Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits Read online

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  Copyright © 2017 by John Merriman

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  First Edition: October 2017

  Published by Nation Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017951124

  ISBN: 978-1-56858-988-6 (hardcover)

  ISBN: 978-1-56858-989-3 (e-book)

  E3-20170921-JV-NF

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE Chapter 1: “The Good Old Days” in Paris

  Chapter 2: Victor Kibaltchiche

  Chapter 3: Another Paris: “Misery Is Everywhere”

  Chapter 4: Anarchists in Conflict

  Chapter 5: Rirette Maîtrejean

  Chapter 6: A Love Story

  Chapter 7: A Bitter Split

  PART TWO Chapter 8: Jules Bonnot

  Chapter 9: The Bonnot Gang Strikes

  Chapter 10: The Bonnot Gang at Bay

  Chapter 11: How to Unload Stolen Securities

  Chapter 12: The Police in Action

  Chapter 13: The Bonnot Gang’s Murder Spree

  Chapter 14: Panic in Paris

  Chapter 15: Police Dragnet

  Chapter 16: Antoine Gauzy’s Variety Store

  Chapter 17: Besieged in Choisy-le-Roi

  Chapter 18: Spectacle in Nogent-sur-Marne

  PART THREE Chapter 19: On Trial

  Chapter 20: The Widow (La Veuve)

  Chapter 21: The Violence of States; the Clouds of War

  Chapter 22: Aftermath

  Primary Sources

  Memoirs and Secondary Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Notes

  Index

  For Peter McPhee

  PROLOGUE

  At 8:45 in the morning on December 21, 1911, in Paris, Ernest Caby, a thirty-two-year-old employee of the Société Générale wearing the uniform of the bank and a blue bicorn hat with a tricolor cocarde, stepped off the tramway at its stop at Carrefour Damrémont-Ordener in the eighteenth arrondissement beyond Montmartre. The stop stood about one hundred yards from the branch office of that bank at 146 rue Ordener at the corner of Cité Nollez. Over his left shoulder, Caby carried a cloth sack, and in his hand, another. This morning, it was filled with 5,266 francs in silver. In his left hand he carried 318,772 francs in titres (securities), some of which were negotiable. Inside his coat was an envelope containing twenty thousand francs in bank notes and five thousand francs in cash.

  Passersby in the busy morning hour in a neighborhood of modest means gaped at a Delaunay-Belleville parked near the bank, some approaching the luxury automobile to have a closer look. Alfred Peemans, a bank official, walked out the door of the Société Générale to meet Caby as he approached the bank, and together they headed toward the bank. When they reached the corner of the Cité Nollez, near the front door of the bank, a man stepped out of the luxury car holding a revolver in his left hand. From just a few feet away, he shot Caby point-blank in the chest, and then shot him twice more. The courier collapsed at the base of a tree.

  The automobile used in the robbery.

  The holdup at the Société Générale, rue Ordener, Paris. The courier Ernest Caby is shot by one of the bandits.

  Peemans was unharmed and ran into the bank, shouting, “They are attacking our courier!” Several bank employees followed Peemans out into the street in time to see the man fire a fourth shot, which lodged near Caby’s spine. The gunman then grabbed one of Caby’s bags; another man grabbed a second sack. Both men jumped back into the waiting car, leaving Caby lying in a pool of blood.

  Two municipal policemen (gardiens de la paix) arrived from different directions and moved toward the automobile, but they were met by a barrage of shots fired from inside the Delaunay-Belleville as it sped off. A bus arrived, blocking the street at the corner of the rue du Cloys, and a tram was crossing the road, but the driver of the speeding automobile skillfully avoided both and turned onto rue Montcalm and then onto rue Vauvenargues and headed out of Paris via the porte de Clichy. No one managed to stop them before they made their escape.

  News of the holdup and shooting at the Société Générale exploded in Paris. Although it was the first holdup in France using an automobile, it confirmed public worries about the use of automobiles in burglaries to elude the police. In this case the thieves were better armed and better equipped than the authorities. The police had very few automobiles at their disposal. Caby, who survived, was the only casualty, but the holdup was an embarrassment for the police.1

  From his office on the Île de la Cité, Louis Lépine, who had been the prefect of police since 1893, moved quickly to coordinate the massive police operation intended to find the bandits. Born in Lyon in 1846 into a family of modest origin, Lépine had quickly given up law for administration, serving in Saint-Étienne as prefect of the Loire. The Prefecture of Police of Paris had been created in 1800 and charged “with all that concerns the police,” in the widest possible sense. Louis Lépine’s post was therefore an important position in the hierarchy of power in France. This position enabled him, as it had his predecessors, to intervene arbitrarily, forcefully, and sometimes secretly on the edge of illegality in the investigation of crimes, ordering arrests and searches as he pleased, dipping into an enormous drawer of secret funds that enabled him to pay off informers and police spies. Lépine knew how to manipulate the municipal council of Paris; he had staked his reputation on his ability to prevail in negotiations with anyone who might check his power. He imagined himself to be “the king of Paris,” or the commander “by divine right,” imposing military discipline on “his” agents, “his” brigades, and “his” administration. As he sat behind his large desk—with his mustache and short beard, invariably wearing a dark suit and tie, matched by a black top hat when he went out—Lépine had no idea who might have carried out the audacious attack on the courier who worked for Société Générale. But his attention soon turned to the possibility that anarchists were involved.

