Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  Having burned his bridges with the illegalists, Victor now undertook in L’Anarchie a vigorous campaign against them. He had his work cut out for him. Criminal acts were becoming the face of the public’s perception of anarchism. Kibaltchiche dreamed of an anarchism based on love and feeling, in which illegalism and the “scientism,” which seemed so eccentric—even stupid—and counterproductive, would have no place. His old friend Callemin’s obsession with the so-called scientism of extreme individualism had now led to his being routinely, and sometimes mockingly, called Raymond “la Science.”45

  Victor, as editor of L’Anarchie (although Rirette held that title on paper), worked to take the newspaper in a new direction “in the sense of a return from individualism to social action. … I wanted to affirm the doctrine of ‘solidarity and revolt’ in the present.” Three years earlier, he had written in the Le Communiste that, “To be in solidarity with economic rebels does not mean to advocate theft or to elevate it to that of a tactic.”46

  Victor didn’t have much luck convincing the illegalists he knew. Marius Metge, who came to Victor and Rirette’s home occasionally, had his own ideas about illegalist tactics. Metge was originally from the small Rhône railroad town of Le Teil in Ardèche, raised by his grandmother. Metge had begun as an apprentice cook in Nîmes and then worked in that métier in England. He thus had the obvious nicknames of “Le Cuisinier,” “Le Pâtissier,” and “La Cuistance” or “Le Cuistancier.” Like Soudy and other anarchists, he had gone to Belgium to avoid military conscription—where he had met Carouy, Garnier, and Valet—and returned to Paris in 1910.

  Marius Metge had fallen in love with an illiterate Breton servant, Barbe Le Clerch, who had come to Paris from the small town of Le Faouët in Morbihan. The number of Breton immigrants to Paris had increased dramatically beginning in the 1880s, particularly to the vicinity of the Gare Montparnasse, their point of arrival in the capital.47 Barbe was one of more than twelve thousand domestics from Brittany working in Paris. The mayor of Le Faouët could find nothing for which to reproach the young woman: “This young person before she left Le Faouët was of good morality, reflecting her upbringing by her mother, who, given her state of indigence, was obliged to place her daughter” in domestic service in town, near her village. Now in Paris, Barbe Le Clerch worked here and there as a domestic. She wrote—through the auspices of a Breton public writer—to her mother several times, but her mother had absolutely no idea about her life.

  Barbe Le Clerch had lived with Metge in Romainville, not far from the offices of L’Anarchie. The sister of the owner of the building recognized her from a police photo as one of the women of the anarchists who lived in the building between December 1910 and April 1911. For a time, she worked as a domestic in Les Pavillons-sous-Bois. That residence was subsequently burgled, and it appeared that Le Clerch provided information to Metge. The couple moved to Suresnes and then to the grim northern suburb of Garches.48

  Two men broke into the post office in Romainville on the night of October 17, 1910, after the illegalists had moved away from that suburb, stealing more than eight thousand francs’ worth of stamps, as well as sixteen hundred francs in cash. They climbed over a wall and shattered a window. Police suspected Metge, whom they believed to be a friend of Carouy and another suspicious anarchist, Louis Rimbault.49

  The illegalists in Romainville had burgled in order to survive. Yet such small crimes brought only small amounts of loot. Following their departure from that suburb, their exploits in August brought in three hundred and then four hundred francs, followed by seven hundred francs for the burglary of a post office and four thousand francs for the burglary of a villa in Nantes. In September, a burglary at the post office in Chelles (Seine-et-Marne), fifteen miles east of Paris, yielded four thousand francs and that of a tax office in Compiègne, fifty miles northwest, in early November netted three thousand five hundred francs. But other nighttime action brought in very little, despite the risks of being caught.50

  While Victor and Rirette were moving in a different direction, their old Romainville comrades were doubling down on their old ways. Octave Garnier began to dream of a bigger robbery that would be worth the risk. Raymond Callemin, “obsessed with revolt,” was also intent on pulling off “an audacious coup.” Garnier’s attention turned toward the use of an automobile for such an exploit. Such a modern contraption could be stolen with relative ease, a new weapon to be turned against the bourgeois state. He had learned how to drive, but he was not very good at it. Garnier needed a comrade who knew how to drive well. So for the moment he hesitated to steal the kind of large and powerful automobile that would be required “to carry out a coup that would keep them from need for a certain time.”51

  Callemin also had learned how to drive, but also not well. He mentioned to Garnier and one or two other illegalists that he had met someone with lots of experience at the wheel.

