Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  The vast majority of families had no savings at all because they needed to spend whatever income they had just to keep going. Between 1902 and 1913, 37 percent of people who died left nothing to their descendants because they had nothing to leave.26 Rents rose rapidly after 1905, and more than two-thirds of working-class families rented their lodgings. For some people, an improving economy brought a slight increase in the quality of life.27 But the rise in incomes for working people had stopped at the turn of the century, so “getting by” remained extremely difficult for the vast majority. Poor people purchased food in small quantities, not being able to afford more. The price of meat had risen dramatically, doubling since 1905. People bought second- or third-hand clothing or, when they could afford to, ready-made attire.

  Most families, as had been the case for Victor’s family in Belgium, could not survive without credit and pawnshops. Hard times easily became disastrous ones—expulsions from rooms, living without shelter, begging to get by. Arrests for vagabondage soared. A journalist looking closely at working-class quartiers reported that “the constant preoccupation of workers is to eat and drink.”28 In April 1911, an editorial in Lectures pour tous lamented:

  Misery is everywhere in Paris, and it seems that “progress,” instead of bringing out its disappearance, has only kept it going and multiplied it. It is in the winter months that the problem of existence is the most anguishing for thousands and thousands of poor people.29

  Winter was indeed the hardest. Heating of any kind could be rare, and illnesses like tuberculosis preyed on hungry, cold, and overworked people living in crowded, dirty homes. In Paris, thirty-two thousand residential buildings out of eighty thousand were considered unhealthy. In the first decade of the twentieth century, municipal authorities were listing “îlots insalubres”—sometimes entire blocks, many in central Paris, including the quartiers of Saint-Merri and Beaubourg in the Marais, around rue Mouffetard, neighborhoods in Belleville and Clignancourt, and many more—that were so unhealthy they were zones of tuberculosis. The disease killed seven of every one thousand residents in buildings housing the poor. In Saint-Denis, the percentage of unhealthy residences—veritable breeding places for disease—jumped to an appalling 58 percent and in Saint-Ouen to 62 percent. In 1911, 45 percent of housing was assessed at “overcrowded” or “insufficient” in terms of size. Despite the efforts of associations for reasonably priced dwellings (habitations à bon marché), Paris lacked at least fifty thousand apartments.

  In 1903, only 10 percent of the houses in Paris were connected to sewers. About fifty thousand apartments in Paris consisted of only one room. Toilets, such as they were, stood in the courtyards on the ground floor or halfway up the communal staircase. A quarter of the buildings in Paris had no lavatories at all, and in the plebeian suburbs the percentage was far less than that. If baths were taken, they were in municipal establishments. Water from the Seine and the Marne was bad enough, but well water was even more dangerous, with cesspools inevitably nearby. Women did the family washing in public washhouses. When electricity was present, it often flickered.30 Streets were badly paved, or not paved at all, little more than mud left by the incessant Parisian rain. The flea markets at porte de Clignancourt, porte d’Italie, and porte de Montreuil affirmed for Parisian elites the association of the periphery with gnawing, inescapable poverty. And so did the tanneries along the horribly polluted Bièvre River that slowly worked its way through the thirteenth and then fifth arrondissements, before emptying into the Seine near Notre Dame.31

  Apollinaire’s poem Zone reflected elite views of the suburbs of Paris. It presents a theme of the displacement of poverty, amid shanties “with their jumble of materials and perspectives.” Likewise, Eugène Atget’s Zoniers photo album, from 1912 to 1913, emphasized marginal types in the marginal zones, some showing only “a simple dwelling or work without the worker.” Atget also highlighted the social exclusion of the poor from the center of the city into the Parisian periphery.32

  In quartiers populaires, family disputes exploded in dank, tiny rooms. Many working women suffered violence at the hands of their men. Poor children had no more hope than their parents. Many very young children were passed, depending on the circumstances, to aunts, grandmothers, and other relatives.33 Children started working as soon as possible—in principle, children were to remain in school until they were thirteen, but this law was routinely ignored. Children’s labor contributed about 20 percent to the income of the families of workers. When Léon Jouhaux, who would head the Confédération Générale du Travail and later win the Nobel Prize for Peace, went out on strike as a worker, his son had to leave school to go to work and earn thirty sous a day for his family.34

