Albert Londres was first a war correspondent during the First World War, then he set out to conquer many countries, many subjects, he snooped, analyzed, explained, with a lively pen and always concerned with the truth. He is obviously disturbing when he interferes, for example, with psychiatric asylums where he denounces the ill-treatment inflicted on the sick; when he reveals the horrors observed in the prisons; he goes so far as to taint the very popular Tour de France cyclist, which he calls the “tour of suffering”. He is talented and stubborn, if we had to sum it up with two adjectives. In his multiple battles, some of which were very unpopular, Albert Londres took care of a man from Lorraine whom he succeeded in pardoning. He was one of the members of the famous Bande à Bonnot which caused a certain terror to reign during the years 1911, 12 and 13. This Lorrain was Eugène Dieudonné.
La Bande à Bonnot has four people from Lorraine, among the 40 in total who come from all over France but also from Belgium, Switzerland, Italy, Algeria and Russia. They are anarchists who will turn into a criminal group and who organize hold-ups. They are also pioneers: they are called at the beginning the “auto-bandits” because they carry out their blows on board cars and it is a first. Among the people of Lorraine, there is therefore Eugène Dieudonné, from Nancy, who meets Jules Bonnot when the latter is staying in Neuves-Maisons; There are the Bill brothers, also from Nancy; one will die in 1918; he had managed to change his identity and had had the war, incorporated into the 167th infantry regiment of Toul and then he had been recognized by another soldier; his brother will die relatively recently, in 1978. The 4th thief is a Meusien, René Vallet. For the Nancéien Eugène Dieudonné, things got tough on February 27, 1913, the day of the robbery of the Société Générale in Paris, the first in France carried out using a car. The police investigate and even come to search the parents’ home, in the Faubourg des Trois Maisons in Nancy. Dieudonné is accused of having participated in this robbery and he is sentenced to death despite the confessions of other members, including Bonnot, who attest that he was not there, and despite the alibis provided by the Bill brothers. It was then that another Lorrain, the President of the Republic Raymond Poincaré, intervened in person and decided to commute the death penalty to forced labor for life, then it was finally a pardon, thanks to the articles by Albert Londres that he had met in the context of a report at the penal colony of Cayenne. Dieudonné therefore returned to Paris and resumed the profession of carpenter, he wrote “the life of a convict”, a book prefaced by Albert Londres.