Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  Five years of suffering in prison had contributed to his changing conception of “our struggle.” Victor Serge no longer believed “that the anarchist ideal could be limited to a single formula. Now I pay much less attention to words than to realities, to ideas than to aspirations, to formulas than to the sentiments.” He was now ready to work with “all those whose good will becomes fraternal to me, without paying much attention to the secondary divergences in ideas.”10

  Victor was able to return to Paris on July 26 with a special visa that would allow him to join a Russian regiment. But Russian officers suspected that political refugees might join up in order to convince soldiers to desert. Not having money for a hotel, Victor went from anarchist to anarchist hoping to be lodged, without success, until finally he was taken in by a cabinetmaker and former contributor to L’Anarchie. He returned to Buttes-Chaumont for walks in the park with Rirette and her children. Victor found work in a printing shop, ironically close to the site where the guillotine had dispatched Callemin, Soudy, and the others, and then moved into the residence of a bookshop owner whom he had known before his arrest.

  When Victor’s visa expired, and with Clemenceau in power and waging war on all dissidents, the police arrested him on October 2, along with other anarchists. Victor wrote Chinette goodbye, telling her that once again he had been incarcerated and once again he had done nothing to merit it. He would “do the impossible to go to war” and asked her to remember him “even if I do not come back. And for your mother, also a goodbye and perhaps adieu.” His final sentence may well contain a hint as to one of the reasons that their relationship fell apart. “I now feel more than ever,” he wrote, “how total is the collapse of all to which I held.… Goodbye.” It is possible that in the end Victor could not accept Rirette’s ideas about free love and open relationships.11

  In the meantime, the Bolsheviks had come to power in Russia by way of the October Revolution. Victor must have heard the news in prison in the Seine-et-Marne. In March 1918 he was transferred to another prison in Précigné in the Sarthe, a dumping place for foreigners who had been arrested, thieves, and anarchists and others with “dangerous ideas.” The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk that month had officially taken now Communist Russia out of the Great War.

  When Victor was imprisoned, Rirette loyally came to visit him and obtained books for him, and tried to mobilize some journalists and lawyers on his behalf. She had no success, and Victor became frustrated, writing Rirette angry letters, which she clearly did not deserve, and asking her to work more actively to try to achieve his freedom. From his cell, Victor wrote articles for the individualist newspaper La Mélée, signing them as Victor Serge. A quarter of the inmates in the prison were killed by the Spanish flu, a pandemic that killed millions of people worldwide from 1918 to 1920, but Victor survived. The Red Cross organized an exchange of French prisoners being held in Russia for Russians incarcerated in France. This finally brought Victor’s release in December 1918, the month after the Great War ended.12

  Before leaving for Russia, Victor sent Le Libertaire comments on the Russian Revolution, which were published as articles: he signed them “V. S. Le Rétif.”13 Victor and Rirette would be separated once again. He told her, “You understand, it is what my father hoped would happen. This is why he fought. I have to go there.” She replied, “I don’t have the strength to follow you. My life is here. Your revolution is taking place over there. I will work for mine here.” Victor promised to return.14

  Victor boarded a ship for Finland on January 26, 1919. Vladimir Lenin had arrived two years earlier, transported in a sealed railroad car. Lenin had been in exile from the country in which he had been born and organized a revolutionary movement against the tsarist autocracy. In contrast, when Victor arrived in Petrograd, it was his first time in the county of his family’s origin. On the journey he fell in love with Liouba Roussakov, a twenty-year-old Russian woman who had lived in Marseille. She was the daughter of a veteran of the Revolution of 1905 who was making the same journey. Victor and Liouba married in Russia on August 13, 1919, even before he had divorced Rirette. Liouba gave birth to their son, Vlady, the next year, and a daughter, Jeannine, fifteen years later.