  PART TWO

  Chapter 8

  JULES BONNOT

  Octave Garnier and his friends found someone who could drive: Jules Bonnot. “A small, sturdy man with a thin moustache wearing a worker’s Sunday-best clothes that were too tight,” Bonnot had arrived from Lyon. He needed money. He was looking for men capable of and willing to, in his words, “play for keeps, willing to succeed or to die.” On December 12, 1911, Garnier, Valet, Callemin, and Carouy had returned from various small “coups” in the suburbs. They met with Bonnot, probably in the apartment of Bernard Gorodsky, an anarchist printer who lived in Montmartre. Callemin remembered, “We discussed the project and in the end we fell into agreement.” Bonnot was wanted for murder. He had nothing to lose.1

  Jules Bonnot embodied the frightening turn of anarchist violence. He was born in 1876 in Pont-de-Roide (Doubs), twelve miles south of Montbéliard and nine miles from the Swiss border. The small town in eastern France had a population of about twenty-six hundred and several mills sawing lumber from the rich forests of Franche-Comté. Bonnot’s father was an illiterate smelter, beaten down by impossibly hard work, low wages, and the constant fear of being let go. Bonnot’s mother passed away when he was four years old, and he resented the siblings from his father’s second marriage. His uncle Charles, a policeman in Paris, became completely unstable, before returning to Franche-Comté and passing away. The children were raised by Jules’s grandmother.

  After a difficult, unsuccessful, and brief stint in school, where his teachers described him as “lazy, undisciplined, insolent,” at age fourteen Jules began an apprenticeship as a mechanic. A year later, he got a job in the Peugeot factory in Sochaux. His elder brother Justin also worked there, until, after an unhappy love affair, he committed suicide by throwing himself into a river. Jules had constant disputes with his employers, whose authority he simply rejected and who probably with reason suspected him of theft. His first brush with the law was an arrest for using explosives instead of a rod and reel for fishing; his second arrest, at age seventeen, got him ten days in jail for a brawl at a dance in Besançon. Other arrests followed for miscellaneous brawls. Bonnot fulfilled his military service, beginning in November of 1897. He did well enough, reaching the rank of corporal in the 133e infantry regiment. Jules was noted for excellent marksmanship, and he also received a certificate of good conduct.2

  After he left the military, Bonnot began hanging out with anarchists, which made it difficult for him to find regular work. In August 1901, he married Sophie Burdet, a young seamstress, the daughter of a farm couple in the village of Vouvray in the Ain with whom he had been lodged while in the army. For a time Jules worked in Lyon, then in Ambérieux, followed by Bellegarde near the Swiss border. At this last place Jules lost his job, seemingly because of his espousal of anarchism. Unable to find regular work, he and his wife left for Geneva, where Sophie’s mother had gone to live. There Bonnot found some employment. Sophie gave birth to a baby girl, named Émilie, but the infant died several days later, perhaps because the couple had no money to pay for urgently needed medical treatment. A so
n, Justin-Louis, was born in February 1904.

  By now, Bonnot began to spread anarchist propaganda, and Swiss authorities expelled him. A brief stint followed in Neuves-Maisons near Nancy, and then Bonnot and Sophie returned to Geneva, before the police expelled Jules again from Switzerland. Returning to Lyon, he found work in the Berliet automobile factory in Montplaisir. He and Sophie lived in the home of a Berliet factory foreman called Besson, a union secretary.3

  Jules Bonnot.

  Bonnot lost his job at the Berliet factory after participating in a strike. Now the police identified him as an anarchist. Long periods of unemployment and underemployment took him from place to place looking for a job. He worked as a mechanic in Saint-Étienne between October 1905 and April 1906. There a police report assessed him as “very violent and above all nasty.” While Jules was working in Saint-Étienne, Sophie left him for Besson, their lodger. The new couple ran off to Geneva with Justin-Louis. Jules wrote to his wife, noting that he was not “under the influence of anger” but that he had decided to “return to his most absolute rights,” in other words, to take her back. He signed the note “Your husband who has not forgotten you, Jules Bonnot.”4

