Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  On June 26, 1910, another confrontation between demonstrators and police brought violence. The occasion was the funeral of Henri Cler, an anarchist and syndicalist cabinetmaker, born and living in the faubourg Saint-Antoine, who had been killed by a blow to the head with the butt of a policeman’s rifle. Victor and Rirette were among the tens of thousands who marched from the faubourg Saint-Antoine to the cemetery of Pantin. Marchers shouted against the “social order” that had killed their comrade and attacked policemen, and the cavalry charged, again wielding swords and slashing about a hundred people.9 Marchers vandalized some shops and a factory on boulevard Belleville that had remained open, as they yelled “Close up! Close up!” When a master smelter fired at demonstrators, a marcher drew a Browning and wounded him with a shot. More confrontations occurred near the cemetery.

  The third cause célèbre of opponents of the French state was the execution of Jean-Jacques Liabeuf a couple of days later. One evening the twenty-year-old worker had struck up a conversation with a streetwalker, earnestly trying to convince her to leave her established métier. Seeing the two walking together, two policemen arrested Liabeuf as a pimp. He was convicted and sentenced to prison. Feeling stained forever by the verdict, upon his release Liabeuf got a pistol and went out for vengeance. He shot and killed one of the policemen who had arrested him, and he wounded another. Victor remembered that Police Prefect Lépine, “whose goatee presided every year over the bludgeoning of the May Day demonstrators, demanded his execution.” Liabeuf was convicted of murder and condemned to death by guillotine. On the night of June 30–July 1, throngs of people moved toward the imposing La Santé prison on boulevard Arago, “always ghastly by day and sinister by night,” to protest his execution. Among the demonstrators, someone shot and wounded two police agents. The cavalry charged, slashing away. Victor wondered aloud how the bourgeois occupants of the elegant apartments, with their curtains “tightly closed on the principle of everyone for himself—and God for everyone” near the prison could appear to not have any idea what was going on, or to care. To Victor, “Our place is in the turbulent crowd during these angry days.… Along with education through words and writing, there is education to be done through action.… To retaliate against authority is a necessity that anarchists should not ignore.” In Paris, the movement of protest seemed spontaneous: “The faubourgs poured toward the center, by hundreds of thousands, workers and ordinary people moved by overwhelming indignation.” Victor noted with pleasure that “revolutionary groups follow rather than guide the masses.” He saw in the violence another sign of bourgeois panic: “In order to guillotine Liabeuf, they had to fill up an entire quartier with soldiers. Our masters have a master: fear.”10

  Thus, as he remembered, the massive demonstrations gave Victor, in particular, and Rirette hope. They also contributed moving Victor away from anarchist individualism and toward a sense that collective action could ultimately achieve great goals. Confronted by popular protest, the French state seemed panicked. Increasingly secure in their relationship, Victor and Rirette now looked more optimistically to the future.

  Chapter 7

  A BITTER SPLIT

  For Victor and Rirette, 1910 and 1911 were busy years. Victor was writing more and more for L’Anarchie, and the pair spent their time meeting old and new anarchist friends at causeries, debates, café conversations, and the newspaper office on rue du Chevalier de la Barre. Before long, increasingly stark differences in anarchist circles began to cause rifts between Victor and Rirette and Victor’s old and their new friends.

  An old friend of Victor’s soon reentered their lives. Victor had related to Rirette his friendship in Brussels with Raymond Callemin, the “dreamer” who had been seemingly inconsolable when the young Russian student, Macha, whom he had met in the Royal Library in Brussels, had returned to her native country. Raymond had remained impulsive, with his omnipresent sarcastic smile. “Poor kid,” assessed Victor.1

  The adolescent friendship of Victor and Raymond Callemin was already in the past. For one thing, Victor now renounced illegalism. His old friend was not only proud to be an illegalist who committed burglaries, but Raymond was a “scientific anarchist,” convinced that a strict diet—essentially vegetarian—was essential to individualistic anarchism. Callemin scoffed at his old friend’s esteem for the Russian revolutionary tradition. On the wall of his room in Brussels, Victor had placed portraits of Russian revolutionaries who had been executed. For her part, Rirette considered Victor’s old friend “a dreamer,” and, ultimately, perhaps a dangerous one.2

