Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  Every week at Jouin’s office, hundreds of letters arrived that provided information about the suspects. Not many could be trusted. But a particularly detailed one came on January 18, claiming to be based on “rumors circulating among the anarchists.” It stated that the shooter on the rue Ordener was “a certain Eugène Dieudonné, originally from Nancy, where he has doubtless returned to his parents. The others are three Belgians,” with names that seemed to be Octave, Remend, and Deboit. The letter added “there’s also Bonnot (from Lyon).” A subsequent anonymous letter mailed on February 3 claimed Dieudonné was the “principal aggressor” on the rue Ordener incident, noting that his wife Louise was now the girlfriend of Lorulot. This suggests the source’s close knowledge of anarchist moves, indicating that some denunciations and information were coming from within anarchist circles.7

  The police continued their search for Garnier. They discovered that Garnier and Marie la Belge had been living in Vincennes. They were no longer there when the police showed up at their former apartment on January 22. The concierge affirmed from police photos that it had been Garnier and Marie who had been staying there. Police found various burglary tools and train schedules to Pavillons-sous-Bois. They also found a package of stickers that included “Our enemy is our master!” and “Bourgeois luxury is paid for by the blood of the poor.” Octave had signed the lease for the two-room apartment in June under the name Émile Rémond. After purchasing some furniture, Octave told Marie that a compagnon would arrive to stay with them, a thin young blond man about eighteen to twenty years of age. The concierge related this and recognized Callemin from a police photo as a visitor. The couple had told the concierge that he was Marie’s cousin, and Octave called him “Julien.” They generally left together at nine in the morning and returned twelve hours later, saying that they had been selling letters for printing shops. Octave provided funds for daily needs. During three nights each in July and August they did not return at all; they said that they had been involved in business projects in the suburbs.

  On December 31, the pair had suddenly announced that they were going to the countryside “for the holidays,” packing up two trunks. Octave sent Marie to place de la Nation to get a wagon and a driver to cart the trunks. A very young compagnon, about ten years old, helped them move. But then Octave told Marie, “I have to leave to take care of some business,” giving her two hundred francs, adding, “You figure it out, but you can’t stay here.” Julien followed him. Marie left the apartment two days later to return to Charleroi.8

  On January 19, Marie went to visit a friend in the tenth arrondissement, finding her at an outside public laundry, a center point of working-class female sociability. They then went to a bar on the quai de Valmy. Marie paid for the drinks and returned the small amount of money she had borrowed the last time they had met. Her friend could not help but notice that Marie had several pieces of gold in her coin purse; this seemed strange as Marie never had more than a few cents. She explained that she had “inherited” the money. Then she left quickly, “because he is waiting for me to go to dinner.” She promised to return for lunch the next Sunday.9

  However, the next day, police arrested and interrogated Marie. First claiming another name, she finally admitted that she was the femme Schoofs. She claimed to be sans domicile fixe (homeless) but then said that she had stayed two nights in a store run by a Swiss anarchist who sold Lorulot’s L’Idée Libre in Montmartre. How could she explain the seventy-one francs she had on her? She claimed that a mechanic named Jules Cambon had given them to her in Brussels. She had stayed with him in a cheap hotel in the Belgian capital, and they had taken the train together to Paris, and then separated at the Gare du Nord, when he had given her two hundred francs. She had lived on that, staying much of the time with Madame Lescure in the fifteenth arrondissement. Madame Lescure was Octave Garnier’s mother.

  Neighbors there recognized Marie from a police photo, as she was often seen in a first floor window. Marie insisted that she had no idea where Garnier could be found. When police searched the apartment of Garnier’s mother, they found a trunk filled with burglary tools. Marie was released from jail on March 15 in the hope that she might lead authorities to Garnier. Then she disappeared.10

  Police, by now, were fairly certain that Garnier was guilty. The final piece of the puzzle fell into place on January 22, when Ernest Caby, the Société Générale courier who had recovered from his wounds after the robbery on rue Ordener, identified Garnier as the man who shot him. He indicated that the man who shot him was left-handed. Parisian newspapers on January 24 carried photos of Garnier. Le Matin’s giant headline screamed, “The Man Who Shot Me—That’s Him!” beneath a police photo of Garnier.11