  The letter did not have the desired effect, so in August 1906 Bonnot again wrote to Sophie in response to a letter she had written apparently denouncing him. He asked if she really believed all that she had written to him: “I really tried to forget you but I couldn’t because it always came back to me that I cannot understand how you had the courage to leave me at the moment when I most needed you. Think of the future of your son. You tell me you think of him. I don’t want a divorce nor your money. It’s you I want.” Besson had accomplished “the most cowardly of crimes because it is not punishable.” He had stolen Bonnot’s wife. Bonnot went on, “You know that I have spent money trying to get you back, at the risk of dying of hunger as I was ill. You know that I am suffering greatly. Do not prolong my suffering. I finish my letter by kissing you.” Bonnot would never see Sophie or his son again.5

  With his formidable skills as a mechanic, Bonnot managed to find some steady work driving automobiles. He received his driver’s license on September 17, 1907. The next year he and Albert Petit-Demange, who had also worked in the Berliet factory, opened an automobile repair shop, and then a second one. The shops became ideal places to store bicycles that the two men or others had stolen. At night, Bonnot and his friend burgled houses. “Business” went well enough that Bonnot rented several other places to store what they had stolen.

  In 1908 Bonnot took a room in a house occupied by Jean-Baptiste Thollon, an alcoholic cemetery guard, thirty-five years of age, in plebeian La Guillotière in Lyon on the road to Vienne. Bonnot fell in love with Thollon’s wife, Judith. The two went on romantic excursions in the adjacent cemetery, while her clueless husband drank and went about his work.6

  Needing another person to help out in his enterprise, Bonnot hired an Italian anarchist and former baker, Joseph Platano (born in Poneragno in 1883; he also went by “Sorrentino,” his family name, “Mandino,” or “Mandolino,” depending on the circumstances), to help him out in a city where Cesario, another Italian anarchist, had assassinated French president Sadi Carnot in June 1894. When the police were on to them, Jules Bonnot left briefly for Geneva and busied himself with more safecracking there. In 1910, he went to London for several months, probably to see about selling stolen cars. Needing some money to tide him over in the British capital, he seems even to have worked for a time as a chauffeur for Arthur Conan Doyle. The English writer, who was bringing Sherlock Holmes to the world’s attention, undoubtedly had no idea that he was being driven skillfully around London by a real-life criminal.

  Back in Lyon later that same year, Jules Bonnot continued to steal. On the night of March 31–April 1, he took six motocyclettes and three bikes from a certain Monsieur Weber in Lyon. Bonnot decided to accelerate, as it were, his one-man crime spree through the use of automobiles—stolen, of course. In the first adventure, Bonnot used a car simply to reach a new and tempting target. He and his sidekick Platano drove to Vienne in April 1911, twenty miles to the south along the Rhône. Dressed in their Sunday best and stepping out of a gleaming luxury (stolen) automobile, they explained to notary Monsieur Girard some sort of project that would bring easy money to all three participants. Bonnot and Platano’s next trip to Vienne took place in the middle of the night on April 19–20, 1911. Undetected, with the help of a welding blowtorch, they cracked Girard’s well-stocked safe and left with thirty-seven thousand francs in gold and bank notes, which had been deposited the day before by a wealthy merchant from Lyon. Platano headed to Italy with some of the loot, while Bonnot calmly returned to Lyon.

  Sometime earlier, Jules Bonnot had stolen a car in Lyon and driven it up to Paris. He took the automobile to a garage owner named Joseph Dubois, who lived in Choisy-le-Roi just southeast of Paris. Dubois was French, but he had been born in Odessa and was a veteran of the Foreign Legion. He was also an anarchist who had served time in jail for burglarizing a church. Dubois sold the stolen automobile, and for some time Bonnot stayed with the garagiste. Together they stole a car in Blois, before Bonnot returned to Lyon.7

  In October 1911, an informer tipped off the police about what was really going on at Bonnot’s automobile repair business. When Bonnot and Petit-Demange were away, police searched the Route de Vienne shop and found stolen motorbikes, bicycles, burglary tools, and various accessories that had been taken from stolen cars, including some from a luxurious automobile stolen in Vienne in January. The motorbikes and bicycles could be identified as having been stolen from Monsieur Weber. The police arrested Petit-Demange, but Bonnot got away when a neighbor told him that the police had come looking for him. He thanked the good neighbor, said he could not imagine why the police were after him, and announced that he was off to buy a newspaper. Jules Bonnot was a wanted man. It was time to get out.8

