Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

by John Merriman

  5 EA 140.

  6 Chomarat, Les Amants tragiques, p. 49, letter sent by Mercier to Monsieur le chef de la Sûreté, March 30, 1912: “I knew Bonnot very well, although it was more than three years ago when I quarreled with him. I know how anxious he becomes when he is alone and although he seems ready for anything, he has a terrible fear of being hit.” He offered his services to help arrest him.

  7 Parry, The Bonnot Gang, p. 69.

  8 Chomarat, Les Amants tragiques, pp. 7–9.

  9 Frédéric Delacourt, L’Affaire bande à Bonnot (Paris, 2006), pp. 18–20; Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot, pp. 24–26; Maîtrejean, Souvenirs d’anarchie, pp. 34, 42; Dominique Depond, Jules Bonnot et sa bande (Paris, 2009); Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot, pp. 56–57; Guillaume, Mes Grandes Enquêtes criminelles, p. 57. Guillaume relates the story of Platano’s response to Bonnot having run over a dog and a chicken.

  10 JA 24, signalement and n.d.; Frédéric Lavignette, La bande à Bonnot à travers la presse de l’époque (Lyon, 2008), p. 19.

  11 Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot, pp. 27–28; Maîtrejean, Souvenirs d’anarchie, pp. 34, 85; Anne Steiner, Les En-dehors: anarchistes individualistes et illégalistes à la “Belle Époque” (Paris, 2008), pp. 100–101, 214; Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, p. 39; Depond, Jules Bonnot et sa bande (Paris, 2009), p. 56. Platano was allegedly carrying with him 27,000 francs, his part of the loot, and that same amount later turned up during a police search in the home of the Thollons, adding to the confusion. Judith Thollon was convicted in May 1912 in Lyon and sentenced to four years in prison. She died after one year (Depond, Jules Bonnot et sa bande, p. 114).

  12 Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot, pp. 15–17, 28; Chomarat, Les Amants tragiques, pp. 19–21, 25–31, 41–42; Frédéric Lavignette, La bande à Bonnot à travers la presse de l’époque (Lyon, 2008), pp. 159–160, Le Petit Parisien, March 15, 1912. Judith Thollon said she was not sure if this had been in the hand of Bonnot, claiming it was part of a collection for the newspaper, to which Bonnot subscribed and which arrived at the Thollon residence.

  13 Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot, p. 44; Chomarat, Les Amants tragiques, p. 17; Lavignette, La bande à Bonnot, p. 23.

  14 Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot, pp. 85–88; JA 15, dossier Bélonie, suggests that David Bélonie noted to Bonnot that he could find a room there.

  15 André Salmon, La Terreur noir (Paris, 2008), p. 275: The poet, art critic, and journalist André Salmon recalled being introduced to Bonnot. Salmon was on boulevard Saint-Michel, at the corner of rue Soufflot, on a warm day. He ran into Victor Méric (Henri Coudon), an anarchist journalist. Méric was sitting in the Café Mahieu with a man, whom he introduced as “my pal Bonnot, an anar.” Bonnot mumbled something to Salmon about being pleased to meet him, and that was it.

  16 JA 19, report of January 26, 1912; Maîtrejean, Souvenirs d’anarchie, p. 85; Pierre Castelle, pp. 129–130; EA 141, L’Aurore, June 17, 1968; Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot, p. 22; Marie-Joseph Dhavernas, “La surveillance des anarchistes individualistes (1894–1914),” in Philippe Vigier, Alain Faure, et al., Maintien de l’ordre et polices en France et en Europe au XIXe siècle (Montrouge, 1987), pp. 354–356. Victor relates in his memoirs, speaking of the attack on rue Ordener, that he did not actually know Bonnot, but this could mean that he had only seen him at causeries when Bonnot was attacking Victor and Rirette on behalf of the illegalists in the relatively brief time between Bonnot’s arrival in Paris and the bank robbery on rue Ordener.

