ILLEGALISM

WHY PAY FOR A REVOLUTION
ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN...
WHEN YOU CAN STEAL ONE?

by Paul Z. Simons

ILLEGALISM

WHY PAY FOR A REVOLUTION
ON THE INSTALLMENT PLAN..
WHEN YOU CAN STEAL ONE?

by Paul Z. Simons
Intruth, it isn't indispensable to el oneself an anarchist to be seduced by the
‘coming demolitions. All those who society flagellates in the very intimacy of
their being instinctively want vengeance.

A thousand institutions of the old world are marked with a fatal sign. Those
afliated with the plot have no need to hope for a distant better future; They.
know a sure means to seize joy immediately: Destroy passionately!

~Zo dAxa
Destroy Passionately!
Well as through this world I've traveled,
Ive seen lots of funny men,
‘Some will rob you with a six gun,
and some with a fountain pen
But as through this world you ramble,
as through this world you roam,
youwill never see an outlaw
drive a family from their home.
~Woody Guthrie
Pretty Boy Floyd

Tlegalism—The open embrace of criminality asan expression of anarchism,
particularly individualist anarchism.

‘The advent of the Ilegalist tendency in the last decade of the nineteenth and
first two decades of the twentieth century, primarily in France, Switzerland,
Belgium, and Ttaly proved to be yet another contentious, seemingly
indefensible dark stain on the soul of Anarchy for many of its working class
adherents. Like the terrorists, the assassins, and the bandits- the illegalists
presented to the world the tableaux of the vessel of social morality tipped,
emptied and smashed. For the llegalists crime was an accepted economic
activity, and simultaneously the very heart and soul of social insurrection, the
negation and the negation of the negation. Passage into the Ilegalist milieu
portended a commitment that encompassed the condemnation of all law,

3
all morality, a rejection of both virtue and vice. It established a terrain of
activitythat by definition was beyond the purview of all social institutions and
accepted relationships—the landscape of the illegalist was a place where the
insurrection had already been fought and won. The illegalists were probably
the most individual of anarchists while simultaneously maintaining the
strongest bonds of association and communication, bonds required by the
social activity of crime as insurrection. The illegalist milieu also illuminates
a singular aspect of utopia, specifically that when the anarchist society is
realized it will not be as a result of some esoteric will-toliberty, or a Freudian
erotic demiurge, nor s the result and sum of a labored economic equation;
rather utopia will rise as a function of necessity, as banal as breakfast and as
certain as summer heat. Inthe same manmner that the illegalists turned to crime
tosurvive and to speak so society will turn to utopia to survive...and to speak.

Of course, illegalist actions and theory are the stuff from which controversy is
‘manufactured—not even ordinary criminals will condone crime publicly, and
the Left, which has always asserted a monopoly on morality, were as outraged.
as the politicians and the press of the dominant society when anarchists
started cracking safes and shooting bank tellers. Anarchist history provides
shining examples of this theoretical hypocrisy: certainly the syndicalists, with
their dreams of economic organization built atop massive industrial union
structures, were no great fans of the ilegalists. The anarcho-communists who
had watched as their tendency bled adherents into the various communist
parties on one side and the syndicalists on the other were in no position to
respond at any level, though Jean Grave, among others, would develop a
ranting liberal critique of the whole scene. A very similar controversy reared
its head two decades ago when Murray Bookchin and his “social anarchist”
‘minions started throwing muck at “ifestyle anarchists” for being uninterested
in organizing the masses for either the social revolution, or even a late July
Social Ecology picnic. Though Bookchin obviously felt that this was a new
controversy within anarchism, his ravings (and ours) had all the trappings of
the Syndicalist versus Illegalist tribal warfare conducted circa 1910, Finally
the Occupations of 2011 and the arguments brought for and against violence
in the General Assemblies, as reported in the non-MSM press, also seemed
yetanother rehash of the illegalist controversy that played out a full century
agoin France. Yet, llegalism strikes deeper into anarchy than any economic
or political construct—including class struggle, surplus value, or post-modern
analysis done in crayon. Certainly, the Hlegalist tap roots penetrate further
than most anarchists would like to admit, and they are not only buried in
the conceptual tangle that supports the anarchist challenge, they are also
present and resonate throughout every historical manifestation of anarchy
or anarchism. Thus one day in a post-insurrectionary era a toddler holding
fast to a chair for balance may query a parent—*Are you an anarchist, too
Mama?” For the simple reason that the child already knows that mom is an

illegalist—it goes without saying.
Clement Duval from War to Crime to Devil’s Island to New York

‘The very first illegalist, and the man who would provide the initial
intellectual argument for anarchists as criminals was Clement Duval. He
had served as a line soldier during the Franco-Prussian War and while
‘unclear whether he participated in the Commune, he was wounded harribly
by a Prussian mortar shell and subsequently contracted smallpox while
recovering. He spent the next 10 years of his life recovering, including four
years in hospital. Upon release he was basically unemployable, being skill-
less save soldiering and with multiple physical challenges, and 5o set about
becoming a thiet. He also joined the legendary anarchist group the Panther
of the Batignolles, one of many contemporary Parisian affinity groups in that
era who were notorious for their extreme ideas and also their street actions
‘which seemed designed more to irmperil police officers and violate laws than
to protest any perceived slight to the anarchist community. The Panther also
doubled as a criminal conspiracy and their occasional forays into illegality
would push Duval even further intothe milieux. Duval, however, wasa pretty
mediocre criminal; shortly after joining the Panther he was arrested for the
theft of 80 francs and spent a year in prison. Then on October 25th of 1886
Duval broke into a socialites house, stole 15,000 francs and set the house on
fire—either accidentally or on purpose—his “confession” is unclear on this
point. He was apprehended two weeks later trying to fence some of the goods
from the burglary. The myth of the illegalists begins with his arrest, for as the
cop Rossignol was trying to apprehend Duval, Duval pulled a dagger from his
coatand stabbed him repeatedly. Though Rossignol would survive his wounds,
the image of an apprehended criminal striking back at an officer of the law
‘mid-arrest was an addition to the history of crime that only an illegalist could
have made. His trial drew loud support from all segments of the anarchist
milieu and ended in chaos as he was dragged from court screaming, “Long
Live Anarchy!” He had also sent to the anarchist paper La Revolte an article
‘which included the lines,” “Theft exists only through the exploitation of man
by man... when Society refuses you the right to exist, you must take it... the
policeman arrested me in the name of the Law, [ struck him in the name of
Liberty”. Duval was sentenced to the “dry guillotine” of Devil's Island from
‘which, after 20 unsuccessful atterpts, he finally got it right and escaped in
April of 1901 and lived out the rest of his life in New York City. His memoirs
were published in 1929, and have just recently been republished (Outrage: An
Anarchist Memoir of the Penal Colony translated by Michael Shreve). Duval
never renounced nor backtracked from his life as an anarchist and criminal.
The Workers of the Night

‘The second foray of anarchists into the criminal milieu is due to one man,
Marius Jacob, who just didn't seem to be able to fitin. Initially a sailor’s
apprentice on a voyage to Sydney Australia, he jumped ship at some point in
time and among other employments tried piracy but found i too cruel to his
tastes. Upon returning to France he took up typography and militant anarchist
activity that ended with him being caught with a parcel of explosives after a
string of minor larcenies. Jacob knew when he was beat, and thereafter never
sought legitimate employment; rather he gathered around him a group of
anarchists similarly alienated from the world of work and formed what they
termed the “Workers of the Night.” He used the term “pacifistic llegalism” to
describe this new twist on anarchist activities. Jacob and his band evolved a
simple though powerful set of guidelines: One does not kill except to protect
one’s life and freedom from the police, one steals only from social parasites
ke bankers, bosses, judges,soldiers, the clergy and not from useful members
of society like doctors, artists, or architects (). Finally, a percentage of the
‘proceeds were to be donated to anarchist causes, depending on the choice
and tastes of the illegalist doing the stealing and the giving. Jacob and his
gang proved to be cunning and successful burglars. One of the many tricks
they introduced was forcing their way into an apartment from the apartment
above. To facilitate this a small hole was drilled through the floor of the top.
apartment and into the ceiling of the lower dwelling, A closed umbrella was
inserted through the hole and opened sothat falling debris and noise would be
lessened in the target apartment. From 1900 to 1903 Jacob and his small crew
of from two to four burglars perpetrated at least 150 burglaries throughout
France, including a smash and grab at the Tours Cathedral and pilfering an
Admiral’s mansion in Cherbourg. Then in April of 1903 the whole venture
went sour with the slaying of a police officer in Abbeville during an escape.
Jacob and his confederates were eventuallycaptured and tried two years later
in Amiens. Anarchists flocked to the city to support him, and while his legal
defense left much to be desired he avoided the guillotine and was sentenced to
life at hard labor in Cayenne. After 17 escape attempts he was finally pardoned
and returned to France, though he was unhappy in Paris and moved to the
Loire Valley where he continued on with his life. He eventually remarried (his
wife had died while he was in the bagne, the Gallic Gulag) and took up a life
of commercial travel. In spite of this his anarchist activities never abated. He
traveled to Barcelona in 1936 to volunteer for the CNT/FAI militias, but was
convinced that the battle would be lost to the communists and republicans
and so returned to France. During the Nazi Occupation he participated in
"Maguis sabotage squads (comprised mostly of expat Spaniards, like Sabate,
with a score to settle with any fascist—Spanish or German), primarily as a
safe house operator and providing food and succor for the guerrillas. Marius
committed suicide by intentional morphine overdose on August 26th 1954.
His suicide was far from surrender, rather he wrote that it was a result of
his calm acceptance of being unwilling to fight the rigors of old age. (My
father committed suicide with a pistol in March of 2008 for very much the
same reason, and I honor his will and courage in this action.) Marius in the
final years of his lfe developed a mixed atitude towards illegalism, based
inpart on the old magnetic attraction of proletarian workeristanarchism, I
don'tthink thatillegalism can free the individual in present-day society. Ifhe
‘manages to free himself of a few constraints using this means, the unequal
nature of the struggle will create others that are even worse and, in the end,
will lead to the loss of his freedom, the little freedom he had, and sometimes
hislife. Basically,illegalism, considered as an act of revolt is more a matter of
temperament than of doctrine. This is why it cannot have an educational effect
on the working masses as a whole. By this, I mean a worthwhile educational
effect.” Strangely, his statement would have been accepted by Bonnot, Garnier
and the other illegalists as being accurate~ they were not very interested in
propaganda by the deed, rather they were convinced that the deed itself,the
robbery, the assassination, was the insurrection. The point was not to educate
the massestowards the social revolution, but o realize their insurrection here,
now and for no ane else but the individual, and possibly the union of egoists
that she surrounds herself with—the herd, the collaborators~ be damned.

