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Bernard Thomas Volume 1 Introduction by Alfredo M Thief Jacob Alexandre Marius alias Escande Attila George Bonnot Féran Hard to Kill the Robber Bernard Thomas volume 1 Introduction by Alfredo M. Bonanno First Published by Tchou Éditions 1970 This edition translated by Paul Sharkey footnotes translated by Laetitia Introduction by Alfredo M. Bonanno translated by Jean Weir Published in September 2010 by Elephant Editions and Bandit Press Elephant Editions Ardent Press 2013 introduction i the bandits 1 the agitator 37 introduction The impossibility of a perspective that is fully organized in all its details having been widely recognised, rigor and precision have disappeared from the field of human expectations and the need for order and security have moved into the sphere of desire. There, a last fortress built in fret and fury, it has established a foothold for the final battle. Desire is sacred and inviolable. It is what we hold in our hearts, child of our instincts and father of our dreams. We can count on it, it will never betray us. The newest graves, those that we fill in the edges of the cemeteries in the suburbs, are full of this irrational phenomenology. We listen to first principles that once would have made us laugh, assigning stability and pulsion to what we know, after all, is no more than a vague memory of a passing wellbeing, the fleeting wing of a gesture in the fog, the flapping morning wings that rapidly ceded to the needs of repetitiveness, the obsessive and disrespectful repetitiveness of the bureaucrat lurking within us in some dark corner where we select and codify dreams like any other hack in the dissecting rooms of repression. Short-lived flashes attest to the heroic deeds of some comrade here and there, some rebel, sometimes even looked on with suspicion before history brands and seals his perfectly battered flesh. We are not inane spectators of unwatchable television or readers of serial romances buried in dusty library catalogues. We are alive and for life, so feed off experience. As soon as a vital sign appears here and there, we pick it up with the tip of our fingernail and place it in the secret portfolio of our heart, a tiny heart-shaped icon or forget-me-not. Basically, we too, the hard, dauntless ones with our refusal to accommodate, even we, who are not discouraged by the threats of the institutions, nor by the far more terrible ones of imbecility disguised as rebellion, also need our iconography. That is why we collect memories, sympathies, friendship—sometimes no more than a simple handshake—storing them up in our minds as sharing and support when not direct participation. Many of us have cracked open vaults of banks and the Treasury, carried ii out radical expropriations, taken land from the landlords and killed enemies in bloody gun battles at sunset, at this hallucinatory level. And reading and making notes of our emotions and remembering stories around the fire when grandmother gave the correct interpretation of Red Riding Hood's rosy cheeks, in our own wildest fantasies we elaborate these events that really happened, which we have only participated in from afar (in the best of cases), and place them at the liveliest part of our desires. And that is that, while the critique that sided with the wolf and not the child remains in the loft. Rigorous science is no longer possible: remember? So how can we put any criteria in our fantasy. Let's leave it at full gallop, far from the sepsis that used to confuse us not long ago. Let's warm our hearts—like taking a cold meal—with tales of adventure like the one we are presenting here—moreover one that is not all that badly realised. The story tells of a thief. A thief with egalitarian illusions. An anarchist and his dreams. But with a difference: this man, along with his comrades, really did open the safes of the rich, and by this simple fact demonstrated that an attack on social wealth, even if only partial, is possible. introduction iii It might seem insignificant that this be the most interesting part of the whole story, but that is not so. The spectacular aspect of the activity of Jacob and his comrades, the incredible list of their robberies and the elegant way they were carried out, are not the most important aspects. But they could be those that strike the reader's fantasy most, even the anarchist reader. Basically, now as in the past, we still want someone to supply the iconography we cannot do without. The comparison with Arsen Lupin is enough. Maurice Leblanc was a well-known serial romance writer; Bernard Thomas is a serial journalist. The two genres go hand in hand. But Jacob and the others were something else. In the first place, they were comrades. And it is here, in the field of their choice of actions, that we need to grasp the deeper significance of their exploits. The description of acting beyond the levels that most people put up with daily is implicit in the story, although it does not succeed in completely rendering the levels of consciousness that were necessary in order to do this. This 'going beyond' was faced and taken to the extreme consequences with all that was extraordinary, not as something mythical but in the reality that Jacob and the iv others faced in order to carry out their attacks. Procedure and method, rigidity and anarchist ethics in dealing with the representatives of the class in power, are but a few aspects of the tale. It is therefore necessary to put description aside and dig deeper beyond the fiction, in order to reach a point for reflection. What does it mean to reach out and touch other people's property? To answer this question and look at some of the mistakes that are systematically made by many comrades, as well as those specifically connected to Jacob's illusions, we need to make a few not very pleasant points. The first is that theft, appropriation in general carried out with strength or guile and not simply by ceasing work, is not a weapon that can lead to social leveling. No matter how colossal the illegal appropriation is, it is but a small thing compared to the wild accumulation that capital puts at the disposition of the financial bosses, the wealthy, the managers of the huge public enterprises, the warlords and every kind of Mafia. The appropriation we are talking about and which was certainly sufficient to make the well-fed bourgeoisie of the French empire tremble, was simply a means to be used elsewhere in order to introduction v attempt to set off the generalising of the struggle which for anarchists is the primary aim of all revolutionary activity. I believe that this is now clear once and for all but the ingenuous. Another myth that needs to be dispelled is that such actions could become a model for the oppressed as a simple, quick way to regain possession of what has been extracted from them by force through exploitation and repression. Right from the first rather banal raids on supermarkets, the concept of proletarian expropriation makes no more sense than the scenario for a film of the life of a revolutionary expropriator: from Durruti to Bonnot, Sabate to Facerias, Di Giovanni to Pollastro. The passive fruition of heroic deeds always produces myths, tales for adults that the frustrating conditions of life demand nonstop, prostheses that help one to carry on living in just the same way as alcohol or sleeping pills do. The overall conditions of the struggle could, at any given moment under certain conditions of a social or economic nature, produce movements of great masses within which expropriation, becoming generalised, ends up being daily practice. But that all germinates spontaneously and has no need for models. vi But if we think seriously about what the anarchist who asks himself what is to be done from a revolutionary point of view faces, the problem presents itself in more detail. It becomes necessary to resolve one's relationship with reality as clearly as possible, a reality that is rigidly incarcerated within the conditions of life marked by production and consumerism. Of course, as we all know, one can 'cop out' (up to a point), close oneself up in the idyllic conditions of a commune rich in hideous self-exploitation and frustrating conditions of life, or in the fresh air of a supposedly uncontaminated nature. Or, within the enclosure of interpersonal relationships, seek to create conditions that allow one to go beyond the cohabitation sadly marked by the classical limitations of the couple, to the point of knifing oneself. All this is possible, and at times even beautiful, but it is not enough. Going further, beyond, always further, one finds the first signs of the real problem: what do we want to do with our lives? Do we want to live them as fully as possible, or do we want to hand over a considerable part of them in exchange for a salary camouflaged as economic services rendered. There are many ways to camouflage this introduction vii exchange today: voluntary work is one of them. There are many ways to become involved in the social field at the tail end of new political models aimed at guaranteeing social peace, and be compensated with unexpectedly large amounts of 'free time'. Power realizes that it must attract this band of social misfits to within the field of control by using increasingly intelligent methods because they are precisely the ones who could react violently to normal working conditions.
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