Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  The house had most recently been a weekend recreation site on the river, near an open-air café, Le Petit Robinson, which had opened in 1906 next to the viaduct stretching across the Marne River for the train heading east to Mulhouse and Bâle. The large park had been subdivided into small properties and paths bordered by hedges. The Villa Bonhoure stood one hundred meters from the river, the closest to the Marne of seven similar houses, and it was isolated by several rows of trees and accessible by several paths. The viaduct towered over the house and its gardens.

  Garnier had rented the house on May 4. “A tall, large woman” went out to do the shopping, while the two men were scarcely to be seen, except while exercising in the villa’s garden. Another neighbor also identified Marie la Belge from police photos. At 3:45 on the afternoon of the day Guichard and his men showed up, a police inspector was interviewing a nearby grocer when the Belgian herself walked into the store. But arresting Marie on the spot would merely have served to tip off Garnier and Valet that the police were on to them. The police had confirmed in the meantime that Anna Dondon, Valet’s girlfriend, had been seen there a few days earlier, but now she was in Garches, to the north of Paris.2

  Inside the villa, Octave Garnier was writing his own account of the now famous holdup on rue Ordener. Garnier was in many ways the real leader of the Bonnot Gang. Although Rirette would describe him as never speaking, he always thought ahead, planning the next coup that would bring the Bonnot Gang the cash they needed. Guichard was bent on finding Garnier, even if it meant organizing another massive police operation just a few weeks after Bonnot’s death. He had to catch the man who had sent him the threatening, mocking letter, complete with his fingerprints and a warning.3

  At about six in the evening, the police surrounded the villa and its gardens, placing agents in the adjoining streets. Several policemen carefully approached the house wearing protective vests and their tricolor sashes. They came upon a woman in a dressing gown standing in the garden. Nearby stood a man who resembled René Valet. The police announced their presence and called out to the woman, whom they recognized as Marie la Belge. The man took out a pistol and began to fire in their direction, one bullet striking a police officer’s protective verst.

  Garnier, who was in the house, began firing at Marie because he believed that she had betrayed them. He hurled insults in her direction as she was taken into police custody: “If they kill you, it will be good for your bones!” The police managed to get her safely out of Garnier’s range as an angry crowd of observers gathered beyond the garden to shout at Marie, some calling for her death. The police informed her that she was under arrest and took her to a nearby house. She told them, “I followed Garnier everywhere he went, even though I was terrified of him,” even knowing he was a criminal. “I love him,” she added simply.4

  The “forces of order” continued to exchange shots with Garnier and Valet, who fired through the windows while protected by mattresses, sometimes with a pistol in each hand. Bonnot’s friends were clearly not about to give up, although besieged by about four hundred armed police, gendarmes, and soldiers. Two sides of the villa were vulnerable to an attack: from the rue du Viaduc and from the garden. There were so many policemen and soldiers firing that it seemed likely that they would shoot each other by accident, particularly because some had climbed up on the railroad viaduct and now were firing down at the house. Police officers dropped huge stones on the roof of the villa, doing little more damage than taking out a few tiles. Lépine, again presiding over a hastily organized headquarters, called for more gendarmes, as well as Zouaves—a light-infantry division whose baggy red pants and open shirts were more suited for their usual service in North Africa—from the nearby fort of Nogent-sur-Marne.5

  The standoff at the Villa Bonhoure drew an enormous crowd of perhaps as many as twenty thousand people all gathered in the vicinity. Police worked to hold back the crowds pushing forward to see the action up close, as if they would be beholding the Wild Bill Cody Western extravaganza that had recently thrilled Paris and other European capitals. Mothers carried babies in their arms. Hundreds of carriages and taxis on the grand boulevards offered their services for hefty sums to carry the curious out to watch the spectacle. Couples dressed in “smokings” (tailcoats) and evening gowns turned up, some having earlier attended shows in Paris before hearing about the police action, others having just finished a champagne banquet for the seventy-fifth anniversary of a literary association. An improvised restaurant, safely away from the besieged house, soon ran out of sandwiches and beer.6

  After a meeting of the top authorities present, the commanders of the operation again decided to use dynamite, as they had done at Choisy-le-Roi. Sticks were dropped from the viaduct twice, the first at about 8:00 p.m., but they did little damage. A third stick of dynamite was placed against the house by a courageous soldier, but the explosion yielded no better result. In the meantime, flares of acetylene merely served to provide Garnier and Valet better light with which to see their targets. The siege risked turning into a humiliating fiasco.