  Victor’s attraction to Russian revolutionary idealism had remained with him. In a letter sent from Petrograd he wrote that he would “join again with those who will fight the evils of the new regime.”15 He broke with anarchism in 1919 and accepted Leninism, which led to angry disputes with anarchist friends. He joined the Communist Party that May, and at one time was given responsibility for looking after the archives of the tsar’s secret police, the Okhrana. He worked for the Communist Third International, the Comintern, which had just been created. Victor readily admitted that “socialism itself contains seeds of reaction… an internal danger much more real at present than the external ones that are harped upon.” To Victor, socialism could only triumph in the Soviet Union and the world “if it surpasses capitalism not in the building of tanks but in the organization of social life.” Looking back, he believed anarchism had failed because anarchists were unable to organize a mass movement.

  Victor explained his evolution in a letter to Le Libertaire: “We are past the time when someone can believe himself an anarchist because he is a vegetarian.” Things had changed. Now it was necessary to accept “all the requirements of the struggle—organization, the use of violence, revolutionary dictatorship—that are part of the vast Communist movement.” Anarchism had shown itself “incapable of any practical initiative through its divisions… its lack of organization and discipline. Whatever it enjoyed in the way of real capacities and energies [was] wasted in small chaotic struggles.”16

  Leninism, at least in the early days in the post-revolutionary period, seemed to Victor, among many others, far more capable of offering a “revolutionary elite, powerfully organized, disciplined, obeying a consistent direction, marching toward a single clearly defined goal.” And, at least early on, discussion and debate took place, and dissension did not bring automatic exclusion—at least on minor issues. To be sure, Victor may have exaggerated the degree of democratic discussion after the Bolsheviks came to power with the October Revolution, a year before he arrived in Russia. And, as brutal repression of the insurrection of sailors at the Baltic port of Kronstadt in March 1921 demonstrated, workers’ control quickly disappeared. Victor opposed the establishment of the Cheka Soviet secret police and of the repression at Kronstadt. These factors probably led him to withdraw to a short-lived rural colony near Lake Ladoga, not far from St. Petersburg. But Victor returned to militancy and in 1921 was named head of propaganda aimed at Central Europe. In Germany between 1921 and 1923, he wrote articles on the political situation there and elsewhere, continuing this work in Vienna in 1924 and into 1925.17

  Victor Kibaltchiche, then Victor Serge, later in life.

  Victor returned to the Soviet Union in 1925 and joined Leon Trotsky and what became the Left Opposition to Stalin. At the end of 1927, Victor was expelled from the Communist Party. Several months after Trotsky’s deportation to Kazakhstan, the secret police arrested Victor as he was purchasing medication for his wife, who was becoming increasingly psychotic. Imprisoned for thirty-six days, he decided to devote himself to writing, believing it “a means of finding harmony by offering our accounts of the vast life that is racing by us and of which we attempt to establish essential aspects for those who will come after us.” Victor embraced what he believed the mission of the Russian writer of fiction, “a means of expressing to men what most of them live inwardly without being able to express, as a means of communion, a testimony to the vast flow of life through us.”18

  Victor’s first novel, Les hommes dans le prison (Men in Prison), published in 1930, was “an effort to free myself from this inner nightmare and also to fulfill a duty to all those who will never be freed.” He wanted to communicate the dehumanization of daily life in prison to people who had no idea what life was like in such places. He insists on the “multiple p
resence of death” in prison and “a total powerlessness that becomes even clearer with the passage of time.”19 The experiences Victor had had during the five years he spent in the French prison now came pouring out. He would soon see Stalin’s even more horrifying institutions of incarceration.

  In June 1933 Soviet police again arrested Victor. He and his son Vlady, who was then thirteen years old, were sent to the Gulag in Orenburg in the Ural Mountains near the border with Kazakhstan. Victor sent Liouba, his spouse who was in failing mental health, back to Moscow for psychiatric treatment. In France, a defense committee for Victor started up. In late 1936, Victor asked to be allowed to return to France, where the Popular Front was in power. French intellectuals—notably Romain Rolland but also André Gide, André Malraux, and Henri Barbusse—pressured Stalin to order Victor’s release.

