Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  Beneath the slick veneer of the fin de siècle and the first years of the twentieth century, the embrace of violence and the anticipation of war took on wider cultural dimensions as well. Futurist artists in France and other countries, attracted by technological innovations and speed, eagerly looked forward to war. Likewise, the emergence of mass sports, including soccer and rugby, also manifested martial concomitants and the growing obsession of nationalists that French soldiers be fit and ready for a war against Germany. Proliferating gymnastic clubs echoed patriotic themes. Their members were expected to be ready to fight.9

  War-like patriotism became a regular theme even in music hall reviews. Patriotic themes filled the Moulin Rouge in January 1912. Films reflected the growing obsession with war, including Honor the Soldier and Don’t Touch Our Flag! Frenzied cheers greeted To the Glory of the French Army at the Gaumont-Palace cinema on the first day of 1913. That year, a man assumed for some reason to be German and thus a German spy was chased by thugs near the theater. Newspapers reflected the increasing obsession with German saber rattling. Ernest Psichari’s L’Appel des armes published that year celebrated patriotic Catholicism and the virtues of war—the enemy was clearly the (largely) Protestant Germany.10

  In January 1913, a soapy theatrical piece called Alsace! opened at the Réjane Theater on rue Blanche. Taking place in Thann, near Colmar, the central point of the play was that Alsatians could never really be assimilated into the German Reich, but would always be French. Excited audiences cheered frenetically.11

  In November 1913, German soldiers—not from Alsace, whose residents were not trusted in Berlin—insulted Alsatians in the Saverne/Zabern Affair (the names of the town in French and in German). Both the German and French governments reacted with fury, before things calmed down. Yet the idea of “Revanche” remained in the air in France. The Michelin Company offered a prize for aviators capable of dropping practice bombs on a target. The French were not alone. German nationalists, too, seemed eager for war.12

  At the time Victor had written in L’Anarchie, “The possibility of a war preoccupies everyone, thinking about the sheer horror of battlefields and burned villages, bodies along every road and entire regiments decimated.” He predicted, “All of Europe is moving toward solutions of violence. We are breathing the oppressive air of l’avant-guerre.”13

  Anarchist propaganda during the Balkan Wars in 1912 and 1913 reiterated the call for insurrection against an eventual war. (The first Balkan War was fought by Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia, and Greece against the Ottoman Empire in 1912. The Second Balkan War, a year later, pitted Montenegro, Serbia, Greece, and Romania against Bulgaria.) The Fédération Communiste Anarchiste readied plans for sabotage. A Revolutionary Manual explained how to make bombs. Circulars included propagating instructions about how to destroy rail lines and viaducts, telegraph lines, and even how to sabotage an airplane. Anarchists encouraged desertion from the army and counseled acts of sabotage if mobilization was declared, to make it more difficult to marshal troops in military centers. With the Second Moroccan Crisis, the CGT insisted on the necessity of insurrection in the case of war. Protest meetings took place, including one bringing together as many as twenty thousand people at an “Aéro Park” outside of Paris, where speakers denounced the government’s seeming plans for war and proposed a general strike to protest a move toward hostilities with Germany. France had ordered thirty planes for military purposes the year before and now purchased sixty more, holding its first military air show. In June 1912, Le Libertaire had complained of the cost of building planes for army at a time when “We can no longer live with our miserable salaries.”14

  In December 1912, L’Anarchie noted with accuracy that “rumors of war are in the air.… The coalition of five powers… arms and mobilizes in secret and newspapers heat up public opinion; alarming news circulates and we are so close to an inevitable butchery.… Everywhere an intense fervor reigns.” Three months later, in March, diplomatic tension increased again. Clearly, “the slightest incidence would be transformed into a matter of national honor and make a war inevitable,” one that would “bring dreadful results.”15

  Anarchists joined the widespread campaign against the Three Year Law, proposed to the Chamber of Deputies in May 1913 under the stewardship of Poincaré. The law, approved in July, increased the term of military conscription, which had been reduced from three to two years in 1905, back to three years. The principal reason was clear: there were sixty-seven million Germans and only thirty-nine million French, and the Reich had a standing army of more than eight hundred thousand men. The Three Year Law brought French service in line with several other allies and enemies. The Fédération Communiste Anarchiste printed a hundred thousand brochures, “Against Three years, Against all Militarism.” Enormous protests against the law coincided with anniversary of Bloody Week during the Paris Commune.

