Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  Raymond Callemin had also become a militant, with the fanaticism and energy of a convert. And so he, too, almost inevitably ended up in Paris, although not for very long. After briefly working as a “homme sandwich” (passing out fliers for a clothing store) in order to earn enough money to buy a decent pair of shoes, fed up with city life and “all those loudmouths,” and wanting to avoid military service, Callemin hit the road in search of fresh air and the countryside, working odd jobs and doing harvest work. He finally reached Switzerland. Callemin had avoided military service in Belgium by refusing to report as required in 1910 and going back and forth over the border as needed. That summer he spent a short time in jail following a brawl. On one trip on the train, he had only a ticket for a previous stop—having spent what little he had to buy something to eat—and jumped off in Valenciennes in the Nord. A railroad official chased him and then kindly let him go. He worked in Valenciennes for a short time, but was let go; later, he remembered that “frontier” bosses were among the worst. He committed two burglaries there, and then he was on his way back to Belgium, to Charleroi, where he met up with anarchists, carried out more burglaries, and again was jailed. He was barely twenty years old. Upon his release, Raymond Callemin returned to Paris.24

  Chapter 3

  ANOTHER PARIS: “MISERY IS EVERYWHERE”

  Anarchists like Victor Kibaltchiche immediately felt at home in the overcrowded, largely plebeian quartiers of the northeastern part of Paris and in the grim working-class suburbs north of the city. In this, Montmartre played a special role. And that is where Victor Kibaltchiche went upon arriving in Paris.

  More than three decades before Victor first arrived there, the Butte Montmartre had a rendezvous with history. It was there that the Paris Commune had begun on March 18, 1871, when ordinary Parisians prevented troops sent by Adolphe Thiers from taking the cannons of the National Guard from the butte. On the rue du Chevalier de la Barre (then the rue des Rosiers), the crowd executed Generals Claude Lecomte and Jacques Clément-Thomas and took control of first the butte and then all of Paris. The victory was short-lived. When the Commune fell during “Bloody Week” in May 1871, the French army targeted Montmartre in particular for reprisals, including summary executions—during the “tricolor terror” in which as many as fifteen thousand Parisians perished.1

  Since then, Montmartre had been transformed from what was still a somewhat rustic site (it had been incorporated into Paris in 1860) into a unique, yet still peripheral, part of the capital. The journal Illustration provided a contemporary description of the butte, one far from that to which tourists rush today. Montmartre was a jumble of banlieue styles, many “offering the same ramshackled, sad appearance.”2 If it was less rural, it was no less poor.

  At the crest of the butte, Victor gazed upon the Basilique du Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre, the construction of which began during the “Republic of the Moral Order” in the early 1870s to celebrate the Versailles victory over the Paris Commune. Victor described it as “sort of a fake Hindu style, monumentally bourgeois.” From Sacré-Cœur, Victor could gaze down upon an “ocean of gray roofs, over which there arose at night only a few dim lights, and a great red glow from the tumultuous squares.”3

  The Montmartre Victor encountered was a site of contrasts. Victor remembered, “Our Montmartre had for neighbors, but without giving two cents about, cabarets of artists and bars haunted by women wearing feathered hats, who wore dresses reaching down to their heels.” The windmill of the Moulin de la Galette announced the dance hall of the same name. The Chat Noir, the Moulin Rouge, and Les Quat’z’Arts around place Pigalle attracted tourists and wealthy Parisians—le beau monde—arriving in taxis in what was still something of a foreign land. The poet J. P. Contamine de Latour recalled, “Once you’d climbed [Montmartre’s] rough steps, you felt as though you were hundreds of miles away from the capital.… Everything about it was rustic and peaceful. Streams down the middle of streets… and birds twittered in the luxuriant greenery that covered the old, ruined walls.”4

  The place Blanche with its brasseries, cheap cafés, and dance halls had come to rival place Pigalle. Mondaines came to see and be seen in what amounted to a subprefecture of pleasure, a capital of debauche, a privileged territory for prostitutes.5

