Source
The Story Of The French Illegalists by Richard Parry
Anarchy in Suburbia
"Instead of wasting time chatting...it would be better to start the revolution inside oneself and realize it according to the best of our abilities in partial experiments, wherever such an opportunity arises, and whenever a bold group of our comrades have the conviction and the courage to try them…"
source
Luigi Galleani (1861-1931)
The move
THE ANTAGONISM between the l'anarchie comrades and Paraf Javal's Scientific Studies Group had subsided in the wake of Libertad's death, only to be replaced by a quarrel with Le Libertaire.
In November fighting broke out between the two factions and one winter evening the windows of 22 rue de la Barre were smashed in.
The rupture between the individualists and the other anarchists was becoming more and more violent, and the mainstream anarchist and syndicalist journals — Temps Nouveaux, Le Libertaire and Guerre Sociale were declaring their intention of getting the Causeries Populaires group off their backs once and for all.
In the Summer of 1910 the old quarrel with Paraf-Javal flared up again.
One night, Lorulot and Dutilleul surprised Maurice Duflou the ex-editor, trying to steal away with most of the printing equipment from the basement of 22 rue de la Barre.
They threw him out and said that his furniture and belongings would be kept until he returned the two thousand francs' worth of printing material that he'd taken.
Two comrades, Lorenzi and Laheurte were put on guard.
At six in the morning on Sunday 8th May, two trucks drew up outside 22 rue de la Barre; in them were Paraf-Javal, his son and a dozen other men.
They jumped out of the trucks and broke into the ground floor of the building; fighting ensued on the second floor and shots were fired by the defenders leaving one of Paraf-Javal's group dead and another seriously injured.
The attackers withdrew and summoned the police, who arrived and arrested the five comrades inside: LomIot, Lorenzi, Laheurte, Dutilleul and Bunin.
They, in turn, demanded that Paraf-Javal, Duflou and the others be arrested for theft, housebreaking and aggravated burglary, but the police were unmoved.
In retaliation for their dead comrade, the Scientific Studies Group now threatened to blow up the premises.
The owner thought that such a threat was not to be taken lightly and gave the l'anarchie group notice to quit before the start of July.
Meanwhile, the l'anarchie five were charged with affray and released on bail to appear before the Seine Assizes in October.
After an article by Paraf-Javal appeared in Le Matin, the conservative daily, Lorulot gathered up forty comrades to enforce his demand for a right of reply.
At one in the morning the editor felt it might be unwise to refuse their request, and a reply duly appeared.
There was still the problem of having to move, however, and the threats of retaliation.
Lorulot felt that it might be better to leave Paris altogether, and came up with the idea of moving to the suburbs, which appealed to him as a lover of nature.
In the last week of June 1910 the seat of l'anarchie was transferred to 16 rue de Bagnolet in the leafy suburb of Romainville, east of the city.
Victor Kibalchich had managed to keep out of the internecine strife between the warring anarchist factions, despite being a reasonably prominent figure in the individualist milieu: he had a front page article in l'anarchie the week after the affray and chaired a meeting on 'Idealism' at the rue de la Barre in June.
Fortunately he lived some distance from Montmartre and so avoided the trouble that plagued the rue de la Barre.
When Lorulot and the others departed for Romainville, Victor stayed on in Paris to organize a Causeries Populaires group in the Quartier Latin.
La Libre Recherche (Free Enquiry), Sociological study circle of the Latin Quarter first met in September 1910 in the Café Dubourg in the rue des Carmes.
Victor, alongside Lorulot, now took over from Mauricius as the main speaker on the Causeries Populaires circuit.
Rirette introduced Victor to an eighteen year-old grocer's boy she'd met in a bar frequented by anarchists in the Latin Quarter.
Victor described him as "a perfect example of the crushed childhood of the back-alleys.
He grew up on the street: TB at thirteen, VD at eighteen...".[9]
[9] Amongst friends he was nicknamed 'Pas de chance', (not a chance), which was to have a bitter irony.
He was later to become infamous as "the man with the rifle", but for the moment he was just the shy, nervous and pale-faced André Soudy, who liked taking Rirette's two daughters for walks in the Luxembourg Gardens.
His father was a plasterer and ex-innkeeper in Beaugency (Loiret), who had sent André to work at eleven as a grocer's boy in a local store.
At sixteen he was working a fifteen-hour day in Orleans, despite the fact that he had tuberculosis and was beginning to spit blood.
The French suffered from TB more than any other European nation, and the incidence was especially high in northern France; in poor areas up to twenty-five per cent of all schoolchildren suffered from it, and the death rate was eighty per cent higher than average.
Kibalchich recalled:
"Even the bitterest joking helped to keep him living, convinced as he was that he was not long for this world, 'seeing the price of medicine'."
As soon as he turned eighteen, in February 1910, André departed for Paris, where he found a little room in the rue des Bourdonnais next to the huge market of Les Halles.
He eventually found a job at the socialist grocers' cooperative Egalitaire in the rue Mouffetard, not far from Victor's and Rirette's lodgings.
Occasionally he would pass boxes of lobsters to comrades, or give housewives double-measures, just so that he could see the surprised looks on their faces.
While l'anarchie had moved outside Paris, other comrades continued the 'interventions' within the city.
Royalist, syndicalist and Christian-Democrat meetings were all seen as legitimate targets.