  One month before the protests, Callemin, Monier, and Soudy were executed. The anarchist newspaper La Guerre sociale drew a clear connection between the Bonnot Gang and the war that was sure to come: “The crimes of these tracked wild animals, as revolting as they may be, are far from equaling the horrors that society is now committing.”16

  Still, there were other things to distract Parisians in 1913—and not just the trial of the Bonnot Gang’s surviving members. On May 29, despite several years of success of his Russian ballets, Serge Diaghilev’s Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) shocked and angered the decidedly upper-class audience at the sparkling new Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, a recently constructed cement palace on avenue Montaigne that combined a classic style with emerging Art Deco. Most of the outraged crowd whistled at the choreography of the great dancer and Diaghilev’s young lover, Vaslav Nijinsky. The complicated and somewhat violent avant-garde keys of the young Russian composer Igor Stravinsky found admirers, but to traditionalists, the performance provided further affirmation that contemporary life was spinning out of control. Many in the audience expressed their disapproval, and here and there fights broke out. A reviewer scathed, “It’s not the Rite of Spring, It’s the Massacre of Spring!”17

  The first part of Marcel Proust’s À elle la recherche du temps perdu, that classic of modernism, was published that same year. Proust’s great novel takes place exclusively in the wealthy arrondissements of western Paris, where he lived on boulevard Haussmann. Proust presented anything but a panoramique view of Paris. He drew upon his memories of literary salons, banquets, and the interchanges of the Parisian elite, evoking the intimate details of privileged life, one that would have meant very little indeed to most ordinary Parisians.18 Few who read Proust’s novel when it first appeared could have imagined that war was drawing near.

  The war that anarchists—and others—feared and that many nationalists wanted did indeed come to Europe. On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo. The Austro-Hungarian government handed a devastating ultimatum to Serbia on July 23. The German Empire famously gave Austria-Hungary a blank check by indicating that it would fully support any Habsburg response to the crisis, including war. The French government frantically demanded Russian assurance that it would honor the military alliance between the two powers, leaving Germany and its Habsburg ally to fight a war on two fronts. Russia declared mobilization on July 30, an act tantamount to a declaration of war. German commanders believed that the planned invasion of France via Belgium would have to begin almost immediately so that their enemies across the Rhine could be quickly defeated. Attention could be then turned toward the east, to stopping the big Russian bear, whose troops would, they assumed, require as long as several weeks to be readied for war. The European alliance system’s house of cards was quickly bringing on the Great War.

  Yet during the dramatic international crisis, in France popular attention focused on the possibility of an income tax—approved by the Senate on July 25—and on the murder trial that began on July 20 of Madame Henriette Caillaux, the wife of
Joseph Caillaux, former minister of finances and of the interior and head of the Radical Party. On March 16, 1914, Madame Caillaux had shot and killed Gaston Calmette in his office—with a Browning, of course. Calmette was the editor of Le Figaro, and his newspaper had violently attacked Joseph Caillaux, never forgiving his support for an income tax. On July 28, one month after the assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo, the jury found Madame Caillaux not guilty of this crime of passion by a vote of 11 to 1 after only an hour of deliberations.19

  On July 27, La Bataille syndicaliste, under the headline “On the Brink of the Abyss,” announced prophetically that “the unleashing of a cataclysm that will surpass in horror what men with the fullest imagination could never conceive of hangs by a thread… It is the burial, pure and simple, of humanity.”20

