Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

August 28, 2017
Historian Merriman (Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune) recounts the 1911 bank robbery and subsequent manhunt that rocked the relatively placid Third French Republic in the last days of the belle époque. He takes readers to the outskirts of Paris, to the working-class neighborhood of Romainville, the site of an anarchist commune. The members of the Bonnot Gang met there, including petty criminal André Soudy and the vicious Jules Bonnot. Merriman’s electrifying narrative follows the gang on their crime spree, from the bank heist to a gruesome home burglary and murder, along with a host of other crimes. The tension builds as Paris erupts in mass hysteria and the police slowly close in on the criminals, resulting in a standoff of epic proportions featuring dynamite and unfolding before thousands of picnicking spectators, eager to witness justice. While the criminals themselves are certainly fascinating, equally so are Rirette Maîtrejean and Victor Kibaltchiche, young lovers caught up with the wrong crowd and arrested and tried under France’s “scoundrel laws,” which ensured harsh punishments for criminal collaborators. In addition to his vivid portrayals of the principal characters and events, the author provides informative context to the crimes, outlining the severe exploitation of workers in this supposedly idyllic time in Parisian history. This is a nuanced and fascinating dissection of the events by a riveting storyteller with a sympathetic (but unsentimental) view of the anarchists’ cause.

August 1, 2017
While artists and writers rebelled against aesthetic conventions, anarchists terrorized pre-World War I Paris.The author of several histories of Parisian unrest, Merriman (History/Yale Univ.; Massacre: The Life and the Death of the Paris Commune, 2014, etc.) uncovers the dark side of the famed belle epoque, offering a fresh perspective on the reality of life for much of the city's population. While Proust, Picasso, and Apollinaire pursued their art, laborers and craftspeople barely subsisted on low wages, facing destitution if they became ill or were laid off. Angry revolutionaries railed against worker exploitation, political corruption, and injustice; some, calling themselves "illegalists," believed that "any acts against society were justified," including theft. Central to Merriman's revelatory history are two self-proclaimed anarchists: Belgian-born Victor Kibaltchiche (he later changed his surname to Serge), the son of Russian emigres, and his companion, French-born Rirette Maitrejean. Merriman draws heavily on their memoirs, supplemented by archival sources and other contemporary testimony. Unfortunately, many quoted passages are not introduced by speaker, forcing readers to turn to the endnotes to make sense of the citations. Victor and Rirette did not condone violence. However, like their fellow anarchists, they believed "that once states had been destroyed, people could live in harmony in natural groupings. They believed fervently that people were basically good" but that government, capitalism, organized religion, and professional armies fomented conflict. Merriman focuses on a particular wave of robberies committed by the Bonnot Gang, led by Jules Bonnot, a sometime mechanic who could not bear anyone in authority. With a string of arrests behind him, in 1911, he and his armed accomplices--"not a finely organized group, but rather a band in flux"--launched into robberies and, later, murder. The author details the aggressive police response and the alarming newspaper articles that incited public panic. Inevitably, Victor and Rirette were swept up as suspects, "accused of being intellectuals who encouraged illegalist criminality," although they had no connection to Bonnot. Chilling historical evidence of the dire consequences of inequality and injustice.

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September 1, 2017

The ever-churning machine of Parisian society was at an extraordinary point before World War I. Art, music, and literature experienced a transformation via the works of visionaries such as Pablo Picasso, Claude Debussy, and Marcel Proust. Electricity buzzed throughout the city. This was Belle Epoque--a so-called beautiful era of peace, hope, prosperity, and renaissance, marked by technological and scientific advances that promised a bright and exciting future. But simmering under all this joie de vivre was an underclass who barely earned enough to survive, and sometimes didn't. The inequality and injustice eventually propelled angry revolutionaries to take Robin Hood-esque measures into their own hands. Merriman (Charles Seymour Professor of History, Yale Univ.; Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune) focuses largely on two anarchists in particular: Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maitrejean. The author's Parisian scholarship shines as he builds a vivid and meticulously detailed image of the period, creating the foundation for a multilayered and three-dimensional story of what happens when oppressed people are pushed to their limits. VERDICT Merriman's especially timely work gives us a robust understanding of the revolutionary thought process, encouraging us to question what lies beneath a society's shining surface.--Erin Entrada Kelly, Philadelphia

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 1, 2017
Merriman's (Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune, 2014) fresh look at the Bonnot Gang, whose violent crime spree riveted and terrified Belle Epoque Parisians, emphasizes the unforgiving socioeconomic inequalities of the era and the allure of anarchism to the desperate. Beginning with the shooting of a bank courier and a dramatic getaway in a stolen luxury car, the mayhem quickly escalated to involve a gun-shop heist, another bank robbery, more car thefts, and several dead policemen. It ended with massive shootouts, the dynamiting of a building, and, for several gang members and their associates, the guillotine. In recounting the spree, which persists in French cultural memory much as Bonnie and Clyde's run does in the American, Merriman digests memoirs and newspaper archives to create a comprehensive, blow-by-blow account. But his true concern is the correlation between economic hopelessness and political violence, hence his digging into the backstories of diverse people for whom France's beautiful era was anything but. These include Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maitrejean, anarchist intellectuals who, despite rejecting violence, were punished for their gun-toting friends' actions. The result is a lively, erudite work that, without romanticizing the Bonnot gang's crimes, manages to humanize those in their milieu, and perhaps suggest lessons for the present.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)