The Motor Bandits: Cars, Crime, and Philosophy
by Michael L. Bromley (copyright 2004)
Published in the SAH Journal of the Society of Automotive Historians,
Issue 212, Sept-Oct/2004

Claiming a first is a dangerous business. You never really know. If you ever browse a "firsts" list, you will find an error in that subject you know well. So get out your pen and correct me on this one: the first time an automobile was used for non-automotive crime was in New York City in 1910. Speeding, manslaughter, steeling cars, these thrills were long before perfected. It wasn’t until 1910, however, that professional criminals and gangs took to the automobile. My collection of New York Times articles gives it as September 29, 1910 with, "Fight Pistol Battle in Speeding Autos." These were not chauffeurs of rival steel magnates. Okay, before the dedicated refuters out there find some 1903 Kalamazoo bank heist with a getaway in a curved dash Oldsmobile (Calling Keith Marvin! Calling Keith Marvin!), allow me a few thoughts on why 1910 marks the meeting of automobiles and professional crime.

Anything before was isolated, and not generally happening, for the simple reason that before 1910, thugs in cars would be conspicuous. Thanks to the motoring President -- my man William Howard Taft -- automobiles in 1910 were finally normal, a politically-correct and socially acceptable object of what Alexis de Tocqueville called every American’s "glance of hope and envy on the enjoyments of the rich." Before Taft, automobiles evoked anger (well, in good company and public speeches) and hope for more railroad reform and six miles an hour speed limits, two around curves if one listened to Congressman Thetus Sims of Linden, Tennessee. If only the rich ran automobiles, only the rich would use them to commit crimes. Following our logic, since the rich owned the banks, automobilists didn’t rob them, at least not through the front door.

With more and more and more common people taking to automobiles in 1909 and 1910, your average criminal could get away with being seen in a motor cars without violating the social lists. All one needed now was a drivers license, not membership to the 400. General licensing, in fact, was the state’s endorsement of automobiling. When only chauffeurs required licenses, automobile owners were a distinct class in law, a privilege that was erased by licensing all drivers, professional and amateur.

Those few news mentions of a shooting or a getaway by car that appeared in 1910 and 1911 became commonplace in 1912, when the Times announced, "200 ex-Convicts Run Taxicabs Here: They have licenses which can aid them in committing crime, the police say." The horror wasn’t so much the crime, but the empowerment of the crimes and the criminals with automobiles. "That the taxicab, as a means of ‘getting away,’" continued the article, "has made the detection of crimes, such as the hold-up of the East River National Bank messengers in which the thieves got away with $25,000 in cash, and the Stern murder case, more difficult than ever before is the opinion of every man in the police department." Its exclusivity gone, so, too, the conspicuousness. Nobody bothered to look anymore, and if one did, there were too many cars to look in and too many different kinds of people. This is not to say that the automobile was no longer the rich man’s tool. In response to the popularity of autos, the industry turned from performance to luxury for distinction. Just as today, one could make a statement with a known expensive car or luxury body style. You still had to dress nice to match a limousine.

1912 was a good year for the news business, giving forth a constant news cycle of the Titanic sinking, the wild Republican primary between a sitting and a former president, the general election and the shooting of one of the candidates during it, and the magnificent and a deliciously slow-revealing story from Paris of a vile and dangerous band of "Motor Bandits." Americans have always loved a good crime story. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had only recently scared the country with their wild and desperate train holdups. But Americans don’t like criminals for the crimes. The Hole in the Wall Gang weren't remembered for their crimes. The story struck the American heart for its rebellion against the closing frontier and inevitable urbanization. Most importantly, they were out having fun, or so we like to think. They wanted money, yes, but what they really wanted was what the money brought by way of excitement, parties, and girls. Criminals who displayed no glamour or adventure, such as the extremists of the labor movement, used a violence too purposeful for romance or Hollywood. Desperados robbing Harriman’s trains were fun. Anarchists shooting the President and blowing up capitalists’ offices were going too far. Americans have little taste for philosophy, especially to rationalize murder. As Tuco said in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, "If you’re gonna shoot, shoot." Don’t bother us with all that talk.

In December, 1911, a loose gang of anarchist thieves, "illegalists" who rationalized their crimes as protest against property ("property is theft" said Proudhon, the French radical), launched the "Motor Bandits" with the theft of a Delaunay-Belleville from a wealthy residence. The intended use of the fabulous and, with its famed circular radiator, conspicuous limousine was the getaway car. The gang hid the car and cased safe-cracking jobs. Four of them spent the entire night of the 20th December in the limousine wandering around, waiting for a rain to cover the sound of a break-in and that never came. The roaming limousine aroused no suspicion. Daylight brought the fall-back plan to rob a bank messenger. Nervous and out of place, the perps sat in the limousine outside a bank and awaited the daily messenger whom they knew to be carrying cash. Two were in front, and two in back, behind drawn curtains. That same morning, an automotive journal ran a little notice from a certain man who was looking for a certain Delaunay-Belleville limousine. He offered 500 francs for its return.

