{"id":80787,"date":"2014-12-12T13:59:52","date_gmt":"2014-12-12T18:59:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=80787"},"modified":"2014-12-12T17:19:29","modified_gmt":"2014-12-12T22:19:29","slug":"the-death-instinct","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/12\/the-death-instinct\/","title":{"rendered":"The Death Instinct"},"content":{"rendered":"

The autobiography of one of France\u2019s most notorious criminals.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"Jacques_Mesrine\"<\/a>

Mesrine\u2019s mugshot, 1973.<\/p><\/div>\n

On the morning of November 2, 1979, a gold BMW pulled up behind a blue truck stopped at a stoplight in Porte de Clignancourt, in northern Paris. After a moment, a tarp covering the back of the truck opened to reveal four men with rifles. They opened fire in unison, blasting holes into the windshield. The man driving the BMW was hit fifteen times; the woman in the passenger seat was blinded and crippled by the attack. Her pet poodle died, too. And that was the end of Jacques Mesrine, France\u2019s public enemy number one.<\/p>\n

For nearly twenty years, Mesrine had humiliated the country\u2019s judicial system with repeated high-profile bank robberies, murders, and daring prison escapes. But now the police had caught up to him. His bloodied corpse laid limp in his car, left out for the paparazzi. One of the officers tossed Mesrine\u2019s wig, riddled with bullets, onto the car hood like roadkill into a dumpster. That last detail comes from one of the many YouTube videos<\/a> you can watch of the shooting\u2019s aftermath, waiting to be compared with Jean-Fran\u00e7ois Richet\u2019s 2008 two-part film Mesrine: Killer Instinct<\/a><\/em> and Mesrine: Public Enemy Number One<\/em>, both starring Vincent Cassel. And through the bullet holes of mythology, you can see in this tableau a bit of Arthur Penn\u2019s Bonnie and Clyde<\/em>, and a little bit of Jean-Paul Belmondo dying on the pavement, calling Jean Seberg a bitch.<\/p>\n

This was a fitting death\u2014and has been a fitting afterlife\u2014for Mesrine. He was France\u2019s most famous criminal not only because of his crimes but for the way he hot-wired the machinery of fame. While he was on the most-wanted list, he gave interviews and was photographed for the cover of Paris Match<\/em>. Two years before his assassination, Mesrine wrote his autobiography, The Death Instinct<\/em>, while incarcerated in the inescapable La Sant\u00e9 Prison, from which he later escaped. It was 1977, a bleak time for culture and politics: in England, it was \u201cGod Save the Queen,\u201d with Johnny Rotten whinnying \u201cno future\u201d into recorded oblivion; in Germany, it was the Red Army Faction, their crimes, and their deaths in Stammheim Prison. For many in France, a few decades out of existentialism, the late seventies were a time of startling political conservatism, a time when the hopes of \u201968 were being actively erased. It was this regime of erasure that Mesrine fought against, and that killed him two years later. <\/p>\n

When The Death Instinct (L\u2019Instinct de Mort) <\/em>was published in \u201977, it presented Mesrine not just as a modern-day Robin Hood but as an articulate and politicized critic of the French government. He wasn\u2019t quite Sartre\u2019s Saint Genet<\/em>, but he was close. His condemnations of the prison system led to the support of many leading intellectuals of the time, including Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. Jean-Paul Belmondo bought the movie rights, and the film was going to be produced by G\u00e9rard Lebovici, who ended up republishing the book in 1984. That same year, he was also assassinated in a still-unsolved gangland killing. Over the years, the book fell out of print while Mesrine\u2019s legend remained alive, though sometimes only in the verses of French rap songs.<\/p>\n

Thanks to the efforts of TamTam Books, a small indie press in Los Angeles that specializes in translation, The Death Instinct<\/a><\/em> has now arrived to these shores. Translated by Catherine Texier and Robert Greene, the book is a barred window into a life and time that has gone by, but it\u2019s also a prescient look at how images and narratives have the power to manipulate lives in today\u2019s world.<\/p>\n

After the few unfortunate pages of Mesrine\u2019s belletristic jailhouse philosophizing that open the book, The Death Instinct <\/em>begins in earnest with his birth in 1936 in suburban Paris, following his life up to the time of its writing. He spent his boyhood days waiting out the war with his cousins in rural France\u2014playing soldiers, herding the cows to pasture\u2014and then returned to Paris for an adolescence that brings to mind the exploits of young Antoine Doinel, at first. He soon trades his slingshot for brass knuckles and school days spent down by the Seine for school nights spent up in the red-light district of Pigalle, hookering it up. By the time his voice drops, Mesrine emerges as a charismatic (detractors say sociopathic) rogue.<\/p>\n

There is no one Ur-crime, no cauterizing brand that marks him as belonging outside of society, although several compete. Early on, he witnesses a group of resistance fighters humiliating a woman accused of collaboration horizontale<\/em>. As the soiree shapes up into a gang rape, young Jacques is led away, \u201cdevastated,\u201d unable to understand this \u201cdesire to punish a woman.\u201d A few years later he loses his virginity to a hooker, whose \u201cperfectly shaped breasts reminded [him] of the woman the resistance fighters had undressed.\u201d The collapsed heroics of the partisans, and that border, porous as lambskin, between tenderness and savagery, seem to preface Mesrine\u2019s relationship with both authority and women.<\/p>\n

