The Weekly Villain

Jacques Mesrine was an architecture student from a middle-class family who went off to fight in the Algerian War while a teenager, and returned in 1959 with a lust for violence that only a criminal lifestyle could satisfy. In the early 1960s he re-invented himself as a flamboyant villain, the kind of man who would hold up a bank on one side of the street and then, with the police sirens hee-hawing ever closer, stroll across the road to rob another. It was a cop-baiting coup he pulled off on numerous occasions on his way to being declared by the French authorities as public enemy number one, a title he bore with undisguised delight.
Mesrine was also, as one police detective put it at the time, ‘a gangster with marketing savvy’. Even while in hiding from the police after his dramatic 1978 escape from La Santé maximum security prison in Paris, he would invite journalists over and feed them home-cooked dinners, fine claret and self-aggrandising stories. He became something of a cause célèbre, first for left-wing intellectuals – Jean-Paul Sartre endorsed Mesrine’s campaign for prison reform, which eventually led to the abolition of solitary confinement in France – and later for disaffected youth, who still today incorporate his name into rap lyrics.