Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  When Callemin ran into a friend, the man, who knew about the plans for the south of France, asked why he was back so soon. “We had a puncture (Nous avons crevé),” came the response. “A tire?” “No, a cop.”25 The prefect of police now informed his agents that they should not hesitate to draw their swords and puncture the tires of an automobile driven by criminals trying to flee the scene of a crime.26

  On February 29, the police made their next move. They had discovered that “Deboit,” who was identified by an anonymous letter more than a month earlier as having been involved in the rue Ordener heist, was Jean de Boe. Police arrested him at place de Clichy and found several pistols and chargers in his hotel room.27

  Jouin was getting closer to Jules Bonnot. He brought Dettweiller and Louis Rimbault to his office. Rimbault was now suspected of having purchased the Brownings used in the holdup on rue Ordener. Other information continued to point to Garnier as having been one of the bandits. The second employee of the Société Générale branch, Peemans, identified Dieudonné from a police photo as one of the four men involved.

  On March 2, the funeral of policeman François Garnier took place at Notre-Dame. In his eulogy, the president of the municipal council of Paris demanded increased resources for the police in their hunt for the bandits on the run. The council itself accused Lépine of using the police to monitor strikes while bandits went about their business. The National Assembly voted seven hundred ninety thousand francs for security, a sum intended for the purchase of more automobiles for the police in order to keep up with the Bonnot Gang.

  The Parisian press, meanwhile, fretted even more about “the general state of insecurity,” insisting that the bandits were anarchists. Le Figaro pleaded, “Protect us! Protect us!” Jean Jaurès’s L’Humanité demanded that Louis Lépine be replaced by someone more competent. A Parisian newspaper editorialized hopefully: “This will be the end of the renaissance of big-time banditry, whose abominable exploits will only be found in popular literature in a time when, perhaps, the police will also have rapid automobiles at its disposition.” However, Bonnot, Garnier, and Carouy were still at large. Their war on society continued without pause.28

  Dieudonné, who had been in jail since February 27, continued to proclaim his innocence in the affair of rue Ordener. He had been in Nancy, seen there by several witnesses the afternoon of the holdup. Journalists raced to Nancy to interview Dieudonné’s understandably frantic mother and others who claimed to have seen him there on December 21. Yet two days earlier, Callemin seems to have sent him a telegram with the message, “Don’t wait, come immediately, Raymond.”

  Juge d’instruction Maurice Gilbert now suspected that Dieudonné was the man who had shot Ernest Caby. In his office on March 5, the investigating magistrate hurriedly organized a reconstitution of the holdup on rue Ordener, confronting Caby with Dieudonné. Gilbert made sure that no photo of Dieudonné appeared beforehand in newspapers, in order to not influence the outcome of the reconstitution of the event. Caby now formally identified Dieudonné as the gunman. Peemans seconded Caby’s new selection of Dieudonné as the man who shot him, as did another witness. Caby had earlier designated Garnier as the gunman. Both men, to be sure, had piercing dark eyes and a mustache. Troubling for Dieudonné’s case was the fact that one of the two revolvers found in his possession at the time of his arrest was the same caliber as the one that was used to shoot Caby, one of which had been originally purchased by Louis Rimbault. Moreover, the ticket for left-luggage at the Gare du Nord led to the discovery of a suitcase in which was found the surgeon’s kit that had been stolen with the car in Ghent. Dieudonné’s explanation: a friend gave him the suitcase, but he chose not to reveal the friend’s name.29

  Another break in the case came when the police learned the names and whereabouts of the two “brokers” who had tried in Amsterdam to sell the stolen securities taken on rue Ordener. A usurer with the appropriate nickname of “the Financier” and with a long police record had information that he was willing to trade for a break. He told the police that he knew two men who had been trying to sell the stolen securities from the rue Ordener holdup.

