Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

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  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Most books are inevitably long solo flights, but in fact one of the nice things about writing is the assistance that friends and colleagues provide along the way. At Fletcher and Company, I would like to thank Don Lamm, as well as Melissa Chinchillo and Erin McFadden. In conceptualizing and researching this book, I have benefited greatly from conversations with and advice from Dominique Kalifa and Quentin Deluermoz. Sven Wanegffelen joined me on a fascinating trek to the Parisian suburb of Choisy-le-Roi to find what is left of the garage where police and soldiers surrounded and then killed Jules Bonnot, and then to Thiais to find where stood the house in which several members of the Bonnot Gang massacred two elderly people. Thanks also to Jean-Claude Petilon and Jean Mpaka, who took me to the viaduct over the Marne that loomed over the “villa” in which Octave Garnier and René Valet met their fate. Cory Browning, Ken Loiselle, and Steve Harp provided helpful suggestions. The staff of the Archives de la préfecture de police was unfailingly professional in facilitating my research there.

  For the research for this project, I received support from the MacMillan Center and the Whitney Griswold Faculty Research fund. I was kindly invited to present talks based on the research for this book at the Sorbonne, as a plenary talk at the Western Society of French History in San Antonio and another at the United Kingdom Society for the Study of French History in Glasgow, and at the University of Oregon, Central Michigan University, and Southern Methodist University.

  I am extremely fortunate to have been able to work for the second time with Katy O’Donnell, now at Nation Books. She is an absolutely remarkable editor. Jennifer Crane provided splendid copyediting. Thanks also to Brooke Parsons who worked on publicity for the book.

  I dedicate this book to my great friend Peter McPhee, a terrific historian of modern France, one of the very best anywhere. We became friends in the early 1970s, when he was working in and on the Pyrénées-Orientales and I was still researching in Limoges. We share a love of French Catalonia, particularly Collioure. Thanks to Peter, I enjoyed two wonderful trips to Australia and began to follow Australian Footy (Australian Rules Football).

  *****

  Carol Merriman passed away suddenly in December 2016. Carol and I were married more than thirty-six years. The two greatest gifts she gave us both are Laura and Chris Merriman. The final stages of the preparation of this book occurred during a time of great sadness for the three of us. We have been fortunate to have the friendship and support of Victoria Johnson, Bruno and Flora Cabanes, Mark Lawrence, Charles Keith, Steve Pincus and Sue Stokes, Richard and Sandy Simon, Dave Bushnell, Joe and Nancy Malloure, Don and Jean Lamm, Steve Shirley, Mike Johnson, Jeanne Innes, Jim Read, Ben Kiernan and Glenda Gilmore, Jim Collins, Gil Joseph, Endre Sashalmi, Peter Kracht, Andrzej Kamin´ski, Thomas Forster, Dominique Kalifa, Jean-Claude Petilon, Sylvain Venayre, Nancy Green, Sven Wangelffelen, Phil Kalberer, and Peter McPhee. And in Balazuc, Hervé and Françoise Parain, Élodie Parain, Lucien and Catherine Mollier, Eric Fruleux, Mathieu Fruleux, William and Ng Claveyrolat, and so many others. Laura, Chris, and I owe much to many people, above all, to Carol.

  Balazuc, July 9, 2017

  John Merriman is the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University and the author of many books, including Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror, and the classic A History of Modern Europe. He is the recipient of Yale’s Byrnes/Sewell Teaching Prize, a French Docteur Honoris Causa, and a frequent speaker at universities across the United States, the United Kingdom, France, and Australia.

  NOTES

  Prologue

  1 EA 141, officer de la paix, Paris XVIIIe, December 21, 1911; JA 15; JA 20, October 21, 1912.

  2 Rirette Maîtrejean, Souvenirs d’anarchie (Paris, 2005), pp. 85–86.

  Chapter 1: The Good Old Days in Paris

  1 Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998), pp. 13–16, 20. Schwartz controversially suggests (pp. 201–204) that the new consumerism and Parisian crowds rushing to see what turned up in the morgue, going to the Musée Grévin, participating in the O’Rama craze, or going to the cinema transformed potentially revolutionary crowds into contented participants in the spectacle of consumption, an “urban culture of spectatorship.” In my view, if Paris seemed less revolutionary, this had far more to do with the increasing bourgeoisification of the city and the enhanced presence of the “forces of order.”

  2 Jean-Pierre Bernard, Les deux Paris: les représentations de Paris dans le seconde moitié du xixe siècle (Seyssel, 2001), p. 241.

