Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  On December 2, police in Lyon, having learned that Bonnot had stayed there, searched the residence of the cemetery guard Jean-Baptiste Thollon and his wife Judith. The police found burglary tools, including eight welding torches capable of piercing steel plate, and moulds to produce counterfeit money. Both Thollons claimed they did not know the tools had been left by Bonnot. The police also found letters from Bonnot that left no doubt about his relationship with Madame Thollon. And the police discovered twenty-five thousand francs in bank notes wrapped in paper, which Judith insisted she knew nothing about because her lover had sometimes left her similarly wrapped anarchist propaganda. Yet it seems that Bonnot had placed that sum in an envelope and sent it to Judith, addressed to “J.T. Poste restante, la Guillotière, Lyon,” with the note “Put this where you want. It is only a beginning. I am at the moment in Paris. Burn this letter when you receive it.”

  The police also found receipts for rent in the name of Jules Renaud—in reality, Jules Bonnot. This led them to the five places he had rented to store stolen goods and to divide up the take. A search of one of Bonnot’s rented places turned up more burglary tools, car tires, various items of clothing, and two stolen motocyclettes, including another taken from Weber. A second search of the Thollon residence revealed some of Bonnot’s clothes; he had taken care to appear as a well-heeled gentleman, as when he had gone to Vienne to check out the notary whose office he had later robbed in the middle of the night.

  The Thollons were taken under arrest to the Palais de Justice in Lyon. Both continued to proclaim their innocence. The cemetery guard’s boss expressed confidence in Thollon, as did the other renters in their residence. Yet there had been worries about people coming and going, and it turned out that Bonnot’s accomplice Petit-Demange had stayed there, too. Platano had also come around. Perhaps Thollon knew more than he let on. The police suggested that he might well have hidden suspicious items among the tombs in the cemetery. Certainly he was “under the influence” of Jules Bonnot—as, obviously, was his spouse.

  The police of Lyon moved forward with an investigation of two other accomplices of Bonnot, hoping, perhaps, that someone would lead them to the man himself. David Bélonie, born in Gignac in the Lot to a mother whose boyfriend quickly abandoned her after the birth, could speak some of seven languages. He became an anarchist counterfeiter and an occasional pharmacy employee. The other accomplice was a swindler who had worked for Le Comptoir Français, which produced small gambling machines for bars. Bélonie sent him gambling machines from Lyon, presumably to sell for profit. On January 3, 1911, Bélonie took one of the motocyclettes that Bonnot had stolen from Weber in Lyon and transported it to London.12

  In a headline on December 5, Le Progrès de Lyon loudly proclaimed, “We now know who killed Platano. It is Bonnot. It remains only to arrest him.” The front page flashed a police photo of Jules Bonnot, taken in Lyon when he had been arrested on November 11, 1909, for assault and battery. The Parisian newspaper L’Excelsior on December 5 was the first to refer to “the Bonnot gang,” but only in the context of the murder of Platano and the thefts and burglaries carried out with others in and around Lyon.13

  For now, though, Bonnot remained at large in Paris. Where in the City of Light could Jules Bonnot—anarchist, thief, and probably murderer—find a place to stay? David Bélonie, Bonnot’s old friend and accomplice from his Lyon days, pointed Bonnot toward a rooming house on rue Nollet in the seventeenth arrondissement. Bonnot, in turn, recommended the establishment to Eugène Dieudonné, a twenty-eight-year-old anarchist cabinetmaker from Nancy.14

  Bonnot’s self-proclaimed anarchism found him a welcome home in Paris. His first stop was the offices of L’Anarchie. No one there recalled seeing Bonnot before, but his reputation as an uncompromising tough guy had preceded him.15

  Jules Bonnot increasingly presented himself as less convinced by theories of anarchism than as a rebel who aggressively refused to submit to the rules and laws of organized society. Older than those who were becoming his associates in crime, he seemed a bad guy (“mauvais esprit”) capable of violence, particularly as he contemplated more lucrative crimes. Bonnot was cold, aloof, suspicious, and secretive, hardened by an impoverished childhood and tumultuous adolescence. But his was not unusual behavior for people on the margins in a France in which undercover policemen and police spies and other informers were everywhere and no one could be easily trusted. Informers were surprisingly successful in infiltrating the anarchist milieu.

