Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  Some individualists had become obsessed with “scientific theories,” wanting to introduce “rationality in all aspects of daily life.” In order to live “scientifically,” they lived in small groups on the edge of Paris in a “free association of egos.”33 They took up vegetarianism and other ascetic régimes, refusing, among other things, meat, salt, pepper, coffee, vinegar, and any alcohol, including wine. They considered alcohol to be responsible at least in part for brutalizing the mass of workers, keeping them from understanding their real interests and developing as individuals. These anarchists ate a lot of macaroni, garden vegetables, and cheese. And only some of them believed that tea was acceptable.34

  Victor’s philosophy was neither that of the illegalists nor that of the dominant individualists. In Paris, Victor quickly turned against illegalism as a dominant current of individualism, and thus turned from the influence of Libertad. Most illegalists who knew him believed, for their part, that Victor was too close to socialism and too much of an intellectual who preferred contemplation, writing, and persuasion to burglaries and violence. By virtue of his articles, he was already known to those frequenting anarchist soirées and debates. On March 21, 1908, before he moved to Paris, Victor first signed an article in L’Anarchie with the nom de plume “Le Rétif”—“the stubborn one” who refuses to compromise [with the state and bourgeois society].35

  Although he still felt himself “lost in space,” Victor began to sign editorials on the first page of L’Anarchie, which was growing quickly and soon had a print run of six thousand five hundred copies. Among the individualist anarchists he met in 1909 on rue du Chevalier de la Barre was a short, slim young woman “with a Gothic profile”—Rirette Maîtrejean.36

  Chapter 5

  RIRETTE MAÎTREJEAN

  By the time Victor first encountered Rirette Maîtrejean, she had become an increasingly visible presence in Parisian anarchism. She was born Anna Estorges in the village of Saint-Mexant, Corrèze, on August 14, 1887, the daughter of a poor farmer. But with prices plunging for farm goods, Anna’s father Martin moved the family to Tulle, five miles away, finding work as a mason. Even as a young child, Rirette had a passion for study, with the goal of becoming a teacher. She wanted to prepare at the regional teaching school for possible admission to the École Normale and eventually a good teaching post. Rirette’s father agreed with this choice, but he soon fell ill with enteritis and died in 1903 at the age of forty-four. With absolutely no money—one grandfather had already passed away and the other, reduced to ragpicking, died soon thereafter—and not yet of an age to secure a teaching position, Rirette’s only option was to find work as a domestic or begin some sort of apprenticeship. Neither path interested her. Her mother insisted that she marry, not necessarily someone of her choice. After all, marriage remained for many an economic arrangement where love was not necessarily a factor.1

  Defying her mother, in the winter of 1904 Rirette took the train to Paris, where she lodged with an aunt in the eleventh arrondissement. This was a traditional and obvious trajectory for a poor girl from the Limousin, except that domestic service or some other similar work was not what she wanted. She arrived in the capital at age sixteen with “a proud idea of my independence.” Yet she needed money in order to survive. Work in the garment industry by sewing at home was a possibility, but she quickly discovered that thousands of young women became virtual slaves working almost around the clock in order to pay the rent on the sewing machines they got from merchant-capitalists, thus gaining little or nothing from their work.

  Rirette Maîtrejean.

  Rirette saw the exploitation of workers up close. Yet she would remember that despite the misery all around her, “a breath of liberty passed through our souls … a reaction against the social suffocation that then ruled.” That liberty took the form of anarchism, which “spontaneously developed in our minds.” It was “a sort of springtime, the springtime of [the new] century. There were bells ringing in the air, appeals made by intellectuals to the people, a great revolt against slavery.”2

  Rirette gradually joined the world of speeches, discussions, and debates about how to bring social justice to France. With two young men, she attended her first causerie, where she heard Libertad speak. As always, he wore the blue smock of a printer as he shouted, “Me, I am an anarchist!” People were not born free, he argued. Freedom had to be conquered and anarchism was the way: “To free yourselves, you must fight!”3 Rirette agreed.

