Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  Le Matin was indignant: “To avenge Louis Jouin: the hunt for anarchists. They are arrested in the morning and go free that very evening. And Bonnot still cannot be found!”12 Torrents of denunciations poured into police offices, as teams of officers scoured the suburbs of Paris, particularly those offering forests as potential hiding places. Other missives arrived purporting to have been sent by the bandits. One that was nicely written—often not the case—was signed “Bonnot” and informed Guichard that he and his friends were on the Côte d’Azur: “Please forgive me for having left Paris without having notified the police, who are so costly and who serve so little purpose.” The author sent along fingerprints, “in place of the flowers of Nice.”13

  Chapter 17

  BESIEGED IN CHOISY-LE-ROI

  In the wake of the killing of Louis Jouin, Xavier Guichard ordered a flurry of more searches and interrogations in working-class neighborhoods in Paris and its industrial suburbs. Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maîtrejean were among the most prominent of those taken in because they had associated with members of the Bonnot Gang. A number of anarchists who had avoided military conscription were arrested. Searches of the residences of “illegalists” were only modestly fruitful, turning up counterfeit money and items stolen in burglaries—the usual. The crackdown made it less likely that Victor and Rirette, two of the more well-known anarchist intellectuals in prison, would be released. They remained incarcerated.

  As for Jules Bonnot, he moved from place to place in Paris and its region, never staying anywhere for more than one night. Those with whom he lodged may or may not have suspected whom they were putting up—the “right to asylum” remained sacred in anarchist circles. More denunciations and letters containing information about possible hiding places for Bonnot and the others arrived in huge quantities at Security headquarters. Almost all were useless. One letter led police to a quiet street in the fourteenth arrondissement where a Russian lived. They showed photos of the suspects to the concierge, who assured them that the man living in the building was not one of them. He was Vladimir Ulyanov, later to become known as Lenin. Yet another letter suggested that the properties of the “anarchist millionaire” Fromentin should be sought in Choisy-le-Roi just south of Paris. Ten years earlier, Fromentin had purchased a large tract of land there and had set up an anarchist colony, constructing small detached houses (“pavillons”) that he sold or rented out. The same man who had linked Gauzy and Cardi seemed, once more, to be leading the way toward Bonnot. Anarchists of any persuasion—anarcho-syndicalists, individualists, illegalists, or mere intellectuals—were targets for police and judicial action.1

  A pharmacist reported that on April 24 a man wearing a raincoat and a melon-shaped hat, a description that could well fit Bonnot himself, had been seen at the garage of Joseph Dubois. Dubois was a Russian-born anarchist to whom Fromentin had also loaned money to start a business, and he knew Bonnot as well. Dubois did not approve of Bonnot’s crimes but had vowed to defend him if necessary. Indeed Bonnot and Platano had apparently planned to stay with Dubois after they arrived in the Paris region several months earlier. Platano, of course, never made it. The police had learned that Dubois had sold a car that Bonnot had stolen in Lyon, making him even more suspect.2

  The pharmacist had treated the wound of a man who corresponded to the descriptions and photos of Bonnot that were everywhere in the press. The man had threatened him with a pistol. Information gathered the same day indicated the presence at the garage of Joseph Dubois.3

  Early in the morning on Sunday, April 18, Guichard and a number of policemen went to Choisy-le-Roi to interview twenty-four-year-old Juliette Frémont, who worked in a nearby rubber factory. She insisted that she knew nothing of Bonnot or his friends, but she enraged her interrogators by proudly stating that she would be pleased to shelter the bandit. This led to a thorough search of her apartment. Police found nothing the least suspect. A bar next door was also searched, in vain.4

  The police squad, about twenty men in all, then descended on the Dubois garage, which was surrounded by vacant lots, not far from the Seine.5 It was a clumsy structure built of cement blocks on the ground floor, a brick second floor, and a roof of red tiles. By that point, Dubois had begun his workday. When the police arrived, he was hunched over the motor of a motorcycle, as a young boy watched with fascination and handed him tools as necessary. Inspector Arlon announced the police presence and Dubois suddenly saw what he was up against. He quickly dried his hands on the back of his workcoat and yelled to the boy to run away.

