Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits Page 3

  In those days Victor, who was only thirteen years old, was like Raymond: living by himself much of the time and in need of friendship. Victor’s parents traveled often and then became estranged, splitting up when he was fifteen.6 His mother, “completely worn out by endless difficulties and sometimes abject misery, as well as serious crises of hysteria,” decided to return to Russia, in principle to fight against the tsarist regime by creating free schools. She died of tuberculosis in 1907. Victor’s father took up with another woman. Victor moved out of the household and into a small room by himself.

  Victor and Raymond quickly became inseparable. They read the same books and discussed them at length. The adolescents absorbed Émile Zola’s 1898 novel Paris, the story of anarchists in the French capital. Raymond particularly enjoyed reading Auguste Comte, one of the founders of sociology. They also read Alfred Musset and Victor Hugo.

  Victor and Raymond found a quiet place for reflection on the roof of Brussels’s enormous Palace of Justice, reaching the rooftop by passing various signs telling them “No entry.” The massive structure was, as Victor remembered it, “a veritable country of steel, zinc, and stone, geometrically uneven, with dangerous fall-offs.” They compared the Palace of Justice to the ancient Assyrian constructions they had read about in a book.

  Far below them stretched the Belgian capital. The Palace of Justice stood on the same level as Brussels’s upper town of grand boulevards and the elegant hotels of the Avenue Louise. It stood proudly above the impoverished neighborhoods of la Marolle, with its “smelly, narrow streets, with laundry hanging everywhere, full of gangs of little brats, amid the shouts coming from the estaminets and the two human rivers that are the rue Blaes and the rue Haute.” Since the Middle Ages, the same population had “stagnated there, subject to the same injustice, in the same masonry, without possible escape.” Completing the picture, the prison for women, a transformed monastic establishment, was wedged between the Palace of Justice and the lower town. Victor and Raymond could barely hear the clacking of the sabots as the prisoners walked back and forth in a courtyard during their brief daily release from their cells far below. From the roof, Victor and Raymond watched one day as a well-dressed lawyer arrived in a fancy carriage, “full of self-importance, carrying a small briefcase full of papers assessing laws and crimes.” They burst out laughing, “Ah! What misery, what misery, this existence!”

  Victor and Raymond were joined in their adventures by Jean de Boe, an orphan from Anderlecht who worked for a typographer and lived with his washerwoman grandmother—he stole to provide modestly for her—near the filthy waters of the Seine River, and by a tall, very pale boy named Luce who worked in a department store and would soon die of tuberculosis, that murderous working-class disease. Sunday was the only day off for the small group of friends, but they had no money to do much of anything but wander among the throngs in Brussels’s crowded streets, “young, scrawny wolves, who had the pride of reflection (la pensée).” They were, as Victor remembered, “a band of adolescents closer than brothers.” Their bond was solidified by their daily struggles. Victor later noted, “In short, life seemed to offer us nothing more than ugly slavery.”7

  Jean de Boe evoked such lives in his aptly titled poem “Misère”:

  From the first moment, in the cradle of the conquerors,

  In the sad shadow of their glory,

  I wove my pathetic rags

  And made my bed in the black mud.

  …

  Here I am, misery, see

  What I drag along with me,

  The raggedy cortege

  Made of hunger, vice, and hate.

  …

  I am the misery that grows,

  And which will one day take the palace.

  I will avenge the shame,

  Of the vile shadow in which I grovel.8

  Victor became an apprentice photographer, earning ten francs a month—virtually nothing—for which he worked ten hours a day, not including the hour and a half he could take for lunch and the hour of travel each way to get to work. He moved on to similar jobs, including that of an office clerk and a technician for central heating. Employers proposed apprenticeships, but without any pay at all. The best that Victor could find, for the equivalent of eight dollars a month, was a position assisting an elderly businessman who owned mines in Norway and Algeria. Life for a poor adolescent was like that.