  Victor was freed from the Gulag and returned to France in 1937, when his ban was lifted, along with Liouba and their two children. That year, he published on life in Stalin’s Soviet Union and left the Communist Fourth International. However, Victor remained faithful to Marxism, about which he wrote “allows us to confer on our isolated lives a high significance.”20 Yet again, French authorities refused to allow him to stay in France. He went briefly to Brussels, where he had not been in at least thirty-seven years, and was reunited with Jean de Boe and Eugène Dieudonné. De Boe had been condemned to ten years of hard labor after the trial and had escaped to Belgium in 1922. In May 1937 Victor returned to Paris, living in Le Pré-Saint-Gervais not far from Rirette. Their divorce had been finalized on February 14.

  The next month, Victor referred in a letter to “a large, dense and reflective book” he had written on l’Affaire Bonnot, but that it had fallen into the hands of Soviet censors. He believed that “the bastards are considering using it against me.” But Victor indicated that he would write it again and “soon.” However, no trace of such a book has ever been found.21

  The French police, never letting up, identified Victor as a “suspect” in October 1938, on the occasion of an official visit by the king of Belgium to Paris. As a result, Victor managed to get a postponement of a year for his forced departure from France, which was renewed in January 1940.22 In Le Pré-Saint-Gervais, Liouba had become increasingly ill, and was later transferred to an asylum in Aix-en-Provence.

  With the German invasion of France in 1940, Victor left Paris for good on June 10, arriving in Mexico on a cargo ship in September of the next year. Victor traveled to Mexico with a new partner, Laurette Séjourné, his son Vlady, and his daughter Jeannine. Stalin’s secret police continued to track him. It was in Mexico that Victor wrote his memoirs.23

  Victor had remained loyal to Trotsky, despite their break over Victor’s view that the Popular Front in France, formed in 1936, and other popular fronts, including that in Spain, could become an instrument of class struggle. Trotsky refused to give unconditional support to Spanish anarchist forces even though they were being undermined by Stalin. For his part, Trotsky denounced Victor as a “disillusioned pretty bourgeois intellectual,” someone who “plays with the concept of revolution [and] writes poems about it but is incapable of understanding what it really is.”24

  Like Kropotkin, Victor was increasingly horrified that one kind of centralized state had been replaced by another, a totalitarian state, which had sent him to the Gulag, along with his young son. Victor’s later “witness-novels” took readers across the Russian revolutionary experience, from before the war, through the Revolution, Civil War, the New Economic Policy (when in 1922 Lenin retreated somewhat from War Communism and permitted the coexistence of the private and state sectors in order that the return of the market to agriculture would increase food supply in the wake of the Civil War and subsequent famine), and the Stalinist period. Ever the idealist, Victor wanted to “rescue the honor” of the men and women who made the Russian Revolution. In January 1947, still in Mexico, Victor published “The New Russian Imperialism: Europe at the Crossroads: Renaissance or Totalitarianism?”25

  Years of suffering had taken their physical toll on Victor Serge: “I suffered more than ten years in various prisons, was an activist in seven different countries, and have written twenty books. I own absolutely nothing.” He had often been the victim of the mass press “because I tell the truth.” Looking back, he had seen “a victorious revolution that then went wrong, several failed revolutions, and so many massacres that it makes one dizzy. And it is not finished.” Yet until the very end, he expressed “more confidence in mankind and in the future than I have ever had before.”26

  Victor passed away on November 17, 1947, in Mexico, still optimistic that “the technical advantages of production, the sense of social justice, the newly found freedom would combine naturally to place the economy at the service of the community.… All is not lost since this rational and strongly motivated hope remains.”27 The last word Victor Serge wrote was “dazzling.”28

