Marie-Félice Vuillemin, known as “Marie la Belge,” was Garnier’s “Rubensesque” girlfriend. Twenty-two years old, she had been born in Mons, where her mother worked in a mine. In April 1909, Marie, who had been condemned to three months in jail for theft, left for Paris. There, she married Auguste Schoofs, a thirty-two-year-old housepainter. The couple stayed together only about a month in the tenth arrondissement in Paris. Marie worked in a small manufacture on rue Béranger, not far away. The couple quarreled constantly, and during the summer of 1911 Schoofs hit Marie hard enough to send her to the hospital. After being bandaged in Hôpital Saint-Louis, she returned to Belgium, to Charleroi, living with her mother and working cleaning houses.20
Octave Garnier.
Marie-Félice Vuillemin, known as “Marie la Belge,” Octave Garnier’s girlfriend.
In Charleroi, Marie met Garnier, who had just been released after several days in jail for what she described as “anarchist deeds.” For two months, they lived together in a furnished room, with Marie going by the name “Madame Garnier.” Marie then accompanied Garnier to Schaerbeck, a suburb of Brussels, where Garnier worked constructing a tunnel and Marie did more cleaning. Back in Charleroi, a cafetier for whom Marie had briefly worked was robbed—presumably by Garnier, Édouard Carouy, Marius Metge (another anarchist sometimes known as “Mistral” because he came from the Valley of the Rhône), and two others, although only the latter fell into police custody. In March 1911, Garnier and Marie left for Paris.21
Garnier left an impression—rarely a positive one—on those he met. A friend Marie had made while living with Schoofs had not seen her for ten months. One day Marie showed up with her new lover, Garnier, whom she never formally introduced to her friend. The couple stayed for two hours. Garnier said he was a road worker, finding employment where he could. Marie added that he was a deserter who had found refuge in Belgium. Before leaving, Marie asked her friend to loan her one and a half francs, explaining that they had nothing for dinner and had to walk all the way back to Romainville, where they now lived. Marie’s friend was “a little frightened” by the new man, whom she described as having “a piercing and angry look.” She asked Marie that the next time she came for a visit, she come alone, adding “above all.”22
Victor described Garnier, who slept in a room on the first floor, as a “rootless force… searching for some impossible new dignity about which he seemed unsure.” Garnier rejected all discussion with intellectuals. “Phrases! Phrases!” he would mumble softly as he went out arm in arm “with Marie and set about preparing some dangerous nighttime crime.”23 Victor said of him, “No other man that I have met in my whole life has ever so convinced me of the impotence and even the futility of the intellect when confronted with tough primitive creatures like this, rudely aroused to a form of intelligence that fits them purely technically for the life struggle.” On one occasion, Garnier had showed one of his neighbors a long, loaded revolver, adding that “with this, one does not fear anything.” 24
Victor and Rirette’s first meal in Romainville was a total disaster. Lorulot asked Rirette to prepare dinner, but when the individualist anarchists realized that she had put some vinegar into a dish, all hell broke loose. Callemin shouted, “She put vinegar in there!” Garnier snarled, “What audacity!” “It’s come to this!” added Carouy. Lorulot, Callemin, Garnier, Carouy, and Valet considered vinegar an “antiscientific” ingredient, capable of compromising their individualist idea of a perfect anarchist life. Individualists believed that oil was the nectar of existence and should be consumed in great quantities, which Lorulot did every day—thus, “oil anarchy.” Salt and pepper were unacceptable, along with coffee, alcohol, and chervil (which Garnier considered to be an aphrodisiac). Lorulot’s advice for workers who demanded higher wages so that they could have enough to eat was that they should eliminate such expensive items as meat and fish from their diets. This sort of individualist denounced those who rejected such rules as the “unintelligent” who had not evolved with the times. The list of acceptable foods included mashed corn, milk purée, vegetables, macaroni with cheese, tea, and sugar. Bananas were a natural food, “chemically the complete, natural element.”25
