Source
The Story Of The French Illegalists by Richard Parry
From illegality to illegalism
"Property is theft. Property is liberty."
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65)
Making a virtue of necessity
ALMOST ALL the illegalists who were associated with the Bonnot Gang were born in the late 1880s or early '90s, into a society completely torn by class division.
Above all, it was the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 that had consolidated the climate of mutual hatred between the workers and the bourgeoisie.
The Commune, a minimal attempt at social-democracy by workers and impoverished petit-bourgeois, was drowned in the blood of thirty thousand people by an army acting on the instructions of a ruling class infuriated at this challenge to their monopoly of power.
The bloody repression of the Commune marked the birth of the Third Republic and served as a constant reminder to workers that they could expect nothing from this 'New Order' except the most brutal repression.
The memory of these tragic events of 1871 left a rich legacy in class-hatred, one with which French anarchists identified and which they hoped to exploit.
With revolutionary organizations outlawed, and all forms of working class political activity banned, anarchists and trade-unionists were forced to operate in ways that were clandestine or outrightly illegal.
As such modes of behaviour became the accepted norm, anarchists acquired a taste for illegality which lingered on into the 1900s when the Bonnot Gang came of age.
The 1870s were lean years for revolutionaries, and it was not until the 1880s that French anarchism really took off.
The amnesty granted to deported Communards in 1880 signaled the return of thousands of hardened revolutionaries from exile in New Caledonia.
A strong and fresh impetus was given to the revolutionary movement and “Paris quivered with excitement”, according to one police observer.
Within a couple of years there were an estimated forty anarchist groups in France with two thousand five hundred active members, including perhaps five hundred in Paris and in Bonnot's town of Lyon.
Within a decade, the anarchist press was selling over ten thousand papers a week.
Anarchist groups adopted names such as 'Hate', 'Dynamite', 'The Sword', 'Viper', 'The Panther of Batignolles' and 'The Terror of La Ciotat' as an indication of their aggressive stance towards bourgeois society.
At the same time, anarchist theory was made more acceptable by proposing the 'commune' as the practical base for the organization of the new society, as opposed to the 'collective'; 'need' became the new criterion for the distribution of goods and services, which were to be freely available to all, regardless of the work each person had done; anarcho-communism was born.
All anarchist activity and propaganda was centred on the class struggle, which was especially bitter and violent up to the mid-1890s.
A miners' strike in Montceau provoked the burning and pillage of religious schools and chapels, and ended in the dynamiting of churches and managers' houses.
Many other strikes involved violent clashes with police or troops and occasionally coalesced into riots and looting.
The anarchist belief in violent direct action, formulated in the policy of 'propaganda by the deed' (rather than by the word), reflected the particular bitterness of these struggles.
Propaganda by deed was translated into action in three forms: insurrection, assassination, and bombing.
The insurrectionary method, which had proved something of a fiasco in Spain and Italy in the 1870s, was not tried out in France.
Instead, assassination became the principal weapon of revenge against the bourgeoisie and the figureheads of the State.
The first wave of attempted assassinations was directed against political leaders throughout Europe: in the five years from 1878 there were attempts on the lives of the German Kaiser, the Kings of Spain and Italy, and the French Prime Minister.
The killing of the Russian Emperor, Alexander II, by the 'People's Will' was, however, the only successful revolutionary execution of a reigning monarch.
There was a hiatus of ten years until the next batch of attempts on heads of State; in 1894 the French Prime Minister was stabbed to death, and the next decade saw the spectacular demise of a Spanish Prime Minister, an Italian King, an Austrian Empress and a President of the United States.
In France, the gap between these two waves of political assassinations was marked by attempts on the lives of upholders of the ruling order in a more general sense.
This time the victims were employers who had given workers the sack, a wealthy doctor, a priest, and brokers in the Paris Stock Exchange.
The bourgeoisie began to be more than a little concerned when the anarchist 'propagandists by deed' began to use dynamite: in 1892 over one thousand explosions were reported in Europe.
In Paris, bombs exploded in the Chamber of Deputies, a police station, an army barracks, a bourgeois café, a judge's house, and the residence of the Public Prosecutor.
It was ordinary workers rather than 'professional' activists who carried out these acts of propaganda, although such desperate measures were habitually praised in the columns of the anarchist press.
The 'terrorists' of the early 1890s were mainly poor working class men—a cabinetmaker, a dyer, a shoemaker, for example—unable to get any work, often with a family to support, bitter at the injustice they had suffered, and sympathetic to anarchism.
This was one aspect of the world into which most of the illegalists were born; Bonnot was in his mid-teens when the spectacular bombings took place, causing a panic among the bourgeoisie not to be repeated until he himself became France's 'Public Enemy Number One'.
As the anarchist desire for the abolition of the State was translated onto an immediate, practical level through individual acts of assassination and bombing, so the wish for the 'expropriation of the expropriators' was reduced to individual acts of 're-appropriation' of bourgeois property.