  Rirette’s life went in a direction decidedly different from Victor’s. After they parted ways, she remained in Paris, with no means of existence and two young children to feed. On May 4, 1918, she was arrested after a theft from a store. A magistrate sentenced her to two months in prison, but with a suspended sentence. After the war ended, Rirette earned her living as a proofreader for France soir. She continued to live in Belleville, and then purchased a small house in Crosne, near Villeneuve-Saint-Georges southeast of Paris. There she was able to invite friends to stay with her, as before, and gradually returned to attending anarchist causeries, although she was no longer a militant. Victor and Rirette had continued their relationship as friends. In 1959 Rirette wrote of their relationship, “Throughout this extraordinary odyssey, we never stopped talking to one another spiritually. I have quite a lot of letters from everywhere—Russia, Germany, Austria, Silesia, and finally Mexico.”29

  Rirette moved for a time to Lyon during World War II, where she became friends with Albert Camus. She returned to Paris after the war, moving into a small attic apartment near the Louvre. She worked for Libération until 1953. It was in the newspaper’s office that she learned the devastating news that Victor had passed away.30

  Rirette Maîtrejean lived to see the révolution manquée (failed revolution) of 1968, a year of hope in France for many, marked by massive student protests and widespread strikes by workers in Paris (and elsewhere in France and abroad) but also by frustration and disillusionment. Rirette passed away on June 14 of that year at the age of seventy-nine in the hospice of Limeil-Brévannes. Rirette had always rejected the pointless violence of “propaganda by the deed” that turned people away from anarchism. The battle, she felt, still had to be won with ideas. At the Sorbonne, anarchists observed a minute of silence in her honor. The newspaper L’Aurore made an obvious comparison: like the young of today, she wanted to “shake the very structures of society and overthrow the bourgeoisie of her fathers.” To the end she conserved “the profile of a young schoolgirl,” still insisting that “our ideas were beautiful.”31

  The Bonnot Gang remains in the collective memory of France. In 1915, a Fantômas film left no doubt that it was about Jules Bonnot and his colleagues. Subsequently, many accounts have appeared in French telling essentially the same story. Since World War II alone, a television series, a film in 1968 with the singer Jacques Brel playing Raymond la Science,32 a song by Joe Dassin the same year,33 and a comic strip published in 197834 have kept the story alive. In 1973, a man wrote the Museum of the Prefecture of Police offering to sell “some of the blood of the celebrated bandit Bonnot.” His father, a policeman who claimed to have participated in the siege at Choisy-le-Roi, had hoped to capitalize on Bonnot’s renown. With this in mind, he had “put this blood on a large sheet of white paper.” The museum declined. Someone else contributed several locks of Bonnot’s hair to the museum.35

  Yet the Bonnot Gang should remain in our memory of France for other reasons. In 1926 the anarchist Victor Méric, who lived through the period and had at the time revealed sym
pathy for the bandits following the siege at Nogent-sur-Marne, published his reflections on the Bandits Tragiques. He now expressed no sympathy for Bonnot, Callemin, and the others. Looking back from the postwar period, he drew a conclusion: If in society one could ever find “a little equality in human relations, a little less savage inequality, more absolute certainty in the precarious lives of the humble and the laborious,” Méric concluded that such events as the sheer brutality of the Bonnot Gang would be impossible. The Great War had had changed nothing in this regard: “The lamentable spectacle [of] ‘the sumptuous arrogance of some and the sordid misery of others’ remained, well after the Belle Époque that wasn’t had been swept away by the violence of states.”36

  PRIMARY SOURCES

  Archives of the Prefecture of Police

  JA 15

  JA 16

  JA 17

  JA 18

  JA 19

  JA 20

  JA 21

  JA 22

  JA 23

  JA 24

  JA 25

  EA140

  EA141

  77W 4255

  BA 928

  BA 1499

  KA 74

  KA 77

  French National Archives

  F7 13053

  L’Anarchie

  Le Matin

  Le Petit Parisien

  L’Excelsior

  Figaro

  National Library of France

  Salle X, banque DOSS. FOL-LN1-232 (11228)

  MEMOIRS AND SECONDARY SOURCES