On 21 April 1913, four men waited behind doors that a common sentence seemed to have rendered identical. Three were to be executed: Raymond Callemin, Étienne Monier, and André Soudy. The fourth, Eugène Dieudonné, was to learn that his sentence had been commuted. In the account he would later give to Albert Londres, he placed this announcement at four o'clock in the morning, at the very moment his companions were being led to their deaths. This testimony lends the affair its final, stark contrast: outside, the survivors of the Bonnot Gang were about to be put to death; inside, a man escaped the guillotine without yet succeeding in detaching his name from that same band.
The name of Bonnot then covered a succession of raids which the press had woven into a virtually seamless narrative. It conferred unity upon men, encounters, and responsibilities that did not always coincide. Jules Bonnot himself had been dead for nearly a year. The trial of February 1913 had thus been unable to question him or to confront his answers with those of the others. It sat in judgment over the survivors and several persons suspected of having aided, harboured, or accompanied the perpetrators of the crimes. In such a dossier, the question of association became decisive: to know a man, to share certain of his ideas, to have opened a door to him—to what extent did this imply complicity in his acts?
On 21 December 1911, on the Rue Ordener in Paris, messengers of the Société Générale were attacked. The motorcar enabled the assailants to strike and vanish with a swiftness that seized the public imagination. Caby, the wounded collection clerk, survived. His testimony was to play a major role in the identification of one of the participants. Around this assault coalesced the image of the "bandits in an automobile," a form of criminality rendered all the more alarming by the novelty of its means of escape. The victims, however, were not novel figures: they were wage-earners carrying money for a bank, exposed simply because that money passed through their hands.
In the anarchist circles frequented by several members of the group, this violence likewise provoked repudiation. The research presented by Criminocorpus recalls the position of Rirette Maîtrejean and Victor Kibaltchich, who directed the journal L'Anarchie: former associations did not imply endorsement of the attacks. Here lay a world of debate, solidarity, and discord which the criminal label would often obliterate. The investigation was legitimate in seeking out material assistance. It was equally bound to prevent a community of ideas from serving as proof of an act in which an individual had taken no part.
In March 1912, the raid at Montgeron and the subsequent assault on the bank at Chantilly added further dead to this chain of violence. A motorcar was seized by force prior to the journey to Chantilly. Two employees were killed in the branch of the Société Générale. Callemin, Monier, and Soudy were to be tried for their participation in the gang’s enterprises, each with distinct roles. A sensational narrative readily favours the driver, the levelled firearm, the flight; the court was obliged to reconstruct positions and gestures, to hear those who had seen the men, and to determine what permitted their identification.
The pursuit reached its climax in the spring. Bonnot was surrounded at Choisy-le-Roi on 28 April 1912. Police, troops, journalists, and a vast crowd gathered about the redoubt where he had entrenched himself. The recourse to explosives transformed the capture into a public spectacle. Bonnot, found in his death throes, did not survive. In May, Garnier and Valet died in their turn at Nogent-sur-Marne. Photographs and news reports engraved these sieges upon the collective memory. For the survivors already in custody or soon to be brought before the judges, they produced another consequence: several men capable of speaking directly to the attacks would never appear in court.
The case of Dieudonné rendered this absence particularly heavy. A cabinetmaker and an anarchist, he knew certain of the accused and denied having taken part in the Rue Ordener assault. In his interview memoirs, Albert Londres revisited the successive identifications attributed to Caby, denouncing the manner in which they had allegedly been steered. Londres did not present himself as an impartial clerk of the court: he was defending a man he believed to be innocent, striving to demonstrate an error. His account must be read as an informed and impassioned intervention, without each of his reconstructed scenes thereby acquiring the legal authority of a formal deposition.
The essential point remains the contested fragility of an identification in an affair where public opinion clamoured for arrests. A witness had undergone an assault, looked upon drawn weapons, and risked his life. His word had to be received with gravity; the possibility of error had likewise to be weighed. The ordeal of what a man has endured does not render his memory infallible. It was precisely because his suffering was real that the magistrates required evidence capable of distinguishing the man who had wounded him from the man whose face was subsequently presented before his eyes.
The trial of February 1913 handed down four death sentences. Callemin declared after the verdict that Dieudonné had not been on the Rue Ordener. Declarations attributed to Garnier and to Bonnot pointed in the same direction. These came from men who were themselves steeped in the crimes; they might be disputed, but they could not be expunged from the record. The advocate Moro-Giafferri pursued Dieudonné’s defense. The petition for clemency succeeded in his case: his capital sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. For Callemin, Monier, and Soudy, the judgment remained executory.
They died on 21 April, before the gates of La Santé Prison. The trial had reached a resolution, but it had not bestowed the same history upon every name. Dieudonné was dispatched to the penal colony. Londres was to meet him in French Guiana, and later in Brazil following his escape. The opening two chapters of Adieu Cayenne dwell insistently upon the crushing weight of that designation: a former member of the Bonnot Gang. For casual acquaintances, a few words were enough to explain a man; for the one who bore them, they demanded that he begin his defense anew, again and again.
The journalist records that Dieudonné described the hesitant glances, the closed doors, the cautiously proffered hands. These recollections belong to the survivor, and we leave them to him. Yet they extend the very question raised before the assizes: for what precise deed does each man answer? The gang’s crimes were real, the murdered clerks belonged to no legend, and the survivors had to answer for their participation. This necessity made individual examination all the more indispensable. On the morning of the four cells, three men were executed and the fourth was sent to penal servitude; beneath the single name of Bonnot, justice had encountered four destinies that no newspaper headline could bind together without distorting the truth.