Today, 29 September, we celebrate the life and birthday of ALEXANDRE MARIUS JACOB (1879-1954) he was
a French illegalist anarchist whose avowed mission was to steal back
from the major thieves: commerce, the aristocracy, the state.
Although a lucid and articulate thinker and polemicist, he soon
learned to avoid political milieux and cut to the chase, working with
common criminals. He was by all accounts a phenomenal burglar — he
was a model for the “gentleman-cambrioleur” Arsène Lupin. He
had, for example, the panache to leave at the scenes of his crimes a
calling card in the name of “Attila.” He devised the trick, often
enacted in movies, of breaking into an apartment from the floor above
by poking an umbrella through the ceiling and using it to catch the
plaster. At one point he bought a hardware store, where he could
dismantle safes at his leisure. But he was also famously Robin
Hoodesque, redistributing the bulk of his takes to the poor. When he
discovered that an intended victim was choked by debts, he left her
10,000 gold francs, and when he found that another one was a writer,
he put everything back and left money for damages. Caught and sent to
forced labor in French Guyana in 1903, he attempted escape seventeen
times, and authorities complained about having to bring in new guards
at frequent intervals, since he regularly converted his jailers to
his principles. He spent his last few decades as a market peddler in
rural France. He died 9 August 1954.