  Chapter 9: The Bonnot Gang Strikes

  1 JA 16, “Mes Mémoires: (Callemin dit Raymond la Science): Pourquoi j’ai cambriolé Pourquoi j’ai tué”; JA 24, report of December 14, 1911; James M. Laux, In First Gear: The French Automobile Industry to 1914 (Montréal, 1976), pp. 154–155. Between 1904 and 1914, the company produced 7,576 automobiles in forty different models, half of them of the six-cylinder variety. Yet most owners did not actually drive their Delaunay-Belleville: “No owner ever drives his Delaunay. It just isn’t done.” Chauffeurs did the job. Delaunay-Belleville was one of the elite manufacturers of automobiles in the early years of the industry. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia owned one.

  2 Frédéric Lavignette, La bande à Bonnot à travers la presse de l’époque (Lyon, 2008), p. 75, and Le Petit Parisien, December 25, 1911.

  3 JA 17, report of November 28, 1911; Marcel Guillaume, Mes Grandes Enquêtes criminelles: De la Bande à Bonnot à l’Affaire Stavisky (Mayenne, 2005), p. 63.

  4 Guillaume, Mes Grandes Enquêtes criminelles, pp. 59–61; Anne Steiner, Les En-dehors: Anarchistes inidividualistes et illégalistes à la “Belle Époque” (Paris, 2008), pp. 102–103, 108; William Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot: Les révélations des archives policières (Paris, 1990), pp. 51–56; Renaud Thomazo, Mort aux bourgeois! Sur les traces de la bande à Bonnot (Paris, 2009), p. 25.

  5 EA 141, officer de la paix, Paris eighteenth arrondissement December 21, 1911; JA 15; JA 20, October 21, 1912.

  6 JA 15.

  7 EA 141, officer de la paix, Paris, eighteenth arrondissement, report of December 21–22, 1911; JA 15.

  8 JA 16, “Mes Mémoires: (Callemin dit Raymond la Science): Pourquoi j’ai cambriolé pourquoi j’ai tué.”

  9 Lavignette, La bande à Bonnot, p. 93, L’Humanité, January 2, 1912; Steiner, Les En-dehors, pp. 107–108; Victor Méric, Les bandits tragiques (Paris, 1926),p. 11.

  10 JA 15, report of December 29, 1911; Dominique Depond, Jules Bonnot et sa bande: Le tourbillon sanglant (Paris, 2009), pp. 9–12; Steiner, Les En-dehors, pp. 102–105; Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot, pp. 61–62.

  11 JA 24, p.v., January 10, February 12, and March 28, 1912.

  12 Le Petit Journal, December 22, 1911; Méric, Les bandits tragiques, p. 9; Philippe Néris, La Bande à Bonnot (1925), p. 8; Frédéric Lavignette, p. 66, L’Intransigeant, December 22, 1911. The Bonnot Gang appear in the last chapter in the recent The Other Paris, by Luc Sante (New York, 2015).

  13 Jean-Marc Berlière, Le Préfet Lépine: Vers la naissance de la police modern (Paris, 1993), pp. 53–58; Depond, Jules Bonnot et sa bande, p. 13; Mary McAuliffe, Twilight of the Belle Epoque: The Paris of Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust, Renault, Marie Curie, Gertrude Stein, and Their Friends Through the Great War (New York, 2014), p. 214.

  14 Jean-Marc Berlière, Le monde des polices en France (Paris, 1996), pp. 62–91, 117–120, and Chapter 3.

  15 Berlière, Le Préfet Lépine, pp. 23–52 (especially 24–26). On the history of state-municipal conflict over the police, see John Merriman, Police Stories (New York, 2005).Laurent López, La guerre des polices n’a pas eu lieu: Gendarmes et policiers, co-acteurs de la sécurité publique sous la Troisième République (1870–1914) (Paris, 2014), pp. 371–374.

  16 Thomazo, Mort aux bourgeois!, pp. 42–43; Pierre Castelle, Paris Républicain 1871–1914 (Abbeville, 2003), pp. 81–95.

  17 Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York, 2012), p. 40.

  18 Victor Serge, Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire 1901–1941, edited by Jean Rière (Paris, 2010), pp. 38–39; Maîtrejean, Souvenirs d’anarchie, pp. 85–86.

  19 Maîtrejean, Souvenirs d’anarchie, pp. 45–49, 78, 85–88; Guillaume Davranche, Trop jeunes pour mourir (Paris, 2014), p. 213; Méric, Les bandits tragiques, pp. 72–74.

