Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits Read online

  Other remarkable technological advances further transformed Paris into the world’s center of pleasure. The cinema became the rage. The first paying performance was in December 1895, put on by Louis Lumière in the basement of the Grand Café on boulevard des Capucines. That year, the first advertisements appeared on screen—for chocolate, beer, hats, and corsets. In 1907, the Cirque d’Hiver on boulevard du Temple and the Hippodrome de Vincennes were transformed into movie theaters. In 1909, the Pathé Journal brought weekly news to the screen. In 1911, the Gaumont Palace opened its doors, becoming the largest movie theater in the world with three thousand four hundred seats. By 1913, annual receipts for films had reached nine million francs in Paris. Parisians had their choice of 121 theaters and 260 cinemas.20

  The magnates of the “great bourgeoisie” hobnobbed with counts and countesses at fancy balls and receptions and at the horse races at Longchamp. They carried their passion for luxury to the spas that dotted the country. They took vacations on the Normandy coast, on the French Riviera, and at Biarritz. Men belonged to exclusive clubs, such as the Jockey Club near the place de la Concorde. They frequented restaurants such as Fouquet’s, which in 1899 had opened its doors on the Champs-Élysées, its scarlet banquettes and high prices symbolizing luxurious privilege. Maxim’s restaurant, on the rue Royale, near the Madeleine, offered a wine list of twenty-four pages and 842 vintages. “The City of Light” celebrated the theatrical dimensions of the ever-visible leisure of wealthy Parisians as they strutted and preened, assisted by bowing valets, drivers, waiters, and sommeliers attending to every whim of the privileged.21

  A spate of publications presented Parisian women as ever ready for amorous encounters. Les cocottes, also known as les grandes horizontales, came to be identified with the pleasures of Paris, the “modern Babylon.”22 Nothing reflected their decadence, or entrenched class differences, more than the emergence of haute couture fashion as a Parisian—indeed French—trademark, at least for foreign consumption. Women closely followed changes in fashion, with voluminous garments and long dresses gradually giving way to narrower and somewhat shorter skirts at the same time that the “bastille” of the corset was slowly collapsing. Hats designed by Coco Chanel sprouted feathers. Women coveted François Coty’s perfumes.23 Men dressed themselves in black bourgeois uniforms right out of Honoré Daumier’s caricatures, inevitably complete with top hats.

  The grands salons of Paris still functioned during the Republic, hosted by various princesses and marquises, including Napoleon’s niece, Princess Mathilde Bonaparte—at least until in 1904, when she passed away. (She was famously unaffected by political shifts. At one gathering, she remarked, “The French Revolution? Why, without it I’d be selling oranges on the streets of Ajaccio.”24) In the faubourg Saint-Germain, aristocratic remnants and grandes dames of the haute bourgeoisie received visitors almost every day, standing as determined rivals with those whom they considered craven imitators in the “little wars” of the salons. Political differences were still present, but nothing like the impassioned days when Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was Jewish, was condemned or found innocent in the lavish town houses of aristocratic families during the “Affair,” which lasted from 1894 until 1906. These practices trickled down to some degree. Middle-class women often also received female guests of their social class in the afternoon.25

  If many in the bourgeoisie aped the aristocratic ideal of not working at all, workers and peasants existed only to provide services for them. Wealthy women managed large households (with their lavish, increasingly ornate interiors), which in effect meant overseeing the help. Governesses and domestic servants tended to their children. Shopkeepers and department-store clerks were there to attend to their shopping needs. Sheer wealth, maintained or augmented by inheritance and timely dowries, created considerable social differences with the various groups of “lesser” bourgeoisie drawn from the worlds of commerce, government service, and education.26

