Free The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection by Dorothy Hoobler, Thomas Hoobler

police. The newspaper also faced attacks by others within the anarchist movement. Its windows were smashed by members of a rival paper, which felt that Victor’s illegalism discredited the movement. Quarrels even broke out among l’anarchie ’s staff: one night, Lorulot caught a former editor trying to steal the printing equipment from the building in Montmartre where the newspaper had its offices. Someone actually summoned the police, who arrived only to find that both sides in the dispute insisted the others be arrested. Afterward, Lorulot received a bomb threat, which caused the landlord to demand that the newspaper’s staff vacate the premises.
    Lorulot decided to move the entire operation away from Paris, to a northeastern suburb called Romainville. Here he rented a house with a large garden where fruit trees and lilacs grew. A train station put Paris within easy reach, and the bucolic atmosphere soon attracted others to what became a commune. It was also the seedbed for the Bonnot Gang.
    One of the first to move into the house at Romainville was Raymond Callemin, an old friend of Victor Serge’s. The two had known each other since boyhood (as teens, they had lived in a commune south of Brussels) and followed the path to anarchism together. Raymond’s father was a disillusioned socialist who repaired shoes to eke out a meager living. Both Raymond and Victor avoided school, teaching themselves by reading radical books such as Émile Zola’s Paris and Louis Blanc’s History of the French Revolution. They began as socialists, but as Victor later recalled, “Anarchism swept us away completely because it both demanded everything of us and offered everything to us.” 3
    Raymond would not have fit Lombroso’s physical description of a criminal type. He was nearsighted, handsome, and a strict vegetarian, and he liked to sprinkle his conversation with the phrase “La science dit…” (“Science tells us…”), which earned him the nickname “Raymond-la-Science.” After leaving Belgium, he had drifted through France and Switzerland. Like Victor, he contributed articles to socialist and anarchist newspapers and was often in trouble with the police, both for his writings (publishing antimilitarist articles was a crime in France) and for taking part in demonstrations, where he tended to get into fights with policemen.
    Raymond-la-Science seems to have set the tone for the commune at Romainville, at least in its early days. Those who stayed there were served a “scientific” diet — brown rice, raw vegetables, porridge, and pasta with cheese. Salt, pepper, and vinegar were banned as being “unscientific,” although herbs were acceptable. Tobacco, alcohol, and coffee were banned. The members were encouraged to keep fit by taking part in Swedish exercises. Many would bicycle to the nearby Marne River and rent a boat for an afternoon of rowing.
    The outwardly idyllic lifestyle, however, concealed darker activities, for there were characters in the group more sinister than Raymond-la-Science. Octave Garnier, also in his early twenties, admitted that he had been a rebel against authority from his earliest years, without even knowing why. At thirteen, he began to make his own way in the world, and his ideas crystallized: “I began to understand what life and social injustice was all about; I saw bad individuals and said to myself: ‘I must search for a way of getting out of this filthy mess of bosses, workers, bourgeois, judges, police and others.’ I loathed all these people, some because they put up with and took part in all this crap.” 4
    He began to shoplift, was caught, and spent three months in jail. Subsequently it was difficult for him to find a job because he needed certificates of good behavior. Garnier learned to forge those, but the work he did in a bakery for sixteen to eighteen hours a day paid barely enough to live on. Garnier knew he needed an education, “to know more about things, and develop my