Chapter 13
THE BONNOT GANG’S MURDER SPREE
With accounts of carjacking prevalent in the press, those possessing luxury automobiles now had reason to fear for their cars. Quality locksmiths did a brisk business in securing garages. Wealthy owners readied their revolvers. Indeed two bold, violent attacks added to the anxiety.
Having failed to snatch a car in Chatou west of Paris with another coup or two in mind, Bonnot, Garnier, Monier, Callemin, and Soudy decided to steal one as it motored along a road. As usual, they were very well armed for the occasion, with Brownings and with a Winchester repeating rifle carried by Soudy.1
On the morning of March 25, a driver was en route from the Dion-Bouton car dealership on the Champs-Élysées to Cap Ferrat on the Riviera to deliver the expensive automobile to its purchaser, a retired colonel. A young employee, a mechanic who worked for the wealthy Riviera resident, accompanied the chauffeur. Bonnot had been tipped off by a garagiste acquaintance. About 8:30 in the morning, as the two men traveled through Seine-et-Marne, about fifteen miles southeast of Paris, a man waving a white handkerchief implored the driver to stop in the forest of Sénart. Then three other men sprang forward from nearby bushes. When François Mathillet, at the wheel, refused to get out and turn over the vehicle to them and appeared to reach in his pocket, Garnier shot and fatally wounded him. The professional driver staggered out of the car and collapsed. The mechanic, named Cérisole, who was also hit, played dead and survived. Hearing the shots, people in the vicinity began to arrive on the scene. The bandits waved pistols in their direction and then drove off. When the mayor of nearby Montgeron tried to alert the police by telephone and provide a description of the stolen automobile, the phone call did not go through.2
Now Bonnot drove the stolen car, packed with his colleagues, to Chantilly, north of Paris. About 10:30 a.m., they stopped in front of another branch of the Société Générale. They had checked it out the previous week, and they knew that its proximity to horse-racing tracks invariably meant there would be lots of cash around. The men were wearing caps and large automobile glasses that covered part of their faces. Bonnot remained at the wheel, and one of his colleagues stood guard, armed with a rifle. Three others burst into the bank, shooting dead two employees (a seventeen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old), and leaving another seriously wounded, as people dove under tables. One bandit, wearing a long raincoat and a melon-shaped hat, pointed a carabine in the direction of passersby, warning, “Get back, get back or I’ll kill you,” in argot (“Caltez, caltez ou je vous canarde”). The robbers emptied a cash drawer and an open safe. Several of them went down to the basement to open another safe but could not do so. The bandits left the scene quickly, guns blazing, wounding one passerby in the heel and lodging another bullet in a horse. They carried with them thirty-five thousand francs in bills, ten thousand francs in gold pieces, and four thousand francs in coins, leaving behind securities that they now knew would be too difficult to unload. The entire operation took but five minutes. A gendarme lamented that his office in Chantilly did not have a telephone and that thus his colleagues in the vicinity could not be notified.
The bandits returned to Paris through Épinay-sur-Seine and then Asnières, where they were followed by two unarmed policemen riding bicycles, whose pursuit quickly ended. At the Asnières train station, the bandits abandoned the car (which seems to have failed them—they were seen looking with concern under the hood). In the car, which had served its purpose, police found a Guide Michelin and maps of France.3
In Paris, the shocking robbery and murders in Chantilly accentuated growing fear—indeed, panic. Authorities were now sure they had identified Bonnot, Garnier, and Carouy as three of the bandits. Police offices everywhere in France received twenty-five hundred copies of descriptions of “Jules Bonnot, born October 14, 1876, in Pont-de-Roide (Doubs), son of Jules-Joseph Bonnot and Hermance Montot. [Bonnot] is a mechanic, unknown address. 1.59 meters tall, clear yellowish eyes, dark blond hair and a reddish-brown beard, with a scar on his upper right ear.” Bertillon identified fingerprints on the steering wheel as those of Bonnot, and fingerprints on the windshield as belonging to Garnier. From police photos, witnesses in Chantilly recognized Bonnot and Carouy as two of the robbers. Witnesses described a smallish man wearing spectacles; this corresponded to Raymond “la Science,” Raymond Callemin. René Valet may have been another of the passengers.
