And the temple of love
Where lovers having escaped the factories
Return, embracing
Going over the red-brick bridge?
I put in rhymes more feet than were necessary.
It’s better.8
On April 9, he again picked up a pen, writing that Billy the Kid had died at the age of twenty-two, adding somewhat mysteriously that the American outlaw had killed twenty-one men, but had never “pillaged banks. Or at least it appears that way. It’s disappointing.”9
Soudy wrote a testament, leaving to the minister of war his burglary tools “to help him open the door of militarism thanks to the Law of Three Years.” He left his brain to the Medical School; his skull to the Anthropology Museum, hoping that an entry fee might go toward the soup kitchens; his hair to the union of hairdressers; and his signature to “Anarchy… so that the priests and apostles of philosophy can use them for the profit of their cynical individuality.”10
On April 18, a policeman named Moutard came upon this threatening poem on a Parisian boulevard, promising that very soon:
The Tragic Bandits will be avenged,
[by] the death of the executioners and
the principal men responsible
[for] multiple executions.
These would include President Poincarré [sic], if the executions take place, Lépine, Guichard [having taken part in the exploits against Bonnot].11
The Montmartre anarchist poet Paul Paillette sang the praises of Jules Bonnot:
Conserving Family and Property
How can one hope to live in freedom?
Keep the laws and the gendarmes
To vanquish us ready your weapons.
…
Leaving, under your fist, women in servitude,
The perverse masters have an attitude.
And you, clairvoyant—without contradiction—
Caltez! Caltez! Soudy would say.12
The early morning hours of April 21 were overcast and humid. Cavalrymen lined the boulevard Arago. Taxis brought journalists to the executions, scheduled to begin at 4:05 a.m. An old lamp in the wall of the prison of La Santé cast some light on “The Widow,” who awaited her victims.
At about 3:30 a.m. guards shouted, “Okay, get up!” to awaken Callemin, Soudy, and Monier. When a guard offered Callemin a drink of rum, he predictably refused. He wrote a short message to his lawyer, drank a glass of water, and noted the obvious: “It’s a day without a tomorrow.” Upon being escorted from his cell, he muttered, “Finally I am free.” Monier thanked his guards, related that he had had a “dream of love,” and said he wished he could kiss the young Marie Besse, who had attended the trial. He smoked a cigarette and drank a cup of coffee. The prison chaplain was there, as always; Monier shook his hand as a friend, not as a priest, as he was led to the scaffold. Émile Michon was there, carrying a laissez-passer issued by the Prefecture de Police. One of the men to be guillotined finished a conversation he had had with Michon and told him what he thought of the press.
Pas-de-Chance Soudy, whose life had been marked by abject poverty and constant illness, asked for a café au lait “without alcohol!” and two croissants with “the joy of a gamin de Paris.” Yet as it was so early, neither cream nor croissants could be found. “No luck to the end,” Soudy wryly noted. He told the guards that he was ready and that he had no “human life on his conscience. It’s a sad ending, but I will have courage until the final moment.” When he saw a policeman from Security, he shook his hand and said, “It does me good to see you worthy men.” He sang a line of “Salut, oh my last morning,” from Gounod’s Faust. An officer told him, “Above all, no fanfare,” and he responded that that would be the case. Executioner Anatole Deibler cut the hair of those about to die, so that nothing would impede the rapid fall of the blade.
The wagon arrived to take the chained men to meet “The Widow.” In attendance were about two hundred “privileged” observers with access to the best seats near ringside, including the investigating magistrate, as well as other magistrates, and Xavier Guichard, in quiet triumph.