  Chapter 11

  HOW TO UNLOAD STOLEN SECURITIES

  With the police closing in, the bandits were confronted with the challenge of selling the securities stolen from the Société Générale. Some of them were high-risk speculations, including some from Spanish railroad companies. Such securities were traceable. Callemin knew that it was dangerous to sell them, because of all the publicity surrounding the heist on rue Ordener. About one hundred twenty- seven thousand francs worth could not be sold and probably ended up in the Seine. That left more than one hundred ninety thousand francs in securities in bearer form (valeurs au porteur).1

  On January 20, Callemin and Bonnot left for Ghent, Belgium, where they met up with Garnier and tried without success to sell some of the stolen securities. They managed to steal a fancy automobile, a Minerva ’11, from a surgeon, holding on to his case of surgeon’s tools for an eventual sale or even use. In Ghent they learned that Callemin was a wanted man in France and that his photo had appeared in the newspapers. The bandits turned the securities over to Jean de Boe, who had worked with a trafficker of such stolen items, Van den Berg, who lived in Amsterdam, but he could not unload the stolen securities. De Boe had no success in Belgium either, and he reported that the securities could not be sold.2

  Callemin, Garnier, and Bonnot then drove to Amsterdam, staying with an acquaintance of de Boe’s, to whom they gave one hundred seventy-five thousand francs worth of the stolen securities in the hope that he could sell them there. They were able to unload enough that, as Callemin put it, “this improved our morale a little.” They apparently burned securities that could never be sold. Bonnot and the others then sold the stolen car for eight thousand francs.3

  Callemin, Garnier, and Bonnot returned to Ghent, where they came upon the garage of an industrialist named Heye. There were two cars inside, one a limousine. A small adjoining room with a bed was empty. Heye’s guard was away, so the plan was to steal both cars before his return. As they got one started up, they heard the key opening a door. The thieves quickly turned off the lights in the garage. When the surprised guard entered, they pulled their revolvers, one of them barking out, “Not a word or you’re dead!” When they told him to start the second car, the guard appeared not to understand the danger of the situation and just stood there, not reacting. The man, who was German, claimed that he did not understand French, which was not true. But one of the bandits spoke a little German and understood when the guard said he was not a chauffeur and did not know anything about automobiles. At that point, “the discussion started to heat up.” Bonnot and Callemin worked on the car, without success. Then Callemin picked up a huge piece of wood and hit the guard on the back of the head, knocking him out. Callemin then hit him with an enomous car jack, and the man stopped moving. Suddenly a voice called out, “What are you doing there?” A man holding a lantern was trying to open a door into the garage, but the body of the chauffeur prevented him from doing so and he quickly disappeared. The bandits grabbed tools and ran outside. They ran into a night watchman, who asked in Flemish about the case that Garnier was toting. Callemin replied, “Things for our trip,” and then shot the man several times, gravely wounding him. They walked along the road to Brussels, reaching the train station in Wetteren, where they took a train to Anvers a
nd then Amsterdam. There they left Van Den Berg a package with more of the stolen securities.

  In The Hague, the bandits found another automobile, this one belonging to a banker. With a full tank of gas, they started south with the goal of returning to France. Driving over bad roads and along canals in the mist, Bonnot decided upon a detour of forty kilometers. He jerked the car to the left, and the automobile slid down the bank of a canal, hitting a tree and thudding to a stop. Peasants, who thought the relatively well-dressed men were English, tried to help them pull the car out of the mud, using horses and ropes. Bonnot and his friends gave them some money, and when the peasants had given up and left, they pushed the automobile into the water. At 3:30 a.m. they left on foot for the nearest train station, twenty-five kilometers away. There they purchased tickets for Anvers, from which they could take a train to Paris.4

