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Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908–1938 (Oakland: PM Press, 2015).
    5 Bonnot and Garnier, the two most hardened killers in the gang, each sent an open letter to the press and police proclaiming Dieudonné’s innocence, then fought it out to the death, surrounded by police and army units. At the trial, Raymond pretended to have nothing to do with the robbers and so waited until after the verdict—when it was too late—to shout out Dieudonné’s innocence. The bandit’s ‘innocence’ pleas contrasted with the 1905 trial of the anarchist burglar Marius Jacob, who proudly admitted: “I have burned down several townhouses, defended my freedom against the aggression of the agents of power. I am a rebel, living off the product of his thefts … I beg no indulgence from those I hate and scorn,” and reportedly “took over the trial,” expounding his anarchist principles.
    6 Dieudonné and Serge were reunited in the 1930s in Paris, where both worked in print shops as proofreaders.
    7 Which I was permitted to inspect on August 6, 1993, accompanied by M. Didier Voituron, a young directeur adjoint who was interested in Serge. Grim. The architecture of the Santé and its bare cells had not changed, but the 1974 prison riots all over France had led to some visible humanization of the regime as M. Voituron explained to me as he greeted unescorted prisoners in the halls. Apparently these reforms did not last. A sensational 2012 expose, Chief Doctor at the Santé Prison by Veronique Vasseur, describes a “pathogenic universe” of overcrowding, “which secretes its own arbitrary rules of despair, boredom, violence, forced cohabitation, promiscuity, domination by the strong, and corruption with no prospect but passing time badly.”
    8 Michel Fize, Une Prison dans la ville. Histoire de la “prison modile” de la Santé, lire epoque, 1867–1914. Ministere de la Justice, Coll. Archives penitentiaire. June 1983.
    9 Marshall Berman, AH That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 34.
    10 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, quoted by Berman.
    11 Ironically, David Gilbert, author of the foreword to this volume, is interned at Auburn in upstate New York. Another irony, it was Alexis de Tocqueville, revered by U.S. liberals, who as Justice Minister imposed this harsh, dehumanizing system in France. As a result, the French penitentiary system remained more repressive than the Spanish, even under Franco, as testified to by Serge’s comrades from the Spanish POUM who were incarcerated in both. The late Wilebaldo Solano laughingly told me the story of receiving in his French prison a postcard from a comrade in one of Franco’s jails that read: “It’s Paradise here! The guards even play soccer with us.” And of course Spain permitted conjugal visits.
    12 Prefecture du Marne, May 19, 1915. In fact, the couple were left alone in an office for an hour or so.
    13 It was unusual for a non-violent inmate to serve out the full sentence, and Serge’s clemency appeals, organized by Rirette, had influential sponsors. However, a high ministry official considered him an anarchist firebrand ‘dangerous to good order’ and kept him in the pen. Nonetheless, enemies in anarcho-individualist circles spread the rumor that Victor had been let off early
    14 Translated by Richard Greeman (Oakland: PM Press, 2015).
    15 Dave Renton cites among the Russian ‘Soviet anarchists’ the names of Benjamin Aleynnikov, Herman Sandorminsky, Alexander Shapiro, Nikolai Rogdayev Novomirsky, Grossman-Roschin, and Appolon Karelin, http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/research/serge.html .
    16 Serge’s son Vladimir, my late and dear friend, was named after Vladimir Mazin, not after Vladimir Lenin as has been surmised.
    17 See Serge’s 1921 “The Anarchists and the Russian Revolution,” translated by Ian Birchall, in Serge, The Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919–1921 (Chicago: