The Crimes of Paris

by Dorothy Hoobler; Thomas Hoobler

  The third policeman on the stairway rushed into the room and, he later testified, found three bodies on the floor. Only one was moving: Colmar. He dragged Colmar out of the room and carried him down the narrow stairs, shouting for help.

  Bonnot had been lying under Jouin’s body and now staggered to his feet, blood flowing from his arm. He made his way across the corridor to the apartment of an old woman who shared the house with Gauzy. Bonnot demanded her bedsheet, planning to lower himself from the window, but she told him she had none. Telling her, “Shut up or I’ll burn you,” he opened her window, which overlooked a small shed. Bonnot jumped onto its roof, slid into the backyard, and ran down an alley, leaving a trail of blood. 26

  The news electrified Paris. Jouin’s superior, Xavier Guichard, was enraged. When he arrived at the scene, he beat Gauzy with his fists, threatening dire consequences if the shopkeeper did not reveal where Bonnot had gone. Of course he could not, even if he had wanted to. However, Guichard now had the support of the government — and the press — in carrying out almost any plan to apprehend the remaining members of the gang. Prime Minister Poincaré visited Colmar in the hospital and authorized an elaborate funeral for Jouin, whom he proclaimed one of France’s great heroes. Newspaper editorials urged the police to “shoot first,” and orders were given for all detectives to be armed on duty, something that had rarely been authorized in France before.

  Guichard started his own campaign of terror, rounding up anyone he could claim was even suspected of anarchist sympathies. His hope was to find someone who would betray the remaining fugitives. Even poor Mme. Gauzy, returning from the countryside with her children, was taken from the train station to police headquarters, where Guichard reportedly told her that her husband was destined for the guillotine and that the police would make sure she had no way of earning a living other than as a prostitute.

  For three days, Bonnot continued to elude capture. He made his way down the Seine to Choisy-le-Roi, where a millionaire philanthropist named Alfred Fromentin had donated some property as a refuge for pacifists, anarchists, and others loosely described as libertarians. Jean Dubois, who had sheltered Bonnot and stolen cars with him in the summer of 1911, was still living in what neighbors called Le Nid Rouge (“the Red Nest”). Dubois’ garage, which doubled as a chop shop, had already been searched twice by police looking for some trace of the Bonnot Gang.

  The garage was still under twenty-four-hour surveillance, and the report that a man had arrived there on the night of April 27, without arousing any barking from a dog Dubois kept, made Guichard suspicious. (Shades of Conan Doyle and “the dog that did not bark in the night-time.”) So on the morning of the twenty-eighth, Guichard arrived, personally in charge of sixteen armed detectives. That would not be nearly enough. As it happened, Dubois was an early riser, and they found him working in the yard on a motorcycle. With him was a boy of about six, and the police held their fire as they stealthily approached. As he saw them, Dubois pushed the boy aside and drew a pistol. One of the policemen had trained his gun on the mechanic but failed to release the safety. Dubois shot him through the arm and ran for the garage.

  The face of Bonnot — said to be “grinning with rage” — -appeared at an upstairs window. 27 Dubois had been forced to take cover behind an automobile in the yard, and Bonnot fired a volley of bullets at the police, trying to give his friend a chance to reach the building. Guichard shouted, “Come out with your hands up. You won’t be harmed,” to which Dubois responded, “Murderers! Murderers!” 28 He left his shelter and ran for the door, but was hit in the back of the neck as he reached it.

  Bonnot had assembled a substantial arsenal of firearms and ammunition and was determined not to be taken without a fight. He returned fire so persistently that Guichard was forced to send for reinforcements, and he got plenty. Local paramilitary Republican Guards arrived, along with a fire brigade and the town mayor. When news of the gunfire spread, civilians began to assemble to gawk at the scene; as the morning wore on, some brought picnic baskets, and others carried pitchforks. Prefect of Police Lépine arrived from the city, bringing with him the investigating magistrate and the public prosecutor for the case. Everyone wanted to be present for the kill. Taxi drivers, whose strike had finally ended, began to bring onlookers from as far away as Paris. According to the newspapers, the crowd eventually swelled to ten thousand people. Movie crews arrived to film the whole affair.