  Yet with hostilities now virtually inevitable, anarchists’ determination weakened as the war approached. Six hundred demonstrators were arrested on July 27 protesting the onrushing war, some of them anarchists. For all their planning, anarchists posed no threat to the French state as it moved toward war.21

  The great socialist leader Jean Jaurès went to Brussels on July 29 to participate in a massive demonstration against the war. He returned to Paris and on the evening of July 31; Raoul Villain, a young right-wing nationalist, shot Jaurès dead as he sat in the Café Croissant on rue Montmartre near the offices of L’Humanité. Jaurès had just decided on the next morning’s headline, “En Avant!”—“Forward!”22

  Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, 1914, and the next day Belgium rejected Germany’s demand that the small, strategically important country allow Germany’s troops to pass through Belgium on the way to France. Germany delivered an absurd ultimatum to France that same day and declared war two days later. Crowds of soldiers and civilians rushed to the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l’Est, shouting, “To Berlin!” In Berlin, soldiers and civilians rushed to the Hauptbahnhof shouting, “To Paris!”

  Most of the leaders of the CGT were away from Paris when the war broke out. Mobilization against the war was decentralized and depended on local initiative. Although the mobilization was greeted with a lack of enthusiasm in France—particularly in the countryside, as the harvest approached—no general strike was forthcoming as anarchists had hoped. Internationalism disappeared. With the Germans invading France, possible movements against the war vanished into the air. The dire necessity of defending France created the Sacred Union, the unity of all political parties. That the government did not apply “Carnet B”—a list of socialist, syndicalist, and anarchist militants who were to be arrested upon the mobilization for war—contributed to the emergence of the “Sacred Union,” even if it was then viewed as a short-term solution. The 1914 legislative elections had returned more than a hundred deputies—they rallied to the war effort as German forces approached France. Some anarchists accepted the “Sacred Union,” while others left the struggle against war because of the repression and the shock of seeing former comrades enter the army. Most anarchist groups and public meetings and causeries simply disappeared into what would be an impossibly long night. Anarchist propaganda disappeared. The last issue of L’Anarchie had appeared on July 22, 1914. Workers went off to war as everyone else. War took over and there was nothing to be done.23

  Most people in France believed that the war would be short and victorious. The fall of Mulhouse to German forces and massive losses in August (at least two hundred thousand casualties and twenty-seven thousand killed on one day, August 22) and in September at the Battle of the Marne—in which eighty-one thousand soldiers on both sides were killed—shocked all of France. The prison in Melun, where Victor was being held, was only twenty-four miles from the Battle of the Marne in September 1914, but the prisoners were deprived of any news about it, or about anything else about the war raging so near.24

  Charles Péguy, who had written the minister of war that since 1905 war was “our only thought” and had loudly denounced the pacifist instincts of Jean Jaurès, was killed in battle at Villeroy near Meaux on September 5. Guillaume Apollinaire entered the war as an artilleryman, writing where he could in trenches and dugouts, working on battered wooden tables or slabs of cement. Cubism also went to war, its design techniques used to camouflage soldiers’ uniforms.25

  Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maîtrejean took no comfort or solace in the fact that millions died during the Great War as states battled it out in total war.26 The Great War destroyed Europe as they knew it, and they watched helplessly, Victor from prison and Rirette from her small apartment in Paris, as the continent disappeared in absolutely unprecedented, murderous violence. “You may not be interested in war,” Léon Trotsky once said, “but war is interested in you.”27 The Great War unleashed the demons of the twentieth century.