  The daunting number of abandoned babies—4,232 in 1903—made it clear how desperately poor so many Parisians were. Of every five babies born, one did not live past three years of age. Until infant mortality began to decline in about 1906, a third of all married couples (and probably even more in unions libres) had lost at least one child to illness. This was particularly true in quartiers populaires.35

  Alcoholism took a frightful toll as well.36 Absinthe—“the green fairy,” of which three hundred sixty thousand hectoliters was produced each year—ravaged and killed. Women found the drink attractive because it was somewhat sweet and could be mixed with water. Eau-de-vie such as Calvados, made from apples, and similar strong liquors from every imaginable fruit added to the prodigious consumption of alcohol. All this contributed to the French nationalists’ fears that the stagnation of the population would prevent the army from having enough soldiers to one day take back Alsace-Lorraine, which included the départements lost by France in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1871.

  The giant French wine lobby, in a country with 1.6 million viticulteurs, continued to insist that “wine is the healthiest and most hygienic of drinks” and that the French, unlike the gin-guzzling British and the bourbon-drinking Americans, did not have a problem of alcoholism. The number of places licensed to sell alcoholic drinks increased by a third between 1881 and 1911, reaching close to half a million in the latter year, even as the French population had really stopped growing (1891: 38.3 million; 1911: 39.6 million). In France, there was one store selling wine and other alcohols for every eighty-three inhabitants. By one estimate, in 1901 the average consumption of wine by a Parisian (counting infants and children, who presumably were not drinking) stood at 191 liters a year—and at 317 liters in the suburbs. In Belleville alone, in 1910 there were 448 merchants selling alcohol and doing brisk business.

  Victor would have been very familiar with the kind of poverty he came upon after he arrived in Paris: he had seen it before in Brussels. And he now observed the great wealth of the elite in central Paris, which undoubtedly reminded him of the fancy quartiers of the Belgian capital. Anarchism drew followers who were appalled by the extreme poverty afflicting many in Paris, by workers confronting overbearing employers and foremen, by low wages, by suddenly being fired with no explanation, by rising rents, and by the ravages of tuberculosis and alcoholism.

  Chapter 4

  ANARCHISTS IN CONFLICT

  Having arrived in Paris in late 1908, Victor needed a little money to keep afloat. He found work in nearby Belleville as a draughtsman in a small machine manufacturing company. He also gave French lessons to Russian immigrants—some of whom were exiled revolutionaries—and translated Russian novels and poems for a Russian journalist, who then published them. All this work brought in barely enough money to purchase onion soup for dinner at Les Halles. In his spare time, he immersed himself in French and other literatures: “Paris called to us, the Paris of… the Commune, of the CGT [Confédération Générale du Travail], of little journals printed with burning zeal, the Paris of our favourite authors, Anatole France and Jehan Rictus [Gabriel Randon].” Anatole France’s anticlericalism and his activism in the campaign on behalf of Alfred Dreyfus would have attracted Victor. Rictus’s poetry spoke to the poor in the language of the street,
lamenting “the suffering of the penniless intellectual dragging out his nights on the benches of foreign boulevards, and no rhymes were richer than his.”1

  After work, Victor often took the Métro toward the Latin Quarter, “our third Paris, that which to tell the truth I prefer.” He headed to the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève near the Panthéon to read for the remaining hour and a half before it closed. He started up a short-lived reading and discussion group—“an eclectic group for social studies” called La Libre Recherche—with about twelve participants. They met in a sordid locale on rue Grégoire-de-Tours, near brothels whose red lanterns beckoned clients not there to read and discuss. Nearby, the rue de Buci offered louche bars. Victor had the impression of being in the Paris of Louis XVI among ancient doors and eighteenth-century figures announcing what goods or services could be purchased there. He remained briefly in Belleville but then found a room in the attic of a hotel on the place du Panthéon. He could cross boulevard Saint-Michel and go into the Jardin du Luxembourg to read near the place where the troops of Adolphe Thiers had gunned down Communards during Bloody Week in May 1871.

