In Uri Eisenzweig’s magisterial Fictions de l’anarchisme, on page 57, mention is made of Clément Duval, who is included among the “mi-révolutionnaires and the illégalistes”. In a footnote, we are told his “affaire” preoccupied anarchist circles in the 1886–1887 period. Eisenzweig’s book is intended to touch on anarchy and the literature of the period, as well as giving us a proto-history of terrorism as a particular discursive device, and Duval was merely a small figure in this theme.

A good book. One review remarked: “Complex analyses — always accompanied by a great attention to the sources, the texts — develops the thesis according to which these provocations [of the anarchist movement] translate a crisis as to the capacity of language to transmit a « realistic » perception of social relations ; a crisis that touched, of course, on the confidence in parliamentary rule, but also, more generally, on the status of communication — thus, of literature…”

So: a name, Clément Duval. I came upon it as an innocent. I know of Sacco and Vanzetti, I know a bit about the Bonnet gang, I know that Carla Tresca was murdered by Stalinists. A little learning, but I come from the Marx side of things, generally. It is only that: lately, I have wondered if maybe it is anarchy, mutual aid as Kropotkin put it, that will save us.

Salvation, which I once thought of as bourgeois mystification, I now think of as a historical necessity. I grow old, I grow old.

I liked the idea of mi-revolutionnaires and illegalists. So I started to research the “affaire Duval.” Which brought me to an address: 31 Rue de Monceau.

A pretty and expensive part of Paris, today. A pretty and expensive part of Paris in the 1880s, too.

I have been thinking about addresses in Paris. I’ve been thinking of city novels and addresses. I’ve been thinking that in the streets of certain cities, certain capitals, there are ghosts. Ghosts of historic events. And ghosts of faits divers. The outlaw event, the irregularity. Didier Decoin wrote: “what seduces us are the “little people” of the fait divers.” In opposition to a history of great events and great people.

An opposition that, like the old regime that forged it, has not entirely crumbled.

In a sense, as my research began to make clear, Clément Duval’s entire life was spent attacking that opposition; which implies, like all such blind and heady attacks, a certain dependence on the opposition.

2.

I’ve come to think there’s a certain guilt about Clément Duval. Not a guilt among the guilty — the powerful, the police, the capitalists, etc. No, a guilt among the comrades. A guilt in the leftwing, anti-statist circles that knew about him.

Octave Mirbeau wrote: “The old world crumbles under the weight of its sins. It will light the bomb that will blow it up. And that bomb will certainly contain neither gunpowder nor dynamite. It will contain the Idea and the Pity: two forces without which one can do nothing.” Mirbeau’s prophecies, of the 1890s apply comprehensively to Clément Duval, but they were written with the famous Ravachol in mind — a much more bloodstained, a much more liminal, a much more psychologically disturbed figure. I believe — or at least the story of Duval has features that make me believe — that he was not only abused by the system — but was, perhaps, set up.

3.

That’s pure speculation on my part. Nobody else says it.

Duval, by profession a locksmith, was a member of the Batignolle Panther, an anarchist group whose choice of totem animal did not, I believe, influence the choice of the same totem for the Black Power militants of the 1960s. However, under the surface, leftist touches leftist, situation situation, courtroom theatre, courtroom theatre. Who knows what rumors Huey Newton might have heard?

It was in 1886 when the Duval affair reached the Paris papers. Duval and a mysterious man named Turquais or Turquet, resolved to put into practice the slogan, expropriate the expropriators. Proudhon’s phrase, Property is Theft (a maxim that contains the essence of graffiti as the anarchist weapon of choice) had been absorbed into the anarchist community. The “right to theft”, which had, they claimed, been the property of the upper class, was to become the property of those bold enough among the workers to claim it. Thievery on a mass scale — capitalism — was to be met with thievery on an individual scale — anarchy. The target they chose was, to say the least, peculiar: a two story town house in which a fashionable painter, Madame Lemaire, lived and worked. On October 6, 1886, at 31 Rue Monceau, a fire broke out — a fire set by robbers. Let me quote Maitron, the indispensable site for radical history:

« Some days later, following a raid on a person named Didier, a fence, Clément Duval was arrested — not without having wounded Officer Rossignol with some superficial knife blows — as being the author of the robbery. Imprisoned in Mazas, he wrote on October 24, 1886 to Le Révolté (n° 6, du 12 novembre 1886) to justify himself in the name of the theories he exposed in court.”

In Duval’s memoir, translated into English by Michael Shreve, Duval describes the circumstances that led to him being tried for attempted murder:

“You are accused of the attempted murder of Sergeant Rossignol. When this officer was investigating Didier with the chief of detectives, Didier’s wife pointed you out as Duval to the officer. He asked you to follow him to talk to the chief of detectives. You answered that you had no business with him and he wasn’t one of your friends. Seeing this, the officer identified himself as a sergeant of the police and arrested you in the name of the law. You answered him: ‘Ah! Scum, in the name of freedom I’ll strike you down!’ And you stabbed him eight times with a handmade dagger, intending to kill him.”