Both Marius and Duval must be considered ultimately as proto-llegalists,
since each saw their respective criminal enterprises within a propaganda
of the deed conceptual framework, and as Ureprise individuelle (basically
individual expropriation). The act wasjustified in a moral universe that turned
asnearly as possible the dominant moral codes upside down, but nonetheless
acknowledged and accepted society and its flaws as the straw man—the thing
that conceptually must be destroyed and altered, manipulated in a negative
fashion. The llegalists, however, were less interested in social revolution than
they were in living in a state of rebellion. Given the chance they would have
saved damn little of the dominant society, and certainly wouldn't have used
it as a negative paradigm from which to design an anarchist community—
‘which is the single greatest conceptual flaw of workerist anarchism. In this
sense these proto-llegalists seem more aligned to the mass-base anarchist
tendencies than to the individualist milieu from which Jules Bonnot and
others would arise. This is best exhibited by Marius's ploughing his llgotten
gains into any one of a number of anarchist papers and projects, and the
fact that such donation was an expected part of the gangs ethics. Both men
viewed their crimes as means to an end, as a way to pay the rent and also
as bringing the social revolution that much closer to fruition by supporting
anarchist causes. One s also reminded of Durruti, Ascaso and Oliver who,
during their “pistolero” period, were clearly closer to either Marius, Duval
or even Nobiling, than to say a Kropotkin. Yet in their case the assassinations
and robberies were, among other things, a way to support the CNT, and later

the FAI, and hence were only mildly tinged with individualist anarchistideas.
‘Though the success of La Revista Blanca, and the popularity of its editors,
Federica Montseny and her father Joan (Federico Urales), would leave a deeply
individualist mark on all of Spanish anarchism, including the syndicalist CNT.
Given the repression that was present in Spain during the period when such
actions took place, criminal or not,their “outrages” were politially consistent
and while not illegalist are worth recalling with fondness

Finally it should be noted that Marxists and the syndicalists who drew
dark, bold lines between crime and the working class did o n spite of the very
real proclivity of both groups to pass back and forth freely from one social
role to the other. Victor Kibalchich (of whom more later) noted of Paris i the
early 1900's: “One of the particular characteristics of working class Paris at
that time was that it was in contact with the riffraff,ie. with the vast world
of irregulars, decadents,wretched ones, with the equivocal world. There were
few essential differences between the young worker or artisan of the old.
quarters of the center and the pimps in the alleys of the neighborhoods of the
Halles. The rather quick-witted driver andmechanic, as a rule, stole whatever
they could from the bosses, through class spirit and because they were free’ of
prejudices.” Similarly, the majority of “loss” to theft in businesses todayis due
less to customers than to employees conscious enough to filltheir backpacks
‘with store inventory and office supplies after a hard days wage slavery.

Toccata and Fugue in Dynamite, Dagger, and Pistol

Concurrent with the fusion of anarchism and crime were the waves of
assassinations and bombings throughout Europe perpetrated by anarchists
‘The opening salvo of the assassination campaigns began in the anarchist
‘watershed year of 1878. Emil Max Hodel attempted to end the ife of the Kaiser,
Wilhelm I, on May 11, 1878 with a pistol; when the first shot strayed he walked.
across the street to try again, but was apprehended in the process. Lessthana
‘monthlater the anarchist Dr. Karl Nobiling had another go at Wilhelm I, again
with a pistol and being a better shot he wounded the aging monarch but did
ot kill him. Nobiling then shot himselfin the head, succumbing to his wounds
a few weeks later. Hodel was tried and subsequently beheaded on August 16,
1878. On November 17, 1878 the anarchist Giovanni Passannante attacked
the king of Italy, Umberto I, while on a tour of the kingdom, accompanied
by Queen Margherita and the Prime Minister Benedetto Cairoli. Wielding a
dagger he tried to stab the monarch who warded off the lunge with a sabre
blow. The king lived, but Cairoli, a former Garibaldian officer and total sell-out,
was severely wounded and retired, briefly, from public life. Passanante was
tried and condemned to death, even though that punishment was explicitly
reserved for successful regicides. Umberto commuted his sentence to life
imprisonmentin a cell only 1.4 meters high, without sanitation and wearing
thirty pounds of chains. Passanante would later die n an insane asylum from
his treatment during his years in hell.

‘The Russian anarchist populist People’s Will (Norodnya Volya) finally got
it right (after several wild attempts) on 13 March, 1881 by tossing a bomb
into Czar Aleksandr IT's coach. The bomb fired but didn't harm the autocrat,
however, as he stood in the street observing the carnage—and waiting for
transport back to the Winter Palace, another member of the People’s Will,
also armed with a bomb, threw it at Aleksandr’s feet, which exploded-killing.
him instantly. The repression by the Russian state was savage and in response
the Peoples Will set about plotting to kill the replacement czar, Nicholas.
‘Their plans were uncovered leading to the arrest and hanging of Aleksandr
Ulianov, Lenin's older brother; which launched his younger sibling on the
road to Marxististatist counterrevolution. So in terms of the long term political
scorecard an anarchist should probably chalk that assassination up as a
draw—sure they got Aleksandr, but ultimately the world got the Bolsheviks.
Mixed bag.

‘The political violence revives, after a ten year lull in 1891 in France when
during a May Day celebration at Fourmies the police fired into a crowd of
‘workers with a new device-the Lebel machine gun—by official count 14 dead,
40 wounded. On the same day a small anarchist demonstration of 14 laborers
in Clichy degenerated into a running gun battle after the police attempted
to break up the meeting. Three of the anarchist fighters from Clichy were
rewarded by the French justice system with unusually harsh prison sentences
for the time (three and five years). Enter Ravachol, an impoverished, but
highly motivated, anarchist who unleashed a singular and determined
bombing campaign. First he borbed the home of the presiding judge of the
Clichy anarchists (March 11, 1892), then the Lobau police barracks, where
Communard prisoners had been taken to be executed (March 15, 1892) and
finally the home of the prosecutor from Clichy (March 27, 1892). Ravachol
‘was turned in after speaking a bit too openly about his exploits to a waiter
while having dinner. He was arrested and executed in July of 1892. Of note
s the fact that on the day before the start of his trial a bomb exploded in the
restaurant where Ravachol had spilled the beans to the waiter; evidently an
attempt at vengeance~thus far no one has claimed responsibility.

Next stop Spain-Noverber 7, 1893, with the tossing of two Orsini bombs by
the anarchist Santiago Salvador into the orchestra pit of the Liceu Theatre in
Barcelona meant to avenge the garroting of anarchists in Jerez. The explosions
Killed twenty and injured an unknown number of others. Not to be outdone by
aspanish comrade, and with Ravachol’s guillotining to avenge—on December
9, 1893 August Vaillant walked into the Chamber of Deputies in Paris and
tossed a bomb packed with nails at the assorted legislators (no fatalities, one
injury). He gave himself up and was guillotined on February 3, 1894. Then
on February 12, 1894 Emile Henry upped the ante and tossed a bomb into
the Café Terminus at the Gare St. Lazare train station to avenge the death of
Vaillant. He was apprehended, ried and guillotined on the 215t of May in the
same year. Henry distinguishes himself by giving a brilliant account of his
political movement towards anarchism and hisjustification for his borbingin
court, The peroration s still reprinted to this day and is worth the time spent
toread it. Finally to top it all off Sante Geronimo Caserio, an Italian anarchist,
to avenge the death of Henry, Vaillant, Ravachol and anybody else he could
think of, stabbed and killed the French President Sadi Carnot on 24 June
1894. He was tried and guillotined in Lyons on 15 August of the same year.
‘The lst of borbings and assassinations goes on almost without interruption
until September 1932 when several galleanisti, using a large dynamite device,
effectively levelled the home of Judge Webster Thayer, who presided over the
trial of Sacco and Vanzetti—then resumes again in the sixties and continues
oninto the present....

Disharmonic Convergence

In terms of political activity and propaganda things were also afootin the
form of Albert Joseph, or Albert Libertad, or just Libertad. Born in 1875 in
Bordeaux and abandoned at birth he became a ward of the state, and faced
the usual miserabilist existence then doled out by the Third Republic to its
unfortunates. Having lost the use of a leg as a result of a childhood illness,
probably polio, Libertad walked the rest of hs lfe with the assistance of canes
or crutches—which also doubled as clubs in a fight. At the age of 21 Libertad.
‘moved to Paris and dove into writing, publishing, organizing, partying,
lovemaking,justaboutevery available opportunity for life andjoy was not lost
on the man. He worked on and contributed to numerous journals including
Le Libertaire, L'En-Dehors, and finally on 13 April 1905 there appeared the
influential individualist journal that he founded, L'anarchie, a four-page
broadsheet. The journal was widely read, and being sufficiently easyto publish
oceasionally had incredibly large print runs; as an example one issue specific
10 the July 14th holiday was issued in a print run of 100,000 (By comparison
‘most contemporary North American anarchist publications run far less than
5,000 copies—Modern Slavery has an average print run of 3K). This issue
included a manifesto appropriately entitled “The Bastille of Authority”. During
Libertadslife he met and worked with an astonishing array of writers, artists
and oddly, politicians. As an exaraple, he worked as a corrector on Aristide
Briand's journal La Lanterne, which is weird because Briand was not only
a Socialist politician but served a total of eleven terms as Prime Minister of
France, and later offered one of the first proposals for an economic union of
European nation-states some 90 years before the EU was realized. Libertad
also worked with various anarchist agitators from Zo d’Axa (quoted above) the
founder of the pre-eminent individualst anarchist journal, LEn-Dehors (The
Outside), reborn in 2002 and currently a francophone website (http:/fendehors.
net/;to Sebastien Faure, Victor Kibalchich, George Mathias Paraf-Javal, and
Emile Armand. The last two anarchists listed, along with Libertad, founded
and organized the Causeries Populaire, well-attended individualist anarchist
public discussion groups which eventually proliferated throughout Paris.
Libertad wrote in short clipped staccato pronouncements strung together
by a common theme, very like prose poetry. Finally, Libertad's version of
free love and his natural combativeness backfired when in February of 1908,
during an internecine individualist brawl, he was Kicked in the stomach by
one of the two Mahe sisters, both of whom had been at one time or another
his lovers. He died a week later in hospital. Victor Kibalchich picked up the
editorship of lanarchie, and if anything cranked the articles into a virtual
storm of individualist and illegalist rhetoric.