Rirette was hurt by all this, while Victor was largely unconcerned. However, this was the end of everyone eating at the same table. Rirette seemed relieved when, in a setting clearly identified with “water drinkers,” a friend dropped off six bottles of Médoc wine. She drank one bottle, and then on another day she drank a second bottle. When she came back to open the third, she found that the remaining bottles were empty. She sensed that some of the self-proclaimed “water drinkers” had come by and had given in. Anarchists came and went from the house, seeking “a momentary refuge.” Some occasionally left a little money for pamphlets taken or meals consumed. Others simply ate, discussed, and slept, before moving on.26
Rirette was torn; she was somewhat tempted to opt for such a life in a rural setting, but by now she was also committed to life in the city, far from her village in Corrèze. She also knew that in such idealized communities, face-to-face relations were not always ideal. Lorulot had the reputation of being a shirker, more interested in sunbathing than assisting in work around the farm. When there was work to be done, Lorulot simply disappeared. On one occasion, when others went to look for him, they found him sitting on a fallen branch, reading poetry, quite nude. When his colleagues complained, he replied, “You are the laborers, you work! I am the brains and I think.”27
In the meantime, life went on, accompanied uncomfortably for Victor and Rirette by the “régime lorulotique”—that is, without salt, pepper, coffee, and wine.28 Huc gardened. Callemin counted. Valet set the print for editions of L’Anarchie, and Carouy and Garnier carried out the printing, along with Victor’s friend Jean de Boe. De Boe had followed the others to Romainville, living nearby with Marius “Mistral” Metge.
Élie Monier was also part of the group. A tall, thin anarchist florist, he was born in Estagel in the Pyrénées-Orientales in 1889, the son of struggling farmers. He had been placed as an apprentice flower gardener with a wealthy family living in a chateau. A later assessment held that these contacts with “well-off people” embittered him, “and seem to have made him independent, undisciplined, and, later, an enemy of society.” He left for Paris at the end of 1909 to avoid military conscription. There he met anarchists involved with L’Anarchie, beginning with Lorulot, with whom he went on the road in the Midi and in the small industrial town of Boucau, which had forges along the Adour River in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques. When Monier left for Belgium to avoid arrest, he traveled with the papers of a Turkish anarchist named Simentoff. He sold whatever he could find in markets and fairs. For several months, Monier went back and forth between Belgium and France. He also managed to get to Carcassonne, where he burglarized a tax office in September 1911.29
In the midst of all this, there was also some fun to be had. The group took frequent excursions into the countryside. On one occasion, Rirette joined Carouy, Soudy, Callemin, Octave Garnier, and his Belgian girlfriend, Marie Vuillemin, for a trek on bicycles to Nogent-sur-Marne to rent canoes. When Marie’s tire went flat, Callemin proved anything less than gallant, casting some doubt on Rirette’s belief that anarchists treated women better than nonanarchists. Yet overall the afternoon and its picnic went very well, amid singing, a deep appreciation of nature, and good humor.30
The police were well aware of the anarchist presence on rue Bagnolet. A police inspector watching the headquarters of L’Anarchie reported on June 20 that he had not seen Mistral (Marius Metge), Édouard Carouy, or Octave Garnier. There were usually about a dozen men at the house and four or five men in the two buildings, “but these people have the specialty of never revealing their names nor their nicknames in the vicinity of where they live.” Only a raid would determine if the three men were actually there. When an agent asked any questions, the reply from residents of the house was usually something along the lines of, “Our home is no
t a branch of the prefecture of police!”31
During the summer, a highly placed police official from Paris and three police agents went out to Romainville with Louis-François Jouin, deputy director of Security since 1909. Jouin was an energetic, reliable, and generally respected policeman of modest means who had worked his way up the ladder in the police hierarchy after beginning as an inspector of rooming houses in the Search Brigades. He had only a certificate of primary schooling, and his first job for the municipality was monitoring the sewers of Paris. He then entered the army as a volunteer in 1891, serving as a sergeant in North Africa. When he was not out tracking down anarchists, he lived a quiet life with his wife and sixteen-year-old daughter.32