This was the theory of la reprise individuelle, whose most celebrated practitioners were Clément Duval and Marius Jacob; the infamous Ravachol, who went to the guillotine in 1894 singing the scandalous anticlerical song Père Duchesne, was known more for his bombings than his burglaries.
Clément Duval, twice wounded in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, spent four of the following ten years in hospital, and was rendered permanently unfit for his trade as an iron worker.
He was imprisoned for a year after having been caught stealing eighty francs from his employer, in order to buy desperately-needed food and medicine for his family.
On his release he threw in his lot with the hardened working class anarchists of 'The Panther of Batignolles' and began a short-lived life of crime.
In October 1886 he set fire to the mansion of a wealthy Parisian socialite, having first burgled it of fifteen thousand francs, but he was caught two weeks later, despite wounding a policeman in the course of the arrest.
In court, the Judge refused to allow him to read his written defence, so he posted it to Révolte:
"Theft exists only through the exploitation of man by man, that is to say in the existence of all those who parasitically live off the productive class...when Society refuses you the right to exist, you must take it...the policeman arrested me in the name of the Law, I struck him in the name of Liberty".
The death sentence was later commuted to hard labour for life on Devil's Island, French Guiana.[1]
[1] He escaped with half-a-dozen others in 1901 and reached New York, where he rejoined the anarchist movement, eventually dying at the ripe old age of 85. His biography, worthy of an English translation, is unfortunately only available in Italian.
If Duval worked alone, the next anarchist burglars of note were leaders of gangs which got successively larger until the veritable federation of burglars organized by Marius Jacob.
Vittorio Pini, an anarchist shoemaker on the run from the Italian authorities, began a series of burglaries with four other comrades in and around Paris that netted over half a million francs.
They stole almost exclusively to support hard-up comrades or prisoners and to subsidize the anarchist press in France and Italy.
Ortiz ostensibly dropped out of anarchist politics in order to begin a career as a professional burglar, with a gang of ten others.
He too donated funds to the cause, but not as strictly as Pini had done.
He and his men were the only ones convicted at the notorious 'Trial of the Thirty' in 1894; the nineteen anarchist propagandists went free.
Alexandre Marius Jacob was really in a class of his own.
At thirteen he was working on a pirate ship in the Indian Ocean.
At sixteen he was a known anarchist in prison for manufacturing explosives.
At seventeen he pulled off a remarkable theft from a jewellers by posing as a policeman.
And by the age of twenty he was successfully burgling churches, aristocratic residences and bourgeois mansions all along the south coast of France.
In 1900, aged twenty-one, he escaped from prison after feigning madness, and went into hiding in Sète.
Here, he concluded that his previous criminal efforts had been amateur, and decided to set up a properly organized anarchist gang to finance both the movement and themselves; they adopted the name of 'Les Travailleurs de la Nuit' (The Night Workers).
Uniforms were acquired for the purpose of disguise, and research done into safe-breaking techniques, in order that the correct special tools and equipment be obtained.
A list of potential targets was drawn up from 'Who's Who'-type books which gave the names and addresses of the rich.
Then they set to work.
They had no particular base, their field of operations being France itself; some of their more lucrative burglaries were the cathedral at Tours, an Admiral's mansion in Cherbourg, a Judge's house at Le Mans and a jewellery factory in rue Quincampoix, Paris.
Jacob checked out the cathedral of Notre Dame and the home of the Bayeaux Tapestry, but decided to cross them off his list.
He left notes signed 'Attila' condemning owners for their excessive wealth, and occasionally set fire to mansions that he'd burgled.
As the group expanded from its original dozen members, some comrades went off to form autonomous gangs, so that a sort of federation was set up involving anything up to a hundred members, but the composition became less and less anarchist.
Jacob escaped arrest in Orleans by shooting a policeman, but they caught up with him again at Abbéville.
He was taken into custody after a brief shoot-out which left one policeman dead and another wounded.
Under pressure, one man informed on the whole gang, in such detail that investigations took two years to complete, and the charges ran to a hundred and sixty-one pages.
At the Assizes of Amiens in 1905, he was accused of no less than a hundred and fifty-six burglaries; outside, an infantry battalion surrounded the court, and some jurors, afraid of anarchist reprisals, didn't turn up.
He was sentenced to forced labour for life and packed off to Devil's Island, where the Governor labelled him as the most dangerous prisoner ever.[2]
[2] He tried to escape seventeen times, and spent five years in solitary, including two whole years in chains.
Pardoned in 1928, he returned to France and eventually took his own life in 1954.
To date there is no biography in English of Jacob's extraordinary life.
All these leading anarchist burglars donated sums to the cause and defended their actions by saying that they had a 'right' to steal; it was a question not of gain or profit, but of principle.
The 'natural right' to a free existence was denied to workers through the bourgeoisie's monopoly ownership of the means of production; as the· workers continued to create wealth, so the bourgeoisie continued to appropriate this wealth, a state of affairs maintained ultimately only by force, but legitimized.
It was the immoral bourgeois who was the real thief, both in history and in the present; the anarchist 're-appropriation' was 'superior in morality', it was part of a rightful restitution of wealth robbed from the working class, done with moral conviction and good intent to further 'The Cause'.
As La Révolte commented: "Pini never conducted himself as a professional thief.
He was a man of very few needs, living simply, poorly even, with austerity; that Pini stole for propaganda purposes has been denied by no-one".
Anarchist arguments in favour of la reprise individuelle had a long history.
L'Action Révolutionnaire asked its readers to steal from pawn shops, bureaux de change and post offices, and from bankers, lawyers, Jews (!) and rentiers[3] in order to finance the paper.
[3] Rentier. A person living off a private unearned income.
Ça Ira suggested that its readers set an example by applying themselves immediately to relieving the rich of their fortunes.
Le Libertaire thought that the thief, the crook and the counterfeiter, in permanent revolt against the established order of things, "were the only ones conscious of their social role".
In 1905, a contemporary wrote of Père Peinard, the most scurrilous of the anarchist papers, with the widest working class readership:
"With no display of philosophy (which is not to say that it had none) it played openly upon the appetites, prejudices, and rancours of the proletariat.
Without reserve or disguise, it incited to theft, counterfeiting, the repudiation of taxes and rents, killing and arson.
It counselled the immediate assassination of deputies, senators, judges, priests and army officers.
It advised unemployed working men to take food for themselves and their families wherever it was to be found, to help themselves to shoes at the shoe shop when the spring rains wet their feet, and to overcoats at the clothier's when the winter winds nipped them.
It urged employed working men to put their tyrannical employers out of the way, and to appropriate their factories; farm labourers and vineyard workers to take possession of the farms and vineyards, and turn the landlords and vineyard owners into fertilizing phosphates; miners to seize the mines and to offer picks to shareholders in case they showed a willingness to work like their brother men, otherwise to dump them into the disused shafts; conscripts to emigrate rather than perform their military service, and soldiers to desert or shoot their officers.
It glorified poachers and other deliberate breakers of the law.
It recounted the exploits of olden-time brigands and outlaws, and exhorted contemporaries to follow their example."
Alongside this shining example of proletarian propaganda came the more 'intellectual' approach of the anarchist theoretician.
Elisée Reclus put 'forward the logical argument for the reprise individuelle:
"The community of workers, have they the right to take back all the products of their labour?
Yes, a thousand times yes.
This re-appropriation is the revolution, without which everything still is to be done.
A group of workers, have they the right to a partial re-appropriation of the collective produce?
Without a doubt.
When the revolution can't be made in its entirety, it must be made at least to the best of its ability.
The isolated individual, has he a right to a personal re-appropriation of his part of the collective property?
How can it be doubted?
The collective property being appropriated by a few, why shouldn't it be taken back in detail, when it can't be taken back as a whole?
He has the absolute right to take it—to steal, as it's said in the vernacular.
It would be well in this regard that the new morality show itself, that it enter into the spirit and habit."
Men of 'high principle and exemplary life' such as Elisée Reclus and Sébastien Faure were so carried away by their convictions on the immorality of property, that they were ready to condone virtually any kind of theft on purely theoretical grounds, but the abstract theoretical arguments put forward by these intellectuals were unconnected to their own daily practice.
Nevertheless, in the Trial of the Thirty in 1894, Faure, Grave, Pouget and Paul Reclus and others were charged jointly with the Ortiz gang with criminal conspiracy.
The propagandists went free and the burglars went to jail, but for Jean Grave at least, it was a salutary experience and he determined henceforth to play no part in propounding theories of the validity of theft.
The paper that he launched the following year called Temps Nouveaux was soberly written and gained a wide audience in 'fashionable' circles sympathetic to anarchism.
Grave saw in crime a corruption that would make people unsuited for the high ideals of a free society.
He objected in particular to the type of professional crook who, rather than being a threat to the system, was the mirror-image of the policeman, recognizing the same social conventions, with similar minds and instincts, respectful of authority.
But, “if the act of stealing is to assume a character of revindication or of protest against the defective organization of Society, it must be performed openly, without any subterfuge”.
Grave anticipated the rather obvious objection:
"'But', retort the defenders of theft, 'the individual who acts openly will deprive himself thus of the possibility of continuing.
He will lose thereby his liberty, since he will at once be arrested, tried and condemned'.
Granted, but if the individual who steals in the name of the right to revolt resorts to ruse, he does nothing more nor less than the first thief that comes along, who steals to live without embarrassing himself with' theories."
In fact, a new generation of anarchists, spurred on by the 'individualist' ideas of Max Stirner, were to take as their point of departure exactly what Jean Grave objected to, that the rebel who secretly stole was no more than an ordinary thief.
The developing theory of 'illegalism' had no moral basis, recognizing only the reality of 'might' in place of a theory of 'right'.
Illegal acts were to be done simply to satisfy one's desires, not for the greater glory of some external 'ideal'.
The illegalists were to make a theory of theft without the embarrassment of theoretical justifications.
JULES BONNOT, aged 33, taken by the police in Lyon.
Within three years he was to become the most infamous French anarchist ever.
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.