He himself later enlisted and was sent to Algeria, where he allegedly worked on a torture squad. Unfortunately, the book doesn\u2019t go into that detail of his military years, though it\u2019s addressed elsewhere. The motive for the omission isn\u2019t clear\u2014perhaps he\u2019d repressed this period in life, or perhaps it had never happened, or perhaps, by \u201977, torturing Algerians had fallen out of vogue. Nevertheless, one would be tempted to posit either of these experiences as the basis for a life of crime.<\/p>\n

They\u2019re not, though, at least not in Mesrine\u2019s eyes: a little later, in one of the autobiography\u2019s more lucid passages, he accounts for his criminality simply by saying he didn\u2019t want to lead a boring life. When he\u2019d returned from Algeria, he was discouraged by what he saw in his fellow Parisians:<\/p>\n

\n

Sad faces, weary eyes \u2026 Human beings condemned to eternal mediocrity \u2026 Stomachs on legs, regular customers of the daily special and the small glass of red wine. Human beings already familiar with their future since they had none.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"the-death-instinct-4.gif\"<\/a>There\u2019s really nothing here that differentiates his thoughts from an avant-garde firebrand, or an angst-ridden adolescent. He expands on his disdain for the bourgeoisie with an admission that it was he \u201cwho was socially maladjusted,\u201d \u201clazy, a gambler, a lush \u2026\u2009\u201d His \u201cwhole youth had been conditioned by the gangster films that [he] had watched.\u201d<\/p>\n

And sure enough, the book progresses from here like a gangster film. At first it\u2019s in a rather lighthearted way, as when Mesrine and an associate, caught midburglary by the owners of the house, must pretend that they\u2019re detectives who have only moments earlier arrived on the scene. Six months later, things get a little darker. In what amounts to the end of his apprentice days, Mesrine casually slaps a prostitute for being rude and then pistol-whips her pimp, who in return brutalizes the face of another prostitute, the one Mesrine had come to see in the first place. Mesrine gags and guts the pimp and buries him alive. By the end of the book, he admits\u2014confesses <\/em>would not be quite the right word\u2014to thirty-nine killings.<\/p>\n

If the plot of Mesrine\u2019s life seems to have been ripped from film noir, at least he has a prose style to match: as a writer, he leans heavily on the bum leg of genre conventions, resulting in a slapstick wobble. Not a scene goes by without him stopping to remind us that something else is on its way. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t be the first time that \u2026<\/em>\u2009\u201d \u201cI was far from imagining<\/em> \u2026\u2009\u201d The constant foreshadowing leaves much of the action, when it does arrive, overcast. And he\u2019s always prattling on about keeping his word and settling scores, often with those who neglected to keep their words. This comes with crime-memoir territory, and it does little to obscure the realism seething through the book, especially as the garrote tightens with each passing escapade.<\/p>\n

In the second act, Mesrine really gets going. He escapes France\u2014where he was \u201cwanted for murder, which involved a settling of scores, and armed robbery\u201d\u2014to Canada. With his girlfriend, he rents a posh apartment on Montreal\u2019s Sherbrooke Street, hoping to start anew. It doesn\u2019t happen. He kidnaps, he robs, and he ends up escaping from an inhumane maximum-security prison only to try breaking back in to\u2014what else?\u2014settle a score with the warden and keep his words to his friends.<\/p>\n

About midway through, one of Mesrine\u2019s aper\u00e7us speaks to this book\u2019s continued relevance. He\u2019s just arrived in Canada with the potential for a fresh start on his mind, but he\u2019s denied a visa because of his lengthy criminal record. Given ten days to leave the country, he says: \u201cYou can\u2019t start a new life, it just goes on, with a past that is denied any future.\u201d<\/p>\n

This fit in with the nihilism of the day (cue Johnny Rotten), but it also spoke to me personally. Several years ago, attempting to fly to Shanghai by way of Toronto, I was told that because of a disorderly conduct charge leftover from a wild night in college, I wasn\u2019t welcome in the country. How could they have known, let alone cared? Here, thirty-five years into a future that\u2019s denied any separation from the past, it\u2019s hard enough for people to start fresh, even if they haven\u2019t been killing pimps and robbing banks. For a public bound in a flexible yet unbreakable web of credit scores, leaked e-mails, and naked photos, life on the outside of society doesn\u2019t seem that bad.<\/p>\n

Hunter Braithwaite was the founding editor of <\/em>The Miami Rail. He has written for<\/em> Art in America,<\/em> The White Review, and<\/em> The Virginian-Pilot. He lives in Memphis<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The autobiography of one of France\u2019s most notorious criminals. On the morning of November 2, 1979, a gold BMW pulled up behind a blue truck stopped at a stoplight in Porte de Clignancourt, in northern Paris. After a moment, a tarp covering the back of the truck opened to reveal four men with rifles. They […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":696,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[291,12997,7583,6797,865,16354,16353,10368,1826,270,15038,8577],"class_list":["post-80787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-algeria","tag-autobiographies","tag-crime","tag-criminals","tag-france","tag-gangsters","tag-jacques-mesrine","tag-memoirs","tag-murder","tag-paris","tag-translations","tag-true-crime"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nReading Jacques Mesrine\u2019s Autobiography<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The notorious French criminal\u2019s memoir, The Death Instinct (1977), has finally been translated into English.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/12\/12\/the-death-instinct\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Death Instinct by Hunter Braithwaite\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"December 12, 2014 \u2013 The autobiography of one of France\u2019s most notorious criminals. 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