  Using the Financier’s tip, the police began to follow David Bélonie and Léon Rodriguez as they moved about in the eighteenth arrondissement. On March 12, agents watched as the two men left a package in the left-luggage at the Gare du Nord. The police swooped in and found fifty thousand francs in securities in the package. When Bélonie returned to the Gare du Nord to pick up the package, he was arrested. At first, he refused to reveal his name, but finally he began to talk. He had taken the train to Amsterdam, arriving on March 5. When he stepped off the train, he was carrying, as instructed, a copy of Le Petit Parisien. A man stepped forward, asking, “Have you seen our friends?” The connection was made. Soon Bélonie had one hundred thousand francs worth of the securities taken on rue Ordener; he strapped them to his body before returning to Paris. The next day, Bélonie met Jules Bonnot in the Métro station at place de la Nation, turning over some of the securities to him. Bélonie claimed that he had met Bonnot once a day for several days in the Bois de Vincennes, presumably to consider ways of unloading the securities.30

  On March 12 police in Lille arrested Rodriguez, a thirty-four-year-old Parisian who described himself as a “traveling salesman.” He was an anarchist who had served several prison sentences for counterfeiting, including one in London. His lover Anna Lecocq was also arrested. Rodriguez carried papers identifying him as Monsieur Lecocq. He also carried a loaded revolver and a pair of American brass knuckles. In Rodriquez’s apartment, police found a suitcase full of well-crafted counterfeit ten-franc pieces, as well as some of the materials used to produce them. In The Hague, the automobile stolen in Ghent on January 24 was discovered. When Rodriguez returned to Paris in police custody, guards had to disperse an angry crowd—the Parisian press had already related his arrest and interrogation in Lille—that descended on the prisoner as he was taken from the train at the Gare du Nord, some shouting, “Death! Death to the bandit!”31

  On March 19, Rodriguez admitted to Gilbert that Bélonie had asked him for money to pay his way to Amsterdam to try to sell the stolen securities. In Paris they managed to sell some of them for about five hundred francs, presumably to the Financier, who then denounced them. They admitted to having met with Bonnot and Garnier in Clignancourt, on the northern edge of Paris near the fortifications that surrounded the capital. Rodriguez and Bélonie had found the two in a bad way, in tatters in a miserable place.

  Unlike Bélonie, Rodriguez was willing to tell most anything he knew in order to avoid prosecution. He claimed Garnier told them that he—Garnier—and Dieudonné had fired shots on rue Ordener and that Garnier had “settled his score” with the cop on rue du Hâvre. Rodriguez insisted that he had seen about a dozen big revolvers stacked in the chimney, and that Bonnot had warned him not to play with “that thing there” or the same “accident” that had befallen “Sorrentino” might happen again, giving his version of the death of Platano. Rodriguez and Bélonie gave Bonnot one hundred francs, relating that he kept sixty francs and Bélonie had held on to 340 francs.32

  In the meantime, anarchist friends of Dieudonné worked to prove that the former had been in Nancy the day of the bank robbery on rue Ordener. The police continued to insist that Dieudonné could have taken the train and been in Nancy late that same afternoon. An anarchist cabinetmaker and his wife constructed a false alibi for Dieudonné, claiming that he had been with the cabinetmaker’s wife at the time of the holdup. They were denounced in an anonymous letter. A twenty-year-old friend of Reinert’s, Charles Bill, suspected a man named Blanchet as the letter writer and early in May shot him dead. Charles Bill then fled, never to be seen again, at least by the police.33

