Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits: The Crime Spree That Gripped Belle Époque Paris

The ever-churning machine of Parisian society was at an extraordinary point before World War I. Art, music, and literature experienced a transformation via the works of visionaries such as Pablo Picasso, Claude Debussy, and Marcel Proust. Electricity buzzed throughout the city. This was Belle Époque—a so-called beautiful era of peace, hope, prosperity, and renaissance, marked by technological and scientific advances that promised a bright and exciting future. But simmering under all this joie de vivre was an underclass who barely earned enough to survive, and sometimes didn't. The inequality and injustice eventually propelled angry revolutionaries to take Robin Hood-esque measures into their own hands. Merriman (Charles Seymour Professor of History, Yale Univ.; Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune) focuses largely on two anarchists in particular: Victor Kibaltchiche and Rirette Maitrejean. The author's Parisian scholarship shines as he builds a vivid and meticulously detailed image of the period, creating the foundation for a multilayered and three-dimensional story of what happens when oppressed people are pushed to their limits.