  The little group of friends had less time for their Sunday strolls, and they began to grow apart. But Raymond and Victor remained close, even when they disagreed about how to face the life of poverty that stretched before them. Raymond was determined to escape “the poisonous corruption that was bosses, their workers, bourgeois, magistrates, police, and others, all these people disgusted me.” He first stole at age seventeen, receiving a short jail sentence. Raymond’s partner in the minor crime—another friend, not Victor—received a suspended sentence. Raymond had defiantly questioned anyone’s right to judge him. His father’s anger meant little to him, and in fact made him “plus révolté.”

  Raymond still found time to fall in love. He had become attracted to a young Russian student, Macha, whom he met at the Bibliothèque Royale. Raymond remembered: “With her I spent the happiest hours of my life. The intimacy of two young people talking together about the goodness of humanity, building idyllic castles in the air, was something so sweet and good. I can still picture the poor, neat little garret where she lived, the tiny table over which our heads always touched and our hair mingled, as we felt each others’ hot breath; our hands never stopped meeting, and our cheeks brushed lightly, and in this way we experienced pleasures that were sweet and entirely innocent.” But the young woman returned to Russia, leaving Raymond heartbroken. He composed poems with her in mind. “Oh! To be handsome! Oh! To be strong!” he wrote over and over.9

  Raymond went back to work, first as a butcher’s assistant, then in a bakery, and then in another meat shop. Lying about his age, he worked sixteen hours or more a day for seventy or eighty francs a week. When he asked for a day off, his boss became angry and fired him. Raymond then found a low-paying job assisting mechanics, but without relevant skills, there seemed little hope for him in this line of work. He worked on roads, again for pitiful wages. He hated that workers were completely subjugated to the authority of their bosses, and he also was appalled by the number of workers he saw drowning in alcohol and smelling of tobacco. He participated in one brief strike and was arrested. Two more subsequent arrests brought several more months in jail. Participation in another strike and in a brawl earned him six days in prison.10 Raymond would not so easily submit to the ugly slavery to which he and Victor seemed condemned.

  At age fifteen, Victor had an easier time holding jobs than Raymond, and he rarely got caught up in the brawls that landed his friend in jail. But he too was frustrated by his circumstances, and he found himself contemplating the political situation in distant tsarist Russia, the country of his family’s origin. As the stirring news of the Revolution of 1905 arrived, Victor learned of strikes, mutinies, and executions. The revolution brought the grudging establishment by Tsar Nicholas II of an Assembly, or Duma, although it had little power. Perhaps with the Russian example in mind, a year later Victor helped found the Fédération Bruxelloise des Jeunes Gardes Socialistes in Ixelles, an antiparliamentary organization under the influence of the French radical socialist and antimilitarist Gustave Hervé.11

  While most other young men their age talked about bicycles or women, Victor remembered: “We were chaste, awaiting better of ourselves and our fate.” Although they fervently believed that society could be transformed, Victor and Raymond both soon lost all faith in socialism, which seemed increasingly reformist and tediously doctrinaire. Socialist leaders told their faithful followers, according to Victor, “March along slowly and in rows of four and believe in ME.” Demonstrators almost inevitably ended up drinking at estaminets, bringing good business to their wily owners. Elections seemed only to prop up corru
pt states and the interests of the wealthy. There seemed to be nothing combative about reform socialism, and Victor and Raymond increasingly believed it would never work. They laughed at Socialist leaders, but their laughter was bitter. Victor realized, “Corruption (la combine) is always there and everywhere.”

  Victor did manage to make connections with some local officials, but these men were just as complacent as he had feared. He obtained an appointment with a municipal councilman, who invited him to his elegant residence, which indicated to the young visitor that the politician “was slowly making himself rich.” Victor tried to engage the man in the realm of ideas; this proved impossible, and Victor left in disgust.