Fanarchie moved rapidly into deep individualist waters propelled not only.
by the experimentation of the editorial staff with free love, vegetarianism,
and water-only diets, but by the discovery in the anarchist community in
France of Max Stirner, the prophet of the sovereign self. His work, “The Ego
and Its Own,” was read, quoted, argued, lauded and reviled throughout the
first decade of the 20th century in France, and indeed in most of Europe and
the United States by anarchists of all stripes. Stirner’s most basic argument
is grounded in an effective reduction of all conceptual political categories to
ash; he derides all external loci of power, coercion and control and places
the individual, his or her needs and desires, including the desire for real
community, at the center of his universe. When first published in German,
Marx, among others, immediately recognized the ramifications of the work
and in response he wrote a typically lengthy and dull polemic in “The German
Ideology” in a failed attempt to squash the individualist challenge. Later
editions of Marx's book edited out most of the anti-Stirner material (almost
300 pages), primarily as a result of the shunting of “The Ego and Its Own” into
a side-yard of theory for several decades. With the re-discovery of Stirner
in the 1890's, and the printing of the first French translation of his work in
1900, the individualists had found a sound theoretical underpinning for a
‘number of different projects. As an example of Stirner’s thought that directly
addresses the issue of crime, guilt, and liberation: “Only when I expect neither
from individuals nor from a collectivity what I can give myself, only then do
escape the bonds of - love; the rabble stops being rabble only when it seizes.
.Only that seizing is sin, crime, only this rule creates a rabble..If people
reach the pointwhere they lose respect for property, then everyone will have

property, as all slaves become free people as soon as they no longer respect
the master as master.”

‘The praise of crime was not just sounded in the individualist milieu and
journals, rather it was found in almost all the anarchist press of the time
with varying degrees of rabidity. One of the better examples was Emile
‘Pouget's journal Pere Peinard, the most widely read working class anarchist
periodical, described vividly by a contemporary as,” (having) no display of
philosophy [which s not to say that it had nonel, it played upon the appetites,
prejudices, and rancors of the proletariat. Without reserve or disguise, it
incited to theft, counterfeiting the repudiation of taxes and rents,killing and
arson. It counseled the immediate assassination of deputies, senators, judges,
priests and army officers. It urged... farm laborers and vineyard workers to
take possession of the farms and vineyards, and to turn the landlords and
vineyard owners into fertilizing phosphates...it recounted the exploits of
olden-time brigands and outlaws, and exhorted contemporaries to follow
their example.” So the anarchist press hasn't really changed that much, the
above content being stockin trade for the best libertarian periodicals now.

By 1910allthis theorizing, bombing, thieving individualist philosophy and
intransigence would produce a group of young men and women determined.
to settle the score with bourgeois society in the form of the Bonnot Gang.

Beginnings: The Gang Forms

Of significance s the fact that Belgium plays a ole in the formation of the
gang the small,primarily francophone monarchy served as a destination for
young men seeking to avoid service in the French Army, political exiles, and.
on the lam criminals. Several gang members would first encounter each other
in Brussels and there they found sufficient agreement in ideals and goals to
begin the process of forming themselves into a working illegalist combine.
Our first suspect is Raymond Callemin (Raymond La Science) who was born
in Brussels and the earliest childhood friend of Victor Kibalchich, scion of an
impoverished Russian refugee family. The two young men worked their way
through a course of reading and drifted slowly towards anarchis; which
‘among other results caused Raymond's father, an alcoholic and disillusioned.
socialis, to disown hirm for keeping bad company. Kibalchich would eventually
land ajob on the French side of the border and while there made contact with
Causeries Populaires speakers and promoters, and it was here that he met and.
became enamored of Henriette Maitrejean (Rirette). Rirette had been married
to an anarchist worker living in Paris at 17 but by the age of twenty-two with
two small children and finding her husband rather boring had drifted through
various anarchist miliewx until finally she settled into individualist circles.

One of the main anarchist papers in Brussels, La Revolte, served as a center
for anarchist and later individualist activities and propaganda. It was here
that Edouard Carouy, the paper's editor encountered a young Parisian draft
dodger, thief, and anarchist named Octave Garnier, one of the two primary

founders, with Bonnot of course, of the Bonnot Gang. Garnier had been born
in Fontainbleau, near Paris, on Christmas in 1889, Garnier’s lfe of crime
begins early and he was initially imprisoned for three months at the age of
17 for conducting a series of smash and grabs. Exiting prison he found that
without the requisite formal certificates indicating responsibiliy, sobriety and.
distaste for rebellion, most employers would have nothing to dowith him. So
taking a practical stance he had the appropriate forrns forged and entered
into the world of work which he found to be far nastier than unemployment,
theft, or prison. He drifted from job to job, tried his hand at being a mechanic
but was repeatedly rejected by employers. During this period of drifting
employment he participated in a number of strikes-which disillusioned him
as to the viability of a working class revolution. He found his workmates
more interested in drink than in changing their situation, and this proclivity
only made them more brutish, dull and easily led. He observed that union
leaders, and especially the syndicalists, were about the same as the capitalists
as they both sought to manipulate workers to serve their own ends. Finally
he concluded in his biography, penned shortly before his death and found
on his body, So I became an anarchist. I was about eighteen and no longer
‘wanted to g0 back towork, so once again I began la reprise individuelle” By
May 1910 he was nearing the age of being called up into the armed forces
and 50 began o drift towards the refuge of Belgium. Of note here is that the
law of 1905 instituting compulsory military service had created an entire
underclass of the militarily-challenged; by one 1910 estimate a full 70,000
Frenchmen were being sought for draft evasion or outright desertion. While
in Belgium Garnier finally found himself in the company of at least some
semi-professional criminals, including Carouy, the editor of La Revolte, who
augmented his income as a part-time pipe ftter with an occasional burglary;
counterfeiting was also on the menu, and here he was instructed by Louis
Maitrejean, Rirette’s erstwhile husband.

Meanwhile Victor, having arrived in Paris, began writing for lanarchie,
and finally got the chance to spend more with time Rirette, who, a their first
encounter, found him uninteresting and “a poser.” It was in the Luxembourg
Gardens that Victor introduced Rirette to a shy young anarchist named
Rene Valet. Valet was born into a middle class home, became interested in
anarchism at a young age and had fled to Belgium to avoid military service.
It was there that he met Victor and Garnier. His stay in Belgium was short
though and upon return to Paris he collaborated on the journal Le Libertaire,
attended anarchist meetings, and spent a lot of free time with Victor. It was
during this period that Rirette introduced Victor to Andre Soudy, a pale thin
‘young man and the most easily identifiable symbol of the Bonnot Gang as the
‘photographic image of “the man with the rifle” has passed into the anarchist
collective consciousness, including some rather impressive tattoos based on
the photo. Victor described Soudy as,” the perfect example of the crushed
childhood of the back-alleys. He grew up on the street: TB at thirteen, VD

n
at eighteen...” In the close anarchist circles in which Soudy moved he was
known by the nickname “Pas de chance” (not a chance—a very prescient
moniker indeed). It also reflected the fact that he felt hs life was to be short
given the “price of medicine.”

‘Then in the midst of ll the fermentation in Paris an event in Tottenham, a
northern suburb of London, broke like a storm on the international anarchist
community. In December of 1910, several members of a Latvian revolutionary
cell, while engaged in breaking into a jewelers store, were interrupted by
the police. The comrades shot their way out, killing three policemen and
‘wounding two, in the process also killing the leader of the kommando.
‘Eventually two comrades were traced back to Tottenham and there fought one
of the anarchist equivalents of Thermopylae—there would be others. The two
men, armed only with pistols, held off seven hundred soldiers and dozens of
cops. The Home Office was eventually forced to bring in artillery, and a young.
‘Winston Churchill to the battle. The fires started by the cannonade ended the
confrontation with the anarchists expiring in the flaming building~they never
surrendered. The news traveled quickly around Europe and the Americas
drawing praise from most anarchist groups and derision from the powers that
be. A young and impressionable Alfred Hitchcock read all he could about the
“Siege of Sidney Street” and eventually would put his artistic spin on it in the
final scene of the 1934 version of “The Man Who Knew Too Much.” Kibalchich
wrote an article in Vanarchie entitled simply “Two Men” and in it he lays
down one of many conceptual visions that would subsequently animate the
Bonnot Gang: “In the ordinary sense of the word we cannot and will not be
honest. By definition, the anarchist ives by expediency; work for hir, is
deplorable expedient, ke stealing.. He takes no account of any conventions
which safeguard property;for him, force alone counts. Thus we have neither
to approve nor disapprove of llegal actions. We say: they are logical. The
anarchist is always illegal—theoretically. The sole word ‘anarchist means
rebellion in every sense.”

Several other minor actors join the group over the course of the next
several months, mostly very young men well heeled in individualist anarchism
and burning for some way, any way, to strike back at bourgeois society. This
‘amorphous group moves back and forth across Paris, lats were rented, small
communes came into being and were abandoned, arguments materialized
and were forgotten. The single greatest surprise of these months is that
somehow the illegalists found themselves in complete control of Fanarchie,
with Kibalchich and Rirette taking over editorial duties.
The Final Puzzle Piece—Bonnot

Much has been made of the character of Jules Bonnot, a charlatan, a dandy,
a sociopath, a criminal masquerading as an anarchist, or vice versa. It is
Known thatunlike the other members of the gang he did servein the military
and made the most of the experience. He learned to drive and fix motor cars
and became a crack shot with both pistol and rifle—two skills that would
serve him well when he decided on career in crime. Finally he was older
than most of the other gang members by a decade, which provided him with
a determination and, strangely, a measured recklessness that rapidly infected
(and affected) his younger comrades. Mostly centered in Lyon after military
service he did occasional mechanic work and waited for the right burglary to
come along—and when it did he hit it big, Bonnot had been travelling around
to the homes of various lawyers posing as a businessman asking for legal
services and inquiring about the climate for commerce in various regions of
France. In July 1910 he found his target, the home of a wealthy lawyer from
Vienne; Bonnot and an accomplice drove to the house during a downpour to
cover any sounds of the burglary. They cut through some shutters, broke a
pane of glass, and Bonnot, using an oxy-acetylene torch burned a hole 30 cm
‘wide into the safe from which 36,000 unfried francs were removed. By the
winter of 1911 Bonnot was finding Lyons far too warm for corafort, the heat
included avisitto a garage he had been working at by the police where, among
other swag, two recently stolen Terrot automobiles from the nearby Weber
factory were identified. Bonnot had luckily been outand after learning of the
isit headed to Paris directly, only to return a few weeks later to see the love
of hislife,Judith, one last time. Judith's husband worked as a grounds keeper
in a cemetery and the two lovers said their final goodbyes among the quiet,
snow-blanketed tombs. They would never see each other again.