  As soon as Bonnot reached the circle of anarchists linked to L’Anarchie, he opened up attacks from the illegalist perspective on Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maîtrejean. Rirette first saw Jules Bonnot with a little mustache and “giving the impression of being old” in a meeting on rue de Bretagne in the third arrondissement. She instantly did not like him.16

  Upon his arrival in Paris, Jules Bonnot turned almost immediately to planning crimes. He soon found the trio of illegalists that had been looking for someone exactly like him. On December 7, he went to the shop in Montmartre where L’Idée Libre, “a monthly review of social education,” could be purchased. This was Lorulot’s “scientific” newspaper. There Bonnot met Raymond Callemin, recognizing him thanks to Dieudonné’s description, and Monier. They had found their driver.

  Chapter 9

  THE BONNOT GANG STRIKES

  On the night of December 13–14, Jules Bonnot, Raymond Callemin, and Édouard Carouy waited in the shadows for Monsieur Normand and his spouse to return from the Opéra de Paris to their luxurious residence in Boulogne-Billancourt, a western suburb. When the couple had returned, turned off the lights, and gone to bed, the three men climbed over a garden wall into the garage and stole the Normands’ black and dark green Delaunay-Belleville, twelve horsepower with a value of fifteen thousand francs. It was exactly the car they had in mind—fast, powerful, and large enough to hold the welding torch that Garnier needed to cut through large safes.1

  Normand woke the next morning to find his prized automobile gone, and he offered a reward of five hundred francs for its recovery. A newspaper that reported on the theft suggested that perhaps a nearby quartier “of very bad reputation because the Italians who stay in furnished rooms are for the most part unsavory,” played a role. For many French of means, Italians were an unwanted other. It was enough of a distraction to keep the press and the police off the trail of Bonnot and give the three men time to plot their next move.2

  Bonnot and his new friends were ready for action, armed with 9mm Brownings, semiautomatic, light, and accurate. If they ran into trouble, they knew that Parisian policemen were unarmed. In the middle of the night of December 20, Bonnot, Garnier, Callemin, Carouy, and perhaps Valet met in La Villette, amid butchers from the nearby slaughterhouse. The plan, at first, was to rob a villa in Romainville, but when they got close to the house they spotted the owner and abandoned that idea.3

  Finally, at around three in the morning, the men made a decision. The elegant automobile moved toward a second target, one that had been suggested by Pierre Cardi, a Corsican anarchist. For a while Cardi had run a wine shop on rue Ordener on the other side of Montmarte in the eighteenth arrondissement; across the street from the shop was a branch of the Société Générale bank, and each morning, a courier carrying cash and securities arrived on a tram, unarmed. Now, well before dawn, Garnier practiced driving—in case something happened to Bonnot—by going down and then up the Champs-Élysées. Bonnot then took the wheel and they drove to rue Ordener in the eighteenth arrondissement, checking out the street and those that adjoined it. The quartier was decidedly populaire. Thus, with even taxis few and far between, the Delaunay-Belleville automobile immediately attracted attention. At five in the morning, as Paris slowly awakened, a few ragpickers could be seen going through garbage at the same time that workers hustled off to workshops and small factories. Garnier sat in the seat next to Bonnot, and Callemin sat in a back seat next to a fourth man. They waited.4

  At 8:45 in the morning,
one of the men in the car stepped out and gunned down Ernest Caby, the courier carrying funds and securities to the branch of Société Générale, shooting him three times. Two gardiens de la paix tried to stop the car, but the bandits sped away, with Jules Bonnot at the wheel.