  20 JA 17, dossier Dettweiller, report of December 21, 1912.

  21 Guillaume Davranche, Trop jeunes pour mourir: ouvriers et révolutionnaires face à la guerre (1909–1914) (Paris, 2014), p. 212. Marcel Guillaume would later relate that an anarchist met the police at École Militaire, fearing to be killed for revealing information to the police, and said that the car could be found in Bobigny (Marcel Guillaume, Mes Grandes Enquêtes criminelles: De la Bande à Bonnot à l’Affaire Stavisky [Mayenne, 2005], p. 67).

  22 JA 17, p.v. December 29 and 30, 1911, report of December 12, 1913, report of December 1911; director of school, July 10, 1912. Arthur Bernède, Bonnot, Garnier et Cie (Paris, 1930), p. 29, has Jeanne leaving Carouy.

  23 JA 17,
p.v., and p.v. of Octave Hamard, December 29, 1911.

  24 JA 17, n.d., December 1911, report of December 28 and p.v., and p.v. of Octave Hamard, December 29, 1911.

  25 Steiner, Les En-dehors, pp. 109–110, noting that Dettweiller’s spouse dreamed of setting up a laundry, but this clashed with anarchist ideals.

  26 Steiner, Les En-dehors, p. 110; Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot, pp. 65–66. Marie-Joseph Dhavernas, “La surveillance des anarchistes individualistes (1894–1914),” in Philippe Vigier, Alain Faure, et al., Maintien de l’ordre et polices en France et en Europe au XIXe siècle (Montrouge, 1987), p. 357, relates that the police path to Carouy’s involvement passed through agents following up a message in L’Anarchie, “François, une lettre pour toi à Lens,” leading to Carouy, who had been born in Montignies-les-Lens in Belgium, whose presence in France had been related by Belgian authorities in 1910.

  27 JA 24, n.d.

  28 Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot, pp. 71–74, 97–98.

  29 JA 20, report of February 15 and June 3, 1912; JA 20, p.v., January 13, 1912; Davranche, Trop jeunes pour mourir, p. 213; EA 141, Rapport, n.d, Bertillon; Berlière, Les monde des polices, p. 45; Martine Kaluszynski, “Alphonse Bertillon et l’anthropométir,” in Philippe Vigier, Alain Faure, et al., Maintien de l’ordre et polices en France et en Europe au XIXe siècle (Montrouge, 1987), pp. 269–285. Bertillon also took a plaster imprint of a footstep in the garden and tried to match up fingerprints the police had of Callemin, Carouy, and Soudy. The fille Froment, when interrogated by the police, claimed that she was present at 11 bis rue Kléber when Carouy, Metge, Callemin, and one or two other men divided up the 8,000 francs and various securities that had been stolen, and that they said they would kill her if she said anything. She had been arrested on May 8 as an accomplice of one of the men, Forget, for counterfeiting, although she was released the same day (JA 16, report of July 5, 1912).

  Chapter 10: The Bonnot Gang at Bay

  1 JA 18, dossier of Louis Rimbault, reports of February 13 and 23, March 21, and p.v. January 8 and February 13 and 23 and March 21, 1912, 6 a.m.; JA 19, report of January 29, 1912; Renaud Thomazo, pp. 51–52, 77–78.

  2 JA 19, report of January 26, 1912; JA 24, reports of November 18, 1911, and March 13, 1912; Dominque Depond, pp. 61–63; Anne Steiner, Les En-dehors: anarchistes individualistes et illégalistes dans la Belle Époque (Montreuil, 2008), pp. 110–111; Renaud Thomazo, Mort aux bourgeois! Sur les traces de la bande à Bonnot (Paris, 2009), p. 134.

  3 JA 15, dossier Caby; Thomazo, Mort aux bourgeois!, p. 31. Caby first said that the man who shot him had blue eyes and was wearing a long raincoat and wearing a British-style cap.

  4 KA 74, dossier Paul Eugène Xavier Guichard (born in 1870), beginning as an inspecteur à la Recherche, report of October 17, 1896, Guichard’s “Travail d’épreuve, August 19, 1895,” etc.; DOSS. FOL-LN1-232 (11228), Paris-Midi, December 25, 1935. Guichard retired from the police in 1934.