There were suspicions that the anarchist community in Romainville was committing burglaries. Jouin and the policemen had gone out to investigate. They knocked on the door. When no one answered, they went in, coming upon a man teaching a number of boys and girls. There were posters on the wall and newspapers here and there. Jouin predictably and aggressively warned, “Hands up! Empty your pockets!” The police began to open the drawers of armoires, searching for fake military documents used by those dodging the draft. They asked Raymond Callemin what he and the others were doing in Romainville. Callemin replied, “We live according to our ideas.” Who is your leader? The reply: “We do not have a leader.” Do you often work? “When there is work.” Are you anarchists? To this, Callemin replied, “If to be an anarchist is to not recognize the right of someone to impose his will on us, then we are. Science tells us that a man should be able to live as he wants.” They would continue their revolt “as long as you will still have prisons.” Callemin asked exactly what the visitors had against them, when those living in the community drank water but not liquor, never smoked, and were vegetarians: “Is this why we are tracked as criminals?” There was no evidence of any illegal activities, so the police had no choice but to leave, carrying away some unimportant papers.33
Had Jouin known where to look, he might have found evidence of thefts. The burglaries of Garnier, Carouy, and Callemin—of which Victor and Rirette disapproved, but looked the other way—brought the anarchist community some resources.
In the community, everyone shared everything, with the right to be lodged and fed and have one’s clothes cleaned. Victor earned a little on the side doing French and Russian translations. One day, Victor asked Carouy for some money. The latter snapped, “I risked my skin, my old friend, to bring in some money. If you want us to share it, then you only have to do the same!” For his part, Victor strongly believed that the risks inherent in such thefts—as in the case of counterfeiting—were too great and that the illegalists’ self-professed independence would inevitably lead to prison, where it was indeed difficult to be free. He also believed that such crimes and the obsession with money that characterized illegalists were incompatible with the true development of the individual and the anarchist way of life. For her part, Rirette questioned whether the theft of a can of sardines would ultimately change society. It was war between “the sentimental” and “the scientifics.” Such “fanatic popularizers!”—in Victor’s description—reduced science to that of “an algebra which becomes the catechism of the individualist revolt: me against everyone.”34
And there were more troubling disputes. On one occasion, Garnier became absolutely furious when the others refused an article he had written with the title “Salt Is Poison.” Garnier drew his Browning revolver before things calmed down.35 On another occasion, Rirette believed that Carouy had come to the apartment she shared with Victor with the intention of killing him.36
There were fights, too, about the direction L’Anarchie was going in. In June 1911, Lorulot left Romainville for Paris. He had argued violently with Garnier, Callemin, and Carouy, but it was only the latest blowup. Once, as L’Anarchie was about to be printed, Rirette eliminated from it a provocative phrase of Lorulot’s that had denounced “smokers, opium addicts, morphine addicts and Baudelarians” as “idiots.” She had quickly asked Lorulot if he had ever read Baudelaire, and he had replied, “Never!” When the edition appeared, Rirette discovered that the sentence had miraculously reappeared. How? Callemin had reinserted the sentence, it turned out, because this was also his view. Another time, Lorulot attacked the illegalists in an editorial in L’Anarchie, which Victor could not really refuse to publish since Lorulot had edited the newspaper. That Victor inserted the piece accentuated tensions with the illegalists. In Paris, Lorulot started up a new individualist anarchist newspaper, L’Idée Libre.37