  By 9:30 a.m., the audacious robbers were driving through Saint- Denis just north of Paris. In the car, the men vowed to defend themselves until death. They were certainly well prepared: Callemin was himself carrying six revolvers, one of which could fire eight hundred meters, and his partners each had three pistols and four hundred bullets.5

  On rue Ordener, Henri Mosier had heard sounds like tires popping. He yelled to the driver and his companions, “Hey, guys, your tires have blown!” He heard someone in the car say to the man at the wheel, “Move forward, forward, forward!” Next to the driver was a man standing up with a revolver in his hand, looking back and firing in the direction of the curious who were following behind the car. When Mosier started to run after the car, which had picked up speed, the man shot at him twice. When the car turned left, he lost sight of it. He described the driver as about twenty-five years old, with a dark “Italian” complexion and a small black mustache, wearing an old, dark-colored raincoat with a black jockey’s cap. The man who fired at him was thin and pale, with a chestnut-colored mustache, a long black pardessus, and a black bowler hat.6

  In the confusion, witnesses offered contradictory accounts as to the color of the big car—black or white—and even the number of occupants of the automobile—four or five—although most everyone agreed that there were at least four bandits. The man seen shooting Caby appeared to be twenty-five to thirty years of age, with a long and rather dark face, wearing a long gray raincoat and a gray cap pulled down over his ears. Someone noted the license plate as being 660-X-8. One of the men had remained in the automobile the entire time.

  The robbers stopped in Pontoise, fifteen miles northwest of Paris, to discover that the take was considerably smaller than anticipated. Moreover, they knew that the securities would be extremely difficult to sell. They had missed an envelope in Caby’s pocket stuffed with twenty thousand francs.7

  The bandits sped north through the octroi in Beauvais. Upon arriving in Rouen, Bonnot and his friends realized they had missed the turn for Le Havre and ended up in Dieppe. That evening on a beach in that Norman town, residents gathering seaweed watched in astonishment as a number of men tried in vain to dig out and start up a luxury automobile, as the wind carried away the hat of one of them. The men then quickly abandoned the car.8

  In the abandoned automobile, police later found the clothes of a mechanic and the card of a car repair shop in Levallois, just to the west of Paris. The owner of the shop knew many drivers, including the chauffeur who worked for Monsieur Normand. The pieces came together. Apparently the robbers had removed the car’s license plate. A child came across it in the gardens of a casino.9

  At 1:30 in the morning of December 22, Bonnot, Garnier, Callemin, and a fourth man arrived in Paris by train. A police report on passengers purchasing tickets for Paris from Dieppe indicated the presence on a train in third class of a man twenty-five to thirty years of age, very pale, with a small black mustache, wearing a raincoat and a bowler hat.

  Yet one police report already had the robbers on the ferry carrying passengers from Dieppe to Newhaven, England. Indeed, the director of the Office of Security sent a telegram to British authorities asking them to monitor the arrival of travelers on ferries from France in that English port. Leaving the car on the coast near a ferry port would encourage this interpretation. Another had the bandits sitting in a café near the Gare du Midi in Brussels, dividing up the take. In reality, upon their return to Paris, the bandits went—for the moment—their separate ways.10

  The night of December 23–24, several men broke into a gun store at 70 rue Lafayette, taking more than one hundred handguns. At the time, there was no reason to link the robbery with the raid on the Société Générale bank. During the night of January 9–10, a similar robbery occurred at Smith and Wesson on boulevard Haussmann. Thirty-four guns were taken, including revolvers but also a number of rifles, and more than fifteen hundred francs in cash.11

  The Société Générale offered a reward of twelve thousand five hundred francs for information leading to the arrest of the bandits. There had been a spate of holdups of bank couriers of late, but not like this. Headlines announced, “A Crime of Unprecidented Audacity!” and “Stupifying Act.” Newspaper hawkers yelled out, “Ask for the Crime of rue Ordener! A Courier Shot in Broad Daylight! The Murderers Fire on the Crowd!” Le Petit Journal included on its front page a drawing of the gunning down of Caby, “based on the testimony of witnesses.”