  The motto of the Third Republic may have been “liberty, fraternity, equality,” but the term equality amounted to a charade. Bankers, industrialists, financiers, speculators, magistrates, wealthy notaries and lawyers, and high government officials—the grande bourgeoisie—ruled the roost. Paris was an imposing center of banking, commerce, manufacturing, and government. The French bourgeoisie lived “three times blessed” because of the economic, social, and political power that was all concentrated in their hands. The French elite benefited from ridiculously low direct taxes on their wealth. Some profited from investment in colonial enterprises, from Russian and Spanish railroads, or simply from buildings they owned in Paris or elsewhere. Regardless of industry, the upper ranks of the bourgeoisie were able to easily add to their fortunes.27

  Even political change was more a charade than a reality. For more than the first two decades of the existence of France’s Third Republic, conservative republicans dominated. In 1898, the so-called Radical Republic came to power. But this changed very little. French Radicals were socially moderate, opposing both the Socialists and the Monarchists. Most Radicals were confirmed anticlericals who vociferously opposed any institutional role for the Catholic Church in the Republic. However, the Radical Republic appeared to be nothing more than a continuation of previous regimes, in which a small percentage of men of great means got their way as coalitions and governments came and went. When Alexandre Millerand became minister of labor and the first Socialist in a ministry in 1899, he found himself sitting at the same table during cabinet meetings with General Gaston Galliffet, one of the orchestrators of massacres during Bloody Week in May 1871.

  The Third Republic has aptly been called La République des Copains (“The Republic of Pals”). The Chamber of Deputies, which included representatives of a variety of political opinions, was essentially a club of like-minded men. Many were subject to corruption, spending as much as necessary to be elected with promises and wine. The vast majority of deputies were drawn from the upper classes: wealthy property owners, rentiers, bankers, lawyers, doctors, and so on. Thirty to forty percent of deputies emerged from the grande bourgeoisie. Only a couple of workers and peasants were elected to the Chamber of Deputies. Deputies shared a collective psychology. They married women from the same social class. They tu-toied each other in the corridors, salons, and café of the Chamber of Deputies. Ministries came and went as if through a revolving door, but the personnel of the Republic remained essentially the same.28

  Given that the Third Republic’s founding fathers had constituted executive authority to remain extremely weak—for fear of “Caesarism,” given the heritage of two emperors Napoleon—the Chamber of Deputies essentially ran France along with an extremely centralized administrative, judicial, and military apparatus organized from Paris. The Chamber of Deputies, elected by universal male suffrage, invariably acted on behalf of the wealthy—only in 1914 would it finally approve a tax on revenue. The Senate, whose members were elected indirectly by those elected to the Chamber of Deputies, members of regional councils in each département, and municipal officials, was even more conservative, reflecting rural influence.29 All this contributed to a sense, at least among the Third Republic’s critics, of inefficiency and stagnation.30

  Parisian newspapers, which might have served as a check on the actions of the powerful, were instead largely complicit. The mass press had burgeoned during the big scandals of the Panama Canal Affair, when it became known in 1892 that members of the Chamber of Deputies had accepted bribes from the Panama Canal Company to facilitate a loan. The company had gone bankrupt in 1889. By the twentieth century, however, if France, like old Gaul, was divided into three parts (“estates”)—executive, legislative, and judicial authorities—the press had arguably become the fourth, receiving tips from politicians and influencing votes in the Chamber of Deputies. Printing machines (linotypes), developed in the United States in the 1890s, dramatically increased print runs and expanded the power of the press.

  Newspapers in the French capital published a
total of six million copies a day. In 1912, Le Petit Parisien published an astounding 1,295,000 copies a day, Le Journal 995,000, Le Matin 647,000 L’Éclair 135,000, and L’Excelsior 110,000. Victor Kibaltchiche’s L’Anarchie used the same technologies, and while it had a much smaller print run, it was one of the few staunchly oppositionist newspapers Parisians could find.31

  As Victor Kibaltchiche would quickly discover after arriving in Paris in late 1908, life was anything but rosy for most French workers. They suffered and protested the subdivision of crafts, increased mechanization, the decline of apprenticeship, the increase in piece rates, speedups, and the beginnings of scientific management in large factories. Bosses adopted new strategies to increase profits while undercutting the autonomy of skilled craftsmen, whose resistance to these changes became legendary. Anarchists, who wanted to destroy states, closely identified capitalism and large-scale industrialization with increasingly centralized governments that protected the interests of the wealthy. Many workers and other ordinary people, frustrated with the corruption of the Third Republic and the avarice of their bosses, came to agree with the anarchists.