  Bonnot gratified the lust for sensation by periodically stepping onto a balcony and firing at anyone who came too near. Once police armed with rifles appeared on the scene (for some reason, the original force had only pistols), they were able to drive Bonnot inside. One eyewitness stated that the outer wall of the house became so punctured with bullet holes that it resembled a pepper mill.

  The event was treated as a matter of national security. Lépine went so far as to ask that artillery guns be brought from the fort at Vincennes, but before they appeared, someone produced a cask of dynamite. A lieutenant of the Republican Guard named Fontan declared that he knew how to place the explosives, and the others gladly let him try.

  Amazingly, Bonnot was finding time to write some additional material in his notebook. He listed the names of people who had been mentioned in the newspapers as part of the gang, declaring them innocent of any involvement. It is part of his legend that when he ran out of ink, he completed his last testament in his own blood. This one man, a classic loser before he became the Demon Chauffeur, was holding off what was now a force of more than a hundred men.

  Lieutenant Fontan ordered a cart filled with mattresses to shield his approach to the house. The cart proved top-heavy, so the mattresses were unloaded and the cart filled with straw. As Fontan pushed the cart closer, Bonnot, warned by the noise, released Dubois’ dog, which ran out and attacked the guardsman. Fontan drew a pistol and shot the animal.

  Finally the guardsman reached the wall of the house, placed the charge of dynamite, lit a fuse, and retreated. Inside, Bonnot made his own mattress barrier and waited for the inevitable — which was painfully delayed. The first fuse fizzled out before reaching the charge. Fontan reapproached the house and lit another. This time, the charge exploded, but with disappointingly small results. More dynamite was procured, and Fontan repeated his actions. Finally, to the delight of the crowd, an enormous explosion destroyed the center portion of the house and set fires in the remainder.

  Even then, no one dared approach Bonnot’s hiding place, though the crowd began to chant “À mort!” (“Kill him!”) to encourage the assembled police and military. Finally the straw-filled cart was called into service again, this time shielding Guichard, Lépine, and a dozen or so other armed men. They dragged Dubois’ corpse away from the house and then cautiously made their way to the second floor. Bonnot, amazingly, was still alive. Though he still held a Browning automatic, he was not able to get a shot off. As he cried out, “Bunch of bastards!” 29 the detectives of the Sûreté fired a fusillade at him. Guichard, now believing it was safe to approach, stepped over the body and gave the motor bandit what was intended to be a coup de grâce.

  Even so, Bonnot clung to life for another hour, in the backseat of the police car that took him to a Paris hospital, while the police searched his pockets for clues to where the rest of the gang might be hiding. The crowd around the house had to be satisfied with being allowed to trample the body of Dubois.

  Two days later, both of the men were placed in an unmarked grave, for even in death they had the capacity to frighten the police — and, perhaps, to inspire others. Guichard, for example, refused to release to the press the contents of Bonnot’s notebook, for it contained “a justification for criminal acts.” 30

  The anonymous burial of the two anarchists contrasted with the full-blown state funeral held for Inspector Louis Jouin at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame the previous day. Dozens of wreaths were laid upon the catafalque, which was drawn by horses through the streets as a tribute to the brave man who had died to bring the d
readed Bonnot to justice.

  In the days that followed, throngs of people visited the ruined house at Choisy. Some came out of curiosity; others showed their feelings by shouting “Vive Bonnot!” (Outraged citizens reported such demonstrations, and a few offenders were sentenced to jail terms of as long as a month.) At movie houses, where newsreel footage of the siege was shown, some in the audience cheered when the figure of Bonnot appeared on the balcony. Though the new editor of l’anarchie played down the death of France’s most famous anarchist, an article (signed with the pseudonym “Lionel”) declared, “Don’t you understand that if there were a hundred Bonnots, a thousand Bonnots, the bourgeois world would be no more than a chapter in history?” 31