  Chapter 22

  AFTERMATH

  During most of the Great War Victor languished in prison in Melun. Friends undertook several attempts to obtain a pardon for him, supported by the director of the prison, but each time the Ministry of Justice turned down the request. Victor was one of rare few political prisoners at the time forced to serve out virtually his entire sentence. In the meantime, he witnessed “promiscuity, half-crazy (prisoners) and victims of all kinds” suffering “the lack of food and the rule of silence forced on life in common at all times, humiliating, torturous, and debilitating punishments, as well as the deprivation as much as possible of intellectual exercise.”1

  Rirette had officially divorced Louis Maîtrejean in November 1913 and she and Victor obtained permission to marry. The brief ceremony, with two prison guards as the witnesses, took place in the town hall of Melun on August 3, 1915. Guards allowed them to spend an hour alone together back in a prison office, and then that was that. During the time of Victor’s incarceration, he sent Rirette 528 letters, each numbered by the controlling authorities.2

  In their correspondence, they disagreed on what Victor should do once he was freed. Victor decided that he should apply for early release on the condition that he join a regiment of the Russian army stationed in France. Rirette, who had heard about the horrors of life—and death—in the trenches, contended that he should serve out his term.3

  After almost five years in prison for having been convicted of, in his words, “the triple crime of being a foreigner, being an anarchist, and not wanting to become a police spy,” Victor was released on January 31, 1917. He spent several weeks in Paris. After so many years in a prison cell, “I filled my eyes with distant horizons and my lungs with good air.” He wrote, “The city is beautiful and made a very good impression on me.” But Victor found Belleville even poorer than the last time he had been there. War had taken its toll on the residents, too. A shop advertised enamel medallions of soldiers. A funeral service announced: “Funerals in twenty-four hours, moderate pricing, with an installment plan.” With the war, there was a lot of business to be had. Yet civilian life went on, “Pigalle, Clichy, le faubourg Montmartre, and the great boulevards, are teeming with people who amuse themselves, but after us, le déluge! … the faubourgs sink into an intense darkness, but the well lit center vibrates long into the night.” Victor was absolutely without resources, so Émile Armand, who had taken over editorship of L’Anarchie, organized a collection of funds for him, but this brought in only 235 francs.4

  After spending time with Rirette and her children, Victor took a train in late February to Barcelona. Rirette followed in May, but left a month later, unable to find work. Strains began to appear in their relationship—after all, they had seen each other but once in almost five years: the day of their marriage. Victor confided to Émile Armand that from then on he and Rirette considered themselves “entirely free so far as regards the one to the other.”5

  Victor did, however, feel obliged to respond to the furor in anarchist circles that the publication of Rirette’s memoirs in Le Matin had caused. In prison, he had heard nothing of this. Now he simply noted that she alone had been responsible for wha
t she had written. She remained “my partner.” They had been separated for five years, even though being apart so long did not change “our life together… especially such a past—of struggle and separation, [and] a tight ideological solidarity.”6

  In Barcelona Victor joined a veritable colony of deserters from French, Russian, and German armies, including individualists and revolutionaries. Here he took the alias or nom de plume of Victor Serge. He worried that “Le Rétif” would be known and that the reactionary Spanish press would attack him and associate all anarchists with prison sentences. He signed an article with “Le Rétif” for the last time on February 12, then used Victor or Victor K., then V. S. Le Rétif.

  Yet Victor found no peace in the Catalan sun. The cafés were improbably full while millions were dying in the war. Moreover, he did not have a great impression of the people of Barcelona: “The Spanish [sic] are ten times less apt to take initiative than the French and a hundred times more sleeping.” During the five months he was there, Victor worked in printing shops and collaborated with Tierra y Libertad, where he signed his first article Victor Serge. The failure of a general strike planned for July 19 disappointed him. He now fully accepted collective action.7

  Following the Russian February Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the tsarist autocracy and led to a provisional government, Victor increasingly turned his attention to the dramatic situation in the country he had never seen. A change had come over him: “With my Russian background, I believed in revolution as a concrete reality.”8 In Paris years earlier, he had translated Russian modernists from the prerevolutionary period into French and had read widely about the French Revolution. Rirette remembered: “When the Russian Revolution burst out, it immediately seemed to him that he should go there, be there, participate, in it, and put great effort into it.”9