"For six terrifying months in 1911-1912, Parisians were gripped by a violent crime wave. A group known as the Bonnot Gang began robbing banks and killed anyone who got in their way. These weren't just bank robbers; they were anarchists."

Professor John Merriman retells the hunt for Anarchist Bandits on the eve of World War I through the perspective of two lovers: Victor Kibaltchiche (later the famed Russian revolutionary and writer Victor Serge) and Rirette Maitrejean. The pair reporrted on the Bonnot crime spree in the radical newspaper L'Anarchie. While wealthy  urbanites enjoyed luxuries during the so-called Belle Epoque, Victor and Rirette protested state AND criminal violence.  Ultimately, though, police would target both the bank robbers and revolutionary writers.

John Merriman teaches, researches, and teaches French and Modern European history. His books include Dynamite Club: How A Café Bombing Ignited the Age of Modern Terror was published by Houghton-Mifflin in 2009, by JR Books in London, and in French translation by Tallandier as Dynamite Club: L’Invention du Terrorisme à Paris, and in Chinese translation, as well. Yale University Press published a second edition in 2016, with a new preface discussing several of the recent terrorist attacks in France and the United States. He recently published Ballad of the Anarchist Bandits: The Crime Spree that Gripped Belle Époque Paris (Nation Books, 2017). Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune appeared with Basic Books in New York in 2014 and by Yale University Press in Great Britain. It has been translated into Portuguese in Brazil and in Dutch, Spanish, and Chinese. In 2019 the University of Nebraska Press published a collection of his essays: History on the Margins: People and Places in the Evolution of Modern France.

Merriman’s other books include The Agony of the Republic: The Repression of the Left in Revolutionary France, 1848-1851 (1978); The Red City: Limoges and the French Nineteenth Century (1985), published in French as Limoges, la Ville Rouge (1990); The Margins of City Life: Explorations on the French Urban Frontier(1991), French edition, Aux marges de la ville; faubourgs et banlieues en France 1815-1870  (1994);  and The Stones of Balazuc: A French Village in Time (2002, was published in Chinese translation in 2015), in French as Mêmoires de pierres: Balazuc, village ardéchois (Paris, 2005), and in Dutch; and Police Stories: Making the French State, 1815-1851 (Oxford University Press, 2005).