S0Bonnot and a companion, the hapless Platano, set off for Paris in a stolen
La Buire automobile on 26 November 1911, The journey was to be marred by
misfortune, first of all, in spite of the freezing weather, the La Buire began
t0 overheat causing the two companions to spend the night in a small hotel
at Joigny. The next day they st off again, only this time one of the car tires
punctured and as Bonnot set about fixing the flat, Platano began to inspect
his newly acquired Browning 9mm pistol. According to Bonnot as he took
the weapon from Platano to show him its mechanism, it discharged and shot
Platano behind the ear, wounding him fatally. Bonnot, not wanting to leave
his comrade mortally wounded, shot him again in the head and then tossed
the body in the bushes after emptying the dead mans pockets. Bonnot then
Sped off towards Paris. The La Buire, like Platano, finally died and Bonnot was
forced to take a train during the final leg of the journey into the Gare de Lyon.
News of the death traveled rapidly to Lyons, and Bonnot was immediately
identified as the most likely suspect. Police scoured his former residences
where they culled anarchist literature, burglars tools, and the 25,000 francs
that Bonnot had meant to be a nest egg for hislife with Judith. Finally, judith
and her spouse were taken into custody and a warrant was issued for Bonnot's
arrest. Fortune was on Bonnot's side however, as the Paris papers ignored
the story, so while being hunted in Lyon~he was relatively free to restart his
criminal enterprises in the capital

‘Upon arrival in Paris Bonnot looked up David Belonie an anarchist whose
name he had been given by contacts in Lyon; he explained the death of
Platano to Belonie and it was suggested that a meeting of the illegalists be
held to review the situation leading to the accident and to provide Bonnot
the opportunity to clear himself of the homicide fully with the comrades. A
meeting was arranged in a top garret in Montmartre: Garnier, La Science,
Carouy, Valet, and a few others settled in to hear Bonnot's side of the story.
Bonnot acquitted himself well-angrily explaining the accident and denying
that he'd killed Platano, rather the shooting was a freak accident. The final
coup de grace was delivered to save the wounded man from any further pain,
notin an attempt to silence a homicide victim. Sometime during the “trial”
Garnier, and possibly others, realized that this Bonnot was the man they had
been waiting for—a mechanic, a sharpshooter, a tried and tested criminal
with a certain degree of sangfroid, including ten years of experience in the
demi-monde to boot.

The Gang Bangs: A Fistful of Bullets

‘Within weeks Garnier, Bonnot and La Science began workingtogether on
their “big job." A quick tangential note about the favored anarchist weapon
of the time, the Browning 9mm semi-automatic pistol. Though not as accurate
as other 9mm weapons like the Mauser, it was light, easily concealed, and
‘ammunition was readily available; further with a seven round clipand capable
of firing offfive clips per minute it was vastly superior to most pistols wielded
by the forces of law and order, especially the clunky cavalry surplus revolvers
carried by the Paris police. Finally, the Browning 9mm was the weapon
wielded by Gavrilo Princip to assassinate Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo
precipitating the First World War, and to brin the discussion full circle the
Browning was manufactured in Belgium, verymuch like the Bonnot Gang, The
illegalists had visited various areas outside Paris to find an auto with which
to perpetrate their crime and finally settled on a 1910 Delaunay-Belleville
limousine belonging to a bourgeois in the suburb of Boulogne-sur-Seine. The
Delaunay-Belleville was considered one of the best cars then available, with
a six-ylinder thirty horsepower engine and a distinctive circular radiator-
-Bonnot clearly had a hand in the decision, as he rarely settled for second
best. Thenamealso had anarchist connotations, Delaunay being the anarchist

assassin of the second-in-command of the Surete in 1909 and Belleville being
the Paris suburb where the Commune had begun, and where during the final
bloody week of street ighting most of the Communards had been slaughtered
by the troops of the triumphant Third Republic. Bonnot, Garnier, and La
Science stole the automobile on the night of 13 December without a hitch.
‘The next decision, however, was the key one; who or what would they rob?
And when? They had weapons, a series of safe houses sprinkled throughout
the outer boroughs of Paris and an impressively fast car.

On the evening of December 20th the four llegalists, Bonnat, Garnier, La
Science, and one other usually thought to be either Rene Valet or Jon De Boe,
picked up an acetylene torch and like Bonnot's previous burglary planned to
enter the home of a bourgeois and relieve the capitalist of the contents of hs
safe. The weather, however, remained dry and clear, and Bonnot insisted that
they have rain to cover at least some of the noise made during the breaking
and entering, At about half past three they gave up on the burglary plan and
decided instead to go for a more bold, innovative job that had been planned
by Garnier and Bonnot a few days before—a daylight robbery on the bank
‘messenger for the Societe Generale, the largest Parisian bank and rivaled
nationally only by the Credit Lyonnais. The robbery would take place just as
abank messenger was to deposit funds into a branch of the Societe Generale
in the Rue Ordener,just west of the Butte de Montmartre, which would allow
the gang to either flee outside of Paris rapidly or to use the neighborhoods of
Belleville or Montmartre as a screen. Themen must have felt an air of destiny
in the whole endeavor; Bonnot was wanted for murder and if caught would
surely face the guillotine, Garnier and Carouy were wanted for an attempted
murder in Charleroi, as well as forgery, and had been under surveillance
for several months, and Raymond La Science, the only non-fugitive, with his
disgustfor bourgeois society clearly had litle to lose either. They ran through
the plan a few times and around eight o'clock found themselves parked on
the Rue Ordener. “We were fearfully armed,” recalled Garnier,” I had no less
than six revolvers on me, my companons each had three, and we had about
four hundred rounds in our pockets; we were quite determined to defend
ourselves to the death.”

Alittl after eight Octave spotted the guard walking out of the bank and
towards the corner where the messenger would arrive. The guard stood on
the corner and waited inthe drizzle. Atlastone of thelocal treet cars ground
t0a halt and a handful of bowler-hatted men stepped off, though only one
was greeted with a handshake from the guard. The bank messenger carried
asatchel and briefcase. As both men began to walktowards the bank branch,
Garnier pulled his hat down low and said,” Let's go,” as he stepped out of
the car. He fixed his gaze on the messenger and marched straight towards
him, with La Science a few paces behind. Twenty yards from the bank, and
six from the cash laden messenger Octave and Raymond pulled out their
pistols and thrust them in to the bodyguards and messengers faces. The guard.
made a sprint for the bank doors as Garnier pushed the messenger down to
the ground and grabbed his satchel. Raymond grabbed the briefcase but the
‘messenger refused o let go of it and was dragged a few yards back up the
street towards the waiting Delaunay. Octave shot the messenger twice in the
chest and ran to the car that Bonnot had just brought alongside the action.
Octave jumped in the front seat, and Raymond, after dropping the briefcase
in the gutter and retrieving it hopped into the back seat. Garnier held his
pistol out the window and fired a few shots above the heads of any would be
pursuers, and any traffic that impeded the escape. Five minutes later they
flew past the Port de Clichy custors barrier and headed northwest towards
St. Denis. Sometime around 11 'clock they halted the car and divided up
the loot. The small satchel revealed just 5,500 francs and the briefcase some
130,000 francs in bonds, and checks. What was unknown to the men was that
the messenger carried a small wallet inside his coat where the remaining
20,000 francs in cash were stashed. Bonnot was irritated, he was much more
comfortable with burglary and now that he had tried a daylight robbery it
hadn't even paid very well. They stopped for bread and chocolate and then
proceeded to Rouen. They had decided to dump the auto over a cliff near La
Havre but ran out of gas 00 soon, 5o they pushed the car onto the beach where
itstuck deep in the mud. They stripped the license plates~one of which was
thrown into the sea and the other into a large garden behind a seaside casino.
‘The men then took a late boat train back in to Paris, arriving at about 1 ar.

Upon alighting in the Gare St Lazare train station Raymond bought a
copy of the right-wing La Patrie whose headlines included, “The Audacity
of Parisian Brigands—A Bank Messenger Attacked in Rue Ordener,” and
“Bold Attack in Daylight”. La Presse reported the robbery as being “without
precedent in the history o crime”, and called them “les bandits auto’—the
auto bandits. The press also blasted the police for allowing such a thing to
happen, especially when it was discovered that of the 84 cops assigned to the
areawhere the robbery occurred only 18 were on duty at any given time. The
Times of London editorialized that,” at the moment when thieves and other
pests of society are daily resorting to more daring methods, the police are
being more diverted from their primary duties in order to mount guard over
strike-breakers and others who...in normal circumstances ought not require
special protection.” In this sense the class struggle, far from being the means
tothe social revolution, was proving to be an effective diversion for the ends
of illegalist insurrection.

‘The issue of the bonds and checks immediately played on the minds of
the illegalists so Bonnot, with an interpreter, went to Amsterdam to see if
they could recoup some of the money lost in the robbery by selling, trading
or finding some way to turn the effectively worthless paper instruments into
francs. Of course the bonds and checks individual numbers were known
across Europe within hours of the robbery and he was advised to wait until
the heat had dissipated, or to try cashing them in South America or Asia,
where the likelihood of their origins maynot, as yet, have been made known.