The executioner Diebler picked the order of the heads to fall, beginning with the youngest, Pas-de-Chance Soudy. The hands and feet of the three men had been tightly bound. As he stood before the guillotine, Soudy noted audibly that he was trembling because it was a cold morning: “It’s the best possible end, better than prison.” He addressed a few words “to conscious and liquored-up workers,” then yelled to the crowd below, “Au revoir!” before his head was placed through the little window. Callemin’s turn came next. Raymond la Science nodded toward the throng that had assembled—some having taken prized places as early as midnight—to watch the executions: “It’s beautiful, eh? The agony of a man!” Monier then followed, saying, “Adieu to you all, messieurs, and to society.” The three executions took four and a half minutes. Only Soudy had someone come to claim his severed body.13
While the others were being led to their death, Eugène Dieudonné’s lawyer had gone to his cell to tell him “They won’t have your head.” President Raymond Poincaré had pardoned Dieudonné upon appeal by his lawyers, if “pardon” could somehow be defined as being sentenced to life at hard labor in French Guiana. The evidence that Dieudonné had not shot the courier Caby was overwhelming. Moreover, Bonnot in the testimony he left behind and Callemin during and after the trial insisted that Dieudonné was innocent. Diedonné managed to escape twice from the prison in the roasting hellhole of Guiana but was recaptured each time, returned to the harsh conditions, and denied even the right to speak to anyone. He finally escaped to Brazil, where he survived incredibly brutal conditions before finally receiving authorization to return to France in 1927 after his story became known and supporters organized a campaign on his behalf.14
The trial of the Bonnot Gang, and the wave of illegalist violence these particular bandits represented, had a chilling effect on French anarchists. Rirette remembered: “Our ideas were beautiful. Unfortunately, these neophytes, these kids… killed… and the blood they shed engulfed us.”15
In the prewar period—the Belle Époque that never was—French anarchists were undercut by the wave of illegalist violence. Victor referred to this as a “collective suicide.” The notoriety of the Bonnot Gang had attracted other marginal characters who now flaunted their admiration for the bandits, further contributing to the association in the mind of the public of anarchism with illegalism and banditry.16
The split between individualist anarchism, a decided minority, and the “communist anarchists” became starker after the trial. More than ever, the “communist anarchists,” like Victor, Rirette, and the other intellectuals, insisted that the individualists, and particularly the illegalists, had cast a shadow on anarchism by saluting “destructive egotism as an ideal,” and thus being responsible for the little progress made by anarchist ideas. Individualists fought back against these attacks and remained convinced that the communists’ ties to Syndicalism was corrupting “the true conception of anarchism.” The latter wanted to identify individualism with illegalism and banditry, although there were some “illegalists and bandits among the communist faction.”17
The anarchist André Girard went further, accusing the bandits of being “among impatient pleasure-seekers who, without any legal means—capital—of being able to ‘live their lives’ in complete security have recourse to an illegal instrument—the revolver.” Thus they were “quite worthy sons of the bourgeoisie,” obsessed with living well, worthy of the French statesman François Guizot when, in the 1830s, he had advised the upper classes to “get rich!” (“enrichissez-vous!”). With their “appetites” for bourgeois luxury, they were not anarchists at all; they abused property as did the bourgeoisie, taking lives as did the bourgeoisie and its state. “Purely egoistic” acts, like theirs, he argued, had to be rejected, as those in the time of “propaganda by the deed,” 1892–1894.
Because of the Bonnot Gang, and thanks in no small part to the press and
the newly reinforced police force, virtually any crime could be blamed on anarchists. Any anarchist could be portrayed as “a violent man, without reason and uneducated in his fury, the dangerous neighbor, the unsociable being, the bandit.”18
The influential Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta shared the revulsion of most anarchists for what the Bonnot Gang had done to damage the cause of anarchism. But he also placed the blood they shed in the context of the society against which they had waged war:
Several people stole, and in order to steal, they killed. They killed at random… killed people they did not know, workers, victims like them and even more than them of the evil existing social organization.… They are the bitter fruit that ripens on the tree of privilege. When all social life is stained by fraud and violence and those who are born into poverty are condemned to all sorts of suffering and humiliations, and when money is absolutely indispensable in order to live and achieve respect and when for so many people it is impossible to find honest and worthy work one could not really be astonished [by the result].