  How, Victor wondered, could one create a just society that was both “ardent and pure”? In recent decades, states had consolidated their power, turning cities into garrison towns. Victor did not want to compromise, but Socialist politics in Brussels seemed to offer only compromise, not revolution. What would become of his desire to fight, his desire for justice, his intense will to get away from the city and away from a life “without possible escape”? Victor and Raymond’s goal remained absolute freedom—nothing else would do.12

  Victor contemplated what to do with his life. Should he become a lawyer, like the proud men he had watched from above as a young boy, striding confidently into the Palace of Justice? He began studies in law at the Université Nouvelle—which had broken away from the Université libre de Bruxelles and had attracted many radical students—but then gave them up. Victor concluded that lawyers were there “to invoke the laws of the rich which are unjust by definition.” Should he become a doctor, caring for the wealthy while advising from afar those living with tuberculosis in poor neighborhoods? All he could offer the poor, he knew, was encouragement to eat well, to seek fresh air, and to rest—none of which was possible for desperately poor workers. Or should he become an architect and build comfortable residences for the wealthy? If he had been the son of a bourgeois professor, he might have taken one of those paths, seduced by “the theory that progress would come along slowly from one century to the next.” Victor told his father that he did not want to continue his studies. By then, he had moved out of his father’s house and into a small furnished room of his own. When his father asked what he wanted to do, he replied, “I will work. I will study without undertaking studies.” Victor did not dare say: “You are vanquished, I see it very well. I will try to have more strength, or more fortune. There is no alternative.” Like his father, beaten down by struggle, he was committed to fighting all his life against the injustices he saw around him. Victor hoped to have more strength, or more luck.13

  Victor determined that anarchism was the only way to carry out this fight and he became a committed anarchist. “Society remains the enemy of all individuality,” he wrote. “The individual must struggle against Society, against imposed social duties.”14 Many French and Belgians looked to the revolutionary socialist Jules Guesde for inspiration. But Guesde believed that revolution would lead to an all-powerful state, albeit one that would look after the interests of ordinary people. Another state, although potentially of a different kind, was not what anarchists had in mind. At the age of eighteen, Raymond also became an anarchist, vowing to “defend himself until death.” The state, he concluded, must be destroyed.15

  Victor and Raymond became vocal anarchists immediately. Their first target was consumer cooperatives, which were increasingly common in Belgium and France but afforded workers only about two percent in savings. When Victor and Raymond distributed anarchist tracts outside cooperatives, directors angrily called them “vagabonds.” Next they condemned Émile Vandervelde, a young Belgian Socialist leader, who in 1907 supported Belgium’s annexation of the Congo, the chamber of horrors perpetuated by King Leopold II. Victor and his friends shouted their opposition at meetings of the Belgian Labor Party in Brussels and then stormed out.16

  Victor and Raymond concluded that workers were not ready to rise up, and they required education in the possibilities of anarchism. Two years earlier the pair had read a brochure by Peter Kropotkin, Aux jeunes gens, and it had clearly influenced them. Kropotkin asked young people to look around themselves, look into their consciences, and understand that their duty “is to put yourself on the side of the exploited and to work for the destruction of an unacceptable regime.”17

  In 1907, Victor and Raymond visited an anarchist community in the forest of Soignes in Stockel, just southeast of Brussels—“a free environment” (“un milieu libre”). A table near the entrance was strewn with anarchist pamphlets and brochures. A saucer near the reading material held this small sign: “Take what you want and leave what you can.” A path led to a white house that appeared amid the foliage. Above the door was a sign that read, “Do what you want.” In this seemingly ideal setting lived printers, gardeners, a shoemaker, a painter, and others, some with their spouses or female companions and children. Such communities were intended to show that people could live in egalitarian harmony without the intrusion of state authority or the concept of property; by their very existence, the communities could serve as a form of propaganda. Victor and Raymond, overwhelmed by the setting and by the idea of anarchism, suddenly stood up and broke into verse: “Stand up, you who are sleeping.… It is the Angel of Liberty, It is the Giant Light!” Not long thereafter, the owner of the land kicked the anarchists out, forcing the group to relocate to Boitsfort, which was a little closer to Brussels but still in a rural setting. Russian, French, and Swiss anarchists joined the small number of Belgians.18