  Dubois retreated into his garage. The police yelled out, “Hands up! Don’t shoot! Hands up and we won’t hurt you!” Dubois quickly returned with a pistol and began to fire, aiming at the police. He ducked back into the garage when the police fired at him, then stepped out again, firing at the police and lightly wounding Inspector Arlon. Dubois then retreated behind a car in the garage and, having been hit by at least one police bullet, collapsed.

  From the second floor, a man wearing dark pants and a white shirt, with one arm wrapped in a bandage, began to fire at the police. He pulled back, and then began shooting again, wounding another policeman amid a barrage of bullets flying in both directions. The police recognized Jules Bonnot. The now famous bandit then began firing from a window, wounding another police inspector.6

  Bonnot was trapped above the garage; the only access was by the exterior wooden staircase. Guichard, sporting his tricolor sash, called in gendarmes and policemen as reinforcements, having no idea of the number of men and weapons above the garage. He considered asking the army to provide machine guns and maybe some artillery to use against the man firing from the second-floor window, but Guichard already had an imposing armed force at his disposal. Requisitioned tramways brought more official reinforcements. Republican guards stepped out of taxis. They took up positions in ditches around the garage. Wearing his top hat and carrying a cane, Louis Lépine emerged from his limousine and announced that he would command police operations. The prefect of police was always eager to be photographed.

  As news of the drama quickly spread, residents of Choisy-le-Roi hurried to the garage, many armed with aged rifles and pistols as if they were going off to war. Thousands of gawkers came to witness the spectacle on a warm and sunny day, some arriving in cars causing a traffic jam. Couples arrived with small children and babies and picnicked with sausages, bread, and wine. The siege was transforming into a festival. By ten in the morning, at least five thousand people had turned up, held back by policemen. The crowd applauded as police and soldiers fired at the garage. From the building, Bonnot kept on firing back. The mayor of Choisy-le-Roi arrived, resplendent in his tricolor stash, and began to fire his hunting rifle in the general direction of the shooter assumed to be Bonnot. A nearby bar served as headquarters for the “forces of order.” A hundred policemen, a company of Gardes républicains, a detachment of gendarmes, a recently formed brigade of police with the goal of combating anarchism, and firemen stood ready. Surrounding the building, they began to fire, riddling the structure. Then the bugles of the firemen called out a ceasefire.

  Local residents and others join the siege of Dubois’s garage in Choisy-le-Roi.

  At this point, Guichard decided to blow up the garage with dynamite. The authorities requisitioned a peasant’s cart, complete with bales of straw and an attached horse to pull it. A first attempt to move the cart toward the building was greeted with a volley of shots, most absorbed into mattresses that had been arranged on the cart to protect Lieutenant Paul Fortan, a Garde républicain, who was pushing it. Fortan lit the fuse for a stick of dynamite at the base of the northwest corner of the garage. Nothing. It did not ignite. Fortan tossed a second stick of dynamite at the house. It exploded, but did little damage. The third time was the charm. Fortan lit a fuse and placed the dynamite against the wall of the garage. A powerful explosion took out some of the western part of the building, which was then enveloped in thick smoke as a fire spread on the roof. Finally, a major
assault began on the garage and its residents. The huge throng of onlookers roared its approval.7

  Guichard, his deputy, his younger brother Paul—who was also a policeman, overseeing the great market of Les Halles8—and Lieutenant Fortan charged into the garage. They came upon Dubois’s cadaver, his left hand still clutching a pistol with two unused bullets. Then, protected by a mattress they carried in front of them, the assault team went up the outside staircase to the rooms upstairs. Armed with revolvers, they forced open the door to the first room. It was empty. Rushing, albeit cautiously, into the second room, Paul Guichard shouted, “Bonnot is here! He is still alive!” Bonnot’s face and body were riddled with bullet wounds. He had rolled himself up in two mattresses.

  Bullets littered the floor. Two large Browning pistols were on the floor, along with a smaller revolver. A box of twenty-five cartridges lay under Bonnot’s head. In a small container, police found a white chemical that they believed to be potassium cyanide. The bandit was still alive and fired at least one more shot, which struck a wall, shouting, “You bunch of bastards!” when he was unable to fire any more. He would die as he had lived, in utter rage and violence. Surrounded by hundreds of police and soldiers, he knew it would end that way.