  3 Mark S. Micale, “France,” in Michael Saler, ed., The Fin-de-Siècle World (New York, 2015), p. 99.

  4 Charles Rearick, Paris Dreams, Paris Memories: The City and Its Mystique (Redwood City, 2011), pp. 13–14; Frédéric Lavignette, La bande à Bonnot à travers la presse de l’époque (Lyon, 2008), p. 229, January 8, 1912.

  5 Eugen Weber, France Fin de Siècle (Cambridge, MA, 1986), pp. 4, 70–73; James Laux, In First Gear: The French Automobile Industry to 1914 (Montréal, 1976), pp. 201–202; Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, 1998), p. 21.

  6 Patrice Higonnet, Paris, Capital of the World (Cambridge, MA, 2002), p. 422.

  7 Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years: The Origins of the Avant-Garde in France 1885 to World War I (New York, 1958), p. 21.

  8 Micale, “France,” pp. 101–103.

  9 Shattuck, The Banquet Years; Mary McAuliffe, Twilight of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Renault, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, and Their Friends Through the Great War (Lanham, MD, 2014), p. 111.

  10 Paul Morand, 1900 (Paris, 1931), p. 205, adding “Au style-nouille en architecture et en littérature correspond la morale-nouille”; Micale, “France,” p. 101.

  11 Hubert Juin, Le Livre de Paris 1900 (Paris, 1994), pp. 104–105; Bernard Marchand, Paris, histoire d’une ville, xixe–xxe siècle (Paris, 1993), p. 173.

  12 Jean-Pierre Bernard, Les deux Paris: les représentations de Paris dans le seconde moitié du xixe siècle (Paris, 2001), pp. 240–241.

  13 John Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (New York, 2014).

  14 Higonnet, Paris, Capital of the World
, p. 315. Goncourt used the term with a sarcasm that would not have pleased the Parisian elite thirty to forty years later: “Tonight, illustrious Tout Paris gathered at the Italiens for a private performance. Well, the reflection to which this gathering gives rise is the following: French aristocratic high society is dead. There is nobody left nowadays but financiers and tarts, or women who look like tarts.”

  15 Lenard Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871–1914 (Baltimore, 1984), pp. 6–7, 21, noting that “To distinguish definitively between the ‘workshop’ and the ‘factory’ is an impossible task.” Berlanstein emphasizes the gradual “embourgeoisement” of Paris and the growing significance of service work.

  16 Marie-Claire Bancquart, Paris “Belle Époque” par ses écrivains (Paris, 1997), p. 95; Juin, Le Livre de Paris 1900, pp. 54–55.

  17 Higonnet, Paris, Capital of the World, pp. 249. 291, 310; Bancquart, Paris “Belle Époque” par ses écrivains, p. 59; Elections for the Chamber of Deputies in 1902 confirmed the political geography of the capital; socialists were defeated in central Paris and the Latin Quarter. In the municipal elections two years later, the more prosperous western and central districts returned conservative representatives [Michel Winock, La Belle Époque (Paris, 2002), pp. 288, 366; Marchand, Paris, histoire d’une ville, xixe-xxe siècle, p. 160; Pierre Castelle, Paris Républicain 1871–1914 (Abbeville, 2003), pp. 35, 103, although the legislative elections brought better results for the left.

  18 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: Entertainment and Festivity in Turn-of-the-Century France (New Haven, 1985), pp. 95–97.

  19 Rearick, Paris Dreams, Paris Memories, pp. 61–62; Winock, La Belle Époque, p. 110; McAuliffe, Twilight of the Belle Epoque, p. 244.

  20 Michel Winock, Les derniers feux à la Belle Époque (Paris, 2014), p. 132; Winock, La Belle Époque, pp. 347–348, 370; Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City (London, 2004), p. 429; Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque, p. 192; Castelle, Paris Républicain 1871–1914, p. 415.

  21 Weber, France, Fin-de-Siècle, p. 162; Higonnet, Paris, Capital of the World, p. 304; Morand, 1900, pp. 9, 205, 209; Shattuck, The Banquet Years, pp. 3–5. Shattuck focuses on four avant-garde symbols of the age: Guillaume Apollinaire, Erik Satie, Alfred Jarry, and the Douanier Rousseau, identifying four traits that the four shared: youth, humor, a sense of dreaming, and ambiguity (Chapter 2 and pp. 198–199 and 275). The four “did not seek courage in numbers; they found it in themselves. We see them variously as children and determined humorists, as dreamers and mystifiers, and they played all these roles. But their ultimate virtue lies deeper, lodged beneath all their vices. They had the wisdom, already rare, to know themselves, and the courage, which is far rarer, to be themselves.”