On the afternoon of December 24th La Science and Octave decided tovisit
Kibalchich and Rirette at home. They knocked lightly at the door and a wide-
eyed, incredulous Rirette let them in, hardly believing them still alive. They
sat quietly and discussed the robbery with Victor, while Rirette occasionally
shushed them for fear of waking the children. As the hours drew long the
church bells rang in the new day, Christmas Day 1912, Garnier suddenly
realized it was his birthday, he was 22, The two illegalists took their leave of
Victor and Rirette and went their own ways to spend the Christmas holiday.
Victor, however, seeing Raymond and Garnier at close quarter had realized
that the time had come for Panarchie to rise to the occasion and to pour
some gasoline on the illegalists fire, and to stand, at least, in journalistic
solidarity with the actions of the illegalists. Kibalchich faced the dual issue
of his friendship with La Science, and his acquaintance with Garnier, (Bonnot
being unknown to him), and the fact that much of his writings were clearly
an incitement to just exactly the type of action that had occurred on the Rue
Ordener. Something had to be written, and write it he did~ in the firs edition
of Lanarchie for the New Year appearing on Thursday 4 January 1912, bylined
Le Retif and titled, “The Bandits”

“To shoot, infull daylight, a miserable bank clerk proved that
some men at least have understood the virtues of audacity.

“Iam not afraid to own up to i; I am with the bandits. I find
their role a fine one; I see Men in them. Besides them I see only fools
and nonentities.

“Whatever may resul, I like those who struggle. Perhaps it will
‘make you die younger, or force you to experience the manhunt and
the penal colony; perhaps you will end up beneath the foul kiss of the
guillotine. That may bel I iike those who accept the risk of a great
struggle..

“Besides one’s destiny, whether as victor or vanquished, isn't
it preferable to sullen resignation and the slow interminable agony
of the proletarian who will die in retirement, a fool who has gained
nothing out of life?

“The bandit, he gambles. He has therefore chances of winning.

And that is enough.
“The bandits show strength.
“The bandits show audacity.
“The bandits show their firm desire to ive.”

Kibalchich was ot done. He knew that his friends were still a large and
that now was the time to attempt to build some level of understanding and
evensupport for the auto bandits among the various anarchist communities.
In notes for two causeries held during the weekend of January 27 and 28
he further developed his ideas. He argued that society was the enemy of all
individuality through its laws of social conservation and conformity, which
deformed individuals into stunted, though “socialized” beings who could do
little more than conform to a pre-defined role. He was under no illusions
aboutsocial progress, and fatalistically suggested that things had been, were,
andwould continue to be pretty much the same. As he indicated in areplytoa
letter criticizing his article on the bandits, he considered their actions as being
“logical, inevitable, even necessary.” Kibalchich wouldwrite one more article
for Panarchie defending the bandits entitled, “Anarchists and Criminals” in
which he emphasized, “Outlaws, marginals, bandits—they alone dare, like us,
to proclaim their will to live at any price. Certainly they live far from us, far
from our dreams and our desires”, but he had as much sympathy for them as
he had for, “honest folks who've either madeit or missed the boat.” Whatever
that last line meant in modifying the general intransigence of the rest of the
article, he was, at least, clear about the importance of the bandits, and their
crimes as they apply to theory.

The police, however, were under o illusions as to how close, both
physically and ideologically, Fanarchie and the auto bandits were © each
other. On January 315t the offices of tanarchie were raided and searched,
though nothing of note was found in that incursion. Of interestis the attitude
of Jouin, the Inspector in charge of the anarchist section for the Surete, who
spoke to Kibalchich wistfully of the ideas of Jean Grave, and how the illegalists
were harming the “good name” of Anarchy. Which is an old trick and has
been used at least as recently as the arrest of Stuart Christie for his alleged
involvement in the Angry Brigade bombings of the early seventies when
during his questioning the interrogating officer came on as an anarchist
sympathizer more concerned with saving the good name of anarchy, than
being a bloodhound sniffing about for sufficient evidence to send the
arrestees to prison for several decades. Yet another lesson for us all-beware
the empathetic, politically engaged cop who “respects” your ideals—his real
motive is to suck your blood, steal your time, and sink your soul- not save
the good name of Anarchy.
‘The police returned later the next week and searched tanarchie’s offices
once again; this time they unearthed two of the ubiquitous mm Brownings;
‘which led to both Victor and Rirette’s arrest for the possession of stolen goods
(the pistols) which were identified as swag from the burglary of a gunsmiths
shop that had occurred on Christmas Eve 1911, Rirette was eventually turned
loose, but Victor waited in jail for something to occur that would either lead
to freedom or to his being charged as a fence for stolen property; either way
his oaths of silence and non-cooperation with police interrogators ran deep
and he remained silent-willing to sit out his detention.

‘The illegalists for their part were pretty certain that the Surete was only a
few steps behind them so they went to ground, changing their hair color and
shaving offtheir distinctive moustaches; further, Bonnot suggested that they
begin todress like the bourgeois enemy to allay suspicion—50 he handed out
collars, cuffs and new shirts to further their disguises. Despite the notoriety
attached to the Rue Ordener robbery not one of the gang members thought
for a minute of leaving France, let alone Paris. La Science and Octave also
maintained contact with Rirette, meeting her in restaurants and cafes to
get the latest news and to hear how Victor was holding up in the belly of
the beast. The gang also kept scouting out new locations for robberies and
burglaries, particularly in the south, eventually happening upon Elie Monier
(aka Simentoff) yet another draft dodger who had flung himself as far afield
as Switzerland to escape French military service. In 1910 he had written a
brief piece for Panarchie detailing an anti-syndicalist action by comrades in
Arles. He readily joined the insurgent army of crime when the time came for
his assistance. On 15 February 1912 a superb Peugeot limousine was stolen
in Beziers by persons unknown and driven northwards towards Paris. By 9
am the following morning, however, the limo had flatted and the five well-
dressed occupants of the auto managed to get aift from a local garage owner
as far as Beaune. After lunch the men caught a train to Paris, arriving in at
6:15pm. No one would ever be charged with the theft but the Surete detectives
suspected it was yet another exploit of Bonnot and the gang. Four days later
the Parisian press announced that the hunt for Garnier had reached as far
afield as Chemnitz and Berlin, though the gang’s next “outrage” showed just
how close the llegalists had stayed to their old stomping grounds. Ina spasm
of spontaneity the gang had decided to travel south to rob the Lavernede mine
near Alais and then the Comptoir Nationale d’Escompte (a bank) near Nimes.
Once again they chose a Delaunay Belleville for a getaway car, this one well
fitted-out by a bourgeois who was planning to follow the Tour de Prance as it
wound its way through the French countryside. The car though almost from
the very beginning developed mechanical problems and after four hours
wasted getting it repaired the disgruntled illegalists headed back north to
Paris. A real lemon. Their drive through Paris was epic by the standards
of the day, Bonnot behind the wheel kept the limo above 80 miles an hour
n
through much of the city knocking over a few stalls near the Palais Royale
and barely missing an autobus backing out of a berth at the Gare St Lazare
by hopping the car up ontothe sidewalk nearly crushing two pedestrians as
the engine coughed and sputtered into silence. A traffic policeman who had
been watching as the limo careened wildly to avoid disaster hurried over to
demand the driver's papers. Bonnot ignored the cop and finally got the engine
roaring again. Garnier who had stepped out of the Delaunay for a moment,
probably to low the onset of an oncoming panic-induced heart attack, hopped
into the back seat as the cop jumped on the running board and attempted to
grabthe wheel. Garnier thinking quickly, fired three bullets point blank into
the cop’s chest killing him s his body crumpled off the side of the car and
collapsed into the road. Bonnot pushed the Delaunay back up to speed. Two
“honest” citizens attempted to give chase in their own automobile but were
mistaken by the gathering crowd as the auto bandits and were surrounded,
and nearly seized and lynched. Despite the best efforts of the mob to exact
vigilante justice, the car of the would-be heroes pulled away from the growing
pocket of bystanders and sped off only to run over a hapless young woman
crossing the street. Their pursuit finally abandoned, the luckless posse of two
‘were questioned severely by police, and subsequently released.

Bonnot and the others continued their search for a target and after 24
hours finally found a house worth burglarizing They made quick work of the
safe but raised enough noise to wake the inhabitants of the house. The owner
of the mansion, yet another lawyer, thinking quickly fired six shots at the
burglars, which sent the illegalists running for cover and ended the attempt
of the gang for an honest, non-violent burglary. Octave, in a fit of pique, found
sufficient flammables to set the Delaunay alight and the gang returned to Paris
withouta penny to show for 48 hours of wild illegality, including very nearly
vehicular manslaughter.

As a result the gang decided tolay low for a few months and during this
time the Surete wentinto overdrive arresting anyone even remotely associated
with Vanarchie, eventually catching two fish worth having-Belonie and
Rodriguez, the two fences who had been given the responsibility of selling
the bonds and checks taken during the Ordener robbery. After selling the
financial instruments and realizing a small surn for the gang both men were
taken into custody and Rodriguez started doing all in his power to avoid the
guillotine, both wet and dry. The illegalists had grown somewhat depressed
in the meantime; the sale of the bonds had yielded almost nothing, their last
attempt at crime had been fun but a fiasco, the anarchist community had
almost unanimously condemned them, and as a final painful reminder of just
how solated they truly were lanarchie had published a piece bylined “LA” that
had thrown some real muck at the gang, The author had called then,” feeble,
narrow-minded simpletons,” whose theories were a load of crap; LA further

z
noted that while their lives would be short, it was necessary for all anarchists
to denounce their deeds and move as rapidly as possible in the opposite
direction. Of course the article drew scorn from a few in the individualist
camp; an article written in response by Victor Meric scorned LA roundly
and concluded with request for funds to assist those in custody. Garnier,
of course, was nothing if not incensed and in order to get out in front of the
criticism decided to do something truly seismic—he would write a challenge
and send it into one of the scions of the bourgeois press, Le Matin, which
published it on 20 March 1912. In the letter, addressed to specific detectives
in the Surete including Jouin, he taunted them and ridiculed the 10,000 franc
bounty offered to his companion Marie to betray him adding” .. multiply the
sum by ten, messieurs, and I will surrender myself o your mercy, bound hand.
and foot..” He goes on to exonerate one of his friends caught in the dragnet,
Dieudonne, and emphasized that he alone was guilty. Lastly he declared that,”
Tknow there will be an end to this struggle which has begun between me and
the formidable arsenal at Society’s disposal. [ know that I will be beaten; I am
the weakest. But I sincerely hope to make you pay dearly for your victory.”
Concludingjauntily,” Awaiting the pleasure of meeting you...Garnier.” Another
enclosed sheet of paper bore inked impressions of Garnier's index finger and
right hand to prove the identity of the author. Bonnot, not to be outdone by
his partner, walked into the offices of the Peit Parisien (a Parisian equivalent
of the tabloid press today like the Sun in the UK or The New York Post), and
placing his Browning menacingly on the desk of journalist Charles Sauerwein
stated that, “Well fire our last round at the cops, and if they don't care to come,
‘we'll certainly know where to find thern.” Then after picking up his pistol he
‘walked non-chalantly out of the papers office. Of course the paper should
have contacted the police immediately, it was the bourgeois thing to do, but
the gang was slowly beginning to garner some mild popular sympathy, and
the police, for whom the average Parisian feltat least a tinge of hostlity, were
sinking low in the perceptions of the press. As an example many journals
had begun to call the gang “the tragic bandits” though the Petit Parisien had
settled on the “Bonnot Gang” which would stick long after the gang and the
journal had ceased to exist.