  Finally the commanders ordered four sticks of the powerful explosive melinite from the nearby forts of Rosny and Vincennes. They also requested two machine guns from Vincennes, but those never arrived. Before long, a car drove up carrying one hundred sticks of the explosive. Following a brief ceasefire at about 1:45 in the morning, the melinite was used and did its job, creating a breach in the villa’s walls. Garnier and Valet continued to fire. A policeman and an inspector from Security entered the garden, wearing shields that offered some protection, but not enough. The inspector fell wounded. The garden was now “full of imprudent shooters.” An officer outside apparently inexplicably yelled for a ceasefire. Another officer shouted, “You ordered a cease-fire and I see them there in the room.” The officer outside yelled back “Very well! Then move in!”

  About twenty policemen and Zouaves poured into the villa through the garden at about 2:15 a.m. Thick black smoke provided protection for the attackers. Garnier and Valet, both shirtless and wounded but still alive, continued to fire from behind mattresses at the approaching policemen and soldiers. A corporal, “with the butt of his rifle,” and policeman Paul Guillebaud finished them off, although it’s possible Garnier ended his own life, despite the policeman’s claims. Valet, following Garnier to the very end, fell mortally wounded, his head riddled with police bullets. He died after being carried into the courtyard. It was 3 a.m. when the fighting finally stopped.7

  In Nogent-sur-Marne, as in Choisy-le-Roi, the crowd, so pleased to have observed a real-life battle, raced into what remained of the villa to grab souvenirs, encumbering the police as they attempted to carry Garnier and Valet out of the house. Two sheets were found to cover the bodies. Eight hundred fifty francs had fallen from Garnier’s wallet. Garnier and Valet left behind a considerable cache of weapons, as well as some recently burned letters. Dry vegetables, pasta, macaroni, and the formerly forbidden coffee were on a shelf. A peddler sold macaroni, now quite toasted by the fire, advertised as the last meal of the bandits. The next day, the bodies of Garnier and Valet were tossed into a common grave in Bagneux.8

  Octave Garnier, as Jules Bonnot before him, left sort of a “testament” behind: “Let’s reflect: our women and children are piled into hovels while thousands of villas remain empty. We build palaces and we live in miserable dumps.” He called on all workers to develop their intelligence and their strength: “You are a sheep, the cops are the dogs, and the bourgeois, the shepherds. Our blood pays for the luxury of the wealthy. Our enemy is the master. Long live anarchy!”9

  The crowd engulfs the Villa Bonhoure in Nogent-sur-Marne where Octave Garnier and René Valet have been shot dead.

  Unlike the siege at Choisy-le-Roi, the “victory” of the “forces of order” after a siege that lasted nine hours failed to draw the enthusiasm of most of the big Parisian newspapers. Seven hundred policemen, gendarmes, and Zouaves had fought against two men amid confusion and shots fired in eve
ry conceivable direction. Two of the three policemen wounded had been hit by bullets fired by Zouaves from the viaduct above the villa. A police inspector was wounded by a rifle shot—yet Garnier and Valet had only revolvers. With the modern military technology at the disposal of the police, the results seemed almost laughable. Would this transform Garnier and Valet into martyrs? Guichard found himself on the defensive, arguing strenuously that the vast majority of troops and police—four hundred Zouaves and police officers—who had been sent to Nogent-sur-Marne were there to keep the crowds in line and maintain order vis à vis the civilians, not the bandits.10

  The one-sided sieges in both Choisy-le-Roi and Nogent-sur-Marne played a role in bringing about greater centralization and coordination between branches of the police. They could not afford another episode in which gendarmes, the Republican Guard, municipal police, and soldiers were all involved in what was invariably described as another example of “tactical bricolage” and an “indescribable chaos.”11

