Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits
Page 18
A poem by Maurice Rollinat captured the dark side of Montmartre:
Accomplices of clever prowlers,
Stalking the monsieur with expensive tastes,
Gas lamps on the nasty corners,
Lighting up the crooks in rags,
And slashes of knives and blows of fists,
Aggressive whistles, suspect shouts,
Hideous ghosts, outrageous informers,
And as sole witnesses to this mystery
The gas lamps of nasty corners.8
Elite anxiety about the apaches had taken off in 1902, with the wildly followed affair of the Casque d’Or in Belleville, when two rivals and their bands battled it out in a Parisian suburb for the love of a prostitute named Amélie Élie—a blonde woman, thus “the golden helmet.” Women, some of them prostitutes, played a prominent role in these bands. The police considered related incidents to be of no great significance, but the Parisian press remained fascinated with the apaches, portraying the associated neighborhoods as a “hotbed of crime and sex.”9
The apaches and, later, the Bonnot Gang helped sell books and newspapers. The Fantômas novels, which began to appear in 1911 with enormous popular success, followed the “exploits” of the criminal of the same name. The first Fantômas film and those that followed during the next few years reflected the influence of Jules Bonnot.10 The “faits divers” in the daily newspapers emphasizing crime also helped confirm the image of these stereotypes.
Le Petit Parisien, for one, attracted readers with articles on “the kings of the pavement.” On behalf of the “parti des honnêtes gens” (the party of the “honest people,” with a strong sense of “men of property”), La Libre Parole screamed, “Thirty thousand apaches are masters of the streets of Paris: they kill, they pillage, they rape.” During the subsequent four years, six theater pieces appeared with “Le Casque d’Or” or “Apaches” in the title. For Parisian elites, the apaches embodied all forms of urban crime committed by young men. And while elites staunchly condemned the apaches, they could still be relied upon to buy books and newspapers and attend plays and now films that dramatized apache exploits.11
Thus, the press helped orchestrate this veritable psychosis, even though the band terrorizing Paris seemed to be common criminals—however much they were identified with illegalist anarchism—and not apaches, despite their young age. Moreover, the Bonnot Gang was not identified with a particular part of peripheral Paris. Still, the police focused on such neighborhoods in their investigations, and when others were caught up in the police dragnet, no one in power protested.
The increase in violent acts, some associated with the apaches, had contributed to an intense debate on the death penalty in 1907. The public worried increasingly about the high rate of acquittals; the previous year, only 34 percent of those accused of murder or attempted murder had been found not guilty, and only 30 percent the next year. Clearly, the majority of the French public supported the death penalty. It remained in place, and executioner Anatole Deibler’s job would be safe.12
Jules Bonnot and his friends played into existing fears about the marauding apaches, but they had left them far behind. They seemed like a new and scary kind of bandit, carrying out their attacks in broad daylight, their Brownings firing away, and escaping in fast-moving luxury automobiles: “Banditry in automobiles!” L’Auto-Journal seemed almost proud to feature a photo of fancy automobiles with bullet holes in them, a drawing of the attack on rue Ordener, and a photo of Bonnot.13
These bandits were decidedly modern. One of those implicated in these events later would relate: “Let’s go back to the progress of Science. Nothing very grand can be accomplished without it. Automobile, telephone, telegraph, automatic weapons—here are the veritable means.” An article in the legal journal noted that “the industry of evil-doers” had evolved following the rules of the progress of science, “Only the police has remained basically stationary.”14
Le Matin published a giant photomontage with map of France and the itinerary of the Bonnot band, so far as it could be known. L’Excelsior published “the double murder of Thiais in five photos,” including the house, the rooms in which the victims had perished, and Bertillon closely examining fingerprints. Other films included two reconstitutions of the “exploits” of the Bonnot Gang. In 1912, the municipality forbade showing of the film Bandits en automobile, calling it “a demoralizing spectacle.” Le Browning would appear on screen the following year. The first of five Fantômas episodic films, which followed by two years the beginning of the wildly popular series of thirty-two small volumes about the criminal underworld, appeared that same year, clearly reflecting public fascination with and fear of the Bonnot Gang.15
The bandits and their getaway cars seemed another sign that society was speeding up—indeed, spinning out of control.
Bicycles had already become “the little queens.” Although still relatively expensive—and thus frequently stolen—there were one hundred fifty thousand bicycles in France in 1893, two years after the newspaper Le Vélo first appeared; by 1913 there were 3.5 million. The automobile, airplane, and even the submarine followed. The first aeronautic salon was held in Paris in 1908. Louis Blériot piloted a plane that flew across the English Channel through fog and wind in July 1909. Roland Garros traversed the Mediterranean without a stop in September 1913. Gatherings of airplane enthusiasts became common.