‘The effect of these interactions with the press were to bring even more
pressure to bear on the police to do something spectacular and apprehend the
outlaws, and the gang too felt that the time was ripe for something completely
outrageous. Garnier had been thinking about firepower a great deal, feeling
that though the police in Pars carried only old cavalry revolvers that the gang
needed something trulyintimidating to make the next robbery successful. He
finally found what he was looking for when he purchased four Winchester
rifles from a local anarchist fence—basically the modern equivalent of
‘would-be criminals arming themselves with surface to air missiles, or rocket
propelled grenades torob a 7-11
Car owners throughout Paris had become far more security conscious asa
resultof the spate of recent auto thefts, 5o in response the llegalists developed
their final innovation to modern criminal activity—the car-jacking. The gang
this time was made up of Soudy, Garnier, Bonnot, Valet and the new guy,
Monier. They armed themselves, including Soudy who carried the Winchester
under his great coat, and took suburban trains into the countryside. They
disembarked at Villeneuve and walked s the final rays of sun peaked from
behind treesinto the forest to bed down for the night Theyhad selecteda piece
of road on the NS, a main north south artery, and by mid-morning had found
an ideal spot for their ambush. Meanwhile at 7am in Paris a brand spanking
new De Dion-Bouton 18 horsepower limousine, that had been ordered and
‘purchased by the Comte de Rouge, was beingrevved and readied for delivery.
Two men were in the car, a chauffeur in the pay of De Dion and a secretary
sent by the Comte to make the 18,000 fr purchase; the Comte, who couldn’tbe
bothered with the mundane was sunning himself on the Cote d’Azur, waiting
for his new car to be delivered. Bonnot, Garnier and La Science recognized
that they had only one chance to obtain a car in this fashion; should a driver
getpast them, their whereabouts would immediately be flashed to the capital,
including all the cops just waiting for the opportunity to pounce. Luckily as
they waited by theside of the road two horsecarts came spanking down the NS,
the illegalists ran out flashing their weapons and seizing the two conveyances
which they propped in the middle of the road. At the same moment the yellow
Dion-Bouton came into view The car came to a halt and the three anarchists
walked with guns in hand towards the auto, La Science calling out” It the
car wewant” The chauffeur pulled out his pistol, but he was too slow, Bonnot
fired and shot him in the heart. Garnier, perhaps in response to Bonnot's shot,
fired at the other passenger, hitting him four times in the hands, which had
apparently been raised in protection. The two bodies were dragged into the
‘woods, the gang scrambled in and the Dion Bouton was turned around and
roared north towards Chantilly.

‘They skirted Paris through the eastern suburbs and taking the N16 arrived
after two hours of driving at the offices of the Societe Generale in Chantill,
located on the main square. Bonnot sat at the wheel while Garnier, La Science,
Valet and Monier walked into the bank. Soudy remained on the pavement
outside the bank, the Winchester raised and ready. La Science called out,”
Messieurs, not a word:” as the gang came charging into the office, one of the
clerks instinctively dove for the floor, which caused Garnier to shout,” Fire!”.
Garnier shot one ofthe clerks six times and La Science poured four shots into
another teller, while Valet winged the youngest clerk, a sixteen year old, with
a shot o the shoulder. The remaining bank employee escaped by diving out
the back door as bullets zinged past him. Monier stayed at the door while
Garnier, finding a set of keys after a “Jesse James” leap over the counter said,”
Get the money first”; perhaps wishing to avoid the embarrassment of staring
lamely at a pile of worthless bonds and checks.
u
‘The shooting obviously did not go unnoticed by the locals, including the
bank manager who began to walk back across the square. Soudy leveled the
rifle at him and shouted,” Hold it! Hold it or Il pick you off,” finishing the
statement with four rounds fired over the man's head. The manager wisely
retreated in the opposite direction. Soudy now began to fire rounds at anyone
‘who ventured into the square as well as those who appeared in windows. The
illegalists raced out of the bank, guns roaring as cover for the retreat, and
crammed themselves into the waiting car. Soudy fired a final shot and ran
after the already accelerating car, he slipped as he was jumping in but was
caughtand hauled in by his comrades who realized that he had fainted in the
excitement of trying to catch the auto. In rinutes the limo was racing south
to Paris, and the relative safety of her teeming millions. Though sighted at
‘numerous places on the return trip o effective chase was given and having
abandoned the car, they hopped a fence and found themselves in Levallois-
Perret, a neighborhood swarming with police due to the presence of the
headquarters of the then striking taxi drivers union. The strike had lasted
for several months and resulted in numerous violent collisions between the
taxi drivers, strikebreakers and, of course, the police. So the gang strolled right
through the largest cluster of police in all of France with 50,000 fr in their
pockets and no one paid them any attention at all. Again, the class struggle
had reared up and provided the perfect screen for the illegalist insurrection
to occur.

‘The robbery at Chantilly sent the representatives of law and order and
especially the bourgeois press into apoplectic fits. Meetings were held up and
down the various chains of command, and like the September 11 occurrences,
the final outcome was a foregone conclusion— unbounded police surveillance
‘powers, augmented by increased funding for the violation of rights, torture of
suspects, whatever would bring the sad, and seemingly endless chapter to at
least a perceived conclusion. Within 24 hours of the robbery raids took place
across Paris, especially in the communities o the north and east,the “red bel,”
as it had been known since the days of the Commune. L'anarchie was raided
for the third time (in all the offices would be searched six times in as many
‘months). The public mood at this time had turned from one of mild, silent
approval for the Bonnot Gang to a raging hysteria—the image of a pale young
man shooting at the honest, law-abiding denizens of a quiet Parisian suburb
‘was unnerving to the point of psychosis for much of the bourgeoisie. Gun sales
spiked upwards as the middle and upper classes began to arm themselves in
response to the possibility of confrontation with these neo-barbarians, and
when the public realized that Bonnot had been trained to shoot and drive by
10 less a criminal conspiracy than the French army many wondered if the
entire structure of sovereignty might not collapse with an armed forces made
up of such malcontent recruits. Further, like the resurrected Elvis, sightings
of the gang began to be reported in such far flung places as Marseilles, Calais,
5
and of course...Brussels. In one incident a Belgian stationmaster opened fire
ona group ofinnocent, and probably stunned, passengers convinced that the
Bonnot Gang had decided to include train robbery in its repertoire. In the
‘working class neighborhoods, however, the mood was visibly different; kids
exuberantly played “Bonnot Gang” with an unlucky few of the youngsters
forced to play cops.

The Gang’s Finale: For A Few Bullets More

After Chantilly, the gang split the proceeds and parted company. Soudy,
seeking some relief from his tuberculosis, traveled to Berck, a seaside health
resort. With his paleness and long interludes of coarse, rattled coughing no
one expected him to rejoin the gang. Everyone else found safe houses and laid.
as low as possible, fully recognizing that anything appearing to be out of the
ordinary could bring the attention of the neighbors and probably the police
shortly thereafter. The gang recognized that huge rewards were being offered
for any information and that in working class areas the temptation must have
been intense to turn informant. Further the Surete was doing their best to
plant as muchsuspicionas possible within anarchist circles, driving home the
point made by Jouin that the bandits were “discrediting a great ideal,” thereby
casting the police in the unlikely role of guardians of the purity of anarchism.

The first to fall was Soudy who had been staying with friends at Berck.
Jouin had been fed information detailing his whereabouts and as Soudy
emerged from his friends home and walked towards the train station five
‘policemen jumped him. An unidentified informant was paid 20,000 francs
for the betrayal. Raymond La Science was next. He had taken refuge with an
anarchist couple, Pierre Jourdan and his lover Louise-Marceline in Paris’s oth
arrondissment. Louise-Marcelline was evidently the unidentified informer in
this case, and as La Science appeared outside the apartment early one morning
‘wearing cycling gear and with a new racing bike he was apprehended. A
search of his cycling shorts revealed sixteen one hundred franc bills and two
loaded Browning 9mm pistols.