Malatesta had noted the obvious. The police and the ruling upper classes seized upon the crimes of the Bonnot Gang as an excuse to denounce anarchism. Now, the “forces of order” had the power and the public support that were needed to intensify a violent war against those who opposed the existing regime.19
Anarchism was now largely discredited in France, although it remained strong in Spain, both in Andalusia and on the docks of Barcelona in Catalonia, for the next two decades. Anarchism was betrayed in the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, then by Joseph Stalin, and finally it was crushed by General Francisco Franco’s nationalist hordes.
In sentencing Victor to five years in prison, Rirette said, French magistrates “had destroyed her youth and her love.” She took a job with a company that purified water. With her two daughters, now six and seven, she moved into a tiny apartment in Belleville, where she still felt at home. She was briefly arrested when police took in a young friend of hers whose residence was full of stolen goods.20
Between August 19 and 31, 1913, Le Matin published some of Rirette’s memoirs, which offered unflattering accounts of the “bandits tragiques,” as newspapers began to call them. In her writing, Rirette attacked illegalism as “ridiculous” and “grotesque.” She probably hoped to influence an appeal of Victor’s sentence, and she denounced Lorulot for not admitting the clear position Victor had taken against illegalism. In response, some anarchists now denounced Rirette. Her former lover Mauricius insisted on his obligation to “publicly express his disgust and contempt for a woman who [earlier] had shared his life.” Rirette stopped attending anarchist causeries and maintained friendships with very few of her former anarchist comrades.21
Victor now seemed a broken man: “The very roots of our mind plunged into despair. Nothing could be done. Man is vanquished, lost. We were destroyed in advance, no matter what we did.” After a brief incarceration at La Santé prison, he was transferred to a larger prison situated on an island in the Seine in Melun. Victor spent nights in solitary confinement; during the day he worked ten hours in the printing shop as a typesetter and then as a proofreader. No newspapers were allowed. At first he was allowed only one book a week to read, and he had to choose “from among the idiotic novels found in the prison library.” Gradually, understanding guards began to bring him books. No visitors were allowed—“My solitude was painful.” Victor tried his best to remain healthy, fearing diseases, especially tuberculosis. He did exercises in his cell, walking the equivalent of ten kilometers a day around his tiny space. On one occasion, he fell so ill because of the lack of food that for the first time, “I feared to be on my way to the little cemetery.” Bouillon and milk in the infirmary brought him back to reasonable health in a fortnight, but he was still in prison.22
From prison, Victor began to consider the illegalists’ legacy and roots. The illegalists’ desperate and, to be sure, self-absorbed tactics against the state and capitalism (and organized religion and the armies that supported them) had failed completely. Victor compared their acts to the period of “propaganda by the deed” in the early 1890s, when Ravachol, Émile Henry, and Cesario killed: “The same psychological traits and the same social elements were present in the two episodes.… They felt themselves in an impasse, fought, and succombed [sic].” The economy and society had achieved “a structure, so durable in appearance that one can’t really see any possibility of real change.” This had carried the masses along with it.
The harsh conditions of working-class life had improved ever so slowly since the 1890s, “with no resolution for the immense majority of proletarians,” while “insolent riches accumulated with pride far above the crowd.” Strikes and criminality followed, “these crazy battles of one against everybody else.” Ideologies had failed the people and “the decline of anarchism in the capitalist jungle [had become] evident.” It was now increasingly difficult to believe “in the renovating power of science,” for clearly science had worked “to increase the possibilities of the development of a traditionally barbaric order. We feel that an era of violence is approaching; no one can escape it.”
Victor looked even more to the Russia of his family’s origin for hope and a possible alternative to what he had witnessed in France. There, the revolutionary movement had “directed these errant energies and carried them along through the paths of sacrifice toward great possible victories wanted by peoples.”23 From his prison cell, Victor tried to imagine the fall of tsarist Russia.