  Victor met up close “a terrifying world, that of the ultimate indigence, of accepted degradation, of the fate of man under the stones of the great city,” some of the poorest of the poor, drawn from les bas-fonds, the lowest and by reputation most dangerous Parisians. Some were on their last legs, begging and exhibiting to often horrified passersby real or imagined wounds and ulcers. Ragpickers waited for the gates of Paris to swing open early in the morning at porte d’Asnières, porte d’Italie, or porte Saint-Ouen, so that they could sell what they had collected beyond the walls or find what they could inside the city. No electric lights illuminated the huge piles of garbage through which they sifted.2

  For Victor and Rirette, the offices on rue du Chevalier de la Barre in Montmartre of L’Anarchie, which the anarchist individualist Libertad had founded in 1905, quickly became a focus of their life together. Victor had gone there almost immediately after arriving in Paris from Brussels in late 1908. Unlike Rirette, Victor had never met Libertad, and the latter’s anarchist individualism continued to loom large in the development of Victor’s anarchism. Victor’s first article in L’Anarchie was published on March 24, 1910, signed “Le Rétif,” and his editorials subsequently appeared frequently.3

  Born in Bordeaux in 1875, Libertad was abandoned by his parents and brought up in a charitable institution. His legs had atrophied from a childhood disease, and he could walk only with the help of crutches. This gave him overdeveloped shoulders, which bore his weight as he lurched along. After some schooling, he worked as an accountant in a small town in the Dordogne, before being fired for organizing what must have been a very small anarchist gathering. He then somehow managed to get to Paris in 1897 at age twenty-two, surviving by begging—“with such a formidable voice that one could hardly refuse.” The anarchist journalist Sébastien Faure came across Libertad living on a bench on boulevard Rochechouart in People’s Paris and took him in for a time. At Faure’s house he sometimes slept on a pile of old newspapers, but it was better than being outside in the cold. One day, a comrade dropped by to see Faure and, seeing Libertad, muttered, “One has the impression of being right in la cour des Miracles!,” the place in Ancien Régime Paris to which supposedly some beggars returned at the end of their day to remove what passed for horrible wounds.4

  On September 5, 1897, Libertad went into the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur de Montmartre because bread was distributed in addition to Communion hosts. The catch was that to get something to eat one had to stay for the Mass. When Père Lenières said in his sermon, “It is unhealthy ideas that provoke scandals,” Libertad hobbled forward from the rows of poor wretches and interrupted the priest’s sermon, shouting with his southwestern accent, “It is you who are causing a scandal and who have unhealthy ideas.… I demand the floor! I demand the floor!… I am poor, and thus I am closer to your Christ than the Holy Father in Rome with diamonds in his hat. And you up there, the good pastor, you are an accomplice of the political schemers who exploit human misery!” He thundered on, addressing the faithful amid chaos: “And you there with your moronic heads! You come here on Sunday to have a clear conscience so that you can peacefully cheat those who work for you during the week. Heap of scoundrels! You bunch of cattle!” Libertad used his crutches to fend off those coming to silence him. Finally, a vicar went to the sacristy and brought back a bedsheet, dropped it from the priest’s pulpit on the anarchist’s head, and, with help, rolled him into it. The police arrested Libertad for vagabondage. When asked to respond as to his means of existence, he replied, “I am habitually without work and have no means of existence, nor a home.” He was jailed for two months. At least there, Libertad was assured of something to eat.5

  Destitute and dressed in the well-worn blue smock of a typographer, wearing sandals, and with his long hair blowing in the wind, Libertad harangued passersby with his booming voice, quickly attracting crowds on street corners or in front of café terraces, or in public meetings, where he was an almost inevitable presence, also often attracting the police who arrested him time and time again. Libertad spoke loudly and well. Invariably, as he attracted crowds, some laughed at him, but often he won people over to his side. He spoke in various rented rooms and halls. Sometimes the number of those attending, paying about forty centimes to participate (of which the owner of the place received twenty-five centimes), was insufficient to cover the fee for the hall. So in 1902 Libertad started up anarchist causeries populaires (lectures and public discussions) in Montmartre, and three years later the causeries populaires began at 22 rue du Chevalier de la Barre.6