  Plunging into the world of Parisian anarchism, Rirette followed the cours d’études sociales at the Sorbonne and attended lectures followed by debates given at the “universités populaires” that had sprung up in many French cities—notably, the first one, the “Cooperative of Ideas” in faubourg Saint-Antoine (which had been a center of militancy in the Revolutions of 1789 and 1792, the June Days of 1848, and the Paris Commune). For a small sum, she and other young workers and intellectuals, including some women, attended lectures and debates, borrowed books to read, and took courses in foreign languages.4

  The gatherings in faubourg Saint-Antoine and those at the Cité Angoulême in the eleventh arrondissement were held in cramped, rented halls. A few times a week, Rirette would walk to the end of a “dark courtyard whose leprous stones oozing misery opened into an uncertain wall giving way to sort of a shop into which air could only enter via a single small window. Furnishings consisted of a huge wooden table and several worm-eaten benches. A large lamp exuding smoke provided light.” She was surprised to find the hall walls adorned by several “decors of modern art,” lending a bit of beauty to otherwise desolate rooms.5

  On Wednesdays, speakers, some obscure, some well known, would choose “the most important subjects” upon which to speak. Outsiders turned up from time to time, some seemingly astonished that they had not come upon anarchist orgies. Usually these were serious affairs, but occasionally they brought comic relief. Once, a group of anarchists impatiently awaited a speaker who was very late. Eventually sounds of chaos could be heard outside. The speaker had been approaching the Cité Angoulême wearing only a pair of shorts. Several policemen surrounded and arrested him, and when they interrogated him on his attire, he explained that he dressed “following his ideas.” The pores of his skin had to be completely open to the air so that “the noxious substance developed by sudoriferous glands” could be free in order for him to think. Three doctors who examined him found him completely sane.6

  There was a communal spirit to many of these gatherings, even if the debates became heated at times. Anarchists shared what they had. Rirette knew one who regularly gave almost every sou he had to the cause of publishing anarchist propaganda. She was aware that his family provided a certain sum for him each week, but he kept precious little for himself, sleeping on the floor in the hallway of a building when the outside temperature was in the twenties, exposed to the courants d’air (drafts) that obsess the French. He once purchased a dozen spoiled herrings because they were cheap and enough to feed him for a week. Anarchist groups willingly accepted comrades they did not know to their dinner tables, although those regularly there enjoyed certain rights—perhaps the first spoonfuls—and such meals invariably went on with mutual respect.7

  Rirette decided to become an individualist. She had heard Libertad speak and had taken his words to heart, especially when he had thundered, “It is not a hundred years from now that one must live as an anarchist. It is now.” She was also impressed that women appeared to have a more important role among individualists than they had among revolutionary anarchist-communists. Several female activists became her friends. For the moment, she believed that the advantages of individualism outweighed the disadvantages, though she remained wary of the fact that many “individualists” had become “illegalists.”8

  On weekends, a small number of “individualists” began to go to the Gare Saint-Lazare or the Gare d’Orsay—paying the fare if they had any money, sneaking onto trains if they did not—and then out into the countryside. L’Anarc
hie announced these outings. The revelers carried musical instruments and something to eat. In the forests of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Sénart, or Rambouillet, they picnicked; listened to anarchist lectures; or simply discussed, debated, and sang anarchist songs, which themselves offered an essential form of propaganda. A picnic in Saint-Germain in 1907 included déjeuner sur l’herbe at noon; “a great public meeting on propaganda” at four, including a lecture on “the social war”; songs by the poet-singer Charles d’Avray; and an early diner sur l’herbe at six o’clock, followed by a lengthy “concert among comrades,” beginning an hour later. Unlike anarchist songs twenty years earlier, these songs no longer saluted “heroic” anarchist attacks, but rather denounced societal inequalities and the plight of ordinary people.9

  A typical poem went like this:

  As the earth belong to everyone as communal property,

  He who, first of all, acquires a fortune,

  First of all commits a theft, as you know by heart,

  That everything is really for everybody, and nothing is to be unfairly exploited.