Chapter 21
THE VIOLENCE OF STATES; THE CLOUDS OF WAR
Europe—at least the old, more reassuring Europe—would soon disappear in a wave of unprecedented destruction. The violence unleashed by the Bonnot Gang was horrendous. But it was nothing like the violence generated by modern states, both autocracies and republics. Anarchists rejected state power, capitalism, and concomitant aggressive nationalism. Theoretical, observant, and informed anarchists such as Victor and Rirette certainly got it right. States had become ever more powerful, controlling the means of violence with huge armies and increasingly modern weapons. For now, the French government used its strength to quash dissent within its borders, but before long that same power would be used against its neighbors.
Long before the outbreak of war, anarchists had been critical of the professional armies of nation-states.1 All anarchists were opposed to armies, which represented the force of states. Anarchist propaganda had increasingly denounced the professional armies of nation-states. Victor referred to colonialization as the “same as banditry” (“synonym de banditisme”), the imperialists protected by powerful armies ready to kill anyone who got in their way.2 The same armies attacked strikers domestically as well. French troops had massacred demonstrators in Fourmies on May Day, 1891; gunned down a striker in Limoges in 1905; and fired into crowds during le Révolte du Midi (the demonstrations and indeed insurrection of wine producers in the south) two years later. Not all anarchists agreed on strategies and tactics in the struggle against militarism. While just about everyone supported the right of conscripts to avoid military service by fleeing to Belgium or Switzerland, or simply by hiding, others believed that comrades should work against the army from within.3 In Zola’s Paris, published in 1898, the main character, Abbé Pierre Froment, believes that anarchist bombs could ultimately lead to the annihilation of armies and “the nations forced into general disarmament.”4 He was wrong about that.
The Association Internationale Antimilitariste had been founded in 1904. That same year, the CGT had asked workers “to remain absolutely away from conflicts between nations.” The rise in international tensions in Europe was episodic rather than hydraulic in the period following 1905, the year when Germany and France, during the First Moroccan Crisis, seemed dangerously close to hostilities over influence in North Africa. In January 1906, when the international conference was held at Algeciras, Spain, to try to resolve the tensions that had brought Germany and France close to war, the CGT called
for an increase in an increase in antimilitary and “antipatriotic” propaganda. The Fédération Communiste Anarchiste (FCA), founded in November 1910, made antimilitarism an essential part of its program.5
In June 1909, army officers badly beat a twenty-two-year-old soldier, Aernoult, who, coincidentally, was from Romainville. He had been forced into the army after being arrested while participating in a strike of road workers. Aernoult died from his injuries. Only one brave soldier publicly denounced what had occurred. The incident again cast the army in a bad light and provided fodder for the cause of anarchist antimilitarism.6
In April 1911, a new outbreak of discord between Germany and France in North Africa led to the Second Moroccan Crisis. Tensions heated up and Italy claimed Libya, bringing war with Turkey. Serbian and Bulgarian troops now invaded Turkish territory. Many nationalists wanted war, which they assumed would lead to the liberation of Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Germany after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. The great composer Claude Debussy, who had emerged as a fervent nationalist, refused to attend a program of French music held in Munich the following year. A police spy reporting on an anarchist meeting held in Paris noted that “everyone there showed that they are for stopping the war by all means, including insurrection and a revolutionary General Strike.” Anarchism, at least in the eyes of the police, began to be seen as a threat to national strength, and in the new climate of war, there was less tolerance for it than ever before.7
L’Anarchie kept up its barrage of denunciations of militarism. The newspaper offered scathing commentaries on military life and the role of soldiers, who were described as hanging around bars, smoking and drinking, “a worker who will wear a ridiculous costume” so that his comrades from the atelier will obey the bosses. In one editorial, “The War and the Anarchists,” the newspaper wrote: “And everybody, patriotic parrots or socialist ‘voters,’ class conscious proletarians or groveling fatalists, all of them will go off to war, without a doubt” upon a declaration of hostilities.8
Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits Page 24