Alexander Marius Jacob Alias Escande, alias Attila, alias Georges, alias Bonnet, alias Feran, alias Hard to Kill, alias The Burglar Bernard Thomas 1970 Contents Introduction ......................................... 3 The Bandits 7 The Agitator 19 I ................................................ 19 II ................................................ 27 III ............................................... 43 IV ............................................... 52 The Hundred and Fifty ‘Crimes’ of the Other Arsène Lupin 64 I ................................................ 64 II ................................................ 79 III ............................................... 98 IV ............................................... 109 V ................................................ 117 A Quarter of a Century on Devil’s Island 137 I ................................................ 137 II ................................................ 150 III ............................................... 169 The Quiet Family Man 178 Some Bibliography ...................................... 188 Newspapers ...................................... 188 On the penal colony .................................. 188 On anarchy ....................................... 189 Various ......................................... 189 2 Introduction Rigor and precision have finally disappeared from the field of human procrastination. With the recognition that a strictly organisational perspective is not enough to solve the dilemma of ‘what is to be done’, the need for order and security has transferred itself to the field of desire. A last stronghold built in fret and fury, it has established a bridgehead for the final battle. Desire is sacred and inviolable. It is what we hold in our hearts, child of our instincts and mother of our dreams. We can count on it, it will never betray us. The newest graves, those on the edges of the cemeteries of the peripheries, are fullofthisir- rational phenomenology. We take things into consideration that would have made us laugh not long ago. We assign stability and pulsion to what we know, basically, is nothing but a vague recol- lection of a fleeting wellbeing. A wing in the mist, a morning flutter that soon disappeared before the need to repeat itself, that obsessive, disrespectful bureaucrat lurking in some obscure corner of us, selecting and codifying dreams like all the other scribblers in the mortuary of repression. Short-lived flashes bear witness to the heroic deeds of some comrade, some rebel here and there, stealing a glance before history brands and immobilizes him in the perfectly tormented flesh. We are not inane watchers of junk TV or readers of the serial romances thatarenow buried in dusty library catalogues. We are alive and for life, so have direct experience. As soon as a vital sign appears here and there, we pick it up with the point of our fingernail and place it in the secret wallet of our heart, a tiny heart-shaped icon or forget-me-not. Basically we too, the hard, dauntless ones with our refractory refusal to accommodate or to be discouraged by the threats of the institutions or the far more terrible ones of imbecility cam- ouflaged as rebellion, also need our iconography. That is why we amass memories, sympathies, friendship—sometimes a mere handshake—storing them up in our minds as sharing and support, when not direct participation. How many of us have not cracked open bank safes and treasuries, carried out radical expropriation, taken land from the latifundi and killed enemies in shoot-out at sunset, at this hallucinatory level. And by reading and feeling this great emotion we elaborate in our wildest fantasy things that really did happen, just like the tales in front of the fire when grandmother gave the correct interpretation of Red Riding hood’s rosy cheeks. We have only participated in them from afar (in the best of cases), addressing the liveliest part of our desires to them. 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: don’t you remember? So how can weputany 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 hisdreams.But with a difference: this man, along with his comrades, really did open the safes of the rich,andby this simple fact demonstrated that an attack on social wealth, even if only partial, is possible. It might seem insignificant that this be the most interesting part of the whole story, butthat is not so. The spectacular aspect of the activity of Jacob and his comrades, the incredible listof 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 inhand. 3 But Jacob and the others were something else. In the first place, they were comrades. And itis here, in the field of their choice of actions, that we need to grasp the deeper significance oftheir 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 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 put one’s hands on other people’s property? To answer this question and look at some of the mistakes systematically made by many comrades as well as those specifically connected to Jacob’ 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 andnotsimply by ceasing work, is not an arm which can lead to social levelling. 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 attempt to set off the generalising ofthe 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 thatthe frustrating conditions of life demand nonstop, prostheses that help one to carrying 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 a daily practice. But that all germinates spontaneously and has no need for models. 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, butit 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 4 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 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 byusing increasingly intelligent methods because they are precisely the ones who could react violently to normal working conditions.