  Thus one of the results of the Bonnot Gang’s string of robberies and the virtual obsession they generated in and around Paris was greater coordination within Security, as well as an enhanced role for the gendarmerie.12 In addition to this “Sacred Union” organized between branches of the police, the number of policemen increased dramatically. In 1911 there were 531 men working in Security, by the end of 1912 there were 650, and two years later 738, with its budget considerably augmented. Under the leadership of Célestin Hennion, who succeeded Lépine as prefect of police and who had earned his reputation as a professional policeman who had reorganized Security, the Parisian police became more efficient and more powerful.13

  The Bonnot Gang, now that it had been defeated, generated a modicum of public sympathy. Like Victor and Rirette, other intellectuals as well as more ordinary people may have rejected the bloody crimes and loss of life, but they also placed these events into the context of a society marked by incredibly glaring social inequalities, the sheer arrogance of the wealthy and privileged, and the power of the state and its police, even if at times the police had looked rather bumbling in the process of taking down the Bonnot Gang. By the end of the Bonnot affair, some fifteen hundred people had been subject to searches and interrogations, which had begun in May 1912, including men whose only crime was operating a garage.

  L’Anarchie, for its part, continued to find excuses for the bandits: “Misery rules everywhere… What is astonishing about these men—the so-called ‘bandits’—battling with a massive organization which is every single day trying to annihilate them… All along these tragic events, can one deny the energy displayed by those who are being called bandits?” The viability of “illegalism” was still being hotly debated in L’Anarchie’s pages, sometimes depending on who was writing. On September 5, 1912, an editorial noted, “The bourgeoisie assumes the right to theft… why cannot it be ours as well?” Yet in the same newspaper, Émile Armand now suggested that one could not have imagined how “illegalism could end up there.” Individualism had led to an impasse.14

  Jean Jaurès’s L’Humanité was not at all for the bandits, but could not help commenting, “One must affirm and repeat, the police authorities became engaged in an abominable and bloody parade, which never lacked the ridiculous and impotence.”15

  La Guerre sociale equated the Bonnot Gang, for whom the newspaper had no sympathy—at least for their crimes—with “the robbers and murderers of Morocco.” Yet the anarchist journalist Victor Méric saluted Garnier and Valet, “[the] prodigious vanquished… By your origins, you are ours… For the crowd, you are bandits. For us, you are victims.” Méric condemned the crimes of the bandits while recognizing the atrocious social conditions which he viewed as being in part responsible: “Garnier, Valet… [Yet] you have not understood that the battle has to continue against the conservative forces of ignorance, methodically, in the general interest, towards a common goal, the end of the servitude of the people.”16

  Hundreds of letters, some signed, many not, arrived at the prefecture of police or in Xavier Guichard’s office. These letters expressed support for the bandits and, above all, hatred for the police. One simply stated, “Garnier will be avenged.” Another, sent to the commissariat of the twentieth arrondissement, read, “Bonnot, Garnier, Valet… all our comrades are still good citizens… Long live Garnier, Long live Bonnot, Long live Ravachole [sic].” Another, “Filthy cop… We have decided to kill you. Watch out! Your days are numbered.”17 One to Guichard read, “You are a coward of a bastard” for having killed “a poor man who was also the father of a family… Bonnot.” The letter warned, “we are going to take care of you!” It was signed, “the avengers of Bonnot, Garnier, Valet and their consorts.”18

  In September, another killing by an anarchist illegalist helped keep the seeming threat of violence in the news. Perhaps illegalism was not finished off. On September 12, near the train station of Les Aubrais just outside Orléans, a certain Lacombe, known as “Léontou,” or by some as “the Dog,” killed a railway policeman, escaping on the policeman’s bicycle. Lacombe then murdered a post office official in Bezons during a holdup. The preceding January he had stayed with a Swiss anarchist named Erlebach—who was then going by the name Ducret—on the passage Clichy, where, in a rented store, the latter had sold copies of L’Anarchie. Erlebach had also certainly lodged Garnier and Marie la Belge. Erlebach knew that the police were looking for Lacombe and probably denounced him to the police. And so Lacombe shot Erlebach dead on December 7. Arrested on March 11, Lacombe jumped to his death in the prison of La Santé. Another incident at the prison on January 13 made the headlines and reinforced fears of survivors of the Bonnot Gang. A prisoner managed to get into the room of an absent guard and put on his uniform before being stopped. He had with him a list of the numbers of the cells of Callemin, Soudy, Monier, and Carouy. Could an insidious escape place the survivors of the Bonnot Gang back on the boulevards of Paris?19

