Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits Read online

  In L’Anarchie, Victor’s editorials focused attention to the challenges faced by the poor. Unhappiness abounded in Paris and other French cities: “No one dares accept the famous opinion of Professor Pangloss: all is for the best in the best of possible worlds.”13 In an editorial, the young anarchist Rirette Maîtrejean called attention to the obvious: “the high cost of rents and food, and the immense effort necessary even to have something to eat.” The cause was “ever more atrocious exploitation.”14

  During the first decade of the twentieth century in Paris, on one side stood “those who have money and do not work… and those who work and have nothing.”15 Money talked and the poor walked. In a time of considerable hardship for ordinary people, many dreamed that France would one day have economic and social justice.

  As workers faced unemployment, underemployment, and dead seasons, undercut by the increasing mechanization of factory production, three kinds of social movements seemed to offer hope for change. The first was Socialism. Reform Socialists believed that sweeping electoral victories would bring about a new state. Revolutionary Socialists counted on revolution to bring the downfall of capitalism and the existing French state. Jules Guesde led France’s revolutionary Socialists. Greatly influenced by Karl Marx, and known as the “the red Jesuit” because he was rigid and doctrinaire as well as humorless, Guesde had organized the Federation of the Socialist Workers of France Party in 1879 and then, four years later, the French Workers’ Party, the first modern political party in France. Guesde considered electoral campaigns a means of propagating Marxian socialism. In 1905, thanks to the leadership of the charismatic Jean Jaurès, a former philosophy professor, reformist and revolutionary Socialists were uncomfortably unified.

  The second possibility for mobilized workers was Revolutionary Syndicalism (under the umbrella structure of the Confédération Générale du Travail, the CGT, which had been founded in 1895). The Chamber of Deputies had legalized unions in 1884, and by the early twentieth century French unions had more than a million members. “Syndicalists” saw strikes—and one day a general strike—as the means of bringing the state and capitalism to their knees. They viewed the shop floor as providing a natural way to organize workers, while providing something of a vision of what a society of equals would be after a revolution. Revolutionary Syndicalism, as proclaimed at the Congress of Amiens in 1906, carried the struggle of workers away from politics to a uniquely economic front.

  Anarchism had emerged as a third option during the last decades of the nineteenth century. It was one response to the growth of powerful centralized states and their increasing capacity to extract resources, command allegiance, and conscript bodies for war. These centralized states and the large-scale industrialization that accompanied them were transforming European society. Nationalism was fully part of state-making. States worked with determination to increase the number of speakers of the dominant language—a push that anarchists firmly resisted. Spain provides a good example of the adage “A language is a dialect with a powerful army.” Thus it is not surprising that anarchism found followers in non-Castilian parts of Spain and in southern Italy, where tax collectors, government officials, and soldiers, speaking a different language, stood as the face of the state. Victor remembered workers being “pulled in opposite directions by two antagonistic movements, the revolutionary syndicalism of the CGT, which, with a fresh and powerful idealism, was winning the real proletariat to the struggle for positive demands, and the shapeless activity of the anarchist groups.” Indeed, many anarchists and other workers were attracted to the structure and organized demands of the CGT.16

  Anarchists dreamed of abolishing the state, and thus the privileges so cherished by the wealthy. The poet Camille Mauclair recalled, “It wasn’t so much that we wanted the miserable to be happy… as that we wanted the happy to be miserable… the label [“anarchist”] covered all the grounds of our discontent.… I hated indiscriminately deputies, policemen, judges, officers, all the supporters of the social order, as much as I hated philistines, and I believed mystically in catastrophic revolution and the red dawn.”17

  Anarchists believed that once states had been destroyed, people could live in harmony in natural groupings. They believed fervently that people were basically good, but that their lives were blighted by the existence of states and the props of capitalism, organized religion, and professional armies. A stateless society would bring about the disappearance of social disharmony, making possible the full development of the individual in a world free of conflict. As Victor put it, “Anarchism rises above class interests. It appeals to all men who energetically hold onto the will to live free.” He went on: “Anarchism swept us away completely because it both demanded everything of us and offered us everything. There was no remotest corner of life that it failed to illuminate; at least so it seemed to us.”18

  Many anarchists were influenced by Mikhail Bakunin, the Russian revolutionary who memorably asserted that “destruction is a creative passion” and who looked to the Russian peasantry for the expected revolution. Another Russian anarchist, the geographer-prince Peter Kropotkin, was a man of peace. Yet he is sometimes credited with coming up with the scary term “propaganda by the deed,” the belief that an assassination of a tsar, general, or police chief could be the spark that would inspire ordinary people to throw off the chains of the state. In 1892, Ravachol (the Dutch-born François Koenigstein) tried to kill magistrates with bombs he planted in elegant Parisian residences. He had already killed before and would have continued to do so had he not been captured and guillotined. During the era of “propaganda by the deed,” anarchists killed six heads of state, including French president Marie François Sadi Carnot and US president William McKinley, who was assassinated in Buffalo, New York, by a man whose fare to that city in upstate New York had been paid by an Italian anarchist group in New Jersey.

