Bankrobber and serial prison escapee Jacques Mesrine had many names during his two-decade criminal career in the 1960s and 70s, reports The Observer.
In disguise and on the run from police, he made headlines as “the man of a thousand faces” and “public enemy number one”. In Canada and the US with his girlfriend, Jeanne Schneider, the couple were nicknamed France’s Bonnie and Clyde.
Now hundreds of letters Mesrine wrote to Schneider during more than 10 years in prison are to be auctioned in Paris. Like the notorious Al Capone, Ronnie Biggs and Jesse James, Mesrine has entered popular culture as the 21st century’s ideal antihero, despite a record that included armed robberies and hold-ups, swindles, kidnappings, abductions and – allegedly – murders.
Said to be charismatic and intelligent, roguish and romantic, he had a good line in pithy maxims that played to his image as a French Robin Hood.
“I’ve no remorse about stealing from banks. I’ve the impression of stealing from someone more of a thief than I am,” he wrote in his book L’instinct de mort (Death Instinct) published in 1977.
At one of several court appearances in the 1970s, he said: “I am not a public enemy. I am the enemy of the banks. I eat the cake, not the grandmother nor Little Red Riding Hood.”
At the same time, the man who said “I became a crook as one becomes a doctor, by vocation”, would mock those who would depict him as a good guy for the poor and downtrodden. “The terrible thing is that some people are going to make a hero out of me, but there are no heroes in crime. There are only men who are marginal and who don’t accept the law.”
Pauline Ribeyre, of auctioneers Baron Ribeyre, selling the letters on behalf of Schneider’s daughter, Murielle, said they were of historic interest. “Mesrine remains a major criminal and it’s not our intention to glorify him or do any publicity for him. The family [Schneider] do not defend what he or their mother did,” Ribeyre told the Observer.
“This private correspondence shows another face of the man Mesrine. We see he could be quite funny, romantic, a bit misogynistic, but very much in love.”
She added: “The question is what you do with all the letters like this? Mesrine was what he was – a serious criminal – but do you just throw them away or do you see them as a vital historic souvenir?”