Gradually, middle-class people of means began to purchase automobiles. In 1898, Parisians owned 288 of them. Two years later, there were three thousand registered automobiles in France, a year after a driver’s license was first required. By the end of the first decade of the new century, a second generation of automobile manufacturers was at work. In Lyon, the Berliet Company purchased machine tools from abroad—principally from the United States, Great Britain, and Germany. Berliet’s factory was divided into specialized units, all under his personal supervision, where he was assisted by his foremen. By 1913, Berliet employed two thousand workers and turned out three thousand automobiles a year. By 1914, well over one hundred thousand were on the roads of France.16
The first taxi took to the road in 1904. Three years later, the iconoclast novelist Octave Mirbeau published an account of his—the first—journey across Europe in a car. In these early days of automobile travel, people in France owned half of the automobiles in the world.17
In these early days of automobile travel, the driver of a car had to know more than a little something about motors, as garages were then relatively few and far between. The first Guide Michelin appeared in 1900, selling thirty-five thousand copies. It listed garages in cities and towns and provided information for travelers, such as emerging rules of the road. It highlighted—not unexpectedly, given the guide’s source—information on Michelin tires. Soon Michelin added the names of convenient, decent restaurants to the Guide’s entries for each town.18
The Michelin Company successfully pressured the government to place markers (bornes, as the Roman had used) to indicate the distance to the next town. These were of sufficient size so that drivers could see them without having to stop to get a closer look. The goal was to encourage travel for tourism, indicating beautiful routes, thus encouraging the sale of automobiles and therefore tires. Michelin also lobbied successfully to have the names of towns at the entry and departure points along, first, national and, then, departmental roads. By 1911, ten thousand towns had asked for them. Three years later, thirty thousand had been set along French roads.19 Automobiles captured the public imagination. Races started up, attracting new customers.
However, automobiles generated anxiety as well as smoke, as they raced by at increasingly greater speeds. A car that went out of control killed a small boy during a race in 1901, and Louis Renault’s brother died in a crash during the first Paris–Madrid competition two years later. The polemicist Henri Rochefort, for one, did not like what he saw: “the satisfaction [of drivers] who have run over dogs [and] old people and children who are crushed without ev
en seeing the machine that has wiped them out.” A journalist warned drivers that beginning on that day he would “walk with a revolver in my pocket and I will fire on the first of these enraged dogs who, having gotten into an automobile… will flee after having flattened me or mine.” A doctor warned—already!—about the harmful effects that the carbonic acid exuded by cars was having on human beings.20 A senator direly predicted that France would have to establish “special cemeteries for automobilistes along the roads.”21 Yet slowly but surely the automobile was transforming life in France. One critic saw this as sort of a “social Darwinism… adapted to the struggle between unequal old and new species within the space of Paris.” Denunciations of “the automobile evil” became something of a staple for observers of the Parisian scene.22
In their early years, such moving machines were only for the wealthy. Custom-made automobiles, like the Delaunay-Belleville car used by the bandits in the holdup of the Société Générale on rue Ordener, could cost well over ten thousand francs each, and up to several thousand francs a year to operate. Tires went for as much as one thousand five hundred francs a year, the equivalent of many workers’ annual income (assuming work could be found)—also the equivalent of fifteen years rent for a working family—and several thousand francs a year to run. Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maîtrejean would probably never have occasion to ride in a car, unless it would be in an automobile operated by the police. The first two generations of automobiles were purchased by industrial barons, bankers, financiers, wealthy propriétaires, and rentiers.
The Michelin Company increasingly identified tires and thus cars with the bourgeoisie, with French nationalism (thus campaigns were mounted to discourage the purchase of German or British-made tires), and with masculinity (leaving women in a subordinate role as coy passengers). “Bibendum,” the multi-ringed white tireman who still stands as an icon of Michelin, stood at the center of a very modern advertising campaign. Bibendum represented French civilization, contrasted with Africans or South Asians who had been annexed into the French Empire, which had expanded dramatically in the 1880s and especially the 1890s.