L’Anarchie still had a following, but it was not prospering under the unsteady hand of Lorulot. Lorulot had begun to pressure Victor and Rirette to take over the newspaper. Rirette was against the idea, warning Victor that “we will be surrounded by illegalists!” who continued to denounce them, led by the abusive Garnier. Yet Victor repeated, over and over, “There is something to be done, there is something to be done.” In the end, Rirette went along with it. Victor would be the editor of L’Anarchie, and Rirette would serve as the newspaper’s manager, as long as they would have no financial obligation to the newspaper. Raymond Callemin would be the treasurer as well as the principal printer. Thus, the two quarreling factions would remain with the anarchist newspaper in Romainville—Victor and Rirette on one side, and the “scientific individualists” and “illegalists” led by Raymond Callemin on the other.38
One evening in July, Victor rose to speak in a causerie; he noted that the prisons were full of anarchists and that it was better not to transform “certain means of action” into a goal or an ideal. Thus, the rupture was consummated. Victor was denounced as “having sold out,” and he barely missed getting punched out. For his part, Callemin, who took himself for the real theoretician of illegalism, insisted that his old friend from his days in Brussels was an intellectual dreamer who should not be taken seriously.39
More disputes inevitably followed. Three weeks later, the illegalists began to leave Romainville. Huc left when police suspected him, with reason, of counterfeiting. Carouy, who lived in absolute terror of jail, departed when he became a police suspect in a burglary in Maisons-Alfort. Carouy moved to Saint-Thibault-des-Vignes, not far from Romainville, dyed his hair black, and sold odds and ends (including fake jewelry and items he and others had taken in burglaries) at markets in the Paris region. Victor and Rirette had tried to reason with him, to get him to stop, but they got nowhere. At times, as he sat in a café on rue de Seine, Carouy dreamed aloud about living in the countryside and having a small garden.40
Garnier and Valet also left, in part because of increased police surveillance of their residence in Romainville. Monier, who had taken the name Simentoff, also departed. He began delivering wine for Pierre Cardi, a Corsican anarchist who had come to Paris in 1906. Cardi’s store on the rue Ordener was across the street from a branch of Société Générale.41
Raymond Callemin departed with his sarcastic, caustic smile, leaving behind his perfectly clear and balanced accounting of the financial situation of L’Anarchie. In July 1911, some of his friends were arrested. Raymond vowed “to take vengeance against this criminal society.” He moved to Vincennes. With other illegalists, he began to discuss the means “to make felt even more strongly the shouts of our revolt.”42
And so, after three months in Romainville, the team of L’Anarchie moved back to Paris. Fewer resources were coming from bookstore sales of brochures and other publications, as well as of the newspaper itself. The annual rent of one thousand francs could not be met. Perhaps a move back into the City of Light might improve the fortunes of L’Anarchie and propaganda for the anarchist cause. In the middle of an October night, the remaining anarchists moved “á la cloche du bois”—that is, with the help of comrades and without paying the rent they still owed.
The bitter split between Victor and Rirette and the illegalists had contributed to the departures from Romainville. Yet for a time the two sides continued to coexist. After all, they had a commo
n enemy: the state. Victor and Rirette continued their friendship with René Valet, and to a lesser extent with Callemin. However, Valet was clearly under the influence of Garnier and Carouy, who seemed to have pressured him to leave Romainville.43
Once Victor and Rirette were back in Paris, Rirette rented an apartment on rue Fessart in the nineteenth arrondissement in Belleville. The apartment offered considerably less space than the property in Romainville. It included a living room transformed into an office, the inevitable room reserved for newly arrived anarchists without a place to stay, and the room in which Victor, Rirette, and the girls slept. Behind the building was a series of small gardens, typical of Belleville, and at the back a hangar larger enough for the printing press. Rirette took care of all the newspaper’s correspondence. The apartment stood on the second floor, halfway between the place des Fêtes and Buttes-Chaumont, thus convenient for outings to the park for Rirette and her two little girls. André Soudy was the only illegalist who came around to visit often. Rirette treated Soudy like a lost little brother, and he took the girls to play in Buttes-Chaumont. And, as in Romainville, policemen—in uniform or not—were frequently stationed outside the building, observing the comings and goings of anarchist visitors.44
Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits Page 10