  Fearing Dieudonné would talk, Garnier sent a letter, addressed to Xavier Guichard “chef de la Sûreté, et Cie,” to Le Matin. On March 21, Le Matin published the letter, written two days earlier. In his missive, Garnier began as follow
s: “Since thanks to your mediation the press has put my modest person into the headlines, to the great joy of all the concierges of the capital,” the police had announced that his capture was imminent. As for an informer or others who would be betray him, he warned that “me and my friends will know how to pay him back with the reward that he deserves.” He mocked the police and the reward of ten thousand francs offered for information leading to his arrest, saying that if they considerably increased the amount, he would deliver himself to the police “feet and arms tied up, along with guns and baggage!” Garnier asserted that Dieudonné had not been the one who shot Caby on rue Ordener, contradicting Rodriguez, who had assured the police (hoping for a deal) that the cabinetmaker was guilty. He, Garnier, had been “more guilty than anyone else.” He added that he had for a moment considered giving himself up, but changed his mind: “Ultimately I will fall into your hands but you should be certain that I will defend my skin until the end.” He signed with “Awaiting the pleasure of meeting you!”—but not before warning Guichard, “Like Jouin, you’re going to get it. Await your glorious death and you will be decorated with a cross—Rejoice, filthy cow!” At the bottom of the letter, Garnier took care to leave the prints of the four fingers and thumb of his right hand, along with the message “Idiot Bertillion, put on your glasses and have a look” (“Bille de Bertillion mets tes lunettes et gaffe”). Bertillon proudly identified the fingerprints as indeed being those of Garnier, but that wasn’t particularly helpful to Guichard and Jouin. With dangerous bandits still at large, Jouin seemed on the verge of resigning, before Lépine convinced him to remain at his post and plough forward.34 As two thousand five hundred copies of posters with photos of Bonnot, Garnier, and Carouy circulated through Paris, on March 20 Le Petit Parisien reassured its readers that nine members of the “band” were behind bars. The newspaper counted Victor Kibaltchiche among these “malfaiteurs.”

  Procureur de la République Théodore Lescouvé now formally declared the existence of an association des malfaiteurs, listing thirteen crimes allegedly committed by thirteen people: Bélonie, de Boe, Dettweiller, Dieudonné, Kibaltchiche, Henriette [Rirette] Maîtrejean, Metge, Rimbault, and Rodriguez (all of whom were in custody), along with Bonnot, Carouy, Garnier, and Valet (whose name had not yet appeared in newspapers). Thus, although Victor and Rirette were specifically accused of receiving stolen weapons from the burglary of guns stores, they were lumped together in this association de malfaiteurs as therefore also responsible for the holdup on rue Ordener, among other crimes.35 In the meantime, Rirette pleaded in L’Anarchie for those anarchists arrested and not really charged with anything specific. Caught in an “intolerable situation,” they suffered “the lack of air and light, suffering the moral torture of handcuffs and cops.” Victor—“Le Rétif”—was among them.36

  In late March, for the first time (besides occasionally with reference to the earlier thefts in Lyon), the name “Bonnot Gang” (la bande à Bonnot) began to appear in the Parisian press. Gradually, Jules Bonnot’s name had been placed in the context of a gang—on March 28, the “Bonnot–Garnier Gang.” “Band of Murderers” had been used, along with “Bonnot, Garnier, and Consorts,” “The Balance Sheet of Carrouy [sic], Bonnot, Garnier, etc.,” and “Bonnot and his People.” The first direct mention of “The Bonnot Gang” seems to have been in L’Humanité, March 30, 1912.37

  However, it became increasingly obvious that the Bonnot Gang was not a finely organized group, but rather a band in flux, benefitting from a network of solidarity and assistance. Although the gang became identified with Jules Bonnot, in part because he was the oldest and drove the getaway automobiles, his name had been one of the first to reach Jouin’s desk from various informers, and because of the Platano affair there was no “leader.” Yet if there was one, Garnier probably assumed that role. Decisions were made after discussion, always reflecting anarchist individualism. What made it even more challenging and probably more dangerous to find Bonnot, Garnier, Valet, Callemin, and others is that they moved from place to place, finding hospitality with anarchists who did not even know their names. The police now considered Raymond Callemin particularly dangerous, because he was “gifted with an extremely lively intelligence that is particularly adapted to evil, excoriating all authority.”38

  Jules Bonnot, Octave Garnier, Édouard Carouy, and the Bonnot Gang reach the headlines of the mass Parisian press.

  So how were Jouin and his colleagues to find the Bonnot Gang? One possibility was someone on the inside providing useful information. For his part, Léon Rodriguez was now even more ready to talk in exchange for leniency. He wrote Jouin that, more than anyone else in the anarchist milieu, if freed he could discover the hiding places of Bonnot, Garnier, and the other members of their gang within two weeks. He implored Jouin to show his plan to the prosecuting attorney. His past meant that he, more than anyone else, could pull it off. Rodriguez would require only “relative, partial freedom… a freedom to act.” He was not “so much compromised in this affair” that his offer could be rejected out of hand. Jouin himself would profit from such a coup, and he could be assured of “my entire good faith.” Rodriguez received no reply. On the same day, he wrote the prosecuting attorney that in order to obtain a pardon he was “ready to do anything.”