  Callemin had gone back and forth between Paris and Belgium between 1909 and 1911, meeting up with the anarchist team of L’Anarchie and turning up at various causeries. He never stayed in one place very long. Seeing uniformed troops and tricolor flags flapping in the breeze in Paris had confirmed for Callemin the idiocy of the very idea of “la Patrie.” Raymond’s “Patrie” was “the entire earth, without any borders.”3

  After a long bicycle trip to Central France and stops in Lausanne and Marseille, Callemin was forced to return to Paris after confrontation with the police. The trip took all his money, and in Paris Callemin had to depend on the largesse of camarades to get by. He went to the offices of L’Anarchie, where he ran into his old friend Victor Kibaltchiche.4

  Callemin was just one of many anarchists from Victor’s years in Belgium who found their way to Paris. Most were illegalists, and the group grew in number in the French capital. Édouard Carouy, a thick-faced Belgian Walloon metal turner, whom Victor had met in Brussels, carried his strong Belgian accent to Paris in 1910. “Built of herculean strength, his face thick, extremely muscular, illuminated by small, tentative, and crafty eyes,” Carouy was not particularly intelligent, lacked education, and did not speak well in French or in Flemish, which he had learned while working in Flanders.5

  Born in 1883, Carouy was the son of a couple of Belgian farmers in Montignies-lez-Lens who died when he was three years of age. Carouy—sometimes known as “Raoul”—had grown up in the care of neighbors, who placed him at age fourteen into an apprenticeship with a metal turner in Brussels. He spent twenty days in jail for putting up antimilitary posters in 1908. Upon his release, he went to the Belgian anarchist newspaper Le Révolté, briefly serving as its manager.

  Carouy worked in Malines and on the barges of the Meuse River before moving to Paris, where he took a room for two months in a shabby hotel beyond the Butte Montmartre; Jean de Boe, Victor and Raymond’s friend from Brussels, was also staying there. Both men were booted out of the hotel because they were constantly inviting people to stay with them.

  Édouard Carouy.

  Using an assumed name, Carouy worked briefly in an automobile factory as an ironworker, but his boss would later remember that he did little work and that he stole. When he moved on, the theft of expensive tools stopped. After he left, fellow workers who had doubts about his identity opened a drawer and found official documents for other people and military papers, as well as a Browning pistol.6

  One day Carouy showed up at the offices of L’Anarchie with a friend. For a moment, Victor was afraid. The Belgian had a violent temper and had once reproached him for a minor disagreement over a few sous in Belgium. He was also notoriously tight-fisted, despite being an illegalist. Victor kept his cool this time, and Carouy simply asked Victor what he should read. “Élysée Reclus,” the anarchist geographer, was the answer.

  Not all their interactions were so easy. One evening, Victor, Rirette, and Carouy were walking along boulevard Saint-Michel. Victor and Rirette’s total fortune amounted to three francs and a few centimes; Carouy knew this. Upon a nod from Victor, Rirette began distributing all the money the couple had to little children they encountered along the way. Carouy was beside himself. “We haven’t become suckers like that, have we?” he snarled, repeating his displeasure again and again. The next day, he related the story to every anarchist he saw, insisting that Victor and Rirette were worthy of dying of hunger for bei
ng so stupid. Yet when he had a little money Carouy purchased birds in a cage, and then released them. He fell in love with Jeanne Bélardi, the wife of an anarchist counterfeiter known as Brutus, whose fake coins Jeanne delivered in the suburbs on her bicycle. Brutus was none too happy about Carouy’s interest in Jeanne; the two men battled over it with knives on rue Ramey, leaving the Belgian slightly wounded.7

  The French and Belgian authorities began to take notice of this strong connection between Paris and Belgium in the illegalist world. In September 1911, an officer in the Belgian gendarmerie sent the French police authorities a list of “our anarchists who are now in Paris and who go back and forth frequently between that city and Brussels.” Édouard Carouy led the list, described as dangerous and “always armed with a Browning revolver.” Callemin and de Boe were also on the list. And so was “Kabaltchiche” [sic], reported as having left for Paris with his “concubine” Georgette Estorges [sic, Rirette], then identified as “Estogues, Anne Henriette, Madame Maîtrejean, born in 1877 [sic].”8