  vii

  Everyone was aware that there were still active members of the gang at large, primarily Octave Garnier and his friend René Valet, who had taken part in the bank robbery at Chantilly. Guichard was particularly eager to apprehend the man who had taunted him publicly. In May, the two bandits, along with Garnier’s lover, Marie, had rented a house in Nogent-sur-Marne, a town to the east of Paris, on the Marne River. Though Garnier had dyed his hair blond and shaved off his mustache, someone recognized him on a bus and reported to the police where he had gotten off. The following day, Guichard, Lépine, and fifty armed men were on their way to Nogent. It took them most of the morning and afternoon to locate the fugitives, and when they approached the house, Marie and Garnier were fixing dinner, while Valet was strolling in the vegetable garden they had planted for themselves. (They followed a vegetarian diet.) Guichard, wearing a red, white, and blue sash as a badge of office, suddenly appeared at the gate and shouted for Valet to surrender. In response, Valet fired a few shots as he retreated to the house. The motor bandits’ last stand had begun.

  Lépine had deplored the fact that so much force had to be used to bring down Bonnot. In the previous engagement, two detectives had been wounded and the whole affair had turned into a public spectacle. Thus, he offered the duo a chance to surrender. In response, they sent Marie to safety, a signal that they meant to fight to the death. As a further sign of their contempt for society, they set fire to a small pile of bank notes.

  Marie told the police that the two men had plenty of arms and ammunition (nine pistols with more than a thousand rounds of bullets), so Guichard and Lépine felt they had to send, once again, for reinforcements — a startling admission that fifty police officers were no match for two members of the gang. By 9:00 P.M., they were in command of what was virtually an army: 250 additional policemen along with dogs, scores of local Republican Guards, 400 elite military Zouaves (infantrymen mostly conscripted from Algeria and Tunisia) dressed in their colorful uniforms of red bloomers, embroidered blue jackets, and fezzes, and finally a company of dragoons. Nogent was a vacation spot, with a casino and beaches, and another huge crowd of civilians assembled. Fortunately for them, the scene was illuminated with a searchlight, scores of flares, and the headlights of police vehicles trained on the house.

  No dynamite was immediately available this time, but the Zouaves had brought another fearsome weapon: machine guns. Once they began to fire, the Zouave gunners raked the front of the house from top to bottom. The heavy-caliber ammunition pierced the walls, forcing Garnier and Valet to take shelter in the cellar. Even from there, however, they could still see out and drive back anyone who dared approach. Hoping to end the siege more quickly than the previous one, Guichard equipped some of his men with sheet-metal shields, which unfortunately proved inadequate against the anarchists’ pistol shots.

  Hours went by, and a supply of an older type of explosive, melinite (picric acid), arrived from the military base at Vincennes. Sappers trained to place combustible materials set off an explosion that shattered windows in nearby homes and virtually demolished the bandits’ hideout. Now, using machine-gun fire as cover, making the spotlighted scene an eerie precursor to the trench warfare that would engulf Europe two years later, the Zouaves and the police ran across open ground toward the house. They found the fugitives dazed and bleeding from a variety of wounds. At Guichard’s orders, they were summarily executed with a pistol shot through the head. As the bodies were carried from the house, the crowd — still assembled, though it was past midnight — tried to seize and lynch them. Afterward, souvenir seekers entered the bandits’ lair and dipped their handkerchiefs in the men’s blood.

  When Valet’s family tried to claim his body, the police declared it was now the property of the state. Both men were buried in the anonymity of the paupers’ cemetery, near their comrades.

  viii

  The deaths of Bonnot, Garnier, and Valet did not bring the affair of the motor bandits to a close. Eighteen other men and three women had been accused by the police of complicity in the gang’s crimes. Raymond-la-Science Callemin and André Soudy were of course the principal members of the gang in custody, but the official net also dragged in those who had provided weapons, allowed their homes to be used as hideouts, or merely — as in the case of Victor Serge and his mistress, Rirette Maîtrejean — written articles that encouraged the gang’s activities. Besides various specific charges, all were accused of “criminal conspiracy” under one of the so-called Wicked Laws that were passed in 1894 in response to another famous anarchist act: Auguste Vaillant’s tossing a bomb onto the floor of the Chamber of Deputies.