After a butcher eyed them, they drifted down the street. None were dressed for the fine back seat, and only one, Jules Bonnot, for whom the gang would be known and who had worked as a chauffeur, was properly dressed for a car, he wearing a chauffeur’s gray overcoat, cap, and goggles. The butcher raised no alarm. At the moment, Bonnot’s accomplices jumped out, shot the messenger, and hopped back into the Delaunay-Belleville, which sped away clean. They ended up in Dieppe, far above Paris, unknowingly parked in the tidal flats. They walked off in the morning through mud and rising water and left the fabulous machine there. The episode’s stupid end was fitting to the take, a mere 5,000 francs and bank notes. The bank messenger had kept 20,00 francs in his vest pocket.

Such robberies were hardly uncommon, and hardly warranted front page headlines. Only days before the Bandits struck, thieves who hit a bank messenger were chased down by a crowd. This one had something different, especially in the less-than egalitarian France, where there was no Henry Ford plotting millions of Model T’s, and no William Howard Taft wishing them upon the poor. These were the days when the Renault was a luxury car. Le Matin’s headlines screamed outrage: "Les Bandits en Auto" (a far more successful bank messenger robbery a month later got fewer headlines and no history, for the absence of the automobile and philosophy). Robbing a bank was one thing; escaping in a stolen limousine was quite another. That was selling news, far more, certainly, than another dull story of an embezzler whose million francs take wasn’t hardly worth mention. A sympathetic biographer of the gang, Richard Parry, wrote, "The theft alone of such a car was, for the illegalists, a radically-conscious gesture." He also bragged that the robbery was the first of its kind. Your author disagrees. New Yorkers beat ‘em to it, as, likely, did Chicago gangs, although that’s mere speculation, however solidly grounded in logic and knowledge of Chicago. Yes, the limousine was a supremely conscious gesture. For an anarchist, shooting a cop was no big deal. It was duty. Shooting a cop and running away in a limousine was the sublime, something the Bonnot Gang managed soon after.

After swiping another motor (unknown make), they headed to Amsterdam to pawn the stolen notes, and without success. They dumped the car in a canal and returned to Paris by rail. The gang spent the next weeks twice robbing armories and breaking into a private home and killing the housekeeper. In late January, three of the gang stole a "landaulet de lux" in Ghent and failed to sell the bank notes in Amsterdam. There they sold the car for 8,000 francs, more cash than they had taken in the bank heist. The police, meanwhile, went after anarchist circles, arresting girlfriends and others who had no involvement, and gradually learning the identity of the gang, who, upon return to Paris, found photos of one of them posted everywhere. Two returned to Ghent, broke into a garage, and murdered a chauffeur who refused to help start two cars. They landed back in Holland, where, having no more luck with the notes, they stole a car for the return to France. It broke down in Belgium. They took the train Paris, where most of the gangs’ photos were posted in the newspapers. La Bande a Bonnot was identified, and its desperation assured.

In mid-February someone stole a Peugeot limousine in Beziers and abandoned it in Paris, a crime immediately attributed to the Motor Bandits but unmentioned in their confessions. We do know that the gang next stole a Delaunay-Belleville "double phaeton." As with the first heist, they rolled it out the garage and down the street, then started it and ran off to exchange plates and find a garage to keep it. Later that night it developed engine trouble, which took some four hours to repair and which forced them to abandon plans for a heist outside of Paris. They ended up back in the city. Outside the Gare St. Lazare, they nearly collided with a bus. The car stalled. A cop, seeing the commotion, ran toward them. One of the bandits hopped out, cranked the engine, and they took off. The cop jumped on the running board, and a bandit shot him three times. They sped away as if in a movie, rounding the Place de la Concorde, tearing up the Champs-Elysées. After hiding out a day, they hit up a rich lawyer’s house, and were chased away by gunfire. They burned the great automobile (a crime that) and scampered back to Paris.

While the gang’s philosophies frightened the bourgeoisie, capitalism got its revenge when they agreed to sell the bank notes for 5% of face to a fence in Paris. He delivered even less, only 500 francs. Worse, it seems he tipped off the police, and the two accomplices of the gang who handled the notes were arrested. Now, the story takes its romance. As the cops busted several members and accomplices, Bonnot and his main partners escaped near capture. One responded with a taunt at the police in a letter to Le Matin that declared them incompetent and the reward money laughable. They’d turn themselves in for ten times that, he wrote. More fantastic, Bonnot walked into a news room, lay his Browning rifle on the table and dictated his own ridicule. With their girlfriends in jail, limousines burned and abandoned, a dead cop, a collection of news clippings about themselves, and their declarations to the press, now they were the "tragic bandits" -- full romantics.

They tried to swipe another car. This time the garage was defended by a chauffeur who got off a couple shots and scared them off. Next, though, they outdid themselves. They staked out a site along a road to the Côte d’Azur, the site, unknown to them, of an ambush of Napoleon’s agents in 1796, and awaited a worthy target. Fate brought them one of the best, an 18 HP DeDion Bouton, straight from the Champs-Elysées showroom, and driven by one of the Marquis-de Dion’s own chauffeurs. As one of the gang shouted, "It’s the car we want," the chauffeur pulled a gun. Bonnot shot him dead. Another bandit opened up on the man in the passenger seat. They dumped both bodies and sped off to Paris, dumping the chauffeur’s gear out the car, singing songs of revolution.