  One illegalist became a particularly close friend to Victor and Rirette. Victor first met André Soudy in a public meeting in the Latin Quarter.9 Rirette had already met the pale, gray-eyed young man, nicknamed “Pas-de-Chance,” in a bar frequented by anarchists. Born in 1892, he was the son of hôteliers—“À la Maille d’Or”—who had gone broke in Beaugency on the Loire River west of Orléans. Soudy had refused the ceremony of the first communion because he had argued with the priest in charge. Soudy, Victor noted, “grew up in the streets,” and his young life perfectly reflected “a childhood without possibilities, of impasses.” Soudy’s father had placed him as an apprentice grocer, and André had gone to Paris, working from six in the morning until nine at night at various small stores. He had acquired the argot and accent of the faubourgs. Soudy complained to his parents about the high cost of living in Paris. He lived alone, moving from place to place, barely getting by. Fired several times, including for alerting customers to the fact that they were being cheated by the weight and quality of the products they were purchasing, Soudy took several of his employers to the Conseil de Prud’hommes, a court-like institution that adjudicated labor disputes, after being let go. Between 1909 and 1911, he was in court several times for theft, selling stolen goods, making seditious statements, committing “outrages” against police authority (earning a short jail term in La Petite Roquette prison in December 1910), and vagabondage. In one case, Soudy was fired by a grocer on rue Léon in the rough quartier of la Goutte d’or for insolence “and especially for having made anarchist statements.” Soudy spent several months in another prison for distributing anarchist propaganda during a strike. He lived for a time with a female cousin. She left him to get married, leaving the young man heartbroken. Soudy now managed to survive by selling postcards to tourists on the Pont Alexandre III, stealing cans of sardines from grocery stores, committing burglary, and pickpocketing on the bridge.

  André “Pas-de-Chance”

  (“No Luck”) Soudy.

  The story of Soudy was that of thousands of young men arriving in Paris at the time. He worked where he could, moving from one small room to another in the Marais and then on the impoverished rue du Bièvre in the thirteenth arrondissement, and one in the more prosperous seventh arrondissement. He found roommates where he could, sharing one rent of five francs a week on the impasse Guépine and rue Jouy in the Marais with Édouard Coupeau, who was twenty years old and “without any known profession or occupation.” They only stayed a month, leaving their landlady Madame Journet with “the most sad memory of them” as well as “a quantity of anarchist brochures.”

  During his second stint in prison—or perhaps earlier—Soudy contracted tuberculosis. He noted sadly, “I am a pas de chance (no luck) nothing to be done about it.” He said, over and over, “I’m jinxed… everything gets me.” In 1910, he spent several months in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Angicourt (Oise). In late January 1911, he had treatment in the Hôpital Saint-Louis. He also had picked up syphilis, probably from his cousin. Victor would visit him in the hospital, bringing him oranges to cheer him up.10

  True to his nickname, Soudy’s luck kept running out. As he was about to go into a hospital in January 1911, Soudy loaned his room to an anarchist illegalist, who stole a mailman’s bicycle. When Soudy’s friend was arrested, he gave the police Soudy’s address, where police found burglary tools. Soudy was in prison from mid-February until late August of that year, where his tuberculosis no doubt worsened.11

  Upon his release, Soudy kept afloat through small thefts. On weekends, he joyfully took Rirette’s two little girls for walks at Buttes-Chaumont, buying them little cakes. They adored him. Soudy was a sentimental man, and the syrupy songs of café singers could move him to tears. He wanted to fall in love, but he “did not know how to meet a woman without appearing ridiculous.” When someone called him “comrade,” he seemed reborn, firmly believing that one should “become a new person” and that anarchism pointed the way. In the meantime, “the most stinging jokes helped him to live,” as he was convinced that his life would not be very long, “given the price of medications.” He remained unfailingly loyal to friends, and proud to be an illegalist.12

