The Anarchist Plot To Steal The Mona Lisa

From The Transmetropolitan Review

Bound copies of The Anarchist Plot To Steal The Mona Lisa can be found here.

INTRODUCTION

Few people know that the French anarchists of the 1890s funded their movement through burglary, and even fewer know that anarchists stole the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. However, fans of the hit Netflix show Lupin have already ingested the legacy of those anarchist burglars, for the titular Lupin was based on the legendary anarchist burglar Alexandre Marius Jacob, head of the infamous gang of Nightworkers, whose daring thefts resonate even today in 2026.


Before the Nightworkers, the French anarchists of the 1890s began their criminal enterprise with a thief named Émile Henry, who has been much demonized by historians, even anarchist ones. Regardless, Émile was a young anarchist who became a thief rather than pursue his academic career, and he was soon renowned for his kind deeds, the most famous of which was his theft of a cow, which he safely delivered to a poor peasant woman. While known to history as a bloodthirsty bomber, Émile in fact had a kind, sensitive soul, one which compelled his first major attack.

In 1892, when the poor strikers at the Carmaux mine were crushed by the capitalists and betrayed by socialist politicians, Émile decided to bomb the offices of the mining company in Paris. As fate would have it, his bomb was found by the police and taken to their station where it suddenly exploded, killing four cops and a secretary. After this unexpected explosion, Émile went on the run, but he had much help from his anarchist comrades.


One of his friends was the anarchist art critic Félix Fénéon, who helped him escape to England through contacts like Oscar Wilde. Another friend who helped him was the anarchist Charles Malato, who had already fled to London. Stuck in this exile, Émile and Charles helped form a burglary crew, among them Leon Ortiz, Louis Matha, and Paul Chericotti. This crew robbed multiples stores and houses in both England and France, their burglaries creeping ever closer towards Paris. However, Émile was deeply affected by the executions of the anarchists Ravachol and Vaillant, and he decided to bomb a capitalist target in revenge.

Unfortunately for everyone, Émile couldn’t find an adequate target, so he chose the middle-class Café Terminus where he killed and wounded random people with his bomb, only to be instantly captured. Most people don’t realize that Émile’s burglary crew helped him with his bombing, including Louis Matha and Leon Ortiz, just as they helped disassemble his bomb laboratory after the attack. Émile’s act set off a wave of repression, and soon nearly all of his comrades were in prison and put on the stand in the infamous Trial of the Thirty.


Félix Fénéon in Mazas prison, by Maximilien Luce

While anarchist intellectuals like Félix Fénéon were found innocent, anarchist thieves like Leon Ortiz and Paul Chericotti were sentenced to penal servitude in French Guyana. As many people know, Émile Henry was guillotined by the French state, although he was soon avenged by the Italian anarchist Sante Caserio, who stabbed the president of France in the heart. The repression that followed these acts was immense, nearly crushing the French anarchist movement, but once they recovered, a new burglary crew was quickly established, this time far to the south in Marseilles.

It was in the seaside metropolis that Louis Matha and Charles Malato met a young anarchist named Alexandre Marius Jacob, and soon they had trained a new burglar who would pillage the Republic like his predecessors. From 1899 to 1903, Alexandre and the Nightworkers brought over a million francs into the anarchist movement, and the proceeds were divided among a core group of anarchists who met in the Cafe Muniez in Paris. Among them were Louis Matha, Jean Grave, Émile Pouget, and Félix Fénéon, all former defendants in the Trial of the Thirty.

Unfortunately, the great Marius Jacob was captured on April 22, 1903, and the epic crime spree of the Nightworkers came to an end. With no way to easily obtain hundreds of thousands of francs, the art critic Félix Fénéon decided to focus on creating an art cartel using young anarchists like Pablo Picasso, and by 1906 clever Félix had become an art dealer at a major Parisian gallery. Within months of landing this lucrative position, an anarchist art thief stole two allegedly African statues from the Louvre and sold them to Picasso, who went on to replicate their stone faces in his paintings, thereby bringing African art into European galleries and scandalizing the racist bourgeoisie.

This anarchist statue thief wasn’t just making a few francs off Picasso, he was testing the security at the Louvre, with his final statue theft taking place just months before the grandest heist of all, the theft of the Mona Lisa. Once the illustrious painting vanished on August 21, 1911, the police eventually learned of Picasso’s connection to the stolen statues, although they were too distracted by him and his artist friends to realize the grander plot.

The full story of this legendary theft is now chronicled The Anarchist Plot To Steal The Mona Lisa, a book-length study of these anarchist artists and thieves, from their origins in the 1880s up to the 1910s when they organized the theft of the Mona Lisa. Not only did they steal the painting, they kept it long enough to sell six forgeries to high capitalists like JP Morgan, thereby generating the equivalent of over one billion dollars in today’s currency. A true crime story like none other.

 

Comments

anonymous (not verified) Sat, 03/14/2026 - 02:57

*sighs* Okay... now we'll have to go back to full late-19th century hipster fashion. I seen that '30s fascist haircuts got trendy again, but are we going fully bowler hats and quadruple-layered robes?

Fucking christ.

anonymous (not verified) Sat, 03/14/2026 - 12:26

In reply to by anonymous (not verified)

'member when hippies used to wear pieces of military clothing from the surplus, as a gesture of subversion? Well I'm doibg somewhat the same, as I see suitable (pun intended) for the current pomo context... i.e. normie-ish clothing, but all worn out, not-so-clean and maybe stinky (I guess?). I think it's the ultimate form of subversion and also anarchist clothing these days, but it won't usually get you a lot of fucking opportunities. Or at least not until your Murikah becomes a full 3rd world cuntry where it's normal to wear rags, and common ppl perfume with bootleg vials of Paco Rabane from Chyynah!

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