As someone who has spent a lot of time around self-described anarchists, I often find it hard to understand how some people see them. There’s variation as within every group and ideology, but the anarchists I’ve met tend to distinguish themselves by being thoughtful and even loving. They do a lot of care work, professionally and otherwise. They’re more likely than most to refuse drugs and alcohol. And wherever people circle their A’s, vegetarianism is the norm. Of the dozens or maybe hundreds that I’ve met, I’ve never known one who took risks with other people’s safety just for the sake of it. And yet, when folks hear the term “anarchist” they think Natural Born Killers. They are wrong, but the picture isn’t baseless.

Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits: The Crime Spree That Gripped Belle Epoque Paris by John Merriman Nation Books, 336 pp., $28.00

In his book Ballad of The Anarchist Bandits: The Crime Spree That Gripped Belle Epoque Paris, historian John Merriman dives into a vortex of violence that broke out in Paris in the early twentieth century when a network of anarcho-individualists initiated their own mini crime wave. Over a century later, these events still make it hard to imagine anarchism as an overwhelmingly peaceful practice. Merriman’s lens is young anarchist Victor Kibaltchiche (later and more popularly known as Victor Serge), who finds himself an accomplice in armed robbery and murder. Despite the branding, Ballad is perhaps best described as a book-length explanation of how the famous prisoner Serge came to serve his first sentence: anarchism.

Ballad takes place in and around 1911, 40 years after the suppression of the Paris Commune (the subject of Merriman’s previous book, Massacre). The rich won the battle, and they enjoyed the spoils. Paris of the time seemed belle in retrospect compared to the decades that would follow, but it was deeply unequal, and the haves enjoyed their blurry paintings and stimulating salons at the poor’s expense. Motorcars drove by starving people—as they would continue to do into the indeterminate future—for the first time. The dramatic juxtaposition of wealth and progress with absolute deprivation yielded, in some, a moral crisis. If this was law, then what good was the law? Merriman’s centers around the tension between two kinds of anarchists. On one side are Kibaltchiche and his editorial and romantic partner Rirette Maîtrejean; on the other was The Bonnot Gang.

Kibaltchiche and Maîtrejean were proud anarchists—rejecting the law of the rich, agitating for revolution, and attempting to live in harmony and generosity with the world around them—but the “illegalists” made it impossible for any anarchists to appear benign. Illegalists saw and used lawbreaking as a means (to fund their activities) and as an end. While Kibaltchiche and Maîtrejean thought of the labor movement as a way forward, others (including Kibaltchiche’s boyhood friend and Gang member Raymond Callemin) liked bank robberies, counterfeiting, and shooting cops. As the modern urban police were coming into being (with their machine guns and squad cars) so were the modern urban criminals (with their repeating rifles and getaway cars). While the state attempted to elevate a new regime of law and order, illegalists sought to pull it back down to earth. Every spectacular heist or shootout was a lesson for the public in the law’s impotence and absurdity.

“The Bonnot Gang” is a historical misnomer. Jules Bonnot was the one who killed Deputy Security Chief Louis Jouin and he had the most dramatic shootout death, but Merriman’s research suggests if there was a leader of their criminal band, it was probably Octave Garnier. Nor were they really a gang per se, so much as an ideologico-criminal milieu—a bunch of guys who read Nietzsche and Max Stirner and committed crimes. Emboldened by the egoistic philosophy, they had no compunction about shooting and killing people if that was the fastest way to get what they wanted, and not just class enemies. Merriman doesn’t have much interest in moralizing about their violence; he plays up the theatricality of it all instead. No doubt other historians have been more blasé about larger body counts, but the author’s excitement and levity makes the whole project a bit unseemly. Murdering people who just happen to be in the way—as the Gang did—is made only slightly more charming with an olde tyme color palette.