The anarchists would form a 'battle-square' in one corner of the hall and demand the right to speak: such a demand being habitually refused, heckling, jeering and whistling would commence.
Such interventions normally ended up in fighting with the Catholic or union stewards or the royalist Camelot du Roi thugs.
Victor Kibalchich, René Valet, and André Soudy often went along to these meetings together.
Rirette recalled André, standing at the back of the balcony at one meeting, and shouting out: "You're a nutter!", as the first politician came up to speak.
There was laughter from those in the balcony.
When the next speaker stood up Soudy cried: "You're another nutter!".
More hilarity from the audience.
By the time the third speaker had risen, only to be insulted, the whole audience was crying: "Nutter! Nutter!".
On 10th October the trial of the five comrades from the rue de la Barre, indicted with affray and lesser charges, began at the Palais de Justice.
The defence lawyer was Gustave Hervé's secretary, Boucheron, who made his name on such trials.
Amongst the defence witnesses were some who were to figure in later events surrounding the 'Bonnot Gang' affair: Mallet, Collin, Fromentin and Dubois; of the latter two, the first was the reputed anarchist 'millionaire' and philanthropist, the other was an auto-mechanic with a garage at Choisy-le-Roi.
The case lasted three days.
Laheurte and LorenZi got five years, Bunin three months for carrying a prohibited weapon (a 9mm Browning semi-automatic) and Lorulot and Dutilleul were freed.
Paraf-Javal's crew had never been charged, and it was suspected by some that he had used his influence as a freemason to get all the charges dumped on the rue de la Barre group.
Two weeks after the trial the l'anarchie comrades staged an intervention at a Freemasons' conference, which resulted in uproar.
Victor Kibalchich defended their actions in an article in l'anarchie entitled 'Shut the Mouths of the Red Jesuits': he was for the systematic obstruction of speakers at public meetings, and for more combative interventions generally.
Lorulot, on the other hand, was against too much aggression as it tended to prevent their ideas getting across.
In January 1911 events in the East End of London, namely the siege of Sydney Street, attracted the attention of the anarchist-individualists.
Members of a Latvian revolutionary cell (part of the Leesma network which carried out the Tottenham hold-up in 1909) were engaged in an expropriation of a jewellers in Houndsditch when they were discovered by the police.
They shot their way out, leaving three policemen dead and two wounded, but in the confusion accidentally shot their own leader.
This mishap led to two comrades being traced to Sydney Street.
Rather than surrender, the two men did battle with seven hundred police and dozens of soldiers, dying only when the house caught fire and burnt to the ground.
Victor Kibalchich felt it necessary to comment in extenso on such resistance to the State in (so the old myth went) socially pacific England; his article was entitled simply 'Two Men'.
"In the ordinary sense of the word we cannot and will not be honest.
By definition, the anarchist lives by expediency; work, for him, is a deplorable expedient, just like stealing.
He chooses the methods of struggle, according to his power and circumstance.
He takes no account of any conventions which safeguard property; for him, force alone counts.
Thus, we have neither to approve nor disapprove of illegal actions.
We say: they are logical.
The anarchist is always illegal theoretically.
The sole word 'anarchist' means rebellion in every sense.
We want total rebellion; our logic, free from the last traditional sophisms, tells us that the rebel will only be impeded in the economic field if he accepts the legal and moral considerations he rejects elsewhere.
Determined people accept the risk; the thought of reprisals renders them at one and the same time more wary, more audacious and more decisive in persevering to the finish.
Reprisals, when they do occur, spread combativity.
The magnificent resistance of the Russian comrades killed in London has stirred the enthusiasm of rebels everywhere.
It constitutes an example of courage and determination from which all the tramps have drawn strength, and all the undisciplined will draw profit.
They did well to defend themselves until death.
They acted as every rebel should act in the same circumstances.
"It can never be repeated too often: the slightest blow delivered against an individual legitimates, on their part, the use of all methods of struggle.
Pacific, benign people, you will see again this nightmare: a thousand brutes hurling themselves against two men!
You will see again often, more and more often, the numberless pack of police and soldiers hunting the rebels, being held in check by a few lone individuals…"
His use of the future tense was indeed to be prophetic; the battle-lines were being drawn.
The Paris Préfecture de Police wholeheartedly supported the action of the English authorities — "The means adopted for the reduction of such redoutable bandits to impotence are the only ones that ought to be employed".
The socialist response was varied; Humanité called them bandits whose mentality was 'capitalist'; the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party agreed with English democracy in denouncing them as 'criminal hooligans'.
One socialist who did eulogize the resistance at Sydney Street was the editor of Pagine Librere — Benito Mussolini.
Victor continued to stay in Paris, and chaired meetings with Lorulot, 'Against Socialism', 'On the Eve of War', and 'Anarchism and the old Parties'.
Some were held at the Universités Populaires with the singing of revolutionary and popular Montmartre songs, and theatre group performances.
The anarchist-individualist milieu was quite lively with groups being dotted about all over France, and information about them appearing on the back page of l'anarchie.
This series of posts will insure that these anarchists' works live on in living memory.
If only a few.
Don't lose hope now, dear reader.
We've made it this far.
At some point the ride gets easier.
Rule by force has had it's day.
When everybody sees the iron fist in the velvet glove we win.
We just have to survive its death throes.
There is a reason these facts are not in the modern curriculums.
Setting rewards to burn only burns the author portion of the payout.
The crowd isn't silenced.
Please cheer loudly, if that is your thing.