  5 In 1905, France had begun obligatory two-year military service for young men, and until 1909 Belgium retained a system of drawing lots for a term in the army, although universal military conscription was not established until 1913.

  6 Arthur Bernéde, Bonnot, Garnier et Cie (Paris, 1930), pp. 25–26, 37–38.

  7 JA 16, February 3, 1912; Richard Parry, The Bonnot Gang (London, 1987), p. 94; William Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot: Les révélations des archives policières Ils ont tué Bonnot: Les révélations des archives policières (Paris, 1990), p. 85.

  8 JA 17, report of March 30, 1912; Le Petit Parisien, January 23, 1912; Police found there some furniture that had belonged to Dieudonné.

  9 JA 19, p.v. January 24, 1912.

  10 JA 19, reports of January 21, 22, and July 13, 1912; JA 17, surveillance reports; Thomazo, Mort aux bourgeois!, p. 134; Dominique Depond, Jules Bonnot et sa bande (Paris, 2009), p. 97. Several police reports confused passage de Clichy with passage Saint-Pierre.

  11 JA 19, report of January 22, 1912; Thomazo, Mort aux bourgeois!, p. 134; Steiner, Les En-dehors, p. 112.

  Chapter 11: How to Unload Stolen Securities

  1 JA 16, “Mes Mémoires: (Callemin dit Raymond la Science): Pourquoi j’ai cambriolé Pourquoi j’ai tué.”

  2 JA 16, “Mes Mémoires: (Callemin dit Raymond la Science): Pourquoi j’ai cambriolé Pourquoi j’ai tué”; William Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot: Les révélations des archives policières (Paris, 1990), pp. 84. A list of the securities can be found in JA 15, including “ville de Paris,” 1898, 500 francs, and 4,000 francs; 1871, 400 francs; “chemin de fer Rosaria Belgrano,” 500 francs, etc.

  3 JA 15, “Vol de titres au prejudice de la Société Générale rue Ordener,” report of May 5, 1912.

  4 EA 141; JA 24, January 24, 1912, and Albert van der Straeten, March 1, 1912; Émile Becker, pp. 70–71; JA 16, “Mes Mémoires: (Callemin dit Raymond la Science): Pourquoi j’ai cambriolé Pourquoi j’ai tué”; Renaud Thomazo, Mort aux bourgeois! Sur les traces de la bande à Bonnot (Paris, 2009), pp. 128–130.

  5 JA 19, report of July 15, 1912; Dominique Depond, Jules Bonnot et sa bande: Le tourbillon sanglant (Paris, 2009), pp. 60–61.

  6 Guillaume Davranche, Trop jeune pour mourir (Paris, 2014), pp. 219–220; Jean Maitron, Le mouvement anarchiste. Vol. 1, Des origines à 1914, p. 436.

  7 Victor Serge, Le Rétif, “Les Bandits,” pp. 162–164; “Expedients,” p. 166; L’Anarchie, January 4 and 18, 1912, June 20, 1908; Anne Steiner, Rirette l’insoumise (Tulle, 2013), pp. 51–53, L’Anarchie, January 4 and 11, 1912. On January 25, Victor offered another provocative take on the bandits: “Remember the number of workers with tuberculosis, which reaches 65% in some industries. All the thousand franc notes stolen in advance from the thankless labor of the suffering—calculate what they cost in ruined liveas, in lost lives” (Luc Nemeth, “On Anarchism,” in Susan Weissman, ed., The Ideas of Victor Serge: A Life as a Work of Art (N.p., 1997), p. 124).

  8 Victor Méric, Les bandits tragiques (Paris, 1926), pp. 75–77; Rirette Maîtrejean, Souvenirs d’anarchie (Quimperlé, 2005), pp. 50–51, 88–89.

  Chapter 12: The Police in Action

  1 Rirette Maîtrejean, Souvenirs d’anarchie (Quimperlé, 2005), pp. 48–49, 89. In “Commissaire Guillaume, Ne réveillez pas les morts!,” published in 1937 and included in Souvenirs d’anarchie. Rirette says she purchased a pistol from Soudy “par goût de Romanesque,” learning later that it had been taken from the gunstore on rue Lafayette.