  Jules Bonnot, wrapped in a mattress, is mortally wounded in Choisy-le-Roi.

  Policemen carried Bonnot, still barely alive, out of the building, fending off people from the crowd who rushed forward to strike Bonnot, despite the fact that he was obviously gravely wounded. A few people charged into the garage and began to kick Dubois’s lifeless body. Bonnot was carried to an ambulance for the trip to the Hôtel Dieu. He died there at 1:15 p.m., with eleven bullets lodged in his body, including three in his head and two in his chest.

  After six hours, legions of police and soldiers had managed to finally finish off two men besieged in a garage in a vacant lot. Although some might have noticed that the “forces of order” had used dynamite, the chosen weapon of anarchists Ravachol and Émile Henry two decades earlier, in the end it was guns, not the explosive, that killed Jules Bonnot. As soon as the police had carried Bonnot out, a crowd stormed into the building to nab souvenirs, including Dubois’s tools and most anything else they could carry away.9

  Bonnot left behind a notebook, in which he had written: “I am a famous man. My renown trumpets my name to the four corners of the globe. The publicity awarded to my humble person by the press should make jealous all those who go to so much trouble to have anyone speak of them and who don’t manage to pull it off.” One might wonder to what extent the publicity generated by the mass Parisian press pushed Bonnot to continue his “exploits.” He had achieved renown.

  The crowd moves toward the garage where Bonnot has been mortally wounded. Some would carry away souvenirs to sell or to keep.

  Bonnot’s note went on: “Should I regret what I have done? Perhaps, but I have to continue and despite any regrets, I will do so… I have the right to live. Everybody has the right to live and because your imbecile and criminal society intends to get in my way, too bad for you all.”10

  In his note, Bonnot insisted that his lover Judith Thollon and her husband were not involved in his acts, nor were Antoine Gauzy and Eugène Dieudonné, both of whom were in jail. He ended with “I die.” And signed it “Bonnot.” He left a small trunk containing various military papers and drivers’ licenses, all in other names, as well as a capsule of potassium cyanide.11

  The press went wild. Newspapers doubled and tripled their normally large print runs in this their golden age. L’Excelsior offered four pages of photographic reproductions of the siege, the final assault, and the capture and death of Jules Bonnot. Men and boys selling newspapers in the streets jacked up their prices as the number of copies available diminished. The recent rage for postcard photographs also contributed to the public’s fascination with Bonnot’s demise. News photos were quickly transformed into postcards for sale, complementing reporting in the press. Even more than before, crimes, and especially bloody crimes, sold big. An increasingly insecure public wanted to know what might be next for them.12

  Le Matin insisted that Xavier Guichard had himself pumped a bullet into Bonnot’s head. The Parisian press, often critical of the police, sanctified the men of Sûreté and the brave Lieutenant Fortan. L’Excelsior demanded stronger means of police action and the right-wing, anti-Semitic La Libre Parole called for the expulsion of “cosmopolitan anarchists”—Jews—from France. Many of the policemen who participated in the siege asked to be decorated for their efforts and a good many were. They had, after all, helped hundreds of gendarmes and troops overcome two men.13

  The very first trains of the next morning carried Parisian newspapers and photos into the provinces. “La Bande Tragique… Les Assassins de la Rue Ordener, Chantilly, Ivry, Choisy-le-Roi,” an “édition de luxe,” went for sixty centimes and included photos of the body of Dubois and of his garage blowing up.14

  The bodies of Bonnot and Dubois were tossed into a common grave—the “Champ de Navets” (“Field of Turnips”)—in Bagneux, just south of Paris. Xavier Guichard and his brother Paul, meanwhile, received gold medals, and Xavier Guichard was decorated with the Legion of Honor eight months later, along with Lieutenant Fortan and inspector Arlon, as well as another of his colleagues. Over the next few days, tens of thousands of residents of the Paris region went out to Choisy-le-Roi to have a look at what was left of the site of Bonnot’s last stand. On May 13, an auction of the “historical” items in the garage and house that had not been carried away by the crowd at the end of the siege attracted hundreds of people, some of whom bid on possessions damaged by the fires. They took away boards shattered by bullets and stained with blood as souvenirs. Jules Bonnot’s last bed went for five francs, the sheets for six.15