Monier was next; he had taken to hopping from hotel room to hotel room
and had been impressively assiduous in his efforts to remain invisible unil
he met some anarchist friends for a meal in the boulevard Delessert; the
meal party included Andre Lorulot whowas well known to police and they
had been tracking him for several weeks. The gambit paid off, Monier was
immediately identified and followed back to his hotel. Unwilling to wait for
him to come out the police forced their way into his room and due to surprise
took him withoutincident. They noted that he had two loaded 9mm Brownings
on the bedstand and had they been less quiet the arrest could have gone very
differently. Bonnot and Garnier would be less easy to takeunawares, and they
‘were both poised to take as many cops as possible with them into the abyss.
B
Bonnot had been staying with a friend named Gauzy above his second-
hand clothing store. As time had gone on Gauzy had become more and
more uncomfortable with the situation, and Bonnot, unwilling to remain
in a darkened room for hours on end had been out walking several times.
Meanwhile the Surete had patched together some loose leadsand decided that
many of the “second-hand” shops in working class areas may well be operated
by fences; they had also linked a number of these shops to gang members.
Gauzy had finally prevailed upon Bonnot to find other accommodations,
though Bonnot had dithered away a day or two deciding what to do. Gauzy
then was surprised to see four bowler hatted men enter his shop on the day
Bonnot was to have left(timing, it seems, was neither on his side nor Bonnot's)
. Jouin introduced himself and stated that he had a warrant to search the
premises, and probably hoping that Bonnot had jumped out the window,
Gauzy led the detectives upstairs to his apartment. Gauzy fumbled with the
Key as he unlocked the door and stood back for Jouin and Colmar to enter;
as they did Bonnot, who had been reading a paper by the window, jumped
up and grabbed for a small caliber pistol in his jacket pocket. Jouin was on
himin an instant,they wrestled and Bonnot, finally getting the pistol in hand
fired three shots into the detective, the final bullet through the neck killing
him instantly; a perfectly appropriate Stirnerian moment; the triumphant
individual destroying the lead coil of the venomous state. A fourth shot,
probably fired from the floor, killed Colmar. The third detective Robert
dashed into the room and finding Colmar breathing shallowly hefted him
on his shoulder and carried him down the stairs. Bonnot, shoving Jouin's
corpse off him ran down the hallway, through a window and down into the
street. His forearm, grazed by a bullet, trailed blood as he ran. Bonnot spent
three uncomfortable nights in the open, finally making it to the garage of an
anarchist at the fringes of the gang, Jean Dubois, in Choisy-Le-Roi where he
spent the night Dubois was up early working on a motorcycle when sixteen
armed men pulled up in several autos and rushed the garage. Dubois pulled
a pistol and shot the detective closest to him in the wrist, but the other cops
wereready and he was met with a hail of bullets, one striking him in the back
of the neck killing him outright. Bonnot, wakened by the din from downstairs,
grabbed a gun and walked out onto a small balcony overlooking the yard and
stairs only to find the detectives just ascending o the room. He fired, catching
the lead cop in the stomach, and then ducked back into the room to avoid the
bullets fiying at him. The detectives summoned help from anywhere they
could, including two companies of Republican Guards, a group of locals with
pitchforks and shotguns (no, really—pitchforks), and further reinforcements
from the Surete. The battle lasted all morning, with thousands of bullets
tearing holes through the room where Bonnot was firing from, and Bonnot
himself occasionally walking calmly out on the porch to take a few well-aimed
shots at his attackers. By noon, with the battle effectively a draw, the Surete
‘men decided to try and blow the garage up, with Bonnot inside. A cart piled
with mattresses was rolled towards the building, the dynamite fuse lit and
placed next to the wall. The fuse sputtered and died causing the cart once
again to roll forward so that the fuse could be relit—this time successfully,
though the charge wasinsufficientto destroy the garage. Third time’s a charm,
‘with the dynamite charge this time large enough to level the building, Bonnot,
still alive though barely breathing was rushed to the hospital, but died en
route. Two days later Bonnot and DuBois were buried surreptitiously in the
paupers part of the cemetery at Bagneux. The graves were left unmarked so
as to preempt any remembrance ceremonies

‘This left Garnier and Valetat large and the Surete detectives were justifiably
concerned. Garnier had sworn in his letter to Le Matin to deal swiftly with
informers and he was serious about the threat. One of the men whom Garnier
‘was sure had sold information to the police was Victor Granghaut, who had
arranged for Carouy to stay with him; he was subsequently arrested the very
same night. Garnier had caughta train to Lozere and there waited for Victor
toreturn from work. Victor and his father were walking back home from the
station when Garnier stepped out of the bushes and in spite of the father’s
pleading and attempts to protect his son with an umbrella shot him once in
each leg stating, “That will teach you to inform on Carouy.” The final batdle
took place in Nogent where Garnier, his companion Marie, and Valet had
rented a suburban bungalow. The two men had been recognized on a bus
to Nogentand it didn't take long for the police toidentify the house that had.
been recently rented to three suspicious newcomers. The illegalists were just
finishing preparations for a simple vegetarian dinner when Valet, standing
in the back yard taking in the air was accosted by a man wearing a red,
white and blue sash who called in, “Surrender in the Name of the Law.” Valet
realized immediately that the gaudily clad man wasn't a neighbor, and put
a few rounds into the air as he dodged back into the house. The gun battle
that then erupted was fierce even by the standard of Bonnot's last stand. A
cease-fire was called for and the detectives yelled in for the men to surrender.
Marie ran out of the house into the hands of the detectives. The two anarchists
downed water and forgetting their restrictive die, also drank some coffee to
stay alert, though neither had any time o eat. They then made themselves
ready for the end. They piled the francs they had stolen in the middle of the
floor and burned them. They both stripped to the waist and loaded clip after
clip of amumo for the seven 9mm Brownings in their possession, though they
had no cartridges for the Winchesters which would have been infinitely more
useful, and accurate, in the static gun battle that they were engaged in. After
Garnier had made sure that Marie was safe the battle was rejoined with gusto.
As time went on the odds became increasingly ridiculous, eventually it was
estimated that the anarchists were outmanned by a ratio of 500 to 1. The two
‘managed to hold out until midnight, a full six hours, when with the aid of
sappers the house wasfinally destroyed by a blast of melinite. The combatants
on the side of the law made their way into the rubble and the brave detectives
of the Surete shot both men, sill alive, twice in the head, in direct violation
of “standard” police procedures. The bodies of Garnier and Valet were laid
t0 rest very near the graves of their comrades in arms, Bonnot and Dubois.

Finally, there were those who had been arrested and now faced trial, a
total of 18 men and three women (Rirette, Marie, and Barbe—a girlfriend
one of the outlying gang members). The prosecution knew it had very little
t0 g0 on, not one of the defendants was talking, the evidence was weak,
‘mostly circumstantial and ultimately compromised in most cases by shoddy
police work. In fact there was no way that the prosecutors could state with
any certainty exactly who had participated in what robbery. The accused
languished in prison until 3 February 1913 when the court began to hear
evidence. In the interim Victor and Rirette began a rapid backpedal from
what had been written in tanarchie, complaining it had been misinterpreted,
and that much of what they had said at meetings like the causeries populaires
went unrecorded and directly contradicted material that had appeared in
print—basically casting themselves in the role of the “honest intellectual”
versus the “criminal illegalist” that the other defendants obviously were. The
final decision of the court and the sentences of some of the defendants follow:

The three women and Rodriguez the fence—Not Guilty
La Science, Soudy, Monier—Guilty; Guillotined 22 April 1913
Kibalchich—Guilty; five years in prison, five in exile.

Of the three defendants sent to the guillotine, they all died well (that
is, bravely and without regret).

Of the two “honest intellectuals” Kibalchich eventually changed his name
(to Victor Serge) and his politics, joined the Bolsheviks, worked closely with
the left-communists and later Trotsky only to be deported by Stalin in 1937.
Like his friend Trotsky he eventually made it to Mexico where he died of
natural causes in 1947—though how he avoided the Stalinist ice-pick is hard
o fathom. Rirette spent the rest of her life damning the anarchists as publicly
as she could— coming to the conclusion in her memoirs serialized in the
bourgeois Le Matin “..behind illegalism there are not even any ideas. Here’s
‘what one finds there: spurious science, lust, the absurd and the grotesque.”
Maybe she did “get it” after all....
Parting Shots

The history of illegalism doesn't end here, a few others have stepped
forward and picked up the theory and the weapons that death had pried
from the moldering hands of the Bonnot Gang, These include the Italian/
‘German Horst Fantazzini, an individualist anarchist, who robbed his way
across Europe during the 60's and 70 with a flair as yet unmatched among
the criminal classes. In one holdup he fled successfully on bicycle, he escaped
from prison several times, and when a teller fainted during one of his bank
robberies he sent her roses the next day. The press dubbed him the “kind
bandit” thereafter. He wrote an account of his escape from Fossano prison,
‘which was eventually made into a movie Ormai é fatta! Fantazzini died in 2001
ina prison infirmary. One of his daughters built a website to commemorate
the life and exploits of her father (horstfantazzini.net) which is fun to look
through. As of today, the life and written works of Alfredo Bonnano continue
the theory and praxis ofillegalism and any one of his articles is worth a read.
In terms of contemporary social movements the Yomango{san ongoing social
phenomenon in South America, Spain, and Italy devoted © open socially-
informed shoplifting conducted en masse. This movement is going strong
and since the world economy hit the skids in 2008 has if anything grown
and become more accepted, t the point of being endorsed by several non-
anarchist spanish trade unions, who periodically sponsor mass shoplifting
outings for their members. There are obviously many other forms of llegalism
that have been tried and used in the anarchist milieux and the above review
isin no way an exhaustive account. As an example all forms of squatting are
by definition illegal, regardless, the practice is engaged in, and approved of,
by virtually every permutation of current anarchist theory or movement,
and s usually justified in a conceptual framework that looks and tastes very
illegalist. Ina practical sense; not al llegalists are squaters, but ll squatters
areillegalists.

Continuing on in a pragmatic manner, Illegalism also provides some
interesting insights into the ongoing conundrum of organization as it applies
to anarchism. Of note is the fact that while Bonnot and company had no
formal structure, no rules for decision making, and little to say on the issue
of organization, they do seem to provide some answers on the subject. One of
these solutions s the turning onits head of the very question of organization,
‘which usually begins with the question,” what type of structure shall we
create?” The illegalists, however, in the example provided by their activity
began with the question what shall we do: what activity is required for the
successful realization of this project? Then based upon what it is that a group
is seeking to accomplish, the structure required to realize the activity comes
into being. Each of these solutions then is also tempered by the principle
that the responsiveness of the structure is based on its ability t realize the
needs and desires of the individual, to safeguard her autonomy against the
ever present likelihood that organizations will tend to blunt and ultimately
deny the sovereignty of the individual in favor of the growing power of the
collective, especially with the passage of time. In extremis some organizations
exist whose sole purpose is to maintain their own existence; the nation-state
is a good model of such circuitous existential theory, and certainly the police
and the military are prime examples of the mailed fis that does nothing save
preserve the sovereign status-quo, and eliminate any contestation that could
lead to eitherradicalinternal change (a elative impossibility) or insurrection.
‘The absurdity of the argument s often laid bare when fundamental principles
are used to justify their own destruction. The Occupy movement, for all its
‘weakness, provided a perfect example of freedom of speech being justified
to destroy freedom of speech—you can say whatever you want, just not at
night, not in a public park, and not in New York. Alternatively there i the
example of military versus militia organization in the Spanish Civil War; a
puzzle that probably accounted for numerous sleepless nights for Durruti
and other FAI militants during the late summer and fall of 1936. In this case
the strategic objective of winning the war did little to inform the structure of
the militias; rather the decade/century militia configuration was far better
suited to either the type of affinity group actions that the FAI excelled at, or
atonestepremove, the strike or insurrectionary committees, either regional
or national in scope, that the CNT had utilized for its industrial contestation
or the outright seizure of villages and towns and the inevitable declaration of
“communiso libertario”. Durruti, in one of his moments of clarity, voiced the
concern that the “discipline of indiscipline” was proving to be an ineffective
tactic with which to fight a civil war. I have noanswer as to how the Spaniards
should have structured their miltias, rather I am convinced that their chosen
organization was sufficiently flawed as to allow them to lose twice, irstto the
Stalinists, and then to the fascists,