“I only struck Sergeant Rossignol twice and not eight times. If I’d stabbed him eight times, being all worked up by the surprise at being arrested as I was, he would probably not be here to testify. It was a scratch, a scrape that he got when we fell off the sidewalk. Unfortunately, he dragged me down with him in his fall, otherwise neither he nor Officer Pelletier, who was with him, would have arrested me.”

“So, you would have killed them both?”

“No, I would have defended my freedom. But I couldn’t. Officer Pelletier right away took advantage of my fall by grabbing me by my throat and my private parts; and Rossignol was able to get hold of my right thumb and bite it.”

4.

A certain air of farce. Officer Rossignol. Officer Nightingale. The grabbing of the private parts, the biting of the thumb.

5.

Albert Bataille, in his early thirties at the time, covered the trial for the Figaro. Bataille was trained as a lawyer. Among his colleagues, he was known for his energy and persistence: “Leaning his head over his pad of paper, pen in hand, he would report on what he was seeing for five or six hours at a time. … He grasped on the fly sudden incidences that would cause a shock, he’d extract from interrogatories everything that was pertinent, susceptible to enlighten the reader…” In France, Bataille was known for a report maintaining that journalists should be trained as such, at the higher education level. He died in 1899 from a heart attack: “ A little tired the last two or three days”, read the report in the Figaro, “he had happily passed the evening at home, with his family. At one in the morning the first symptoms of the sickness declared themselves. His entourage, and he himself, at first believed that it was only a not very serious feeling of discomfort, and soon, after taking some care, his good humor returned. It was only around seven in the morning that a new crisis occurred. He got up suddenly, then, regaining his bed, at the insistence of his poor frightened wife, he told her simply, I am lost, and died in her arms.”

Bataille described Duval like this, on January 14, 1887: “Duval is a bad boy around thirty years old, hairy, with an evil squint, a bushy moustache, a line in bibulous talk, a sinister clown who posed himself before the jury without seeing that he was playing for his head.”

Posed. A threatrical term. One used by Duval himself — he spoke, once, about being “posed” — playing the role of — the accused. The dramaturgy leaks through the legal ritual.

Yet, Bataille’s account of Duval’s street eloquence is not without a certain hint of admiration. Duval was not a buffoon, a sinister clown, however much his working class manners insulted the dignity of a courtroom that was, in its etiquette, a redoubt of esoteric and feudal gestures. His speech to the jury after they found him guilty is both moving and, for the readers of Figaro, where it appeared in Bataille’s reporting, a threat.

“I have to tell you that I am not a thief, but a rebel. I have to tell you why I am an anarchist. My lawyer has posed me here before you as the accused. But I pose myself as the accuser. If you want the head of an anarchist, here it is, take mine. But I have the right to turn to bourgeois society and ask it to account for itself. Theft, on our part, is restitution. In pillaging, as you put it, the town house of Madame Madeleine Lemaire, I committed an act of anarchy.

I’ve given the people a lesson in the deed…. I do not recognize your law. I am not a defendant — I am an avenger!”

6.

Yet was this locksmith an avenger?

Or a dupe?

For his tussle with a policeman, his stealing of silver and jewellery, and for setting a fire that burned “a portrait of Lemaire by Chaplin, a piano, and an umbrella painted by a young miss,” Duval was given the death penalty. However, because this sentence caused a stir — it is a little much to guillotine a man for scratching a plainclothes policeman and taking some thousands of dollars in jewellery that was quickly recovered — it was changed to life in the prison colony of Guyana, another sort of death sentence. Duval’s speeches had been too well reported in the papers to allow him to serve five years in some prison in France. Duval himself published, or had someone publish, a little pamphlet containing his defence. In his memoir, he claimed that 50,000 of these pamphlets were sold. So: better to bury him in the French overseas concentration camp system. Like the much more famous Henri Charrière — Papillon — he managed in the end, after 18 years, to escape his prison in Guyana. Papillon became a movie, written by Dalton Trumbo, the ex communist. In Marianne Enckell’s introduction to Duval’s memoirs, Duval is called an anti-Papillon — Papillon was, after all, a cop stooge who bowed down to the authorities, snitched, and snubbed his fellow prisoners. Duval, that hirsute locksmith, was far more guilty in the eyes of bourgeois society: he threatened it with the bomb. His Hollywood category is plainly villain.

7.

“… and Clement Duval, who made his name in 1886 by knifing a police officer.” Beverly Gage, The Day Wall Street Exploded: the story of America in its first age of Terror.

:… A burglar named Clement Duval, who stole from a wealthy Paris residence, was transformed into Comrade Duval.” John Merriman, The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-siècle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror.

“… Clement Duval, a notorious robber who justified his profession as a redress of social oppression.” Louis Patsouras, Crucible of Socialism.

