Description
Jules Bonnot (Pont-de-Roide, October 14, 1876 - Paris, April 28, 1912) was a former military soldier first class, an accomplished marksman, who became known after identifying with illegalist anarchist ideologies in France. He became especially notorious for his role in the anarchist criminal organization dubbed the Bonnot Gang by the French press. Seen by himself as a professional criminal averse to carnage, his method was to deceive and delude his targets. Almost always posing as a businessman, his taste for expensive clothes earned him the pejorative pseudonym Le Bourgeois (the bourgeois) among his companions.
Bonnot was born on October 14, 1876 into a family of laborers in Pont-de-Roide, a town in the French department of Doubs (the same department as the birthplace of the anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon). Of frail constitution, his mother died on January 23, 1887, when Jules' family was living in Besançon. Little Jules, then ten years old, was left in the care of his father and paternal grandmother. Illiterate and living at a time when labor rights did not exist, his father managed to bring him only what was necessary for the survival of the family, and sometimes not even that.
Living a childhood of insecurity and constant need, with no prospects for the future, young Jules was sent to school by his family, but not performing well, he ended up abandoning it. At the age of fourteen he started working as an apprentice in a factory. This job did not motivate him because he considered it hard work, poorly paid, and overexploited. Finally, he quarreled with his boss and was fired.
Youth
Bonnot (middle) in a photo together with two other young officers of the French army.
He got other jobs that did not last long either. In 1891, at the age of fifteen, Bonnot is sentenced to prison for the first time for stealing some copper brushes from the factory where he worked. Later, in 1895, he is imprisoned for assaulting a policeman at a dance. After a disagreement in a café, Bonnot would end up in prison again for three months for obstructing the law by reacting to a policeman's aggression with verbal and physical offenses. Upon his release, Jules Bonnot searches for his father who refuses to let him into his home by closing the door in his face.[source needed]
At the age of 21 with nowhere to go or a job to support him, Bonnot was forced to enlist in military service, serving in the French infantry for three years. There he works mainly as a car and truck mechanic, but also proves to be an excellent marksman, with impressive accuracy in rifle shooting. In the army he also acquires notions of chemistry and handling explosives. He leaves the army in 1901 holding the rank of Private First Class.
In August of that same year he met and married Sophie-Louise Burdet. Two years later, in 1903, his brother commits suicide by hanging himself because of a disillusionment in love.
Source: wikipedia