  The next morning, in their small apartment in plebeian Belleville, Victor Kibaltchiche, the Brussels-born anarchist son of Russian émigrés, and his companion Rirette Maîtrejean, a fellow anarchist who had come to Paris from her village in central France, read in the newspapers about the dramatic, bloody theft and getaway. Victor immediately thought of someone who might have done it: a certain Jules Bonnot, whom Victor and Rirette had recently met in anarchist circles—“He is crazy enough to have done that!” Victor and Rirette read the descriptions of the perpetrators. For her part
, Rirette doubted that a man whom eyewitnesses described as being small with a thin mustache could have been Bonnot. Victor disagreed. And another accomplice had been described as “seeming very young, not very big, wearing a martingale raincoat, a melon-shaped hat, binocles, and with a face of baby-like rose complexion.” Victor immediately recognized Raymond Callemin, once a close friend from his youth in Brussels. Eyewitness accounts led Victor to believe that another Belgian, a violent anarchist named Octave Garnier, was one of the four—or five—men whom passersby had seen in the car. Victor and Rirette realized that although they had had absolutely nothing to do with the holdup, completely disagreed with such violent acts, and had long since distanced themselves from this small faction of anarchists, this could be bad for them. They were already known to the authorities because of the anarchist paper they ran, L’Anarchie. The police had been on to them for years, waiting for an opportunity to silence them. And Victor and Rirette knew that if Callemin, Garnier, and Bonnot were behind the brazen holdup, there would be more violent attacks in Paris.2

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  “THE GOOD OLD DAYS” IN PARIS

  In the first decade of the twentieth century, foreign-language guidebooks saluted the sheer beauty of Paris. One touring book described Paris as “the beautiful city…, which for ages has been recognized as the chief capital of Europe.” Parisian newspapers celebrated the permanent spectacle of Baron Georges Haussmann’s grands boulevards, centers of conspicuous consumption that had been created when the city was remade in the 1850s and 1860s. The iron balconies along Paris’s boulevards symbolized the Second Industrial Revolution, a transformation characterized by steel, iron, and—increasingly—electricity.1 Guidebooks emphasized the boulevards and their grand cafés, not the city’s soaring Gothic churches. The Third French Republic (first proclaimed in 1870 and lasting until 1940) celebrated the city as a showcase of a “happy modernity.”2 This would be the capital of the wealthy—not the unlit, crowded streets of plebeian Paris, or the tiny apartments that impoverished people like Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maîtrejean called home.

  In 1910, the Catholic writer Charles Péguy exclaimed that “civilization has changed more in the past 30 years than it has since the time of Christ.”3 French society seemed to be speeding up, accelerating rapidly, if not spinning out of control—and nowhere was this more true than in Paris. Inventions such as the wireless telegraph, telephone, elevators, electric-powered amusement park rides, and then subways had become part of modern life, particularly city life.

  A few decades after Haussmann’s boulevards changed the city, Paris was altered yet again: by 1900, three hundred fifty thousand electric lamps brought light to the city. It was at this time that the term Ville Lumière began to appear in tourist guides for Paris. The Grand Palais, the Petit Palais, the Gare d’Orsay, and the Pont Alexandre III were completed for the occasion when Paris celebrated… being Paris. In 1900, fifty million people went to see the Exposition Universelle, which saluted electric lighting with the Palais de l’Électricité. The first Métro line opened up for the occasion in July of that year, its cars carrying visitors along the Seine to the Exposition Universelle that celebrated France and its soaring capital. By 1913, six lines were in operation.4

  Electricity turned hotels and department stores into what the great novelist Émile Zola aptly called the “cathedrals of modernity”—where advances in glass technology made possible dazzling window displays to attract clients who had money to spend.5

  When we think today of the Paris in the early years of the twentieth century, great artistic, musical, architectural, and literary accomplishments first come to mind. Avant-garde artists embellished the reputation of Paris as the “capital of art.”6 Like their Impressionist predecessors, the Neo-Impressionists Georges Seurat and Paul Signac; the Post-Impressionists Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cézanne, and Paul Gauguin; and the Fauvistes Henri Matisse and André Derain reacted in their own ways against tradition, conformity, and “official” art. They came to Paris—and especially to Montmartre, the butte overlooking the capital, whose cabarets and cafés also “represented a new aesthetic,” as historian Roger Shattuck put it. The Cubism of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso reflected the sense of movement and even speed that modern Paris exuded.7

  Avant-garde music thrived, too. Claude Debussy’s expressive piano pieces were so innovative that they were to music what the Impressionists had been to painting.8 The composer Maurice Ravel combined respect for traditional influences with innovative tempos reflecting the dynamism of the period. Erik Satie’s brilliant compositions and humor—including “Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear”—also reflected the originality of French culture at the turn of the century.9

