Bonnot gang

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Bonnot gang on an illustration in Le Figaro
Attack on a branch of Société Générale

The Bonnot gang ( La Bande à Bonnot ) was a criminal group whose members professed anarchism and which operated in France and Belgium from 1911 to 1912 . It was made up of people who identified with the philosophy of illegalism . The gang used high-tech equipment such as bolt action rifles and automobiles that were not yet available to the police.

Career

The gang carried out the first bank robbery at the Bank Société Générale in Paris on December 21, 1911. The gang members then escaped in a car (a Delaunay-Belleville ) that they had stolen a week earlier. Because stolen cars were used for the first time in a robbery, as well as in the following crimes, some of which were extremely brutal, the press initially referred to the group simply as "Die Autobanditen".

The group remained criminally active until March 25, 1912 (in the meantime also in Belgium), then a large, spectacular wave of arrests by the French state, carried out with all military severity, in which all protagonists of the group were killed or arrested. The counter-attack was preceded by extensive, in some cases arbitrary, arrests in the alleged sympathizers of the Bonnot gang. The survivors of the groups were tried in 1913, many of them sentenced to death and subsequently guillotined .

After Jules Bonnot had given an interview to the popular daily newspaper " Petit Parisien " in the spring of 1912, the organization was subsequently called "the Bonnot gang". The press perception that Bonnot had a supposed leadership role within the group was later strengthened when his spectacular death during an exchange of fire with the French police in Nogent became public.

Members

The Bonnot gang originally consisted of a group of French anarchists around the individual anarchist magazine l'Anarchie . It was founded by Octave Garnier , Raymond Callemin and René Valet . It was Garnier's idea to use automobiles for criminal acts. Jules Bonnot joined them in December 1911.

The main members of the gang were:

Other, less central members were the “ chemist ”, the antimilitarist Marius Medge , Antoine Gauzy , Pierre Jourdan , Charles Reinart , Victor Serge , the Russian refugee Godorowski and Berbe Leclech .

The gang's political and social perspective was largely shaped by Bakunin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as well as Max Stirner , Ludwig Büchner , Friedrich Nietzsche and Félix Le Dantec . Bonnot's ideas were more in line with those of the late anarchist Ravachol .

  • Raymond Callemin

  • Jules Bonnot

  • Octave Garnier

  • Edouard Carouy

  • Eugène Dieudonné

  • André Soudy

Legal proceedings

The trial of the surviving members began on February 3, 1913. Victor Serge was sentenced to five years in prison, all others to death. Eugène Dieudonné's sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, that of Édouard Carouy and Marius Metge to life imprisonment and forced labor. Carouy committed suicide. Metge was taken to a penal colony. Raymond Caillemin, Antoine Monnier and André Soudy refused a pardon and died in the guillotine .

literature

  • The atrocities of the Parisian automobile apaches. and fight against Parisian automobile apaches. In: Illustrated Universe Yearbook. 1912, pp. 137, 185 and 227 (with photo illustration).
  • Pino Cacucci : Better to aim for the heart. Edition Nautilus, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-89401-722-4 .
  • Richard Parry: The Bonnot Gang. Übers. Osama Gobara, updated and revised 2nd edition, Bahoe books , Vienna 2017, ISBN 978-3-903022-44-7 .

Movie

The story of the Bonnot gang was told in a 1968 film of the same name by Philippe Fourastié with Jacques Brel , Annie Girardot and Bruno Cremer . It was also featured in the popular television series Les Brigades du Tigre in the 1970s. The last adaptation for the cinema took place in 2005 with Jacques Gamblin as Jules Bonnot.

Trivia

The hustle and bustle of the Bonnot gang also formed a model for the Fantômas silent films produced in 1913 and at the time sensationally successful , in which the technical arms race between Fantômas' gang and the Paris Sûreté (surveillance techniques, biometrics, use of escape vehicles) plays an essential role.

Web links

Commons : Bonnot Gang  - Collection of images, videos and audio files