Bonnot Gang

The Bonnot Gang (La Bande à Bonnot) or The Tragic Bandits (Les Bandes Tragiques) was a French criminal anarchist group that operated in France and Belgium during the late Belle Époque, from 1911 to 1912. Composed of individuals who identified with the emerging illegalist milieu, the gang used new technology, such as cars and repeating rifles not then available to the police.

The press originally referred to them as simply "The Auto Bandits," as they carried out the first motorized robberies and bank raids in world history. The group also earned the moniker "Les bandes tragiques" from the press due to a sense of the group's "desperate courage," who were painted as tragic-comic figures for their working-class origins and espoused anarchist politics.^[1] But ultimately the gang became known by the title of "The Bonnot Gang" after Jules Bonnot gave an interview at the office of Le Petit Parisien, a popular daily paper. Bonnot's perceived prominence within the group was later reinforced by his high-profile death during a shootout with French police in Choisy-le-Roi.

While many of the gang's members originated from regions across France and Belgium, such as Lyon, Brussels, Charleroi, Alais, they congregated in the city of Paris. Only some decades after the Commune of 1871 and the wave of anarchist terrorism of the 1890s, and not long after the General Strike of 1906 organized by the Confédération Générale du Travail (CGT), Paris was a hotbed of anarchist debate and organizing, with ongoing bitter disagreements between the anarcho-individualists (such as the illegalists) and anarcho-communists and -syndicalists.^[1]