  Bohemian artists and writers had already colonized Montmartre when, in 1904, Pablo Picasso moved into an apartment in a tangle of poor dwellings at Bateau-Lavoir, off place Ravignan below Sacré Coeur. Like many Parisians, Picasso would sometime carry a Browning revolver for protection; Montmartre had a reputation for crime.6 At least at the beginning, like most Parisians he had very little money. He drank at the modest Le Zut cabaret on rue Ravignan. It was in his tiny studio in Montmartre that Picasso launched Cubism in 1906–1907 when he painted Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In 1909, his financial situation improved enough that he moved to a nicer apartment, but not far away, on boulevard de Clichy near Pigalle. He still liked and thrived in Montmartre. The young Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani also headed for the butte upon his arrival in Paris in 1906, finding a place to live in what was little more than a shack.7

  In Montmartre, the avant-garde reacted against the cultural restraints of artistic tradition and convention, continuing the revolt against Romanticism. In this sense, their “violent dissent” had something in common with the anarchist revolt of Victor and many others against hierarchical bourgeois society and its state.8

  Why did Montmartre become something of a “privileged terrain” for anarchist revolt, attracting newly arrived radicals like Victor? Did its narrow, steep streets, some of which were little more than stone staircases, and paths, back courtyards, caves, and attics provide an easy means of remaining hidden? Because some anarchists rejected festive meals and alcohol, did the rampant, public festivity—even debauchery—of Montmartre, which stood in stark contrast to the abject misery of many residents, encourage anarchism?9

  And it was not just Montmartre. To the east lay La Chapelle, an essential part of the expanding sprawl of plebeian Paris in which anarchism thrived. La Chapelle was a chaos of small railway depots, workshops, factories, and warehouses, interspersed with vacant lots. Many female workers, including seamstresses, lived in this area. Their children took their apprenticeship on the tough streets of the La Chapelle neighborhoods. An increasing number of dilapidated houses stood along the roads, with flower pots in the windowsills and laundry hanging every which way, drying before again becoming soiled by soot carried from nearby chemical plants by the wind. The buildings, most of them constructed in great haste during the 1880s, were three or four stories high. Unlike houses of “standing” constructed during the same period along boulevards Rochechouart and Clichy, their facades consisted of just about any building material that could be found: planks of wood or pieces of metal, cardboard—anything except solid stone. The houses of La Chapelle offered—if that is the appropriate term—tiny apartments into which were crammed as many people as possible. The ceilings of many of them were already in a state of virtual collapse, as were doors weakened by use and suffering assaults by aggressive neighbors.10

  The historian Daniel Halévy once said of La Chapelle that it was not “part of Paris,” but rather “a passage, a current of air.” Snow and rain entered at will. When a renter informed his landlord that rainwater from a storm was pouring into the apartment comme vache qui pisse, the owner retorted, “You only have to pick up an umbrella.” The arrival of the Métro changed very little, except bringing the roar of the trains and probably prostitutes—and “bad boys,” some of whom were pimps—from other quartiers. There, at least at night, they ruled. Thugs from La Chapelle carried their provocations to Montmartre. The tattooed thugs did not dance the tango.11

  The so-called Belle Époque was not belle for very many Parisians, including Victor. Contemporaries used the expression “fin de siècle” or “1900.” The very idea of a “Belle Époque” before World War I was a construction that first appeared during the late 1930s—and then, a
bove all, with the lingering sense of the “world we have lost” during the time of Vichy France during World War II when Paris was occupied. Following the war, when France was no longer a great power and its colonial empire was disappearing, it was again easy to imagine that the years before la Grande Guerre were the halcyon days.12 They were not.

  Victor remembered: “One of the particular traits of Paris at this time was that it included… a vast world of people coming and going, of the disillusioned, the miserable, and even the seedy.”13 He would never forget:

  The opulent Paris of the Champs-Elysées, Passy, and even the great commercial boulevards were to us a foreign or enemy city. Our Paris had three centers: the vast working-class city which began somewhere in the lugubrious zone of canals, cemeteries, vacant lots and factories, toward Charonne, Pantin, the pont de Flandre, reaching the heights of Belleville and Ménilmontant, there becoming an intense plebeian capital, whose residents try to make ends meet in their anthill, having as its frontiers the city of railroad stations and of pleasure, surrounded under the iron bridges of the métro by sad quartiers.

  There were found small hotels, “merchants of sleep” where for twenty sous one could catch his breath in an attic without air, bistros haunted by pimps, swarms of girls with their hair up in buns and wearing polka-dot aprons on the sidewalks.… The rumbling wagons of the métro suddenly disappearing into their tunnel under the city.14

  Victor encountered two cities of Paris. The overstated elegance and good times of the wealthy meant nothing to the vast majority of people living in Paris and its region. Not including its suburbs, the great city had a population of more than 2.8 million people—many times that of Victor’s Brussels. The capital grew because of immigration from the provinces into the peripheral, poorer arrondissements. New residents formed urban villages within the burgeoning capital. Chain migration brought Auvergnats from central France to the eleventh and twelfth arrondissements. Poor Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe moved into the Marais in the fourth, between the rue des Francs-Bourgeois and the rue de Rivoli, particularly the Pletzl (“petite place”) centered on rue des Écouffes. Limousins migrated to the fourth and fifth arrondissements, while Bretons headed for the fourteenth arrondissement and out north to Saint-Denis. There were some transplants of means, but not many. Generally prosperous Swiss and Americans were a small part of the social geography of Paris, living around the Opéra and the Champs-Élysées, along with wealthier Parisians.15

  The largely plebeian suburbs also continued to grow rapidly, housing those who could not afford to live in even the poorest parts of the city. The suburbs within the département of the Seine now included 1.3 million people with the industrialization of the periphery. Saint-Denis grew from 15,700 in the Second Empire to 71,800 in 1914, Boulogne-Billancourt from 7,000 residents to 57,000, and Ivry-sur-Seine from 7,056 to 38,307. By the turn of the century, 26 percent of the population of the Paris region lived in the suburbs, double that of 1861. A railway line circled Paris beyond the city walls, connecting the peripheral communes.16

  The availability of space and a transient workforce; proximity to the Seine, canals, and railroads; and standing beyond the octroi at the edge of the city—the customs barrier where taxes were imposed on goods brought into the city, which accounted for half of the municipal budget—encouraged manufacturing beyond the walls of the city. Raw materials arrived via the Seine River and the Canal Saint-Martin. In 1914, 154 of the 307 manufactures that had more than one hundred workers were in the peripheral arrondissements of Paris. This included most of the “dirty” industries, expelled from the center of Paris, a process begun by Napoleon III and Baron Haussmann during the 1850s and 1860s. This had been largely achieved through chaotic expansion driven by market forces.17 The chemical and textile industries, particularly clothing, had moved to the suburbs. Two-thirds of the grandes enterprises (fourteen firms) employing more than five hundred workers—producing automobiles and soon airplanes, electric motors, and gasoline, oils, and tires—were found beyond the walls of Paris, although some heavy industry remained in the twelfth, fifteenth, and nineteenth arrondissements. Beyond the city limits, the Renault and Dion-Bouton automobile manufacturers, in Boulogne-Billancourt and Puteaux, respectively, as well as the French Society of Munitions in Issy-les-Moulineux, employed more than two thousand people in 1914.18

  This contributed to the gradual de-industrialization—at least in terms of the size of enterprises—of central Paris. In 1911, nine hundred seventy-eight thousand workers lived in the capital, although most worked in small firms (90 percent of employers had fewer than ten employees, and eighty thousand workers labored at home). Much of artisanal production remained in Paris itself, such as in the first arrondissement. The neighborhoods around rue Sentier in the second arrondissement remained the center of the garment industry, for instance, although much of the work was done by women sewing at home. The effect of this shift was to further separate the two Parises: one becoming increasingly fancified, catering primarily to the wealthy, and the other one becoming the site of factories of various sizes and poor workers.