The press became obsessed with “l’homme à la carbine.”4 Le Petit Parisien, among the other major Parisian dailies, expressed certainty that the weapons used in the murderous attacks in Montgeron and Chantilly had been among those Winchester rifles stolen on the night of January 9–10 from a store on boulevard Haussmann. The royalist newspaper Action Française was quick to add that “the Russian Nihilist Kibaltchiche and the woman Maîtrejean, recently arrested, had been involved.”5
For his part, Victor, in jail and suffering from “constant hunger,” heard “only distant echoes” of these murderous events. Yet he “recognized, in the various newspaper reports, faces I had met or known. I saw the whole of the movement founded by Libertad dragged into the scum of society by all sorts of madness; and nobody could do anything about it, least of all myself. The theoreticians, terrified, headed for cover. It was like a collective suicide.”6
A letter sent to the police identified André Soudy as the homme à la carabine in Chantilly. Moreover, the letter indicated that Soudy was staying in the Channel spa town of Berck.7 On March 30, police indeed found Soudy in Berck-Plage, as they had been tipped off. Soudy may have been betrayed by an anarchist and his girlfriend, whom Rirette had suspected of working with the police. The anarchist had also asked Victor to keep some counterfeit money that he had brought by, thus setting Victor up for a possible later arrest. (When Rirette became aware of this, she panicked, realizing that they may have been set up, but Victor, perhaps with what Rirette referred to as “Russian fatalism,” merely shrugged his shoulders.)8
Soudy was receiving treatment for his tuberculosis and staying with the unemployed railroad man Barthélemy Baraille, who was well known to local police, in a small wooden house near the dunes. Baraille, a friend of Lorulot, probably did not know Soudy, but he would have respected the anarchist “droit d’asile” (right to asylum, refuge, or sanctuary). “Pas-de-Chance” Soudy said to the policemen who arrested him that “the bullets in my revolver were for you and prison is for me.” On the way to Paris he told his guards, “To die of tuberculosis or to die on the scaffold, it’s the same thing. I am condemned to death and have only a few months before I meet Deibler.” Diebler was the famous executioner who had succeeded his father on the scaffold in 1899 and who did his best work in public.9
Police found on Soudy 969 francs, two Brownings, two chargers, and a vial of potassium cyanide. He refused to answer questions when interrogated in Paris by Guichard. The next day, Soudy’s sister committed suicide, anguished by her brother’s most recent arrest and the fact that their parents had forbidden her to marry.10
Soudy denied being involved in any way in the events in Chantilly. This despite being identified from photos by several witnesses who remembered his coat, his hat, his long, pale face, and that he spoke with an accent from the working-class faubourgs, using argot (“Caltez, caltez, ou je vous canarde”). Rirette, who had become close to him, remembered him “only speaking argot.” A policeman who read of Soudy’s arrest wrote from a sanatorium north of Paris, where he was being treated for tuberculosis. He had overlapped with Soudy in another a sanatorium, when Soudy was using the name “Colombo” and bragging about being an anarchist. And “this person very often spoke argot and the word caltez is really him.” The policeman asked that his name not be revealed. He, too, feared reprisals. When Guichard asked Soudy if the possessions seized chez Baraille belonged to him, he replied, “None of it is mine. You know very well that property is theft, as [the anarchist writer] Proudhon said.”11
On April 3, it was Édouard Carouy’s turn t
o be captured and jailed. He had been seen in the vicinity of Choisy-le-Roi, near Thiais, where the elderly man and his maid had been horribly murdered. Agents on a stakeout were sure they saw Carouy, who had dyed his hair, and another man on bicycles at five o’clock one morning, but the two had disappeared into the lingering darkness. Later that same day, police learned that Carouy had found refuge with Granghand, a bookbinder in the village of Lozère, south of Paris. Granghand had quickly betrayed him, going to the police, undoubtedly in exchange for cash. He set up Carouy to go to the train station there, ostensibly to pick up a bed. Carouy noticed that his “friend” walked ten yards ahead of him on the way to the station. Five officers dressed as workers awaited in a nearby café. They subdued and arrested Carouy. He told arresting officers that he carried a Browning pistol because he had heard Garnier wanted “his head.” Carouy said upon incarceration that he had no intention of trying to escape and that he would now finally have a good night’s sleep. For reading matter, he asked for treatises on philosophy.12