  Unlike anything else, the automobile became a marker of wealth—and the speedup of French society—in the new century. The first Tour de France, the grueling bicycle race that stretches across France, held in 1903, popularized automobiles. The vehicles, which closely followed the cyclists during the race, made people think of new ways of getting around—so much so that suddenly every member of the elite wanted a car. Yet the enormous cost of purchasing and running an automobile also underscored the gap between Parisians of means and everybody else, especially in the new, scientifically managed car factories.

  Scientific management, or Taylorism (named after the American engineer Frederick Taylor), offered employers and foremen a means of measuring the performance of assembly-line workers by applying scientific techniques to mass production. Taylorism speedups were particularly prominent in the production of automobiles; Louis Renault had already begun to employ some of Taylorism’s techniques. A visitor to a factory in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, noted that almost all of the workers employed by an owner who had become enamored with techniques of scientific management were quite young. When asked where the older workers were, the owner hesitated and then replied, “Have a cigar, and while we smoke we can visit the cemetery.”

  Chapter 2

  VICTOR KIBALTCHICHE

  Un monde sans évasion possible (A world with no possible escape)

  —Victor Serge

  The fast-paced lives enjoyed by the wealthiest Parisians stood in stark contrast to the abject poverty of so many of the inhabitants of the French capital. This latter group included the young Victor Kibaltchiche, who arrived in Paris in late 1908 with almost nothing.

  Paris attracted tens of thousands of transplants like Victor during the first decade of the twentieth century. Some came seeking work; others were looking for an opportunity to get involved in growing antiestablishment movements. Victor would spend only six years in Paris, a relatively brief stop in a life defined by exile and impermanence.

  Victor Kibaltchiche was born in Brussels on December 30, 1890, the son of Russian exiles from the tsarist Russian Empire. His father, Léon Ivanovitch Kibaltchiche, the son of a small-town Orthodox priest, had been a junior officer in the imperial guard. He sympathized with Narodnaya Volya (the People’s Will), a secret radical socialist organization within the army whose members believed that violent attacks against the state could spark a massive, successful peasant insurrection. On March 1, 1881, members of Narodnaya Volya assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Victor’s uncle, Nicolai Kibaltchiche, a chemist and member of the Central Committee of Narodnya Volya, was among those arrested and subsequently hanged. When police uncovered the group, Victor’s father, Léon, hid in the gardens of a monastery in Kiev and then managed to swim across the Austro-Hungarian border as Russian guards fired at him.

  The young Victor Kibaltchiche. Note the Russian-style shirt.

  Victor’s mother, Vera Pederowska, was from a poor family of Polish nobles. Her father was a military officer. She went to Geneva to study, where she met Léon Kibaltchiche, who was also studying in that classic city of political refuge. Proletarianized intellectuals with virtually no money, they traveled as best they could from Geneva to Paris, where Léon continued his medical studies and read widely in geology and other natural sciences. They moved to London and finally to Brussels, in search of books to read and enough to eat.