  Well into the middle decades of the nineteenth century, employers had remained present in factories, but now foremen, promoted from within the enterprise or brought in from the outside, enforced an increasing number of regulations. Workers commonly referred to factories as bagnes—prisons—because of the strictures of industrial discipline.19

  Between 1902 and 1913, 37 percent of people who died left nothing to their descendants because they had nothing to leave. For some ordinary people, an improving economy brought a slight increase in the quality of life, even if for the majority of workers getting by remained extremely difficult. Anarchist newspapers ran articles lamenting the rising cost of food, particularly meat. Misery was everywhere to be seen in People’s Paris.20

  Transient workers came to Paris and its suburbs, while others departed in search of a job, somewhere. Work was largely uncertain, and when it could be found, workdays lasted twelve, fifteen, and even more hours a day. Barbers and hairdressers labored fourteen hours a day and sometimes even more, tramworkers ten to fourteen. The expansion of white-collar work was dramatic, rising from about one hundred twenty-six thousand in 1866 to three hundred fifty-two thousand in 1911. About five thousand women worked in department stores such as Bon Marché, Printemps, and Galeries Lafayette. These had come into existence during the 1850s and 1860s, strategically placed on Haussmann’s grands boulevards. The harsh conditions confronting department store clerks are often forgotten. They, too, were subject to long workdays and sudden dismissals. Many women working in the grands magasins slept in chilly dormitories above the stores.21

  French industrialists, the new seigneurs, ignored what minimal protection laws provided workers, laws that lagged far behind those available in monarchical Britain or autocratic Germany. Employers routinely ignored the 1906 law making a weekly day of rest obligatory. If workers protested, there was always someone to replace them. Of two thousand bakers in Paris, only two hundred allocated a day of rest. Wages could be cut for the slightest infraction or imperfection. Workers were vulnerable to accidents at work; in 1909 and 1911, almost four hundred thousand were reported—as required by an 1898 law that was often ignored.22

  At least three hundred fifty thousand women worked in Paris. The proportion of female workers in the workforce had risen from about 15 percent in 1870 to around 33 percent in 1914. More than 40 percent of women working in Paris were domestic servants, some of them commuting often daunting distances on foot from the plebeian heights of Paris into the beaux quartiers. The majority, though, were lodged miserably in attics or under staircases in the fancy apartments where they worked.

  Female workers, many of them producing the famous “articles de Paris”—purses, gloves, and other quality goods—earned little more than half what male workers brought home, sometimes for the same work (in Paris in 1906, an average of seven and a half francs a day for men and four and a quarter fo
r women). Textile work provided the major occupations, however varied, and at least twenty-five thousand women produced artificial flowers and feathers. Female workers enjoyed virtually no state protection at all and many suffered sexual harassment from foremen and male workers. French women remained unequal before the law, which made it impossible for them to combat daily harassment or sudden dismissals. Households headed by single women faced devastating and usually inescapable poverty.23 The level of education for women remained considerably behind their male counterparts. Untimely pregnancies remained a constant risk not only for unmarried or uncoupled women, but for married females as well.

  Some working women turned to prostitution pour faire sa fin du mois—to pay the bills at the end of the month—some with the knowledge and indeed permission of their husbands. For women living alone, this “fifth quarter” was necessary to keep afloat.

  Tens of thousands of Parisians made their living selling whatever they could wherever they could, pushing or pulling their carts through the streets of the capital, the sound of their bells and shouts announcing what they had to offer for sale or could repair. Women who sold fruits and vegetables (marchandes aux quatre saisons) set up their wagons along major arteries, and “market strong men” carried provisions on their shoulders, above all in and around the great market of Les Halles in central Paris.24

  Working-class life in Paris remained fragile, precarious. Underemployment and unemployment were inevitable parts of the working-class experience. Older workers seeking to be hired faced daunting challenges. Furthermore, much industrial work—such as boilermaking and the clothing trades—remained seasonal, leaving many workers with long periods of generating no income. Sometimes, smaller enterprises simply closed their doors, leaving those who worked there with absolutely nothing. More than two-thirds of a family’s income went to purchase food, and when things were tough, there was little more than a large loaf of bread on the table. In 1911, 82 percent of the population of Paris was classified as poor, and 72 percent of those were indigent.25