Clemenceau, who at the time was prime minister and minister of the interior, was despised by anarchists. He was a leader of the Radical Party, whose proponents were anticlerical but socially moderate. Clemenceau was a bully and a renowned dueler who detested socialists, unions, and the Catholic Church almost as much as he detested his American ex-wife, whom he had had followed by a detective, jailed, and deported. He made his allegiances clear during the bitterly contentious years before Victor’s arrival in France. On March 10, 1906, an explosion deep in the Courrières mines in Pas-de-Calais killed more than one thousand one hundred miners. Just before the massive demonstrations on May Day, a tradition that had begun in 1890 in France, Clemenceau, who relished his identity as “France’s first cop,” ordered the arrest of leading union leaders and brought an addition thousand troops to the capital.19
Over the course of the year, more than two hundred thousand workers in the building, textiles, metallurgical, chemical, and transport industries went out on strike. They demanded that wages not be lowered; they also demanded a shorter work day and the implementation of the law obliging employers to grant one day of rest per week. The affirmation of Revolutionary Syndicalism at the Amiens gathering of the CGT that year frightened employers amid talk of a possible general strike. Clemenceau remained determined to turn police and troops loose during demonstrations and strikes. He ordered twenty-six thousand soldiers to Paris to complement the standing garrison of fifty thousand in the capital. He was quite willing to turn to state violence to confront what he considered working-class rampage.20
Police repression of demonstrations and strikes had noticeably increased in intensity when Clemenceau had become prime minister and president of the Conseil in 1906. When he “received” a delegation from the CGT a few days before the planned demonstrations of May 1, he told them, memorably, “You are behind a barricade, while I am in front of it. Disorder is your means of action. My duty is to impose order!”21
The French state made such coordinated repression possible, and the upper classes called for it. Armed troops, gendarmes, and police could be sent against demonstrators and strikers without the slightest hesitation. On behalf of the French Republic, Clemenceau used violent tactics of repression with ease and virtual impunity. This left no doubt in the minds of anarchists of all varieties—and of socialists and syndicalists as well—that their criticisms of the centralized and powerful state were justified.
The strikes generally failed to secure the demands of the workers. To anarchists, such defeats demonstrated not only the sheer evil of the state but also the impossibility of carrying out a revolution through unions and, for that matter, socialist political organization. Libertad denounced unions as “the ultimate imbecility.” Yet many anarchists—the “communists”—still had faith in unions as the way to prepare future revolution.22
For their part, the upper classes were reassured by Clemenceau’s repressive tactics. A Parisian lawyer had intoned, “Contempt is the voluptuousness of the moment.… Never has authority managed better without respect.”23 The popular novels of Paul Bourget, celebrating the French bourgeoisie, identified workers and socialists as the enemy. Clemenceau’s determined repression of strikes would inspire Bourget’s La Barricade (1910). If entrepreneurs exploited workers, so much the better. An infusion of muscular Catholicism would help counter what Bourget considered the ongoing “social war.”24
During subsequent strikes in Draveil, twelve miles south of Paris, in May and June 1908, it became clear that in response to the violence of the “forces of order,” some strikers and demonstrators were willing to reply in kind.25 Most union members favored a general strike but did not believe that they would see a victorious insurrection in their lifetimes. The internal forces of the French state had grown more powerful since the Paris Commune. However, this did not mean that all workers rejected the use of violence in the conflict against employers, strikebreakers, and police.26
Events in the grim southeastern suburbs in the spring of 1908 only reaffirmed Rirette’s anarchist militancy. Early in May, a bitter strike broke out in the desolate suburbs of Draveil, Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, and Villeneuve-le-Roi. Thousands of workers labored for thirty bosses, extracting sand in quarries over a thirty-kilometer stretch along the Seine. Building the new Métro and train tunnels and canals required an enormous amount of sand. These workers, many of whom were Breton, Auvergnat, or Italian in origin, were a hardy, tested lot. Injuries were commonplace, and for many workers three liters of wine each day was the only thing that could keep them going.
