Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits

Paris, 1911. Picasso, Debussy, and Proust were revolutionizing art, music, and literature. Electricity had transformed the City of Lights. And the Parisian elites were mad about their fancy new cars. The Belle Epoque was well underway, yet it was not without incident. That year, Paris was gripped by a violent crime streak that obsessed and frightened its citizens. Before Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger, the Bonnot Gang, led by the coarse Jules Bonnot, captured the minds of a nation with their Robin Hood-esque capers. With guns blazing, the Bonnot Gang robbed banks and wealthy Parisians and killed anyone who got in their way in spectacularly cinematic fashion--all in the name of their particular brand of anarchism.

In Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits, John Merriman describes the Bonnot Gang's murderous tear and the Parisian police force's botched efforts to stop them. At the heart of the book are two anarchist idealists who wanted to find an alternative to Bonnot's crimes and the French government's unchecked violence. Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maitrejean met and fell in love at an anarchist rally, and together ran the radical Parisian newspaper L'Anarchie, which covered the Bonnot Gang with great sympathy. The couple and their anarchist friends occupied a world far apart from the opulent Paris of the Champs-Elysees. Their Paris was a vast city of impoverished workers who lived near bleak canals, cemeteries, and empty lots around smoky factories. Victor and Rirette found hope in radical politics, Bonnot and his gang in crime, but none could escape the full might of the French military. The lovers were arrested and imprisoned for their political views, Bonnot was murdered after an hours-long standoff with the police, and his gang was hunted down and sentenced to death by guillotine or lifelong imprisonment.

Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits is a classic tale of lost causes, tragic heroes, and the true costs of justice and revenge.

“"Thorough andsweeping... Merriman's book addresses larger questions about anarchist ideologiesand the forces of order in Belle ”

"Author John Merriman delivers a ripping good yarn with a lineup of compelling characters .... [the book] leaves the reader with some timely questions about where a country should set the balance between security and civil rights for people with unpopular views."--MinneapolisStar Tribune
"Electrifying.... 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."--Publishers Weekly
"France's long history of antiterrorist legislation is given a timely appraisal in Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits, a riveting history of the Bonnot Gang, the brutal band of murdering anarchists who rattled the City of Light in the early 20th century....a vivid recounting. [Merriman's] eye for detail is particularly acute."--Tobias Grey, TheWall Street Journal
"I found this book fascinating: a Bonnie and Clyde story set in the heady Paris of a century ago, a Paris etched by Merriman with erudition, a fine eye for lively detail, and a lightness of touch. It also fills in, in a way we have not had before, an important tragic early episode in the life of the man who later became one of the 20th century's great eyewitnesses to tyranny, Victor Serge."--Adam Hochschild, author of Spain in Our Hearts
"In Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits John Merriman spins a true crime story full of intrigue, passion, and political significance. He paints an unflinching picture of a society torn apart by inequality and of the people who took desperate measures to try to remedy it. A compelling perspective that is richly resonant today."--Maya Jasanoff, author of Liberty's Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War
"John Merriman's Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits tells another story of the Belle Époque-not the romance of the 'Ville Lumiére' with its dazzling palaces and grand hotels but the dark tale of a city in the grip of a crime wave...Merriman's subject is the rise and fall of the Bonnot Gang, but he shrewdly wraps his historical analysis in the arms of a love story."--MarilynStasio, The New York Times Book Review
"Merriman uncovers the dark side of the famed belle époque, offering a fresh perspective on the reality of life for much of the city's population.... [A] revelatory history...of the dire consequences of inequality and injustice."--Kirkus Reviews
"Merriman's fresh look at the Bonnot gang, whose violent crime spree riveted and terrified Belle Époque Parisians, emphasizes the unforgiving socioeconomic inequalities of the era and the allure of anarchism to the desperate....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."--Booklist, starred review
"No one knows the rebellious underworlds of fin-de-siècle France as well as John Merriman, and no one can write about them as vividly. Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits is a beautifully told story, by turns comic, tragic, hopeful, despairing, and intensely human."--David A. Bell, author of Shadows of Revolution: Reflections on France, Past and Present
"Once again, John Merriman has written a gripping tale about fin-de-siècle Paris. By tracing the slowly merging destinies of the Bonnot Gang, a group of anarchist-inspired criminals, and Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maîtrejean, an anarchist couple who refused violence, Merriman has written an absorbing tragedy that also plumbs the history of radical politics in France."--Robert D. Zaretsky, author of A Life Worth Living: Albert Camus and the Quest for Meaning and Boswell's Enlightenment
"The author's Parisian scholarship shines as he builds a vivid and meticulously detailed image of the period, creating the foundation for a multi-layered and three-dimensional story of what happens when oppressed people are pushed to their limits. Merriman's especially timely work gives us a robust understanding of the revolutionary thought process, encouraging us to question what lies beneath society's shining surface."--Library Journal
"Thorough and sweeping... Merriman's book addresses larger questions about anarchist ideologies and the forces of order in Belle Époque society.... He manages, through imagistic detail and pacing, to build suspense even when the historical outcome is known.... We know we are in expert hands."--H-France Review
Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits reads like a novel.... engaging and suspenseful, and the moral underlying in the story, wealth inequality, rings true today.... a must-read for fans of history and true crime alike. It grips the reader and pulls you into a tale so wonderful you almost can't believe it's true.--DanArel, HuffPost

John Merriman is the Charles Seymour Professor of History at Yale University and the author of several books, including Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror, and the classic History of Modern Europe. He is the recipient of Yale's Byrnes/Sewell Teaching Prize, a French Docteur Honoris Causa, and speaks frequently at universities across the United States, United Kingdom, France, and Australia.

Paris, 1911. Picasso, Debussy, and Proust were revolutionizing art, music, and literature. Electricity had transformed the City of Lights. And the Parisian elites were mad about their fancy new cars. The Belle Epoque was well underway, yet it was not without incident. That year, Paris was gripped by a violent crime streak that obsessed and frightened its citizens. Before Bonnie and Clyde and John Dillinger, the Bonnot Gang, led by the coarse Jules Bonnot, captured the minds of a nation with their Robin Hood-esque capers. With guns blazing, the Bonnot Gang robbed banks and wealthy Parisians and killed anyone who got in their way in spectacularly cinematic fashion--all in the name of their particular brand of anarchism.In Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits , John Merriman describes the Bonnot Gang's murderous tear and the Parisian police force's botched efforts to stop them. At the heart of the book are two anarchist idealists who wanted to find an alternative to Bonnot's crimes and the French government's unchecked violence. Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maitrejean met and fell in love at an anarchist rally, and together ran the radical Parisian newspaper L'Anarchie , which covered the Bonnot Gang with great sympathy. The couple and their anarchist friends occupied a world far apart from the opulent Paris of the Champs-Elysees. Their Paris was a vast city of impoverished workers who lived near bleak canals, cemeteries, and empty lots around smoky factories. Victor and Rirette found hope in radical politics, Bonnot and his gang in crime, but none could escape the full might of the French military. The lovers were arrested and imprisoned for their political views, Bonnot was murdered after an hours-long standoff with the police, and his gang was hunted down and sentenced to death by guillotine or lifelong imprisonment. Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits is a classic tale of lost causes, tragic heroes, and the true costs of justice and revenge.

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