  Serge, who had earlier written so enthusiastically about the uses of violence, chose to emphasize some of his more moderate statements in his defense. Since the conspiracy evidence against him was strong, considering that he had been part of the communal household that included two of the principal bandits, Callemin and Garnier, Serge had to distance himself from them, as well as from the others who had assisted the robbers. In a letter to his successor as editor of l’anarchie, he wrote, “I am — we are — [he was including Rirette in his defense] disgusted, deeply aggrieved, to see that comrades — comrades that I have had affection for since their first and purest passions — could commit things as deplorable as the butchery of Thiais. I am heartbroken to see that the others, all the others, have madly wasted and lost their lives in a pointless struggle, so tragic that, beneath the façade of such desperate courage, they cannot even defend themselves with self-respect.” 32

  The trial, with so many defendants, promised to be a long one. Several hundred people were on the witness list, and some seven hundred exhibits entered into evidence, including all firearms that had been recovered. The ominous sight of these weapons, assembled on tables, faced the jury throughout the trial. On the first day, the judge announced that the question of politics was not to enter the deliberations of the trial. But of course virtually everyone in Paris knew of the crimes that the defendants were implicated in.

  One of those accused, Marius Medge, was charged with the slayings of the old man and his housekeeper at Thiais. There had been fingerprints left at the murder scene, but apparently they were not distinct enough to incriminate Medge. Bertillon himself was called to the stand to interpret them. He pointed out irregularities in the prints and, with typical convoluted reasoning, said that these proved that the man who left them had been a cook. Unfortunately for Medge, the prosecution was able to produce proof that he had indeed worked as a cook. The jury, only partially convinced, found him guilty but asked the judge to show clemency. As a result, Medge was sentenced to life at hard labor (la guillotine sèche, the “dry guillotine”).

  Ultimately, Callemin, Soudy, Monier, and the unfortunate Dieudonné (who the bank messenger in the first robbery had testified was, after all, the man who shot him) all were sentenced to the guillotine. Most of the others received prison terms; many were sent to Devil’s Island, the notorious French penal colony off the coast of South America.

  Rather than face Devil’s Island, Carouy (who, largely on Bertillon’s shaky fingerprint analysis, had been convicted along with Medge of the murders at Thiais) swallowed a cyanide capsule someone in the courtroom had passed to him. He left a note: “Not having kn
own the joys of existence, I shall leave this realm of atoms without regret. When I feel my muscles, when I feel my strength, it’s hard to imagine that all this can disappear for ever on the strength of one statement of my guilt. I cannot believe that Monsieur Bertillon can, in cold blood, really dare to send me to my death, because he is obstinate and doesn’t wish to admit that he’s wrong. Science is playing me a dirty trick.” 33 It wasn’t the first time Bertillon had incriminated a man because he couldn’t admit his mistake.

  Appeals for the condemned men were presented to the courts and duly rejected. The only hope now was a reprieve from the new president of France, Raymond Poincaré. In view of the intense journalistic outrage at the gang’s crimes, it is surprising that Poincaré did in fact commute Dieudonné’s sentence to life on Devil’s Island. 34 Callemin, Soudy, and Monier were guillotined on April 21, 1913. Despite the fact that it was 4:30 in the morning and a light rain was falling, there was a crowd of spectators that had been steadily gathering since midnight. One of them was Gabriel Astruc, the impresario who had sponsored Serge Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes: “I went with a magistrate friend of mine to the execution of the Bonnot gang.… First prisoner. Two steps forward. Plank tilts. Click. Corpse disappears. Three buckets of water. All over. Second prisoner: same business. Third prisoner: same business. An American reporter who had consulted his watch during the triple execution said to my friend: ‘You know, monsieur procureur, how long the whole thing lasted? Forty seconds exactly: it’s the new record!’ ” 35 Speed had scored another triumph.

  Raymond-la-Science Callemin proved he deserved his nickname by declaring that his last wish was to have his body turned over to the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Paris. That was done. Bertillon’s father and the Society for Mutual Autopsy would have approved.