After a short-lived strike in November 1907 that brought a return to the paltry pay level of fifty centimes an hour, on May 2, 1908, about eight hundred workers who extracted five hundred to six hundred tons of sand a day went out on strike. They demanded seventy centimes an hour, plus twenty-five more for work in water, thirty for night work, and eighty centimes for additional work beyond their daunting workdays. The twenty-six bosses signed a pact of solidarity, vowing to defeat the strike, and brought in strike breakers. The strike was marked by fighting, sabotage, and even arson, with many acts carried out by anarchists. Some workers armed themselves with pistols. Anarchist speakers went out from Paris to address the strikers. Libertad was among them. In a fiery speech he told the workers, “When the earth has been freed from its oppressors, this will be the coming of an anarchist society when mankind will be united by their love for life.”
On May 23, two hundred of the strikers tried to prevent scabs from working and were attacked by police and soldiers. Next, workers pushed four scabs into a restaurant and held them there until the subprefect managed to obtain their release. On May 28, gendarmes tried to enter a meeting of strikers being held in the Restaurant Ranque. Forced back, they began to fire into the restaurant, killing two people: Émile Giobellina, who was only seventeen years of age, and Pierre Le Foll, a carpenter.
Rirette went out to Draveil-Vigneux every day to participate in what she called a “festival of common misery.” On June 2, as she arrived at the site of the strike carrying food she had gathered on farms along the way, Rirette learned of the restaurant shootings. Rirette went to see Giobellina’s body, having discovered that the boy had no family. Someone, she insisted, should be there. Others had the same idea, and Rirette joined about ten thousand people in a solemn procession toward the cemetery where the young man was to be buried. Cavalrymen blocked their entrance.
Georges Clemenceau sent in more troops to back up the police and gendarmes. Two days later, ten to fifteen thousand people followed the casket of Pierre Le Foll to the cemetery of Villeneuve-le-Roi, amid shouts of “Down with the capitalists!” Violent confrontations between workers and soldiers occurred along the route.
A quickly organized investigation into the shootings concluded that the gendarmes had no orders to go into the restaurant and that, worse, they could not demonstrate any aspect of “legitimate defense.” But that was the end of it; no one would be prosecuted for the deaths.
On July 30, a huge mobilization of union members, socialists, and anarchists took place, as building workers and others arrived by train from Paris in support of the strikers and to protest the harsh repression. They marched toward the cemetery where Émile Giobellina had been buried. Cavalrymen cut through the demonstration with their swords, killing four demonstrators and wounding a hundred more, including a thirteen-year-old. The clash left sixty-nine soldiers, gendarmes, and police wounded as well. Indeed, some of the demonstrators had brought pistols. The police arrested more than a score of union leaders, among them Victor Griffuelhes, the general secretary of the CGT, who spent two months in jail. A deputy mayor of Draveil was among the injured—his arm would be amputated while he was in prison.
Both Rirette and Libertad were there that day. Rirette’s leg was broken by a huge rock thrown at her by a soldier during the confrontations on July 30. She escaped arrest only when a doctor convinced the police that she needed to be taken in an ambulance to medical care becau
se she risked paralysis. Libertad avoided arrest only by throwing himself into the Seine, surviving despite being handicapped and not knowing how to swim.27
Gradually, negotiations started, and in the end the strikers received a tiny raise of five centimes, the workday limited to ten hours, the guarantee of one day of rest per week, a little more pay for night work, and the closure of exploitative bars run by foremen. Sixteen people who had been arrested were freed without being charged. It became clear that provocateurs and informers had been at work within the ranks of the strikers. Yet again, Clemenceau’s strategy had been bloodshed.28