  Émile Henry’s bomb attack in Paris in February 1894 on the Café Terminus, near Gare Saint-Lazare, initiated the era of modern terror. Henry, twenty-one years of age and the son of a man who had been condemned to death in absentia after the Paris Commune, went out to kill not officials representing the state but just ordinary people listening to music and having a beer before bedtime. He was also an intellectual, which at the time made him unusual among anarchist terrorists. Before his execution in April of that year, Henry assured judge and jury that the state could not destroy anarchism, insisting that “its roots are too deep.” Most anarchists, in the wake of these high-profile attacks and assassinations, rejected “propaganda by the deed” and moved in more positive directions, including propaganda by the word, cooperatives, and seeking influence in trade unions. The vast majority of anarchists were not violent, but it was the small number of violent anarchists who preoccupied public attention.

  As anarchism gained ground with workers during the last years of the nineteenth century, anarchist committees started up and their public meetings became more frequent. The anarchist press again came to life, and newspapers advertised lectures, debates, and causeries populaires. A police report correctly assessed that these anarchist gatherings, which were informal lecture series, served as something of an organized center for Parisian anarchists. Their searing editorials played a major part in the way that competing anarchist tendencies defined and promoted their positions. This became even more important with the new century, as differences in outlook between different anarchist groups became even deeper and increasingly bitter.

  Most anarchists, a majority of whom were workers, rejected the hierarchical organization that characterized socialism. Other anarchists drifted toward producer and consumer cooperative movements, although this evolution generated considerable hostility from comrades who saw such a trend as moving toward socialism. Recent interest in neo-Malthusianism (whose adherents sought to limit population growth because of fears that existing resources were inadequate to sustain more people) also divided anarchists. Yet most anarchists were favorable to neo-Malthusianism, beli
eving it was part of the transformation of society, and many saw it as part of control over their own sexuality. Some believed in a woman’s right to abortion; others did not.

  In the first years of the twentieth century, some anarchists moved toward Revolutionary Syndicalism, or “Anarcho-Syndicalism” as it was sometimes called, particularly in Spain. Trade union membership in France grew from about two hundred thousand in 1906 to seven hundred thousand in 1912. To syndicalists, bourses du travail (labor exchanges)—which many French cities had—offered something of a vision of a future transformation of society once the state and capitalism had been destroyed. French elites feared exactly such an occurrence.19

  When Victor arrived at rue du Chevalier de la Barre and began attending causeries that sometimes took place twice a week, he walked right into contentious debates among communist anarchists, anarchist individualists, and, increasingly, illegalists. He had it right when he assessed that anarchism was “built upon contradictions, torn apart by tendencies and sub-tendencies.”20

  Victor, like Libertad, had embraced anarchist individualism: “Let’s not wait for a problematic revolution. We live in a society… in the state of permanent revolution [and] we have faith in ourselves, in the ability of the individual to transform himself and to struggle non stop for the transformation of society.” In any case, “every anarchist is by definition revolutionary.” He put it this way: “[t]he evolution of minds that foresees the great social upheavals has hardly begun. We deduce that the revolution is still far away.” Victor’s advice: “make your own revolution by being free men and living in comradeship.”21

  It took courage to live “en-dehors” (on the outside):

  To be an anarchist is to leave the beaten paths on which for hundreds of years generations of sheep have walked without reflection, break with routines, reject commonly held believes, be contemptuous of public opinion, have disdain for rejecting smiles and treacherous laughs, insults, and calomnies.22

  Victor would take the route that pleased him, working hard “to be ‘me,’ a free man among the slaves, strong among the weak, brave among the cowards.”23

  The Revolution, anarchists believed, had to begin within the individual. “Individualists,” influenced by the philosopher Max Stirner, encouraged ordinary people to “sculpt their ‘me’” in order to achieve “the revolution in oneself.”24 Like all anarchists, they rejected military service and organized religion. They also denounced sexual repression and, for some, marriage as compromising the individual.

  Victor insisted that the anarchist had to “resist and take action continually.” The masses were blocked by “the habit of believing, the habit of obeying, the habit of being guided.” Laws were powerless to transform society. The “parliamentary illusion” simply deluded ordinary people. From the individualist perspective, “Bestial violence, hatred, the sheep-like mentality of [political] leaders, the gullibility of the masses—here is what must be annihilated in order to transform society.… Without the renovation of mankind, there is no salvation!” The bases of anarchist morality could be found “in our very lives. Because it is life that inspires our insubordination.”25

  Some “libertarian individualists,” espousing “conscious egotism,” lived in small groups on the margins of society. This took some of them to the suburbs. Anarchist communities there were intended to transform the self as a first step in the conversion of many in society to the ultimate possibility of revolution.