  Early on the morning of November 26, 1911, Bonnot crammed some clothes in a bag, along with five Browning pistols—thus the illegalist argot, to bouziller, or “lodge a Browning bullet in the body of someone”—and one hundred bullets. He dressed up a bit so as not to raise suspicions as he and his friend Platano, who had returned from Italy, drove a stolen—naturally—olive-green Buire luxury car on the long road to Paris. As they reached the region of Brie, Bonnot drove over a chicken and a dog. Platano laughed, “Who are you going to kill now?”9

  Platano never made it to Paris. About 10:30 in the morning a rural guard in the village of Pamfou in Seine-et-Marne, on the road from Melun to Montereau, heard a shot. Thinking he might nab a poacher, he hurried in that direction, and then a second shot sounded. He came upon the critically wounded man lying in the light snow in Le Châtelet-en-Brie. He turned and saw a man dressed in black leather run to a beige Rochet-Schneider automobile, jump in, and drive away. The guard rode his bike to get help, and the bleeding man was taken to the farm of the village mayor. A summoned doctor could do nothing for him. Platano died without revealing anything. He was ultimately identified by the name “Mandino”—one of his aliases—found on a tag in his coat, in which he had 450 francs, a considerable sum. A tailor confirmed by telephone—another accoutrement of the fin de siécle—that he had sold the clothing to a man called Mandino. Mandino had asked that the clothing be delivered to a shabby Parisian hotel. The word “Saulieu” written on a small piece of paper led police to a hotel in that town where Platano and his companion had stayed, and to a restaurant there where the two had dined without exchanging even a word.

  Bonnot did not get far before the automobile broke down in Moissy near Melun. Someone saw him trying to restart the motor several times, without success. Exasperated, he went into a small restaurant and ordered two eggs and half a bottle of wine for lunch. He stood out because his fine boots were covered with mud. And he seemed preoccupied, leaving quickly after discarding his driving clothes. He took the next train for the hour trip into Paris.

  Police soon discovered
through the engine number that the Buire automobile, eighteen horsepower, had been stolen at about four in the morning on January 18 in Vienne. Platano had briefly worked as a chauffeur for the owner of the stolen vehicle. Accessories from the car had been found in Bonnot’s shop in Lyon.

  Witnesses, including some who had seen him catch the 2:31 p.m. train to Paris, described a man about thirty years of age. That description was sent to police stations: a man about thirty years of age with a little brown mustache, “1.60 to 1.63 [meters tall], stocky, oval face, dark complexion, rather gray looking, not very engaging, well-kempt, wearing a large dark raincoat, black melon-shaped hat, and dirty boots.” In Saulieu, Le Châtelet-en-Brie, and Moissy, those who had seen him identified Jules Bonnot from police photos. The juge d’instruction in Melun soon put out a warrant for Bonnot’s arrest for murder. L’Excelsior named him as the suspect in its edition of November 30.10

  So why did Bonnot kill his sidekick Platano? The police concluded that the two men had been waiting for an accomplice on the train to toss them the loot from a big theft and that Bonnot had eliminated Platano to avoid having to split the money. Or had Bonnot suspected that Platano was ready to betray him? Or had—as Bonnot later claimed to anarchists in Paris—Platano accidentally shot himself while checking out a Browning revolver with which he was not familiar, and the second shot the rural guard heard was the coup de grâce that Bonnot fired to spare Platano further suffering. If Bonnot’s account was indeed true, illegalists in Paris debated whether this was the correct thing to do. Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maîtrejean had not yet met Bonnot, but “from the grapevine we gathered than an individualist from Lyon, Bonnot by name (I did not know the man)… had killed Platano.” Victor did not believe Bonnot’s story about Platano’s demise, and he rejected the idea that an anarchist could end a colleague’s life in such a way. Rirette also had her doubts. Their opinion was an unpopular one. When Victor made this point at an anarchist meeting, he received a visit from his old friend Raymond Callemin, who apparently even threatened to “bouziller” him. “If you don’t want to disappear,” Raymond warned, “be careful about condemning us.… Do whatever you like! If you get in my way I’ll eliminate you!”11