  Anarchist communities, stretched for resources, usually did not last very long. Some fell apart over disputes and jealousies, which was eventually the case for the community in Boitsfort. But this did not undermine Victor’s confidence in an anarchist future in which such groups would proliferate, if only at first to provide a setting that would show anarchism “under a truer light, with its ideal of peace, life, and peaceful labor.” Such communities would stand, in Victor’s words, as “the first cells of the new society.”19

  The anarchists who floated in and out of Boitsfort included several violent revolutionaries, among them a Russian chemist known as Alexander Sokolov (his real name was Vladimir Hartenstein) from Odessa who had arrived in Belgium via Buenos Aires, not an amazing trajectory in a time of fast and sturdy steamships. Victor described him as “a man of firm will, formed in Russia by inhuman struggle… he came out of the storm, and the storm remained in him.” It was Sokolov’s belief that in order to wage “social war… one needs good laboratories.” He had set up his “perfect laboratory” a few steps from the Bibliothèque Royale in central Brussels. Aware the police were on to him, Sokolov fled to Ghent, locking himself in a rented room, readying two loaded pistols. When police stormed in, he wounded two officers before being shot dead. In the subsequent trial, Victor and Raymond were summoned as witnesses, although not accomplices. They used the occasion to defend Sokolov; the Russian anarchist had given his life, in Victor’s words, “to awaken the oppressed.”20

  The vast majority of anarchists rejected such attacks. After all, such activities gave anarchism a bad name. Moreover, any revolution that would destroy the state seemed distant, and its outcome seemed uncertain. Victor became an “individualist” anarchist: rejecting theoretical assurances that the day of revolution was near, and instead believing that people had to be transformed one by one, in order to create “new values.”21 The revolution could come later.

  When he was eighteen, Victor began to contribute articles to a four-page anarchist newspaper called Communiste, and then to its successor, Le Révolté: Organ of Anarchist Propaganda. He had a knack for writing, and it gave him a venue to work out and refine his ideas about individualist anarchism.

  Victor could not find sufficient work in Brussels, even as a badly paid typographer, because of the anarchist propaganda he was writing. He and Raymond “felt like we were in empty space.” Moreover, Victor’s status as a refugee and his involvement, howeve
r distant, in the Sokolov affair made him vulnerable to expulsion from Belgium.22

  In 1908, Victor decided to leave Brussels and seek work elsewhere. He carried with him only ten francs, a second shirt, and several notebooks. At the train station, he ran into his father and told him he would be going to Lille for two weeks. He never saw him again. In the quartier of Fives-Lille, he rented an attic room in a miners’ residence (coron) for two and a half francs a week, payable in advance. Victor needed a job, and quickly. Mine work in the region seemed a possibility, but a miner warned the frail Victor that he would not last two hours there. Three days into his stay, he had only four francs left. Bread, a kilo of green pears, and a glass of milk, purchased on credit from his understanding landlady, left him twenty-five centimes for the day. The soles of his shoes betrayed him, and not having enough to eat left him dizzy and sitting on benches in a park, dreaming of soup with some meat in it. A chance encounter brought work for a photographer in Armentières, twelve miles from Lille, for four francs a day—for Victor a fortune. He left the coron each morning at the same time as the miners in their leather helmets in the chilly fog of the Nord. When he returned home at night, he read L’Humanité, a socialist paper edited by the reformist socialist leader Jean Jaurès. Through thin walls he could hear his neighbor beating his wife, who through her tears sounded as though she was pleading for more abuse. It was dispiriting, to say the least. How could the lives of such people be improved? How could they be brought to understand that a better life could be found?

  Victor had exhausted the employment opportunities in and around Lille. His next stop would be Paris in November or December 1908. Like arrivals in the French capital from the provinces, who went to the quartiers of their countrymen upon their arrival in the big city, anarchists knew where to go to find a welcome.23 Soon after reaching Paris in late 1908, Victor headed for rue du Chevalier de la Barre in the eighteenth arrondissement on Montmartre, where the anarchist newspaper L’Anarchie, begun by Albert Libertad in 1905, was published. The offices of the newspaper had quickly become a center of anarchist organization and police suspicion.