  Art Nouveau emerged as an adventurous new style in Paris, as well as in Brussels and Barcelona. It flourished in architecture, graphic art, interior design, furniture, vases, and other household items, and it served as an imaginative response to the geometric, straight lines of the style represented by the grands boulevards. Yet Art Nouveau’s free-flowing lines and vegetable- and plant-like curves generated hostile responses from some who denigrated it as “noodle art.” Even Hector Guimard’s “dragonfly” entrances to the Métro, now iconic, at the time had strident critics.10

  Artists and tourists weren’t the only ones who descended on the growing capital city, the population of which rose from 2,345,000 in 1896 to 2,763,000 ten years later. Paris was an endless beehive of activity. On an average day, 60,000 vehicles, 70,000 horses, and 400,000 brave pedestrians crossed the place de l’Opéra, in front of Charles Garnier’s magnificent gilded “wedding cake.” About one hundred fifty people were killed and twelve thousand hurt each year, taken out by horses, omnibuses (which moved at eight miles an hour), trams (ten miles an hour), and, then, automobiles.11

  Automobiles were without question one of the symbols of the new age. The first automobile appeared on the roads of France in 1893. The country produced 1,850 automobiles in 1896, 24,000 in 1898, 34,000 in 1909, and 43,000 in 1913. The first regular autobus line began in 1904, linking Saint-Germain-des-Prés to Montmartre.

  The guidebooks never mentioned the quartiers populaires, or the impoverished suburbs of Paris, where most of the workers who ran the trams, built the popular new cars, and cleaned the city lived. Moreover, guides for visitors presented Paris as a pacified city, with insurrections, revolutions, and the Paris Commune of 1871 in the distant past.12

  Following France’s humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), ordinary Parisians had proclaimed their freedom from the provisional government that had been set up in Versailles, from which the kings had ruled during the Ancien Régime. After little more than two months, the Paris Commune was overrun by the troops of Adolphe Thiers, the president of the provisional French government. During the state-supported terror that ensued, which became known as “Bloody Week,” May 21–28, 1871, as many as fifteen thousand Parisians were killed, many summarily executed.13

  But that was more than three decades earlier and, at least for wealthy Parisians, easily forgotten. Now, writers described Paris as the “capital of pleasure.” For Parisians of means, the years of the fin de siècle and the first decade of the twentieth century were “the good old days.” Vast sums of money now easily made up for blue blood. The “high bourgeoisie,” as they were sometimes known, including many nouveaux riches, had largely supplanted the old aristocracy. The term high life emerged from this period.14 The upper classes lived very well indeed, benefitting from the growth of the French economy that would last until 1914. Three years earlier, the census had identified 19.5 percent of Parisians as “employers”—including master artisans and thousands of people who did piecework in their rooms who were strangely classified as “patrons.” Another 21.4 percent were classified as white-collar workers, the percentage of which had increased by more than 2 percent since 1886. Finally, 59.3 percent were classified as “manual workers.”15

  Wealt
hy Parisians dressed, spoke, and lived differently than ordinary people, so much so that even religion became a marker of class divides. The Catholic Church was far more likely to play a role in the lives of the upper classes than it played in the increasingly dechristianized quartiers populaires in northeastern Paris and the suburbs, even after the 1905 law on the Separation of Church and State ended government funding for religious organizations and made all churches and other religious buildings national or communal property. Elite marriages, baptisms, and funerals took place in the Church of the Madeleine in the eighth arrondissement. Protestants, too, were counted among the wealthiest Parisians.

  As poet and playwright Guillaume Apollinaire put it, the French capital let loose “a fantasy both nostalgic and modernist.” For the wealthy, the fin de siècle and the first decade of the twentieth century were a time of dreams: “Everything pointed in that direction: women’s clothing, household decorations, sovereign kitsch, and the ambitions of the magnificent symbolist poets. We were in a crucible, in a factory taken over by madness. Everything was possible and everything could suddenly occur.”16

  Upper-class amusements came at an increasingly steep price. Being able to afford an evening at the opera at the Palais Garnier signaled one’s arrival in the Paris of luxury, closely identified with the prestige of France, privilege, and central and particularly western Paris. Going up and down the opera house’s enormous marble double stairways lit by incredible chandeliers, le tout Paris (the Parisian bourgeois financial oligarchy) attended lavish operatic performances and the masked balls that captured the prevalent sense of operatic illusion.17

  Fancy theaters also were closely identified with privilege. A few years earlier, an architect had noted that the theater was “a place of luxury.… The public loves lavish displays.” This was now even more the case. Seats for a performance at the Folies-Bergère or Le Lido near the Champs-Élysées went for four to five francs—a day’s salary for a worker—with standing room for three francs.18 This was the Paris of the aging actress Sarah Bernhardt, who would make her “farewell” tour of the United States in 1913 at age sixty-nine.19