  Thus it was by chance that Victor was born in Brussels. In every dank one-room—or at best two-room—apartment in which the family lived, illustrations of Russian revolutionaries martyred by the tsarist regime graced the walls. As political refugees, Victor’s parents had lost their Russian citizenship. Victor never attended school because the family moved around so much and because his father detested state-run schools—“stupid bourgeois education provided to the poor.” His father and mother taught him to read in French, Russian, and English with the help of old, cheap editions of Shakespeare, Molière, Lermontov, and Chekhov that could be found in flea markets in the Belgian capital. His father instructed Victor in history, geography, and the natural sciences. He took his young son to libraries and museums, where Victor developed the habit of taking notes on what he read or observed. When Victor was twelve, his father asked him, “What is life?” His son first replied that he did not yet know, but then added, “You will think, you will struggle, you will be hungry.” Victor Kibaltchiche’s youth and subsequent life would be like that. He would later add, “You will fight back.”1

  Life was indeed a struggle for the family. When they went briefly to England hoping for better things, they ate wheat that Léon gathered on the edge of a field near Dover. In Whitechapel, Victor contracted—but survived—meningitis. In a mining suburb of Liège, in Belgium, where Léon had apparently found some work, the family lived above a small restaurant. They fell asleep as enticing smells of moules frites—nothing more Belgian than that—rose up from the restaurant of the same name, but which they could not afford except on occasion when the landlord extended them a little credit. Once in a while, the restaurant owner’s son traded them a bit of sugar in exchange for stamps from Russia or other odds and ends. Victor developed the habit of nourishing himself on sugared coffee into which he dipped a piece of dry bread. His brother Raoul, two years younger and dangerously ill, literally wasted away in a dark room. Victor told him stories, wiped his forehead with ice, and gently lied that he would soon be better. Raoul died in 1891, barely nine years old, of tuberculosis, but also of hunger and, as Victor remembered, of “misery.” Victor and his father carried Raoul’s body to the cemetery at Ucel, the small town where they were living at the time.2

  When what was left of the family moved to Charleroi, Victor called a large house capped by a crafted gable “Raoul’s house.” He never forgot the faces of children condemned to hunger—above all, that of his younger brother. He was not even a teenager yet, but Victor had already begun to ask himself what was the value of surviving, if not to help those who were at risk of being unable to hold on.3

  In 1903, the Kibaltchiche family again settled in Brussels in the grim faubourg of Ixelles, the population of which had risen to almost sixty thousand people, up from forty-four thousand a decade earlier. Victor’s father often got by pawning the few possessions the family had, buying them back when things were a little better. This was the way it was for poor families. At times, Léon depended on usurers to have any money at all. The family ate well enough the first ten days of any month, not well at all the second ten days, and insufficiently the last ten days. For Victor, these memories were “stuck in his soul as nails in a chair.” His father regularly carried a little box under his arm when he left home to try to get hold of some bread on credit. Successful or not in his quest for food, he plunged into an atlas of human anatomy or books on geology when he returned.

  For Victor, words like bread, hunger, money, no money
, work, credit, rent, and landlord took on “an extremely concrete sense,” although things got a little better when his father found work at the University of Brussels.4

  One day when he was twelve, Victor, dressed in a Russian-style shirt with red and mauve checks and carrying a single cabbage, was walking up a street in Ixelles. On the sidewalk across the street, he noticed a short, bespectacled boy about his age staring at him with condescension. Victor, never one to shy away, headed in the boy’s direction, mocking his antagonist’s glasses, and the two exchanged shoves before the other boy asked him if he wanted to hang out with him. Victor agreed, and the two became friends.

  The other boy was Raymond Callemin, the myopic son of a small, illiterate, alcoholic shoemaker of considerable temper, Napoléon Callemin, who “lived sitting on his stool, leaning at the window over miserable old shoes on a provincial street of Ixelles.” Raymond’s mother had died young, and Raymond grew up in the streets of Brussels, left to his own devices and enduring the prostitution of his sister, age fifteen. Their late mother’s father provided some stability, which allowed Raymond to earn his brevet, the certificate of primary schooling. Callemin later claimed that in those days he attended the theater at least once a week. Raymond was placed as an apprentice in a sculpture workshop and then became an apprentice typographer.5

  Raymond Callemin.