  During the trip to Paris, Callemin left the compartment to go to the bathroom. He carried his pistol with him, loaded as always. In the tiny bathroom, he accidentally dropped his revolver. The gun fired, but luckily the sound was not heard because of the roar of the locomotive. The bullet lodged in Raymond’s right arm. In great pain and holding the wound to somewhat reduce bleeding, he returned to the train compartment where Bonnot and Garner were waiting. The surgeon’s case stolen in Ghent now proved fortuitous. Bonnot tightly wrapped the wound, reducing the flow of blood. There was much for them to fear—especially the sudden arrival of a train conductor before Bonnot had been able to care for the wound as best he could. Garnier stood watch in the corridor, his own pistol ready. As Callemin leaned back and Bonnot sat down, a conductor arrived to check tickets. With clenched teeth, Callemin managed to function through the pain, and the conductor noticed nothing. When the conductor moved on, Raymond fainted. Garnier had readied his pistol behind the back of the conductor had he seen anything suspicious. Upon their return to Paris and completely undeterred, the gang readied for their next coups, these being planned by Monier in the southeast around Alès, more than four hundred miles away from Paris.5

  The Parisian press was covering the gang’s every known move, and the police were hunting them down. Newspapers orchestrated the veritable psychosis of fascination and fear in the capital. But how would the anarchist press react to the violent crimes, allegedly the work of illegalists? Le Libertaire, the principal organ of anarchist communism, did not mention what had transpired. Jean Grave’s Le Temps Nouveaux, which had always opposed illegalism, insisted that such crimes were becoming the public face of anarchism, insisting that “at the moment they commit such acts, they cease to be anarchists.” Such acts had nothing to do with anarchism and were, for that matter, “purely and simply bourgeois,” reflecting the “principles of egotistical individualism.”6

  Despite the fact that Victor Kibaltchiche had been a constant critic of illegalism and violence, his provocative editorial in L’Anarchie on January 4 nonetheless gave the impression that he defended illegalist violence. He assessed the role of the courier Caby, “who consented, this poor guy with his miserable salary, to transport fortunes.” He therefore stood with “the miserable cowards who could never imagine audacity nor the will to really live, and now denounce the rebels (les hors-la-loi); and with the dogs who are the police, the journalists-police spies, the grocers sweating fear, and the rich who are more ferocious in their hatred of those who resist.” He saluted those who had “firmly decided to not squander the precious hours of their life in servitude.” Confronted by the realities of contemporary society, their choice had been between “servitude and crime. Vigorous and brave, they chose battle—crime.” A week later, responding to an article in La Dépêche de Toulouse that had compared the bandits to wolves, he affirmed, “I am with the wolves, the wolves who are hunted, being starved out, and tracked, but who can bite back!” The causes of the violent acts of the bandits, he argued, would only disappear when the social order was transformed.7

  On or around January 23, someone came to tell Rirette that Callemin and Garnier wanted to see her. They would await her on a corner of rue du Temple in the Marais. Rirette went as instructed and the three talked, standing on the sidewalk early in the evening as stores closed and metal screens slammed down. A policeman asked them to move away to facilitate pedestrians passing by, and they complied. Garnier invited Rirette and Callemin to dinner, and they went into a cheap restaurant, sitting at the only available table, right in the middle of the room. Rirette would take their seeming indifference to being seen in a public place as reflecting a sort of fatalism that had engulfed the two. Next to them, diners were reading evening newspapers, which related that a reward of one hundred francs had been offered for the capture of the two men—who just happened to be sitting at a table next to them. A woman discussed this tidy sum with her companion. At their nearby table, Garnier easily recognized her Belgian accent and brazenly piped up that he, too, would love having such a windfall, but that certainly he would never have the good fortune. He then laughed out loud, while Rirette had difficulty swallowing her food. Garnier and Callemin had apparently given up trying to hide. Yet Garnier said in a lower tone of voice, “They don’t dare arrest us, and this could go on a long time.” Callemin replied only, “This can go on as long as we do.”8