  How could such a robbery take place with seeming impunity on a crowded street in Paris, with its legions of police? After the holdup on rue Ordener, news about the revolutions in China and Paraguay, a short war between Italy and Turkey fought over Libya in the fall of 1911, and the aftermath of the Second Moroccan Affair that same year slipped to the back pages. A French force had violated the terms of the Algeciras Conference five years earlier by going into the town of Fez. Germany sent a gunboat to Agadir, bringing rising tensions between France and Germany. On Sunday, December 24, Le Petit Journal, which advertised itself as having the greatest circulation of any newspaper in the world, sported a photo of the automobile found in Dieppe.12

  On December 27, Le Petit Parisien advised readers that the police were closely watching “louche individuals” in Montmartre, including anarchists and tire thieves. In illegalist circles, Garnier’s name was the first to be widely mentioned as a participant. The Spanish Cubist painter Juan Gris was arrested when he was mistaken for Garnier; he was released when the Fauvist André Derain came to the station to confirm his identity. La Lanterne informed eager readers that the security police were sure that the crime had been the work of a band of anarchists. In the meantime, Alfred Peemans, the official in the Société Générale who had been at the scene, used a sizable collection of police photos and was able to identify Carouy as one of the bandits.13

  Parisian police had a reputation for being mediocre but also violent and playing a political role despite the pretense of neutrality. Louis Lépine, prefect of police, wanted to change that image. Born in Lyon in 1846 into a family of modest origin, he had quickly given up law for administration, serving in Saint-Étienne as prefect of the Loire. Like his predecessors, Lépine did not come out of the police force itself. Lépine was a professional administrator who built a reputation for insisting on efficiency as the absolute goal of maintaining public order in the Third Republic, to which he was devoted as a republican conservative. Overseeing the daunting responsibilities of the post, Lépine’s goal was to be a model functionary respected for his good work. He was patriotic and proud of the army, on several occasions affirming that “a Frenchman is born a soldier.” Lépine made no secret that he detested socialism and anarchism, which to him represented a lack of discipline as well as disorder and irreligiosity. The police should become masters of the streets. Socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist demonstrations and activities got in the way. Irritated by what he considered frequent and unfair hostility to the police in the mass press, Prefect of Police Lépine wanted Parisians to love their police.14

  However, the Bonnot Gang, terrorizing Paris and its region, presented a daunting challenge for the police. In his capacity as prime minister and minister of the interior, Georges Clemenceau in 1907 had created mobile units that became known as “the brigades of the Tiger,” adding to their number in 1911. The number of police agents in Paris had been increased to seventy-five hundred following the anarchist attacks that had begun in 1892. But unlike those attacks, which were bombings carried out by individuals against specific targets, Bonnot, Garnier, and their colleagues were committing crimes in and beyond the capital, escaping to rob and kill again. The number of nonuniformed policemen now stood at an imposing one thousand. The Security police numbered close to
350 men, headed by Octave Hamard (appointed December 30, 1911) from his office at 36 quai des Orfèvres on Île de la Cité.

  However, the inability of any of the police authorities to put an end to the bandits terrorizing Paris and its region laid bare tensions and the lack of effective centralization, coordination, or even basic communication among the security, or “judicial” police, the gendarmerie, and the municipal police. For that matter, the gendarmerie, with Paris having its own legion, had been virtually ignored by the judicial police. While the municipal police were, in principle, under the authority of the mayors of the arrondissements of Paris, paid by the municipality, and their day-to-day organization in arrondissement police offices (commissariats) focused on the surveillance of neighborhoods, the ministry of the interior and thus the officers of Security remained superior authorities.15

  The investigating magistrate (juge d’instruction) in the Bonnot case was to be Maurice Gilbert, a lawyer forty-one years of age. Deputy Director of Security Jouin and his staff—including a veritable army of informers in the pay of the police—were put at Gilbert’s disposition. The holdup on rue Ordener put Hamard under pressure: under his watch the Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre in August 1911 (it was recovered two years later).16

  Victor guessed that his old friend Callemin, along with Garnier and Bonnot, had committed the holdup because Bonnot—“now hunted and trapped”—needed money. Victor understood that the term “without possible escape” now also applied for different reasons directly to Bonnot, Callemin, and Garnier. There were now five illegalists on the loose, “wandering in the city without escape, ready to be killed somewhere, anywhere, in a tram or a café, content to feel utterly cornered, expendable, alone in defiance of a horrible world.”17