Under interrogation, Carouy denied being anywhere near Thiais, rue Ordener, Montgeron, place du Havre in Paris, or Chantilly. When asked to explain where exactly he had been during those events, he fell back upon the classic anarchist answer: he would not say where he had been, not wanting to compromise comrades. Carouy became more and more depressed in jail, particularly after a young man serving a sentence for theft threw himself from the third floor of his block, the second suicide in a week. Carouy attempted suicide himself, swallowing what he thought was potassium cyanide. When it turned out to be something not at all lethal, he loudly denounced the pharmacist who had given him “little candies” instead of the powerful drug. After that attempt had failed, guards had to stop him from smashing his head against the cement wall of his cell. The juge d’instruction charged him with being part of the association de malfaiteurs that had been responsible for the theft of the automobile of M. Normand in Boulogne-Billancourt, a burglary in Maisons-Alfort in August 1911, murder and attempted murder in Mortgeron and Chantilly, and the burglary of the post office in Romainville. Those who feared reprisals had good reason: Two days following Carouy’s arrest, a man who had been seen in Lozère the previous night fired at Granghand and his son as they returned home from work, wounding the younger man.13
Garnier and Valet were still on the run, with the police in full pursuit. The gang’s string of successes, as it were, appeared to have reached an end. Most of the securities had not been sold, the burglary in Pontoise had been bungled, and they had not made it to Alès. Moreover, Dieudonné seemed on the verge of telling all he knew.
Valet’s sisters claimed to have no knowledge of their brother’s whereabouts. Like his parents, they insisted that he was an antimilitarist pacifist, nothing more. The police assumed that Anna Dondon, Valet’s anarchist girlfriend, would be somewhere with him. Dondon, born in the small town of Decize in Nièvre in 1884, was “a little dumpling, very brown and somewhat creole, artistic-looking, with her hair in ringlets and wearing a bandana.” She had been free since her release from prison in 1909 after a sentence for counterfeiting. The couple briefly lived in a room with an adjoining kitchen on the sixth floor of a bourgeois-appearing building on rue Ordener—only a couple of blocks from the Société Générale branch that Valet had helped hold up. The concierge recognized the renter from police photos. Her tenant had given a different name, of course, and told her that he worked in a nearby printing shop, but this had struck the concierge as unlikely, because he was seen at the times one would assume he would have been working. Leaving in haste, Valet had left behind a gray leather overcoat, three new rifles, and some burglary tools—by now classic illegalist provisions.14
The police noted the proximity of a furniture store owned by a woman who had anarchist sympathies. For a time, the store was run by the twenty-six-year-old anarchist printer named Bernard Gorodsky, the eldest of nine children. Gorodsky, whose father also had a furniture store, had worked as a printer for L’Anarchie and had been a habitué of anarchist lectures. He was known for his radical views but “was sober and hard-working” and had had a job in the municipal print shop. He and his girlfriend had left their apartment without paying the rent, “as is the custom in Paris,” a policeman commented bitterly. Gorodsky and his girlfriend had then moved away from the furniture store to rue Cortot, a narrow Montmartre street, and the police found some stolen goods there. Rodriguez told police that Gorodsky had worked with Bélonie in trying to unload the securities. Moreover, Bonnot had received a letter addressed to him at that address. “Suspect” people came in and out of the furniture store, including Valet and Anna Lecocq, Rodriguez, and possibly Soudy, Carouy, and Bonnot. A couple, the man wearing a long gray overcoat, had stayed with Valet and Anna for several days—this was probably Garnier, along with Marie la Belge. But Gorodsky then quit his printing job at the Hôtel de Ville and simply vanished into the night.15
Garnier and René Valet had moved quickly from rue Ordener to avenue Saint-Ouen, not far away in the eighteenth arrondissement. However, early in the morning of April 23, fearing a police “descent,” they suddenly left in an automobile. They stayed several nights with an anarchist in the nineteenth arrondissement. There, police found revolvers and cartridges.16
Chapter 14
PANIC IN PARIS