  The killing in Étampes almost two months earlier of a policeman who had surprised anarchist burglars—one of whom immediately committed suicide—had led to the arrest of Joseph Renard but not the other killer. Both Rimbault and Renard had “worked” together in Belgium and knew Carouy and Garnier. Renard had stayed at passage Clichy, where Lorulot sold L’Idée Libre, and after his departure Garnier and Marie la Belge had shared a room. Moreover, Renard was in possession of a revolver when arrested; it had been stolen from the arms store on rue Lafayette. And so had the two Brownings found in the apartment in Belleville where Victor and Rirette were living. This put Rirette under even closer police surveillance.39

  When Jouin again summoned Rirette for a fourth interrogation on March 25, she showed up the next morning as instructed to see Maurice Gilbert. Rirette denied that the offices of L’Anarchie had served as a meeting place for an association des malfaiteurs, adding reasonably enough that she did not ask those arriving in the office if they were members of such an association. Likewise, Victor, brought next into Gilbert’s office, insisted that he had never in the offices of L’Anarchie heard of any planned crime and that he had certainly never profited in any way from any such criminal activity.40

  Rirette’s protestations were of no use. After the interrogation, she was arrested and sent to Saint-Lazare prison, once an institution for lepers. There Rirette was generally treated well by the Sisters of Marie-Joseph, even by the intimidating Sister Léonide, responsible for discipline, who was feared by most of the inmates, and who waged war on the enormous, ravenous rats who also resided in the prison. There was more to eat than Rirette had in her apartment—“If anarchy could not nourish its men, it nourished even less its women,” as she put it. Moreover, Rirette knew that trusted friends were taking care of her girls. She was able to avoid the larger prison dormitories, whose residents, including many prostitutes, were forced to work. The prisoners benefited from an improved situation (“en pistole”) thanks to five sous a day paid for Rirette by donations from anarchist friends. They benefited, too, from the proximity of a stove. The spiders were left alone to spin their webs, and the omnipresent rats pillaged any food not eaten by humans.

  Rirette was the only anarchist there. Her colleagues included bourgeois women who for whatever reason had shoplifted, other thieves, women condemned for “crimes of passion,” and more. But most were ordinary working-class women who had for some reason fallen in disfavor with the police. During her incarceration, Rirette helped Barbe Le Clerch, Marius Metge’s Breton girlfriend who was also imprisoned at Saint-Lazare, begin to learn to read. The prison chaplain came to visit Rirette, brought her books, advised her that “idleness is a poor adviser,” and asked her if sh
e wanted to learn Latin. She dared not refuse, and the course began. On one occasion, her daughter Chinette was allowed to come for a brief visit, which went very well once her mother convinced her that a well-meaning guard was not a “cop.” Rirette suffered enormously from the forced separation from her daughters and from Victor.41 While in prison, Rirette soon learned that Octave Garnier and her old friend André Soudy were almost certainly involved in the crimes.

  An editorial in L’Anarchie, which had moved to a new address with Émile Armand taking over as editor, commented bitterly on Rirette’s arrest: “It’s natural. No judge would ever pardon her proud attitude and her disdain for the magistrature.” “Le Rétif” had been arrested because of his propaganda for anarchist individualism, and Rirette by virtue of “her haughty refusal to play the role of an informer.” Both were victims of the Scoundrel Laws that allowed them to be considered as belonging to an association des malfaiteurs.42

  In the prosecution’s case against Victor and Rirette, the only tangible piece of evidence that could possibly place them in an association des malfaiteurs was the two Browning pistols found in their apartment when it was searched on January 31. Yet clearly their role in the editing and publication of L’Anarchie, for which Rirette was legally the director, would play a role. They would be accused of being intellectuals who encouraged illegalist criminality.43