‘The simple, elegant ilegalist “solution” to the problern of organization was
neither new nor particularly innovative. The raiding parties of the Great Plains
tribes were composed in a very similar manner. The “solution” then consists of
a structure thatis temporary~ that ceases to exist past the accomplishment of
the trategic goalfor which the organization was broughtinto existence. The
organization allowed for each of the individuals involved sufficient input so
as to satisty the need for participation in decisions that affect ones own life,
especially those decisions that may lead to the maiming, capture or death of
the organizations members. Each of the individuals involved understood their
arious responsibilities and that knowledge allowed for tasks to be completed
quickly and completely without the need for oversight (administration)
nor the attendant operationalizing factor of oversight—discipline, and its
sustaining hierarchical motivating principles—punishment and/or reward.
‘The Hlegalists also represent one of the last glowing embers of the
association of anarchy with utopia; which would be brought back into a raging
conflagration some seventy-five years later with an unlikely mixture of anti-
civilization, anti-technology theory, the resurgence of combative, mobile
affinity groups best exemplified by the “Vermont Family,” urban squatters,
and the re-discovery and re-popularization of 120 years of anarchist theory
and history (including the Situationists and the Frankfort School) by a well-
connected group of writers, journalists and theorists linked together through
zines and mail who found each other via the ultimate underground print
media clearinghouse, Factsheet Five. This strange mix of theory, personality
and history would be brought to a near explosive mass via the catalyzing
addition of various meetings and events including the 1986-1989 Continental
Anarchist Gatherings (Chicago-SF-Toronto) and the Tompkins Square Park
Riot of August 1988,

Grinding back to the 19th Century~ Marx and Engels would use the term
utopian as a way to criticize and infantilize not only those thinkers who
had swum in the waters of socialism, communism, and revolution prior
o their arrival, additionally the anarchists, especially Bakunin, would use
the term utopian as an insult for all comers as they vied for political pre-
eminence among the various population strata most likely to participate
in revolutionary upheavals, In the case of Bakunin the epithet was hurled
‘without acknowledging the obvious and gnawing truth that most of anarchist
theory and praxis was,in fact, pretty utopian. The Paris Commune provided
the political upheaval that materialized as the fork in the road that would
effectively split the various revolutionary currents into utopian (anarchist)
andanti-utopian (Marxist) camps. Using then select activities of the Commune
o illustrate this marked dichotomous political vision and simultaneously
as real events that stirred the acrimonious stew then brewing between
Marx and Bakunin. Let's see what the Communards did that produced such
antipathy—for the Marxists the high water mark of the uprising may be
the Commune’s outlawing of night work for bakers, a solid practical step
towards socialism without a blemish of the idealistic or heroic and without
any of the revolutionary mumbo-jumbo that they accused their adversaries
of engaging in. For the anarchists the destruction of the Vendome Column
was the insurrectionary act par excellence~ with all the possibilities the
action entailed, the death (regicide? archicide?) of imperialism, militarism
and nationalism, the proof of the malleability of the urban landscape to
meet the needs of people, and finally the outrageous, side-splitting comedy
of watching the bronzed, granite phallus tumble grandly and flaccidly to the
ground. Not surprisingly the author of the night work legislation was Leo
Frankel, a devoted follower of Marx, and the destruction of the Column was
the brainchild of the artist Gustave Courbet, an admirer of both Proudhon
and Bakunin. Pushing on from the Commune into later European history
one sees this dichotomy grow ever more striking, ever more profound. The
anarchists became the midwives of week long Social Republics, of risings
doomed before the frst shot was fired, of being the guardians of insurrection
that s “nowhere” because it is realized and dreamed of everywhere.

In the mind one sees the image of a Spanish peasant unable to read but
staring at and moving rough, calloused fingers over the pictures of black
flags and various images that adorn the latest issue of La Revista Blanca.
Anarchism is utopian because the anarchistvision is sublime, transcendent;
even the poorest, most uneducated worker could viscerally relate to a future
‘where bosses and work had been destroyed in favor of play as the dominant
economic activity and a grand illuminating equality of resources, wealth,
and opportunities to learn and attain knowledge, and finally to participate
directly without mediation in decisions that affected one’s life. Unlike the
Marxist who envisioned a society very like the one that she lived in—only in
the communist world the workers were the masters, not the slaves. Marxism
is anti-utopian because the communist vision is of a society where nothing,
other than the class makeup of the new bosses, has changed. The advent and
activities of the illegalists, and the concurrent rise of that most possibilist of
anarchist tendencies, anarcho-syndicalism, replayed, in miniature the split
that occurred after the Commune. In this instance the reinsertion of utopian
currents into anarchism, accomplished as the result of the individualist
challenge, including the rediscovery of Stirmer, and the writings of Zo d”Axa,
among others, was offset by the growth of the syndicalist tendency, including
the uptick in the census of various union bodies, especially those associated
with the Confederation General du Travail in France, the IWW in the US and
Australia, and of course the proliferation of soviets in Russia. The strength
of the syndicalist argument ultimately being contained in the non-utopian,
practical method of building unions as the seeds of the new society, and also
providing structure as to the post-general strike world and how industry would
be changed from a generator of profit to a liberator of human aspirations.
Of interest oo is the seeming confusion that reigned at the “top” of these
organizations especially the IWW, where Bill Haywood would respond as
to whether he had ever read Marx's Capital with the snappy rejoinder,” No,
but [ have the marks of Capital all over my body.” This sentiment is echoed
by Joe Hill, who while rotting in prison during the months that the State of
Utah was figuring out the easiest way to justify his murder was asked by a
Iocal journalist whether he was a Marxist to which he responded with the
simple, and avowedly untrue, “Yes, 1 am, and always have been” Therefore
as syndicalism sought to reject as much s possible the smear of topianism,
the closer the leaders and rank and file edged towards proclaiming the
organization and its members Marxist

B
‘The illegalists on the other hand never stood back from the glaring
utopianism that characterized much of their theory. Certainly Kibalchich was
sufficienty clear in his theoretics that he acknowledged the basic topianism
that animated much of individualist anarchism; he was equally solid in
translating llegalist activities into the living breathing insurrection that was
then being fought out. Not to be put off o some great event scheduled to occur
in the next few centuries, but a battle that was joined daily by the adherents
of llegalism, and their supporters. In this sense the insult to the anti-utopians
is two-fold, yes we are utopians, and yes we are utopians operating on the
terrain of utopia-now—not is some far-flung future where our children’s
children will form the general staff of an as yet unborn insurrectionary
‘militia. Finally its also importantto note the fundamental violence that such
theories do to the Marxists, and some anarchists, who believe that only when
the time has become ripe, through the collapse of the wage and profit system,
the downhill slide from peak oil, or the moment when everyone, in a vast
global pre-frontal cortex explosion of wisdom realizes that the total amount
of deb, individual, sovereign, and corporate exceeds the total amount of all
possible form of profits and incomes with which to make the payments; will a
revolution become a viable alternative to the species. As opposed to the very
general utopian notion that basic human individual desire and need will be
the sole motivating factors that will push the species from where it is now
into the next great necessity, utopia.

Finally, the real arguments made against illegalism were that of an early,
seemingly meaningless death. So 1l let Marcuse, who stood with one foot in
Marxism and the other in utopia bring this essay to a conclusion,:

“Under conditions of a truly human existence, the difference between
succumbing to disease at the age of ten, thirty, fifty, or seventy, and
dyinga “natural” death after a fulfled life, may well be a differ-
ence worth fighting for with all instinctual energy. Not those who
die, but those who die before they must and want to die, those who
die in agony and pain, are the great indictment against civilization.
They also testify to the unredeemable guilt of mankind. Their death
arouses the painful awareness that it was unnecessary, that it could
be otherwise. It takes allthe institutions and values of a repressive
order to pacify the bad conscience of this guil. Once again, the deep
connection between the death instinct and the sense of guilt becomes
apparent. The silent “professional agreement” with the fuct of death
and disease is perhaps one of the most widespread expressions of
the death instinct ~ or, rather, of ts social usefulness. In a repres-
sive civilization, death itself becomes an instrument of repression.
Whether death is feared as constant threat, or glorified as supreme
sacrifice, or accepted as fate, the education for consent to death

u
introduces an element of surrender into lfe from the beginning ~
surrender and submission. It tifles “utopian” efforts. The powers
that be have a deep affiniy to death; death is a token of unfreedom,
of defeat. Theology and philosophy today compete with each other in
celebrating death as an existential category: perverting a biological
Jact into an ontological essence, they bestow transcendental blessing
on the guilt of mankind which they help to perpetuate ~ they betray
the promise of utopia.”

»
Recommended Reading:
‘The Bonnot Gang by Richard Parry
Without A Glimmer of Remorse by Pino Cacucei

Outrage: An Anarchist Memoir of The Penal Colony
by Clement Duval

Jacob by Bernard Thomas
Disruptive Elements: The Extremes of French Anarchism
Anarchists Never Surrender by Victor Serge
Freedom: My Dream by Enrico Arrigonni

0s Cangaceiros: A Crime Called Freedom
(translated by Wolfi Landstreicher)

sabate: Guerrilla Extraordinary by Antonio Tellez
Facerias: Urban Guerrilla Warfare (1939-1957) by Antonio Tellez
Run Hombre Run by Xose Tarrio Gonzalez

Adios Prison: A Tale of Very Spectacular Escapes
by Juan Jose Garfia

How It All Began by Bommi Bauman

Mesrine: The Life and Death of a Supercrook
by Carey Schofield (Imprimi Potest Editions)

Where The Money Was by Wilie Sutton
Queen of the Underworld by Sophie Lyons
The Complete Book of Locks and Locksmithing by Bill Phillips

Modern Slavery: The Libertarian Critique of Civilization
If there is anything left in you, make a stir while you live! NOW
you have a chance. It won’t be long. Your days are numbered.
Your end is nearer than you think. Soon the worms will eat you.
Do you understand?

ENEMY COMBATANT PUBLICATIONS

ZWAANENDAEL DELAWARE