They headed straight to a bank, this time holding it up western style, guns drawn and demanding the money from the clerks and the safe. Maurice Leblanc, a crime writer who in 1912 told the Bonnot story to readers of the New York Times, described the scene, beautifully drawing the Bonnot as the Nietzchean super heroes they and their defenders in the anarchist press aspired them to be:

There are six of them. Four break into the building to kill and rob. A fifth, the consumptive Soudy, is on the pavement with a carbine a his shoulder. "Clear out!" But where is Bonnot? At the steering wheel. All the dangers centres on him, isolated in the middle of the street, the centre of a gathering crowd. He it is who has the most perilous, nerve-racking post. The others are acting, are too absorbed in their deadly work to be conscious of the danger. But he is obliged to remain inactive, motionless. He cannot, must not stir.. He does not move an inch... he was terrible to look upon. His whole body was contracted under the fearful strain of his muscles, rendered rigid by the anxiety of the moment. His face was distorted, almost disfigured. Eyes narrower than ever, shifting with suspicion and hatred from one group of on-lookers to another. He was watching with special care the road in front of him. He, a chauffeur broken to all the difficulties of auto-driving, for whom those lovely roads of France held no secrets, who better than he could have realized the terrible risk of stopping there a minute too long? A hay cart, a traction engine, might come along and bar the road. Trapped! Another auto more powerful than his own might arrive and give chase. It would be the end.

In the DeDion Bouton, Bonnot had no such problem. One gangster shot at a pursuer and another at a horse to prevent its cart from blocking the way. They raced off, and easily outpaced two cops who pursued them in another town by bicycle and horse. They dumped the car near a train station, broke up into pairs, and rode back to Paris. Parry wrote, "Bourgeois society, and the press in particular, now went hysterical over ‘the drama of Chantilly,’" especially noting the fear that struck automobilists over the hijacking.

They distributed the money and went different ways. Three were snatched within a few weeks. Bonnot was the next to go down. After spending three nights wandering, he returned to the garage of his old automobile fence friend, where he tried to hide the first limousine they stole, and which he surely knew the police were watching. Sixteen detectives raided the garage the next morning and shot dead his mechanic friend. Bonnot held out upstairs and behind a mattress for several hours, taking shots at the hundreds of gendarmes, Republican guards, locals with pitchforks and shotguns, and spectators who screamed "À mort! À mort!" At the dying shots, Bonnot screamed, "Bastards!" At least Bonnot had the ironic good sense to die in a garage. The remaining Bandits were shot and blown up in a house a few weeks later. Both captures were enabled by automobiles, which the police used to follow quickly on tips.

The 20th century had a terrific way of burying outrages beneath worse ones. The wild year of 1912 was sunk to the War to End All Wars, and of course, the more vicious and even more potentially vicious ones after that. This worst fate of history fell upon the few survivors of the Bonnot Gang and other 1900s-1910s anarchists in the form of a 1920s pardon by the French government. Radicals, too, just fade away. Society was no longer scared. A few ran off to the Soviet Union, which was just then studying American automobile factories, hoping that automobiles would lead to the workers paradise. Back in Paris, society was never more in love with the automobile. It brought delight not fear, charm not revolution. Some of the greatest automobiles ever built, and certainly the most beautiful, came from the French Salons of the 1920s. And, after the Second World War, in a failed attempt to force economic and, as ever, automotive equality, Western Europe taxed the luxury car to near death.

The Bonnot Gang has survived only in anarchist lore. An attempt failed to resurrect their outrage in film, and Richard Parry’s 1968 loving homage (from the "Rebel Press") meant nothing to a modern popular culture that cannot comprehend the real meaning of the Motor Bandits in their day. We know about the Motor Bandits only because for a few months they terrorized good society and helped sell lots of newspapers by stealing cars and using them to rob banks. It was the automobile, not the philosophy that so outraged, so intrigued, and made such a good story. Gone the outrage of the automobile, gone the outrage of the Motor Bandits. Nobody ever complained that Bonnie and Clyde used a car.

Back in America, the purist of egalitarianism -- universal envy -- trumped outrage. Cars? Crime? Cool. Soon enough it was "whatever." Where the Bonnot Gang stole it for a wild, brief ride, popular culture seized the automobile forever from its exclusive hold by the rich. But even the the joy ride was in America ever an unlikely, happy contrast to European anarchist discontent. Richard Parry ought know that Americans would have better enjoyed the Motor Bandits if they were in it for the fun, not the philosophy. Imagine, Butch and Sundance missed the automobile by just a few years!

It’s the same old story, one we know all too well today. Protesting wealth, rebels turn its highest technologies against it, only to be killed by the same. May the final irony ever persevere.

- Michael L. Bromley, 2004