  PART THREE

  Chapter 19

  ON TRIAL

  Bonnot, Garnier, and Valet were dead. The long-awaited trial of the twenty remaining accused slowly approached in early February 1913, nearly ten months after the death of Garnier and Valet in Nogent-sur-Marne. Rirette was transferred with the other defendants to the Conciergerie, the tiny cells of which were beneath the Palais de Justice on the Île de la Cité. There were nuns there, too, but unlike at Saint-Lazare prison they did not serve as guards. Real prison guards searched prisoners morning and night. A bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling made sleep extremely difficult, as did the opening and shutting of the little window in the cell door every ten minutes or so, so a guard could peek in. Republican guards escorted the prisoners up narrow stairs to a lateral door that led into the grand courtroom at the Palais de Justice, the scene of so many famous trials in the City of Light, with its polished wooden walls, rows of seats, and large chandeliers hanging from the ceiling.

  Juge d’instruction Maurice Gilbert began his interrogations on February 3. Marie la Belge calmly related that Garnier and Bonnot had been involved in all the incidents, noting the tensions between them. She stated flatly that Garnier had shot the courier Caby on rue Ordener and had killed the policeman (also named Garnier) at place du Havre. She placed Valet at Montgeron and Chantilly, but Marie said she did not know more than that and was unsure about Dieudonné’s involvement in any of this, but repeated that he had not gunned down Caby. Marie explained that following the death of Bonnot, Garnier and Valet had watched her closely, fearing that she might talk. Marie said that she had asked Garnier about the packages he had left in his mother’s apartment and that he had snarled that it was “not the business of women.… You have what you need, thus my business is none of yours.” When he had left, she looked in the packages and had seen the burglary tools. Garnier had warned Marie not to talk to the concierge and to speak in only a low voice with “Julien” and with the younger comrade. She told the juge d’instruction that she had feared Garnier and that he had predicted h
e would soon be dead and Marie would be arrested. She claimed rather disingenuously that she had not believed Garnier to be guilty and had remained with him out of love and pity until the police surrounded the villa in Nogent-sur-Marne.1

  André Soudy was next in line. When being interrogated, he denied being “l’homme à la carabine.” He said he had an alibi, but that he would not use it for fear that it would lead to his being prosecuted for another crime. But he had no fear of the scaffold, he insisted—he would prefer death to prison. Why did he have two revolvers when arrested? Because he had decided to defend himself to avoid arrest. And the 980 francs in his possession? The product of a theft.2

  No evidence or testimony placed Carouy on the rue Ordener at the time of the holdup of the Société Générale courier, nor in the car when the policeman was killed at place du Havre. However, fingerprints taken of the murder victims in Thiais suggested that Carouy had been present in Thiais when the two elderly people had been slaughtered. A print of one of Metge’s palms had been found there, as well. Indeed, police had found jewelry taken from the house at the residence of Barbe Le Clerch, Metge’s girlfriend. Moreover, a woman testified that Metge and Carouy were the two men who asked how to get to their destination in Thiais, and that she heard Carouy lament the fact that it was broad daylight, or they might have robbed the woman, who might have been carrying funds from the Singer Sewing Machine Company, where she worked. Indeed, she identified the two men when confronted with them, despite their dyed hair. Callemin also had dyed his hair, but when questioned on June 3 as to why, he replied that it was for his “personal satisfaction.” He denied being at Montgeron or Chantilly as Marie la Belge had claimed, improbably replying that he had won the money found in his possession at the racetrack.3