Men in Prison Read Free Page A

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    Victor and Rirette c. 1911. This photo appears on the cover of
Confessions
magazine with Rirette’s account of the ‘Tragic Bandits’ affair.
    The ‘Bonnot Gang’ have also gone down in history as the first bank-robbers to use a stolen getaway car (the cops only had bicycles), but their robberies, although bloody, were not very successful. On the run for months, they were joined—out of solidarity—by other comrades who offered them asylum according to the unwritten laws of anarchism and who ended up sharing their tragic fates. When finally cornered, they defiantly held off regiments of police and military units in gun-battles so spectacular they pushed the sinking of the
Titanic
off the front page. Victor, who in his writings had defended the expedient of ‘illegalism’
in theory,
had nothing to do with the robberies, whose bloodiness ratherhorrified him. However, writing in the pages of
anarchie
as Le Rétif, Victor was bound by solidarity and loudly proclaimed, “I am with the wolves” in their war against society. 4 He had just turned twenty-one.
    Arrested, Victor refused to ‘talk’ and was kept in solitary at the
Santé
prison for thirteen months. At the sensational 1913 mass trial, he and his lover Rirette (the business manager of
anarchie)
were cast in the role of the ideological ‘brains’ behind the gang. Against them, the evidence of two stolen pistols found during the police search at the office of
anarchie,
where Victor, Rirette and her children also lived. Neither had had anything to do with the robberies, indeed by then were out of sympathy with illegalism, but their ‘not guilty’ defense was compromised because their comrades, the surviving members of the Bonnot Gang also pleaded ‘innocent.’ This transparent masquerade lead to the conviction of Eugène Dieudonné, who really
was
innocent. 5
    This non-political ‘not guilty’ defense was in any case pointless since the Prosecution’s evidence was as overwhelming as was the judges’ thirst for vengeance. Only Dieudonné’s repeated cries of innocence rang true, yet he too was sentenced to the guillotine (later ‘pardoned’ to Devil’s Island for life, whence he managed to escape). 6 Raymond (‘Science’), Victor’s oldest friend from Brussels, was sent to the guillotine, along with luckless Soudy, another close comrade. Rirette got off with time served. Victor, for refusing to cooperate with the law or renounce his anarchist ideas, was given the unusually harsh sentence of five years for possession of the pair of stolen pistols apparently bought by Rirette. The night of the verdict, Victor heard prolonged moans from the next cell: Carouy, the strongman from Brussels, managed topoison himself rather than accept a life of sentence. As for Victor, he resolved to drink the bitter cup of prison to the lees and survive to tell the tale you are about to read.
    Men in Prison,
Serge’s first novel, is thus based on the author’s experience of five years’ incarceration: thirteen pre-trial months in solitary at
La Santé
followed by forty-seven months in the Penitentiary at Melun. From January 31, 1912, until the end of the 1913 trial, Victor was kept in solitary under Maximum Surveillance among the Death Row prisoners, 14th div. cell 32, then 10th div. cell 20 of Paris’s
Santé
prison. 7
    Although the name
Santé
(Health) derives from a former hospital that stood at the site in central Paris, the appellation is appropriate. The
Santé
was designed during the heyday nineteenth-century scientific progressivism for reasons of ‘philanthropic hygiene’ to replace traditional dungeons which were dark, filthy, malodorous and the source of epidemics like cholera. 8 Billed as a ‘model prison,’ the
Santé
was designed to offer its inmates ‘light and air’ as well as central heating, gaslights, washstands, toilets, and sewer evacuations—luxuries only dreamed of by its honest neighbors in 1867 when
La Santé
opened (or rather