  Libertad began to write in Le Libertaire, and in 1902 he was one of the founders of the Ligue antimilitariste. No one was really sure of his real name—“My name? I don’t care. They can call me whatever they want!” His theme was constant: “When the oppressors have been eliminated from the earth, it will be the coming of the anarchist society and men will be united by their love of life!” Yet “revolt was not his only mistress.” He was known to have lived with two sisters and to have never declared the resulting babies to the authorities: “Public records? [État civil],” he spat out, “never have heard of them!”7

  In April 1905, Libertad started L’Anarchie, helped by the take at causeries. The anarchist newspaper, which appeared on Thursdays usually in four but occasionally two pages, emerged as the center of anarchist individualism in the French capital. Two years later, Libertad managed to bring together enough equipment to print the newspaper in the building he rented on rue du Chevalier de la Barre. Down a steep incline from Sacré-Coeur, across from an old, high house with green shutters, stood—and still stands—the three-story building. Libertad published L’Anarchie in the basement. On the ground floor were the newspaper’s offices, a room large enough for anarchist causeries, and other rooms to lodge up to ten visitors or comrades who didn’t have a place to sleep. It was an article of faith that anarchists would welcome them and not ask what had brought them there.

  The anarchist Libertad.

  Victor Kibaltchiche described the street: “[H]ouses from the previous century still standing, a small misshapen intersection stretches its cobblestones up to a crossing of two streets, one a steep hill and the other of completely gray stairs… the ‘causeries’ populaires and the publication of L’Anarchie took up all of the low house, from which could be heard the roar of the printing presses, songs, and intense discussions.” The police would later insist that the printing letters were stolen from print shops in which some compagnons worked. A police report referred caustically to Libertad as “the king of Montmartre.”8

  Libertad was nothing if not provocative. Under his editorship, L’Anarchie wondered aloud if it might not be a good thing if prostitutes knowingly passed along venereal disease to bourgeois as a means of exacting revenge. He outraged policemen on one of many occasions referring to them as “imbeciles who watch intelligent people go by,” e
ncouraging the hostility of the crowd that assembled to the uniformed agents.9

  In August 1907, on rue du Chevalier de la Barre, Libertad pointed to two policemen and provoked, “Look at the murderers!” Three months later, he was again arrested, allegedly for threatening to kill a policeman. At his trial early the next year, he denied having said that workers should break their tools (owned by their bosses) and burn their factories, claiming he only said that they should “burn down the unsanitary factories, as well as unsanitary houses.” He was acquitted.10

  In April 1908, on boulevard Barbès, Libertad and several friends were singing “Down with war!” accompanied by several guitars and violins. When a policeman asked if they had permission to sing in the street, Libertad replied that they needed none. When the police insisted that all this had to stop, he announced, “Comrades, these policemen want to arrest me arbitrarily in order to beat me up. If they want to take me in, they will need a carriage!” Then he dropped to the ground. The police tried to arrest him, but the crowd prevented the police from doing so, as Libertad shouted “Death! Down with the cops, down with the cows [cops]!”11

  Libertad loved the chaos and the people of the street, mocking all authority. He had particular contempt for socialists who participated in elections, thus in the mind of most anarchists propping up the bourgeois state. “The elector, there is the enemy!” he insisted, although he provocatively put forth his candidacy as the “abstentionist candidate” in elections for an arrondissement municipal council. He used the occasion to denounce universal manhood suffrage as a fraud serving to legitimize oppression. Libertad held that those promoting immediate revolution were “jokers” like the others. Don’t wait for the Revolution! Make your own Revolution—be free and live freely, he insisted. Be yourselves. Libertad became the patron saint of individualism. He reminded his followers, “The most difficult enemy to defeat is in yourself, anchored in your brain. It is one, but wears different masks: it is the belief in God, the belief in the Patrie, the obsession with the family, the existence of property. It calls itself Authority, the holy Bastille of Authority, to which everyone is supposed to bow.”12