  2 Victor Serge, Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire, 1901–1941, edited by Jean Rière (Paris, 1978), pp. 41–42; Maîtrejean, Souvenirs d’anarchie, p. 122; Steiner, Les En-dehors, pp. 114–116.

  3 Jean-Pierre Machelon, La République contre les libertés? (Paris, 1976), pp. 449–457. Robert A. Nye, Crime, Madness, and Politics in Modern France (Princeton, 1984), pp. 171–182. Nye writes, “By the period 1905–1908, a language of national pathology which regarded crime, mental illness, or alcoholism as signs of national debility was no longer a monopoly of medical specialists” (p. 172). He compares the social fear of anarchists to that of the “laboring and dangerous classes” in Paris during the July Monarchy (the Orleanist monarchy, 1830–1848).

  4 Machelon, La République contre les libertés?, pp. 426–439. Anarchist propaganda “fut somise à un régime pénal aggravé par rapport au droit commun.”

  5 Machelon, La République contre les libertés?, pp. 407–410, 415–419, 445; Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (New York, 1958), pp. 188–189.

  6 Steiner, Les En-dehors, p. 117.

  7 Maîtrejean, Souvenirs d’anarchie, pp. 51–52, 89; EA 141, interrogation of femme Maîtrejean.

  8 Guillaume Davranche, Trop jeune pour mourir (Paris, 2014), p. 214.

  9 F7 13053, “Anarchistes possesseurs ou chauffeurs d’automobiles,” minister of the interior to prefects, February 4, 1912; JA 21, “automobiles signalées et garages inconnus.”

  10 JA 21, January 6, 1912, to Monsieur le Chef de la Sûreté and report of February 5, 1912
.

  11 F7 13053, February 14, 1914, “listes des écoles d’aviation actuellement connues”; February 17, 1912, minister of the interior, note for commissaire special of Amiens; report of May 14, 1912; report of M. Caudron, constructeur-aviateur, April 19, 1912; February 14, 1914, “listes des écoles d’aviation actuellement connues.”

  12 JA 23; Le Libertaire, February 3, 1912; Bataille Syndicaliste, February 4, 1912.

  13 Davranche, Trop jeune pour mourir, p. 213.

  14 JA 16.

  15 JA 24, report of February 28, 1912; JA 23, dossier, “Meurtre du gardien de la Paix Garnier François, commis place du Havre le 27 février 1912”; report of March 1, 1912; Frédéric Lavignette, pp. 125, 131, Action Française, February 2, 1912.

  16 Richard Parry, The Bonnot Gang (Paris, 1987), pp. 95–96.

  17 Frédéric Delacourt, L’Affaire Bande à Bonnot (Paris, 2006), p. 111; Arthur Bernède, Bonnot, Garnier et Cie (Paris, 1930), pp. 44–46. Monier had been arrested in Alès on January 19, but then released.

  18 JA 16, p.v. March 14 and March 18 and report of June 8, 1912; Dominique Depond, Jules Bonnot et sa bande: Le tourbillon sanglant (Paris, 2009), pp. 51–52; William Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot: Les révélations des archives policières (Paris, 1990), pp. 42–43.

  19 JA 16, report of June 8, 1912.

  20 Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot, p. 42.

  21 JA 15, dossier Bélonie; JA 16, p.v. March 14 and 18, and dossier Dieudonné; JA 17, p.v. Jouin, February 28, and reports of June 8 and July 11, 1912; L’Excelsior, March 12, 1912.

  22 Le Petit Parisien, March 1, 1912; Arthur Bernède, pp. 69–73, who has David Bélonie recommending chez Rollet to “M. Comtesse.”

  23 Frédéric Lavignette, La bande à Bonnot à travers la presse de l’époque (Lyon, 2008), pp. 14, 144, Excelsior, March 1, 1912.

  24 EA 141; JA 24, report of February 29, 1912; William Caruchet, Ils ont tué Bonnot: Les révélations des archives policières (Paris, 1990), pp. 100–101.