  Individualist anarchists scorned leaders who called for immediate social and political mobilization. Victor remained scathing about the political and union demonstrations he had observed in Belgium: “Look at them about seven in the evening as they file down the streets, glum or marked by alcohol, broken by abhorrent tasks, not even giving the vigorous impression of beasts of burden. Watch them, the days of fêtes, going about in raucous bands among the hiccups of a drunken binge, [singing] the sorry and obscene songs of the people.”26

  Individualist anarchism thus defiantly broke with “communist anarchism,” whose adherents believed that revolution was near and who were proponents of collective action and willing to undertake alliances with socialists and syndicalists. To Victor and other individualists, “Marxism and Syndicalism are incurable forms.” The concept of organization itself flew in the face of anarchist spontaneity. L’Anarchie editorialized: “When anarchists want to undertake something together, they do not need something in writing—their free consent always suffices.” Individualists encouraged “acts of individual revolt in order to diffuse libertarian ideas,” which would ultimately bring about individual and then collective emancipation. They insisted they were building toward a revolutionary future and the transformation of society. Between October 1910 and June 25, 1911, 2,908 attacks occurred on railway lines—above all, the cutting of telephone and telegraph lines. The police invariably suspected anarchists, and in many cases they got it right. They would count thirty-nine “individualist” groups in Paris and its suburbs, scattered throughout the plebeian neighborhoods.27

  Some individualists became “illegalists.” Illegalism had first developed in France during the late 1890s, as well as in Italy and Belgium. Illegalists contended that any acts against society were justified. They argued that since property was theft, such heists or counterfeiting were simply taking back that which belonged to everybody. It was “la reprise individuelle” (the individual taking back). One could hold up a wealthy person at gunpoint or break into a wealthy person’s safe, because the money or objects being taken were not stolen but simply taken back from someone who benefited from the protection of the state, thus stealing from the poor. Work brought scanty remuneration, while labor further enriched people of means. Illegalists were not only on the margins of society but also in defiance of all of its codes and laws. Believing that no immediate escape from the capitalist state was possible, they would no longer be exploited. Illegalists insisted that such acts were part of a “permanent revolt against the established order.” Thefts became revolutionary acts. Illegalists represented a new, younger generation of anarchists, most of whom were workers. Traditional anarchists like Sébastien Faure and Jean Grave (a follower of Peter Kropotkin and the author of La société mourante et l’anarchie [Moribund Society and Anarchy]) rejected them, although the latter opened up his newspaper columns to illegalist views. And so, later, would Victor Kibaltchiche.28

  Marius Jacob became the most eminent “illegalist.” Born in Marseille in 1879 to a working-class family and beginning his career as a typographer, Jacob traveled to Australia as an apprentice sailor. He deserted the ship, commenting bitterly, “I have seen the world and it is not beautiful.” He returned to France and became a burglar. Jacob’s band of thieves sent out scouts to gather information about possible targets for operations. They divided France into “zones of activity,” and in principle they stole from only those whom the burglars designated as “parasites.” In the desire to separate “reprise individuelle” from “theft,” Jacob asked members of his band to contribute at least ten percent of the take to anarchist propaganda. After hundreds of burglaries, he was arrested in 1903; three years later, he was sent to the Hell of Cayenne, a notorious French penal colony in French Guiana, where he remained, despite almost twenty escape attempts, until 1927.29

  The number of illegalists in Paris slowly increased during the early years of the twentieth century. A police report noted in July 1907 that young unemployed men “who frequent the milieu of anarchists and anti-militarists, [were] living from plunder and theft.” They stole bread and milk, among other things, following the passage of suppliers. Some raced by to take things very early in the morning as grocers and other merchants started to put their goods out on the street. The report assessed that “this way of living at the expense of society is now strongly recommended in private conversation in all the libertarian groups of Paris.”30

  Most illegalists stole very little and did so in order to have something to eat. One day, in a fairly poor
neighborhood on rue Clignancourt, a poet friend of Rirette’s was walking with an illegalist who had had nothing to eat the day before. But he had an idea. His dog was trailing behind the pair. As they approached a poultry store, the merchant was putting out his finest chickens for customers. At his master’s command, the dog leapt up and grabbed a chicken and ran down the street. While the merchant ran after the dog, the illegalist grabbed a second chicken and thrust a third in the hands of his astonished friend. “Let’s get out of here!” the illegalist shouted. But then he stopped: “Wait, I forgot the watercress!” He returned to take two bunches of it. When they returned to the illegalist’s apartment, the dog and presumably the chicken were waiting. “Never had such a good meal,” the poet related to Rirette.31

  Although the anarchist press helped differentiate the two major anarchist groups—on the one hand “communists” in the anarchist sense working for revolution that they believed they would see in their lifetimes, and on the other hand individualists and illegalists—the separation between them could easily be exaggerated. Go-betweens often left one group for the other, or participated in both. And although anarchist groups may have had increasingly different views of the possibility of revolution, they were often in contact, at times coordinating activities. They even raised funds together to allow for the publication of newspapers and brochures. Moreover, as anarchists came and went, not all of them were fully aware of the ideological and strategic differences between the two groups. The editors of L’Anarchie, for their part, insisted that all anarchists were illegalists because they were outside the law.32