Many well-heeled Parisians took the plebeian origins of the assumed members of the Bonnot Gang as a sign of the danger the lower classes potentially posed to their riches. The Bonnot Gang were workers who—pushed by the lack of work and the police—traveled from place to place. That they were anything but sedentary made them seem even more frightening. Their young age compounded the danger. Morever, the fact that several of the members of the gang were Belgian added an international dimension to the crimes. To many wealthy Parisians, socialists and all anarchists were not much better than the bandits who were terrorizing the capital. That Jules Bonnot and his gang were illegalist anarchists in action—defying society, its laws, and the police—made social anxiety even worse. The elite still expected deference from the lower classes, even in a Republic.23
The press whipped up demands for dramatically increased security and vigorous repression. A reporter in 1907 insisted, “Insecurity is à la mode, it is a fact.” L’Éclair worried aloud: “We are overwhelmed and surrounded by a troop of apaches, most of whom are repeat offenders and lower-life types,” yet because of “the weakness of the courts, the lack of prisons and official tolerance,” they were allowed to “obey their own pernicious principles while essentially retaining immunity.” The public demanded action. Parisians signed a petition calling for more severe penalties, and merchants on the grands boulevards demanded more police searches of residences. Even the prefect of police called for more. Lépine proclaimed that “a virile repression” was desperately required to protect society. The first step was clear.24
Chapter 15
POLICE DRAGNET
Protecting society meant putting an end to the Bonnot Gang. Guards monitored the city gates of Paris and soldiers patrolled the main railroad stations. The Société Générale offered one hundred thousand francs for information leading to the arrest of the robbers, who had struck their banks twice in a matter of several months. “Suspicious” automobiles generated panic and police mobilization well beyond Paris, among other places in the Nord, Pas-de-Calais, and in Chartres.1
The police went after anyone vaguely associated with anarchism. Aggressive roundups (rafles) in working-class neighborhoods came more frequently. Police searches and arrests of random anarchists continued in the Paris region. In L’Anarchie, Victor Méric noted on March 14 that each day the public feasted on “previously unpublished details” and the attacks continued, after which the bandits simply disappeared: “The police arrest, release, and arrest again.” For his part, the anarchist Jean Grave mocked the frantic chorus for defending bourgeois society: “Let’s come up with more great laws and build more prisons!” Who were the people really responsible for these attacks? It was stated that amid the misery and suffering of ordinary people, “As long as you have not taken by the throat these odious criminals who are Luxury, Wealth, Indolence, and insolent Good Fortune, you the bourgeoise, you can fortify your police, increase the numbers of your defense forces, and continue to insult us, but there is nothing you can do.”2
In the anarchist press, Le Libertaire, which had ignored the events on rue Ordener and in Thiais, noted that the victims of the crimes of Montgeron and Chantilly were ordinary people doing their underpaid jobs. An editorial refused to condemn the perpetrators, suggesting that social inequalities were behind the acts. The members of the Bonnot Gang were minor figures compared to those pillaging the colonies, “legal bandits” who were even more guilty. An editorial regretted that Bonnot had not put his “heroisme” and energy into “the emancipatory cause of the oppressed class.”3
On March 21, L’Anarchie saluted the “four or five determined and audacious men who held the police, gendarmes, and magistrates at bay.… They managed to escape a powerfully armed organization, an entire dragnet closely linked.… Let’s imagine a thousand men with the same courage as this handful of resisters and tell me if you do not see this “dying society” really in danger?4 During a meeting of the Groupe de la Fédération Révolutionnaire in the thirteenth arrondissement, an individualist stated what was painfully obvious: “Those who possess great fortune have never backed away from any means to enrich themselves and similarly the ‘illegalists’ have done the same thing in acting as they have.” In his view, the bandits’ actions were good for anarchist propaganda and could bring “only good results.”5
L’Anarchie continued to publish, although magistrates were taking copious notes of editorials for further use. From the point of view of the authorities, it was preferable to allow the anarchist newspaper to continue, because it provided a constant source of information on anarchist meetings, causeries, and other events that could easily be monitored.
Denunciations and letters containing “information” continued to deluge the office of Guichard, arriving by the thousands in response to the hefty reward offered by Société Générale. Each item had to at least be read. One citizen advised the police to investigate all the people who lived in a building next to the bank. A cuckolded husband claimed that Carouy was his spouse’s lover. A citizen boldly offered to find Bonnot and his gang within four months; he would need only an automobile, and he generously offered to give Xavier Guichard a quarter of the reward once the bandits had been captured. A Parisian sent along the address of his neighbor, who happened to have the surname Bonnot. His first name was François. A Parisian suggested that “aviation” be used to find the gang, asking only for employment as a secret agent in return for his brilliant idea. Another similar suggestion also reflected the influence of airplanes on the public imagination: a plane would follow the bandits, once their location has been identified, and drop messages to police below indicating the direction taken by their automobile. The helpful citizen even suggested dropping explosives from the air on anarchist targets, if such targets could be found. Other ideas included stretching chains across roads to stop speeding bandit-mobiles, the way th
at chains had centuries earlier blocked the entry to ports. Another proposed covering over the new Michelin road signs to confuse the gang as they drove to their next coup.6
A resident of Lyon assured authorities that he had had “commercial relations” with Bonnot, and offered to help capture him. This relationship would make it possible for him to approach the bandit “without too many difficulties.” A Parisian who lived in the same neighborhood as relatives of Garnier related that rumor had the bandit returning to see them. He added that he did not want to sign his name, fearing reprisals from the bandits. Another resident of the capital advised that if Guichard wanted to find the bandits, he should have a look in an orange house in the second arrondissement. He assured Guichard that “the owner hides anarchists,” and he described this owner as “just as unsavory as the bandits you are after.” A deaf mute simply denounced a neighbor as “dangerous.”7
Reports of sightings of the bandits proliferated. A female day laborer related that as she carried lunch to her husband near the porte de Vitry close to the fortifications, she observed a small man with a casquette jockey running toward the railroad tracks. Four other men were running about sixty to eighty meters behind him, followed by a thin woman of about thirty years of age.8