Inglory is one of the great tools of bourgeois historiography. When that tool is seized — as in the recent case of the 1619 affair — there is a veritable explosion in the club. It is as if by some inadvertence, some failure of the police -the cultural police — Clément Duval or his type — mounts to the judge’s seat and issues sentence. It is as if the avenger were at the door. Clément Duval is a perfect stooge for writers who reckon that the terrorism of the anarchists and the terrorism of the Islamicists are one terror. Not included in this terror are the slave labor camps of the French and the British, the bombs, trenches, poison gas, missiles, white potassium, napalm and other of the ordinary paraphernalia of policing situations. There is no connection made between oppression and terrorism. Except to say that those who point out the oppression are justifying the terrorism

And to say back: those who are pointing out the terrorism are justifying the oppression. Flip the coin: on both sides, there’s faces.

8.

There are so many perspectives, infinite perspectives, in which a person can be seen, and the sum of these is a difficulty for novelist, policeman, anarchist, artist and the angels of God. Even those celestial recorders with their data. What does it profit an angel if they mark down a theft and lose their own souls?. Was Duval the anti-Papillon, the avenger even in chains? Paul Mimande, a journalist, went to Guyane in 1894 and wrote a reportage: Among the anarchist felons. As a senior convict, Duval was a mentor to many of those sent to the prison camps as the French Republic cracked down on political dissent. Mimande went and interviewed certain names that had once seemed threats to the bourgeois order. Duval was living, then, on one of the island camps, in a hut. He’d returned to his old job as locksmith. When Mimande asked his police guide about Duval, he was told that he no longer had the “hand” of a good locksmith, but: “… he is full of good will, no transferee is as submissive, as gentle, as well behaved.”

Mimande found that Duval had not lost his convictions. Which bored the journalist-tourist. So he asked about his wife, the family from which he had been parted, and got a satisfactory breakdown, tears, some ragged regrets about his wife. Mimande was satisfied.

Mimande’s account is of a different Duval than the one who penned the memoirs. Far from being submissive, Duval made 18 attempts to escape and he aided in a failed rebellion. He finally did escape in 1901. His memoirs, which recount his life in Guyana among the political prisoners, don’t give the details of that escape. Duval did not think of himself as an adventurer. He was an avenger.

9.

Among the anarchists, from the very beginning, there were agents provocateurs. Agent provocateurs, either hired by the cops or by the wealthy, were scattered among anarchists groups like a cluster of raisons in a pain aux raisons. The first French anarchist paper, La Révolution sociale, in 1880, was founded by Égide Spilleux, who it turned out was on the payroll of the police chief, Louis Andrieux. Duval would surely have known this. Spilleux was unmasked in 1881.

In the Affaire Duval, there is a mysterious gap, from the beginning. Duval, when he was caught, spoke of one Turquais. Or Turquet. “I met him boulevard de la Chapelle. I initiated him into anarchism. I showed him our newspapers, which are made by workers and not journalists. And then he indicated to me a good job. (with the voice of a villain in a melodrama) The day came at last to break open the strong boxes of the rich! (general hilarity).”

Another version: “I was out of work last September. My boss, to whom I had been denounced as a member of the anarchist group, the Panther of Batignolles, threw me out on the pavement. One day, in the square of Villette, I came upon Turquet sitting on a bench, not less desperate than me. We spoke of social injustice, and I showed him that it was time for anarchists to act against the propertied class. I told him that I had fabricated a jimmy for stealing, hoping by this example to give courage to the workers, who will not be free until they have blown open the safes of their bosses. It is Turquet who proposed that we rob Madame Lemaire.”

Duval did not disclaim the idea behind his crime; but his forging of a “pince” a burglar’s tool for forcing open locked drawers was as far as he had gotten. He was a talker, Duval. He wanted to “teach” the working man. Hypothesis: this is the very type of gull that the agent provocateur preys on.

Turquet knew of Madame Lemaire. How? This uncaught presence knew a place. Don’t they always? It was Turquet who shimmied over a wall, and let Duval in to the garden of the apartment. Turquet, when they got to Suzanne Lemaire’s room, the daughter of the painter, read her letters and scattered them on the carpet. They must have gone through the atelier. They must have recognized it as such. A place of work. Turquet set fire to the house, the latter over Duval’s objections. Not that Duval was against the arson for bourgeois reasons! Duval does not come out and say it, but he evidently thought arson would endanger the other people in the town house. The Judge and prosecutor laughed at Duval’s claims. Where was this Turquet? The police could not find him. Although Duval never expressed this, either at the trial or in his memoirs, there is something funny about Turquet, something that bothered Duval enough that, even though he took on himself the guilt, or the glory of the burglary, he compulsively told on Turquet. Even as he exculpated the two others who were on trial with him.

Was there really a Turquet? Was Turquet, the man conveniently on that bench, really… an agent provocateur?