La Danse Apache, c. 1920: The Apache was often made to look like a physical attack
In his 1932 comedy Love Me Tonight, Maurice Chevalier dons a black roll-neck sweater, a tight tweed suit and a droopy cloth cap to sing in the character of a Paris street gangster, the type known as an apache.
To tourists visiting Paris during the années folles, the character of the apache, even though the great days of street gangs had been the 1890s, was integral to the Parisian experience, along with the street-corner prostitute, the artist in a paint-stained smock, and the furtive guide selling dirty postcards. American visitors were less attracted by crime, since they had enough of it at home. However tourists from more authoritarian nations, in particular Russia, paid top prices for a glimpse of Paris’s underworld where the only rules were those of force.
Sisley Huddlestone, long-time Paris correspondent of the London Times, watched them being systematically duped in what came to be known as The Tour of the Grand Dukes. “The Russians were conducted to faked apache dens. There were the red-aproned golden-casqued girls, and the sinister-looking apaches with caps drawn over their eyes. A girl dressed as a poule in black stockings and a slit skirt let herself be scorned, rejected and flung around the stage by a mec in a striped jersey, a black beret, and a look of weary contempt. In the course of the dancing, a quarrel would break out. A duel with knives would be fought. The grand dukes had their money’s worth of thrills; and then the girls took off their aprons and the men donned respectable hats and went quietly home to bed.”
For the last decade of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th, gangs of young apaches (pronounced “ar-pash”) terrorized working-class Paris, particularly the districts of Montmartre and Belleville. In 1907, police exaggerated their number as 70,000, against only 8,000 policemen. Driving home this comparison, the cover of a popular magazine showed a giant apache, knife in hand, looming over a troop of tiny cowering lawmen. Apaches combined in gangs with flamboyant names, each advertising its mastery of a particular piece of turf: the Tattooed of Ivry or the Beauty Marks of St. Ouen.
Their speciality was street robbery, for which they split into small groups. While two kept watch, one throttled the victim from behind and another rifled his pockets.
It’s not clear why they adopted the name of a Native American tribe. They may have learned it from such writers about the frontier as Fenimore Cooper and Mayne Reed. More probably, they saw genuine Apaches when Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show played Paris every few years from 1896, since a tribal village and simulated attacks by war parties were part of the program. The 1889 World’s Fair also included an exhibit showing a “typical Red Indian” hut festooned with scalps. Lurid stories in the press described Native Americans crazed by drinking the white man’s “firewater.”
The uniform of the Parisian apache featured the same tight jacket, trousers and loose cloth cap as Chevalier, but added a horizontally striped sailor’s jersey, and a gold-fringed crimson sash, which could be wrapped round the hand in a knife fight or tied on the face as a mask. Tight shoes of yellow leather completed the outfit—not forgetting the most important accessory, a short wooden-handled knife. Hand-forged by Polish cutlers, regarded as the best, it was known as a surin, from the Romany word tchouri, or an eustache, after Eustache Dubois, the 18th century artisan who first produced them in quantity.
Apache women, known as lamfé, wore gaudy blouses, brightly colored aprons over their dresses, and a black velvet ribbon around their throats. They took great trouble with their hair, but wore no hats. At a time when respectable women never went outdoors bareheaded, this omission flagrantly announced their renegade status.
Apache gangs would have been more dangerous had they not wasted so much time and effort on their wardrobe and on fighting bloody turf wars. The most notorious clash took place in 1902. Joseph Pleigneur, aka “Manda,” leader of the Orteaux, and François “Leca” Dominique, chief of the Popincs, both desired a teenage prostitute named Amélie Élie, known, because of her blonde hair, as Casque d’Or—Golden Helmet. To settle the question of who should have her, the two gangs fought it out with knives and pistols through the streets of Belleville.
The skirmish enraged the establishment. That gangs should fight at all was bad enough, but that they should do so over a woman seemed particularly offensive. “For half an hour,” wrote journalist Arthur Dupin, “in the middle of Paris, at high noon, two rival gangs battled for a girl, a blonde with her hair piled on her head like a prize poodle. These are the customs of the Apaches of the Far West, and a disgrace to our civilization.” The police made an example of Manda and Leca. Both were sentenced to terms at hard labour in the penal colony of French Guiana, Leca for eight years and Manda for life. Leca died there. Manda survived, won early release, but never returned to France.
Although the French police officially retired the term “apache” in 1920, the gangs, while much depleted by World War I, lived on. One night in the 1920s, novelist Ford Madox Ford found himself in Montparnasse, walking beside the walls of the Santé prison, “a long boulevard, lined all the way with high, blank, very grim walls, darkened by the chestnut trees then newly planted, with very dim gas-lamps far distant one from the other.
“Fifty yards behind my back, running footsteps sounded. I ran like hell. But they gained and gained on me. I stood at bay under a gas-lamp, beneath the black walls of the prison.
“They emerged from the gloom—two men. They were apaches all right; there were the casquettes with the visors right down over the eyes; the red woollen mufflers floated out, the jackets were skintight, the trousers ballooned out round the hips, and one of them had an open jackknife.”
Fortunately for Ford, they were after a rival gang member, and didn’t stop to rob or murder him.
Amélie Élie lived blamelessly until 1933, and died of tuberculosis. Any slurs on her character were eclipsed by her growing legend. Obeying the principle that history repeats itself, first as tragedy, then as farce, the mystique of the apache survived as a dance. In 1910, dancer Maurice Modvet visited the Caveau des Innocents, a dive near the old Les Halles markets. During the evening, a mec, or pimp, grabbed one of the poules, or chicks, and performed a variation on the “Rough Dance,” a country romp in which a couple playfully bumped and jostled one another. The pimp and whore made it more like a brawl, the girl begging for attention, he shoving her away, even throwing her to the floor, only to have her crawl back and clutch his leg adoringly. Impressed, Modvet paid the man to teach him the steps, and created the Apache Dance, which became a feature of nightclub shows around the world.
Casque d’Or inspired novels, plays and, in 1952, a film starring Simone Signoret. Over the years, sentiment softened the edges of a sordid story. In the film, Leca is a greedy middle-aged owner of a guinguette, or outdoor dance hall, and Manda a peaceable ex-gang member who’s retired to become a carpenter. Manda kills Leca for the noblest of reasons, but is sentenced to the guillotine. Amélie, determined to be with him to the end, rents a room overlooking the prison yard in order to see him beheaded.
A 1927 guidebook reported on the status of the apaches, who congregated on rue de Lappe (11th). “Not tough any more. You are safe here, because, outside every resort, there stands a gendarme. Seldom, if ever, any disorder. A long dark lane of Apache Dance Halls. The noise, terrific. An uproar of mechanical pianos, banjos, drums, accordions, laughter, boisterous stamping and hand clapping. The Apaches are making merry. They dance, not alone with their girls but ‘man with man’ and always with their hats on.”