  Soudy regularly attended causeries, where he was usually in good spirits and enjoyed rousing debates with fellow anarchists. One evening, when a professorial type was at the podium, Soudy shouted from the first row of the balcony, “Vous êtes une bille!” (“You are an imbecile!”). The hall exploded in laughter. The speaker, visibly shaken, continued. When a second speaker began, Soudy thundered again, “Vous êtes une deuxième bille!” The shaken speaker finished with difficulty. A third speaker was greeted by “Vous êtes une troisième bille!” Chaos. And then virtually the entire audience began to shout in unison: “Bille! Vous êtes une bille!” The evening ended.13

  Victor’s intellectualism and critiques of illegalism were well known among this new group of illegalists. Georges-André Roulot, known as “Lorulot” (born in Paris in 1885), had become editor of L’Anarchie in 1909 after Libertad’s death and had infused the newspaper with individualism and illegalism. He defined illegalism as “the permanent and reasonable response of the individual to everything that surrounds him—it is the affirmation by each person of his own existence and his desire for complete development.”14

  Although Lorulot and Victor tended to disagree about illegalism, they still appeared together in causeries announced in L’Anarchie. They shared a common enemy and were “Against all Bastilles”—thus, all kinds of authority, whether erected in the name of republicans, royalists, or socialists.15

  But when in July 1910 Lorulot rented two buildings at 16 rue de Bagnolet (now rue de la République) in Romainville to create an ideal anarchist community, it wasn’t quite clear how Victor and Rirette would fit in. Such a way of life would include adherence to a strict vegetarian diet and the practice of regular exercise. A rigorous life would, in Lorulot’s mind, along with L’Anarchie, provide propaganda for anarchism. Such a free setting (milieu libre) seemed a logical place for anarchist individualists, “les en-dehors.”

  Romainville had been incorporated in 1867 into the commune of Les Lilas; by 1911, it had a population of about five thousand six hundred. Like almost all of the suburbs north of Paris, Romainville had become a working-class town. A site of gypsum mines (gypsum was used as a fertilizer and in plaster), some of the commune was not built up and represented an extension of the “zone” beyond the old fortifications of Paris. The capital itself could be reached from Romainville via a tramway whose route ended at Charles Garnier’s opera house.16

  The property on rue de Bagnolet, which was set off from the street by an imposing wall, included a large garden with trees and lilacs and offered a rural image that pleased its anarchist occupants. There was also space for illegalists to practice firing their Brownings. Upon entering the property, visitors came upon a building of two floors with caves below. There were several bedrooms, in one of wh
ich slept Jean-Joseph Huc, a former counterfeiter and convict known to his friends as “Ripolin,” who gardened, and his girlfriend, Marie Bader—known as “Ripoline.” Another room provided space for anarchist travelers who had nowhere to stay. A second building included a large room for a sizable printing machine, a storage room for stacks of newspapers that had not been sold, and a large shower room. There were smaller gardens in the courtyard, where fruits and vegetables were grown; the poultry occupants of the courtyard offered eggs.17

  Rirette and Victor arrived in Romainville as summer was approaching in 1911. There they met the illegalist Octave Garnier. He had joined those who were going on the offensive against Victor and Rirette’s intellectual approach to anarchism. Garnier, whom Victor described as stout and rather squat, with light brown hair, was “a dark, handsome boy, silent, with astonishingly dark and intense eyes.” He had been born in Fontainbleau, where his father was a road worker. Garnier wanted to make his mother proud of him. He told her, “You’ll see, Mama, how you will be happy. You know that I am not afraid of work.”18

  After leaving school at age thirteen, Garnier worked for a baker. However, several arrests for theft put an end to that. He then survived as a terrassier (a road worker or ditch digger; he was sometimes known as Octave le Terrassier), and continued to steal. Garnier was convicted of several political offenses—and was once badly beaten because of his role during a strike. He spent two weeks in jail for assault during a construction workers’ strike. Just after his release, he avoided conscription in 1909 by fleeing to Belgium, leaving his worried mother in tears. In Charleroi he met Raymond Callemin, Édouard Carouy, and Jean de Boe. He and Callemin became “inseparable” companions, and Victor noticed that Garnier clearly exercised great influence over Callemin and Édouard Carouy. Garnier returned to Paris because the Belgian police were looking for him.19