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

mind and body.” 5 He attended labor meetings and added his body to demonstrations and strikes, but felt that the union leaders were too prone to give in to employers.
    Then, at the age of eighteen, he discovered anarchism. “Within this milieu,” he later wrote, “I met individuals of integrity who were trying as much as possible to rid themselves of the prejudices that have made this world ignorant and barbaric. They were men with whom I found discussion a pleasure, for they showed me not utopias but things which one could see and touch.” 6 One of those things was reprise individuelle, and Garnier set out to put it into practice. Caught during one of his attempts at theft, he went back to jail. That was the pattern he followed for nearly two years. As he approached his twentieth birthday, when (despite his criminal record) he would face required military service, Garnier kept a job long enough to save travel money and left France for Belgium. There he took up with Marie Vuillemin, a young woman who had been married for only a month and already wanted to escape her husband.
    Belgium was a haven for French political refugees and draft dodgers; by one estimate, some seventy thousand young Frenchmen had left the country to avoid military service, and most of them headed for Belgium. Naturally enough, Garnier gravitated toward anarchist meetings, where he met Raymond Callemin. The man of thought and the man of action thus united.
    In addition, Garnier added to his criminal education by falling in with Édouard Carouy, a professional housebreaker who sympathized with the anarchist cause. A year later, probably at the invitation of Callemin, both Garnier and Carouy, along with Garnier’s lover, Marie, returned to Paris and moved into the house at Romainville. They were welcomed because they contributed funds to the commune by foraying out to commit burglaries from time to time. Garnier and Carouy, now carrying 9-millimeter Browning automatics, which were readily available in Belgium, disturbed the pastoral atmosphere by conducting target practice in the commune’s garden.
    With the newcomers’ presence, the nightly discussions of illegalism became more than theoretical. Serge, recalling those days much later, wrote that “they were already, or were becoming, outlaws, primarily through the influence of Octave Garnier, a handsome, swarthy, silent lad whose dark eyes were astoundingly hard and feverish. Small, working-class by origin, Octave had undergone a vicious beating on a building site in the course of a strike. He scorned all discussion with ‘intellectuals.’ ‘Talk, talk!’ he would remark softly, and off he would go on the arm of a blonde Rubensesque Flemish girl, to prepare some dangerous nocturnal task or other.” 7 Lorulot, who was never enthusiastic about illegalism, disliked being the nominal head of a group that actually practiced it. He decided to leave Romainville and start a new publication in Paris. That promoted Victor to the editorship of l’anarchie, although his lover, Rirette, was listed on the masthead as the actual editor. Perhaps this was a concession to feminism, or possibly a way to divert police attention away from Victor.
    Communes can be delicate things, held together by relationships that can break apart for seemingly trivial reasons. In this case, it seems that Victor and Rirette craved coffee and were tired of bland food. Now that they were the group’s leaders, they began to eat by themselves, choosing a “nonscientific” diet, and then violated the free-spirited editorial policy of the newspaper by refusing to print an article Garnier had written, titled “Salt Is Poison.” Toward the end of August 1911, everyone except Victor, Rirette, and her children left the commune. This departure may have partly been due to the fact that the police were now closing in on Carouy for one of the burglaries he had recently committed. Carouy rented a new place farther down the Marne, giving