For Jean Jaurès’s L’Humanité and other newspapers on the left, Clemenceau’s responsibility for the tragic events seemed clear. The Commission Administrative de la Bourse du Travail noted, “Yet again Clemenceau wants to show that he is the master of France. Laws mean nothing to his bloodthirsty existence.” The commission denounced the “government of murderers.” The conservative Le Temps had a very different view, describing the CGT as “a purely insurrectionary committee” and declaring, “We will deal with it as such.”29
Rirette would never forget what she had seen during those weeks in Draveil. In five years in Paris, she was much changed. And for Libertad, the strikes would be his last stand. He died four months later, in November 1908, at age thirty-three—eight days after being kicked in the stomach during a brawl following an anarchist talk on rue du Chevalier de la Barre. He hobbled on crutches to Lariboisière Hospital near the Gare du Nord. Before Libertad died of peritonitis (although rumor has long since had him being poisoned), his only visitor was Mauricius. No one came to claim his body.30
Chapter 6
A LOVE STORY
Rirette had first caught sight of Victor Kibaltchiche in the spring of 1909 at an anarchist meeting in Lille that she attended with Mauricius. She was not impressed. Victor had “worried” dark eyes, his mouth was small and contemptuous,” and his hands were “very meticulous,” not those of a worker. Reflecting his family’s origin, Victor wore a Russian shirt of white flannel, embroidered with light silk, covering his “frail” chest. He spoke softly, reassuringly, carefully choosing his words, with “precious” gestures. “He displeased me enormously. What pretension!” she remembered. Victor’s impression of her was not much better. He asked Mauricius, “Who is this little goose who is accompanying you?”1
In July 1909, after leaving her girls with militants she knew, Rirette and Mauricius made a brief trip to Italy and planned to go on to North Africa. But in Rome Rirette fell ill with meningitis and had to return to Paris. Rirette’s relationship with Mauricius had become stormy by that point, and the abbreviated trip did not help things. Yet she returned to France with characteristic optimism about anarchism, although she and Mauricius went their separate own ways.
Again Rirette ran into Victor Kibaltchiche, at an anarchist causerie on the rue du Chevalier de la Barre. Victor annoyed Rirette, as well as other comrades, even more—“he exuded being an intellectual”—when he rose to speak during these debates. On several occasions Rirette countered his arguments, and Victor always responded politely. A comrade made fun of the tension between them: “If you talk together for only an hour, you will find agreement,” he assured her. When they met again at the Université populaire on rue de Faubourg Saint-Antoine, Rirette began to have a different impression. Soon Rirette again bumped into Victor, this time in the Jardin du Luxembourg. He seemed alone, a bit disconcerted, and sad. They chatted, and Victor opened up to her, describing his young life in Brussels and what he had left behind there.2
After that, Victor and Rirette began to meet every day in the Jardin du Luxembourg. On occasion, they walked into the distant woods on the edge of Paris during the day. Some evenings, they strolled along the quays of the Seine, discussing poetry, music, and life. When the weather was good and they had a few sous, they would take a bâteau-mouche to Saint-Cloud. Rirette, now in love, found Victor “beautiful as a god… with a very pure oval face with his delicate and sensitive mouth and a somewhat distant smile, giving the impression of considerable nonchalance.”3
With virtually no money, Victor and Rirette moved into an attic room offered them by a philosopher friend in the fifth arrondissement, not too far from place de la Contrescarpe, paralleling rue Mouffetard. Their apartment was close to the setting for Honoré de Balzac’s Père Goriot, near where the novelist had once lived. For a time, because of their friend, they gave lessons to a seventeen-year-old baron whom the former had taught, until he ran into some trouble and his parents refused him further education. But no matter. No money, no problem.4
When the baron-student’s parents stopped paying, Victor and Rirette found themselves “lacking only money, although they had enough to purchase tea.” And they had Rirette’s two girls, who were a joy, as well as causeries to attend and their friends who came to visit.