With the alleged leaders of the band still at large, Paris was in a full panic. The headline in Le Matin described the highway robbery of a car and the shootings in Chantilly as “the most terrifying in the history of crime.” Newspapers called for the expulsion from France of all people banned from France and the obligatory registration of automobiles. They published accounts of disagreements between Xavier Guichard and his deputy-chief Louis-François Jouin. Henry Franklin-Bouillon, representing Montgeron’s département of Seine-et- Marne in the Chamber of Deputies, questioned the readiness of the authorities to protect citizens, noting tensions within Sûreté and between branches of the police. The Chamber voted additional credits to hire and train new policemen in the struggle against “perfected banditry.” In L’Humanité, an editorial suggested that France was becoming a new California, “where the revolver was king.” Thanks to the automobile, the bandits were feared well beyond the region of Paris.1
Following the murderous attack in Chantilly, the bandits, in the words of Louis Lépine, “vanish like the wind… all the tracks disappear.” A telegram went out to all police offices in the Paris region ordering policemen to carry loaded pistols night and day. Once again, police turned their eyes toward Montmartre.2
The attacks carried out so audaciously by the Bonnot Gang marked the culmination of public fears about crime, which appeared as an unprecedented threat to social order. Cities, in particular, were again perceived—as in the 1830s and 1840s—as dangerous places. Criminology developed as a field of study, with Alphonse Bertillon the rising star.3 The mass press devoted an increasing amount of space to crime, often under the rubric “faits divers” (miscellaneous news in brief, increasingly emphasizing crime). L’Excelsior noted in October 1911 that the Sûreté Générale had accumulated three hundred thirty thousand dossiers, including thirty-one thousand photographs “of disreputable men about whom one must be concerned, and who are watched, or else known bandits who are behind bars.”4
Crime continued to push troubling international affairs to the back pages. By 1908, 12 percent of the columns of the wildly selling Le Petit Parisien—1.5 million copies each edition—was devoted to the coverage of crimes, and a third of the covers of Petit Journal were devoted to crime. Specialized newspapers covering the police began to appear, such as Le Passe-Partout and L’Oeil de la police (1908). This was the golden age of the police novel in France. Maurice Leblanc’s novels featuring the “gentleman” burglar Arsène Lupin had great success, reflecting public fascination with—and fear of—crime. Sherlock Holmes was already enormously popular, as were the memoirs of policemen. Crimes et criminels étranges (“Strange Crimes and Criminals”) appear
ed, as did “Illustrated Violence.” Illustrated supplements presented color portraits of notable criminals. The enormous success of police novels during the fin-de-siècle period may well have contributed to journalists merging criminal investigations with reporting. Journalists for Parisian newspapers elbowed each other out of the way in the frenzy to get the next “scoop.” Reporters emerged as “modern adventurers,” going after every possible story. By the time Bonnot, Garnier, Callemin, and their band entered the scene, the newspapers were primed to capitalize on their crime spree to sell papers.5
Indeed, violent crime had become more common. The number of murders rose between 1901 and 1913. The eighteenth and nineteenth arrondissements easily led the way in murders in 1911, followed by the equally plebeian twelfth and thirteenth arrondissements. Juvenile delinquency increased in scope and visibility, manifest in what appeared to be a growing number of bands, particularly on the edge of Paris—based in the “zone” around the fortifications.6
Newspapers sounded the alarm about a disproportionate number of crimes committed by these groups of adolescents and young men. They were nicknamed apaches, after the American indigenous people. Most Parisian apaches were between fifteen and twenty years of age, cared about their appearance and their physical strength, and were proud of their reputation as thieves. Bands of apaches—such as the Bande de la Goutte d’Or, the Bande de Belleville, and the Bande à Milo du canal Saint-Martin—were seemingly omnipresent in the first years of the new century, but they were still around when the Bande à Bonnot was named. They maintained a strict code of honor. In La Chapelle, apaches organized their own tribunals and condemned one of theirs for spying for the police. Le Matin demanded judicial action against the apaches—“the whip or the rope.” The popular newspaper even blamed the persistence of the apaches, viewed as the “new barbarians,” on antimilitarist propaganda, particularly in view of a number of incidents between apaches and soldiers. This representation of the “bad boys” and apaches contributed to the new view of delinquency as “a social phenomenon.”7
Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits Page 17