  Rirette, who was part of a group of anarchists espousing free love, soon discovered that she was pregnant by someone she had recently met. Her mother came up to Paris to help her daughter and found work as a domestic servant in the eleventh arrondissement. One rainy afternoon, at the corner of rue des Envierges and rue Piat, Rirette dashed into a café to get out of the rain. Sitting at a table, two men—probably pimps—began to bother Rirette, mocking her obvious distress. Just then, a tall young man jumped to her defense, intimidating the two aggressors and scaring them off. Her rescuer was Louis Maîtrejean, a young saddlemaker from a village in the Haute-Saône in eastern France with a forceful mustache and prominent cheekbones, who had seen Rirette at causeries.10 Rirette and Maîtrejean shared what they had to eat that evening and for several evenings after that. In the summer of 1905, they took up residence together.

  Rirette gave birth to Henriette, known as Maud, in January 1906, and the following September Louis and Rirette undertook a civil marriage, although many if not most anarchists repudiated the institution linked to recognition by state and church. Rirette was nineteen. Louis’s name was entered on the birth register as Henriette’s father. In 1906 their child Sarah—nicknamed Chinette—was born, just ten months after the birth of her sister. Maîtrejean and Rirette continued attending anarchist soirées and debates on the rue du Chevalier de la Barre and at Cité Angoulême. Whenever they went out, Rirette’s mother, who was living nearby, took care of the babies.

  Rirette and Maîtrejean lived with their two children in plebeian Belleville in the twentieth arrondissement, where the saddlemaker could find work, changing addresses three times in ten months. This was the way of life for the working poor. Life was tough in one of the most impoverished, dilapidated, and crowded parts of Paris; the quickly erected facades of buildings began to crumble, and broken windows let in torrents of Parisian wind and rain.

  The neighborhoods in which Rirette and Maîtrejean lived were typical of Belleville, a place of hundreds of shops of artisans and craftsmen. Belleville was less properly “proletarian” than other parts of the Parisian periphery. There were really two Bellevilles. In upper Belleville, rentiers and other bourgeois could be found, lending a more conservative appearance that stood out next to working-class lower Belleville, which had drawn workers from quartiers populaires of the tenth and eleventh arrondissements. Forty years earlier, the Commune reinforced the negative image of lower Belleville in particular in the minds of many elite Parisians, who identified the neighborhoods with radical politics, alcoholism, syphilis, crime, and delinquency.11

  There was not always work to be found for Maîtrejean, whose generosity and anarchist ways frequently brought an unanticipated mouth to feed, in the person of a comrade passing through with nowhere to sleep or eat. Rirette spent her days taking care of the babies, doing laundry, trying to find food they could afford at the market, and preparing meals.12

  The young couple began to drift apart—gradually, but definitively—even though Maîtrejean was a good worker and father who brought home his pay every Saturday without stopping at a bar along the way. And he remained loyal to the struggle of the unions and the illusion that revolution was not far away. Yet the conditions of life, seen in the abject deprivation of young children in the neighborhood, drove Rirette to despair as she worried about her own babies. She felt this especially keenly after she and her friends visited an experimental anarchist school in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, founded in 1904. Here, children’s education seemed very successful, in harmony with the rustic environment and based on respect for the pupils and rejecting the authoritarian structures of ordinary schools. Rirette’s return to Belleville after the outing made the contrast seem enormous—indeed, disturbing. How could she find a suitable environment in Paris in which to raise her daughters?13

  To make matters worse, Rirette had little opportunity to go beyond the radius of a few blocks. There was increasingly little for the couple to discuss. Rirette continued to attend causeries, and she thrived on the exchanges she had there; Maîtrejean, meanwhile, was innately suspicious of intellectuals. Rirette put it this way: “Intellectually, we had nothing in common. Any idea a bit elevated made him dizzy. As for me, I was only happy with lofty ideas.”

