination or even force of habit as much as to lack of time. The ninety-six- or eighty-two- or sixty- or forty- or even thirty-five-hour workweek keeps people from straying far from their rotation around one pole. The enforcement of the constraint was one in which employers and the ostensible liberators of the working class were equally complicit. “A strange delusion possesses the working classes in nations where capitalist civilization dominates. This madness entails individual and social sufferings that over the last two centuries have tortured poor humanity. This madness is the love of work, the raging passion for work, which pushes to the limits of exhaustion the vital forces of people and their progeny.” Those are the words of Paul Lafargue, Karl Marx’s son-in-law, about whom Marx once said something like: If he’s a Marxist, then count me out. Lafargue, who wrote his manifesto, The Right to Be Lazy, while incarcerated in Sainte-Pélagie in 1883, called laziness the “mother of the arts and noble virtues.” He looked forward to the day when machines would relieve humans of drudgery, not suspecting that the rise of machines wo
uld remove many people’s ability to make a living, while “laziness” could be advanced as a reason to let them rot.
Monumental map of Paris, 1920
The use of the whole city could not be a function of work. It just wasn’t practical for colporteurs to try to work every single corner, floor by floor, the way they could elsewhere traipse from farm to farm; census takers and religious zealots and vendors of Épinal prints were bound to territories as firmly as laborers and typists. The city—compact and curled within itself, a labyrinth—had to be played like a game. Many of the flâneurs were compulsively garrulous types who played the city the way they’d work a party (or perhaps, in the case of Restif, like a pervert at an orgy). If they had constraints or ground rules, they didn’t leave descriptions. The first to consciously engage the game were the Dadas, whose ventures to overlooked parts of Paris were feeble if not touristic. On their excursion to Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre in 1921, for example, it rained; they shouted vaguely provocative slogans to no reaction and handed out printed statements that people threw in the gutter. They were far less interested in seeing than in being seen.
An American edition of The Right to Be Lazy, by Paul Lafargue (1907/1977)
Their successors, the Surrealists, did a bit better, on the evidence of Louis Aragon’s 1926 Paris Peasant, a poetic account of their investigations of the Passage de l’Opéra, one of the earliest arcades, built in 1822 and demolished a bit over a century later as part of the extension of Boulevard Haussmann; and of the Buttes-Chaumont, which, “seen from on high, has the shape of a nightcap,” and which at the time, being located squarely in the middle of a quartier populaire, was seldom visited by the intelligentsia. “The fauna of the imagination and its oceanic vegetation, as through a mane of shadow, lose and perpetuate themselves in the badly lit areas of human activity. It is there that appear the great spiritual lighthouses, formal neighbors of less pure signs. The door to mystery is opened by human exhaustion, and we find ourselves in the kingdoms of shadow.” That was the protocol: to move through the city as if in a dream, interpreting artifacts along the way as clues to an unresolvable mystery. The Surrealists regularly met for drinks at the Café Certa in the Passage de l’Opéra, initially because it was neither Montmartre nor Montparnasse, which were fashionable hence hateful, but they came to appreciate that “human aquarium” for its own sake. Aragon’s text, which combines exhaustive inventory with regular flights into the ether, was by way of an obituary for the arcade, a found object of the highest magnitude, a three-dimensional counterpart to those nineteenth-century steel engravings that Max Ernst cut up and recombined in The Hundred Headless Woman. As Walter Benjamin expressed it, “The nineteenth century is the set of noises that invades our dream, and which we interpret on awaking.” The inventory of images he and the Surrealists had experienced in earliest childhood was now impossibly remote, could scarcely be reconciled with the roar and flash of their present, and yet there it was, preserved in amber.