  The memorial service for Louis Jouin took place on April 29 at Notre-Dame Cathedral. His death at the hands of Jules Bonnot catapulted him from an occasional target of derision into a hero. Théodore Steeg, minister of the interior, saluted Jouin’s courage “against terrifying adversaries seeking to panic the popular imagination with the sinister novelty of their organization and their weapons.” The president of the municipal council of Paris loudly lamented rampant criminality. The events in Ivry-sur-Seine dramatically increased the collective psychosis as well as the demands for better coordination between the various policing authorities. Commentators insisted that if gendarmes had surrounded Gauzy’s store, Jouin would not have been killed. They also decried the fact that the “forces of order” lacked the weapons available to these modern bandits

  Louis Lépine’s eulogy quickly turned political. The prefect of police reminded those assembled that in five years, thirteen policemen had now been killed in the line of duty. He insisted emphatically that society had the right to defend itself and that the courts did not deal harshly enough with criminals, finding “attenuating circumstances” and excusing crimes because the perpetrators were young “and were just beginning their criminal careers.”16

  Le Matin succeeded in finding and interviewing Sophie Bonnot, who lived in Annemasse on the Swiss border with the son she had born with Jules, whom she had not seen in five years: “Very quickly I knew the torments of betrayal, the revolting brutality of the miserable person to whom I had given myself.” She insisted that he never liked work, and that money was his single passion and that he would do anything to have it.17

  The few dissenting voices could be found in the anarchist and syndicalist papers. In L’Anarchie in April 1912, Mauricius, who had been editing the newspaper under the pseudonym “Lionel” since Rirette’s arrest, wrote indicating his approval of the crimes of Bonnot and his gang: “Bonnot, with his revolver in his hand, going out to take back bourgeois gold in the saddlebag of the Société Générale, and defending himself with bullets from his Browning, was an anarchist.” He saluted Bonnot’s anarchism, depicting him as “alone against an army of cops, soldiers, magistrates and the rabble of “honnêtes gens.”18 La Bataille syndicaliste a
dopted the same tone, but with a telling difference: “Bonnot and his acolytes are impatient for social justice. Bonnot is a monster, but what can one say about [Xavier] Guichard?” Mauricius was indicted for apologizing for a crime and sentenced to five years in prison, but the conviction was overturned on appeal. In La Guerre sociale, Gustave Hervé wrote the equivalent of a eulogy for Bonnot, saluting his courage as a “wild boar tracked” by the police, who, before being killed, somehow found a way “to kill one of the pack of dogs who were tracking him.” The newspaper defended the right to asylum and announced a collection for the families of anarchists arrested in the police round-ups for which the acts of the Bonnot Gang had served as a pretext.19

  The novelist Léon Bloy was not alone in sarcastically highlighting the “glorious victory of ten thousand against one. The country is in great joy and several bastards will be decorated.” Cynics noted that it was the first victory of the French since Austrian troops were defeated at the Battle of Solferino in 1859.20 At least for some, Bonnot’s death transformed him from a vicious bandit into a martyr and a hero.

  Chapter 18

  SPECTACLE IN NOGENT-SUR-MARNE

  On May 14, fifty armed detectives led by Guichard and Lépine headed out to Nogent-sur-Marne where they believed Garnier and Valet might be hiding. The decisive tip possibly could have come from a resident of the eastern suburb, a bank employee who had agreed to convert stolen securities, but who then called the police after recognizing Garnier and Valet. But it is more likely that the information was provided by Alphonse Kinable, who went to the quai des Orfèvres to relate that two suspicious young men and their girlfriends had been living in the “Villa Bonhoure,” a house that was considerably less stately than its name would suggest. Kinable thought that the men’s hair had been dyed and noticed that they remained inside almost all the time. The woman who did their shopping had a Belgian accent and from police photos he recognized Marie la Belge. In the meantime, the earlier presence of Anna Dondon could now be confirmed by nearby residents, but the presence of Valet or Garnier could not.1