  Chapter 12

  THE POLICE IN ACTION

  On the night of January 30, André Soudy slept in Victor and Rirette’s apartment. Fearing the police, he left at four in the morning. A couple of hours later there came a much-louder knock on the door. It was Louis-François Jouin, as ever wearing a tie to signify his status as deputy director of Security, accompanied by several policemen. His long, sad face belied a pleasant and, for his position, not very aggressive personality. Jouin had come to ask some questions and to oversee a search of the apartment. In their search, the officers found two Browning pistols that had been stolen from the armament store on rue Lafayette. This burglary was almost certainly the work of Bonnot, Callemin, and Garnier. Victor and Rirette denied the theft, insisting that they had bought the revolvers from a “comrade” whose name they did not know.1

  That afternoon, Victor was summoned to Jouin’s office to sign the list of what the police had carted off with them. The policeman told Victor that he was very sorry to cause him any problems—and that he admired the anarchist writing of Sébastien Faure and realized that Victor was an intellectual, unlike many of his compagnons. He deplored the damage being done to the anarchist ideal by the illegalists acting outside of the law. But he advised Victor that the world “will not change very quickly.” He suggested if he was taken into “preventative custody,” his stay in jail could be long, but suggested that this could be avoided. He wanted information, promising that no one would ever know about their conversation and warning that “If you keep silent, you will get six months of preventative prison.” Victor had nothing to tell the policeman. Jouin’s threat was not idle. A tiny cell in the prison of La Santé awaited Victor. He found himself imprisoned alongside convicts who were awaiting the death sentence.2

  Victor was arrested by virtue of the “Scoundrel Laws” (les lois scélérates) as they had become known. This meant that anyone could be arrested at any time for having the slightest relationship with known anarchists, violent or not. The laws facilitated a repressive onslaught against anarchists.

  On December 9, 1893, Auguste Vaillant, a destitute man unable to afford to feed his family, had thrown a harmless small explosive device into the Chamber of Deputies to call attention to the plight of the poor (he became the first person executed in France during the nineteenth century who had not been convicted of murder). On December 12 and July 28, 1894, the French National Assembly passed in great haste laws that made it possible to prosecute virtually any anarchist, or anyone who had in any way helped an anarchist who was linked to some “deed” or “planned deed,” even if they were in no way involved, or if they simply espoused anarchism.

  With anarchism itself considered a “secte abominable,” the laws identified terrorism with
anarchism. Jurists and politicians now felt free to refer to anarchists in terms that had previously been applied to “marginal social elements.” Elite attitudes toward anarchists fit into the obsession with degeneracy and the concern with statistical increases in the number of people classified as criminals, alcoholics, or insane. The upper classes considered anarchists to be particularly dangerous because of their unrelenting opposition to social hierarchy, which they intended to destroy. The Scoundrel Laws defined anarchist crimes as offenses against common law, and therefore they could be punishable by death.3

  The Scoundrel Laws offered courts a wide-ranging definition of what constituted “provocation,” direct or indirect, and authorized harsh penalties for “apologies” for criminal acts. The assumption behind the laws was that a close solidarity existed between terrorists and anarchist intellectuals such as Victor and Rirette. The laws were directed at anyone who could be accused of “preparing an attack,” a definition that included “the training of minds by propaganda.” The notion of “propaganda by the deed” was extended to cover all sorts of basically harmless propaganda. It proposed a brand new crime: “an agreement established in the goal of preparing or committing crimes against persons or property.” What constituted an “entente” was left purposefully vague. To take one well-known example: A “malfaiteur” (evildoer) commits a crime. He is then lodged by a comrade, and that evening he borrows a pen from his host to write a note to someone who is involved in or aware of the crime. Both the anarchist and the person who provided him a place to sleep and loaned him a pen could be convicted of the same crime. The law of December 18, 1893, also targeted “associations de malfaiteurs” (associations of evildoers), considered an entente for crime. The law of July 28 made “anarchist views a potential (virtuel) crime against common law (droit commun)”—and thus not considered a political offense and therefore subject to harsh penalties.4 So armed, the police routinely trampled public liberties. Authorities banned an international workers’ revolutionary congress that was to meet in Paris in 1900, the year of the World’s Fair. Searches without cause became routine. And so did police beatings.