Victor’s friends became Rirette’s friends. He introduced her to René Valet, a shy anarchist locksmith he had met in a bar in the Latin Quarter. “One has to extract his words” from René, but little by little, “he came to life,” emerging as a “lively restless spirit.” Influenced by Victor, Valet could recite passages from Anatole France and from the anarchist Rictus. They discussed literature and poetry in the cafés around Sainte-Geneviève or the boulevard Saint-Michel, or in Victor and Rirette’s apartment. With no funds to purchase kerosene, they read by the dim light of a candle. In such moments, the long face of Valet—who became known to his friends as “Carrot Hair”—took on “an expression of extraordinary suffering,” relating things “sad, so sad… his appearance is both painful and brutal.” He dressed in wide corduroy pants with a blue flannel belt. Valet spoke slowly, softly, and sometimes with great bitterness, particularly when it came to his bourgeois family, who lived nearby.5
René Valet was born in 1890 in Verdun, and his family lived on boulevard Port-Royal. He was an intelligent young man, and he, like Victor, took advantage of his proximity to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève. Valet’s family was “well considered” in their neighborhood. His father was an entrepreneur in public works projects. René had been a student in the nearby École Lavoisier. He had grown up with two older sisters and an elder brother; when his brother passed away four years earlier, a change had come over René.
René Valet.
In 1910, Valet briefly served as secretary of Jeunesse Révolutionnaire de la Seine, an antimilitary group that included anarchists and syndicalists. He was arrested and condemned to a suspended sentence of fifteen days in jail that year for “outrages” against police. An industrial electric company in Suresnes (beyond Bulogne-Billancourt), where he had worked, accused him of thefts in September 1911. But what had been removed from the company was found outside, along with an official order for Valet to report for military service. He left for Belgium, with funds provided by his father who apparently was fed up with him, and he managed to avoid being conscripted. Returning to France thanks to a porous frontier, Valet worked briefly in Brest and on the construction of tracks between Pontoise and Dieppe and distributed antimilitary propaganda. He spent a couple of weeks in prison for assault during a strike.6
For all of their seeming incompatibility when they first met, Victor and Rirette had several interests in common that brought them together, in addition to anarchism and the lectures and debates in the causeries. Victor recalled: “Anarchism swept us away completely because it both demanded everything of us and offered us everything.” Intellectuals, they shared a passion for poetry, literature, and music. They enjoyed strolling through the Jardin du Luxembourg, discussing what they had read and ideas in general. Rirette recalled that their love began with daily meetings there. Both also loved on occasion watching dawn arise and walking along the quays of the Seine in the evening. Victor and Rirette also took short trips together into the countryside beyond Paris. Moreover, both had survived extremely challenging times when they were children and adolescents. They both were used to making the best of
the little they had. For his part, Victor quickly adapted to life as a couple shared with Rirette’s two daughters.7
Victor remained preoccupied by the challenge of mobilizing anarchists against the French state. Could not the expansion of the ravages brought by international capitalism and state power be countered by massive demonstrations in Paris and other cities, which could increase the appeal of anarchism? Three giant Parisian demonstrations had offered Victor hope. He joined massive protests following the execution in Barcelona in October 1909 of Francisco Ferrer, an educator falsely accused of conspiracy in the bloody attempted assassination of Alphonse XIII by Mateu Morral Roca three years earlier. Before being shot in a moat of the fortress of Montjuïc in Barcelona, he yelled to the execution squad, “I forgive you, my children. Aim well!” On October 13, an angry crowd of twenty thousand poured into the streets of Paris. Demonstrators marched from place Clichy to place Villiers, to boulevard Batignolles and then through the fancy neighborhoods of Malescherbes-Courcelles, where they showered the elegant bourgeois apartments with rocks. The protesters then swarmed toward the Spanish embassy, before being driven away by police firing pistols into the air, intent on protecting, above all, the major boulevards, accurately described by Victor as “bordered by banks and aristocratic residences.” Marchers destroyed kiosks, gas pipes, and several omnibuses and attacked monuments, some shouting “Death to the inquisitors!” At one point, a man stepped out and fired a Browning at Louis Lépine, the prefect of police of Paris, shouting “Assassin! I am going to take care of you!” Lépine was lightly wounded, but not badly enough to prevent him from ordering a second charge against the crowd, which had constructed several barricades using café tables and chairs. Pitched battles left wounded on both sides. Aggressive shouts echoed: “Death to the cops!” “Death to the cows! Death to the gendarmes!” and “Death to the bourgeois!” The repeated use of violence by police and soldiers and the killing of several demonstrators raised the stakes and intensity of conflict.8
Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits Page 8