  In 1907, Rirette met and fell in love with Mauricius, a well-known anarchist orator. Born Maurice Vandamme, in 1886, the well-read Mauricius grew up on place du Tertre in Montmartre, the son of a bankrupt jeweler and a mother who sold paints and other materials to artists. He contributed articles on medicine and human biology to L’Anarchie, and, like Rirette, he actively espoused neo-Malthusianism. Yet Mauricius had developed the reputation as a “talker” and not a man of courage—a theoretician, nothing more. His rather bourgeois appearance somewhat irritated Rirette, but on several occasions it allowed him to avoid arrest during police roundups. And, at any rate, his countenance was very different from her husband’s. She wrote Mauricius a letter, telling him, “I am completely yours,” and assuring him that her husband no longer meant anything to her, except as a friend she admired. Louis Maîtrejean, who still loved Rirette passionately, hesitated to show his jealousy—anarchist couples were not supposed to do that. As Mauricius put it, “The stability and permanence of a couple were viewed as retrograde, monogamy as a [bourgeois] appropriation.” Louis understood that Rirette would no longer be in his life, and he suffered in silence. Early in 1908, Rirette left their small apartment and moved in with Mauricius, taking her little daughters with her. In the spring, Rirette, Mauricius, and the two girls moved to a small house on the Seine in Champrosay in the commune of Draveil, twelve miles southeast of Paris.14

  By then, Maîtrejean had abandoned saddlemaking for counterfeiting—“cash in chocolate,” a common illegalist tactic—although it brought him only thirty francs a week instead of the sixty francs he had earned making saddles. Rirette suggested that this might have been because Maîtrejean had been devastated by her leaving him and that perhaps he wanted to show her “he was also a perfect illegalist.” He justified counterfeiting by asserting that such a practice would ultimately destroy the French franc. In June 1910, Maîtrejean was sentenced to four years in prison for counterfeiting.15

  In April 1908, Rirette went to rue du Chevalier de la Barre to see Libertad. He had been her idol, and now she found him alone, crying like a child. Libertad believed himself to be a victim of a cabal of “scientific” anarchists who had worked to undermine his influence while he was in jail for a short time. Moreover, the sharp division continued between individualists like Libertad and “communist” anarchists who believed in organizing for revolution. Libertad’s rivals, and even enemies, within the anarchist movement were at work.16

  Things turned worse for Libertad. For all the lovers he took, a woman named Jeanne Morand seemed always to be at his side, “silent and sad.” But Libertad announced that this woman was not his “girlfriend,” and in late May, Libertad
told Rirette that Jeanne Morand had left him. Yet if Libertad had been abandoned by “his immediate entourage,” he still retained some degree of influence, as French workers reacted to increasingly hard times by going out on strike.17

  Despite the reliance of police, gendarmes, and soldiers on increasingly brutal tactics in dealing with demonstrations, anarchists seemed unable to increase their influence among ordinary people, many of whom shared their critiques of Georges Clemenceau’s government. When Libertad spoke early in 1908 on the rue du Chevalier de la Barre, he admitted that “anarchism is in a state of rest and even of lassitude.” Furthermore, Libertad’s influence among individualists was being challenged by a group led by Georges Paraf-Javal, a leading “scientific” anarchist who had co-founded the Ligue antimilitarist in 1902 along with Émile Armand, an illegalist, and Libertad himself. Paraf-Javal printed two brochures directly attacking Libertad. In turn, Libertad accused Paraf-Javal and his followers of being “more scientific than anarchist.”

  Libertad and his followers felt increasingly isolated, particularly as many anarchists moved toward the union movement and the bourses du travail. Police observers worried that this would put an end to ideological factions within anarchism and lead to “one single unified revolutionary wave.” This was not to be. Yet causeries continued, and a policeman reported that “the anarchists danced and behaved like fools.” Even depressed, Libertad believed such events would continue to provide attractive propaganda for anarchism that even Clemenceau could not stop.18