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Concept
René Belbenoît
Summary
Jules René Lucien Belbenoît (ʁəne bɛlbənwa; 4 April 1899 – 25 February 1959) was a French prisoner on Devil's Island who successfully escaped to the United States. He later published the memoirs, Dry Guillotine (1938) and Hell on Trial (1940), about his exploits.
René Belbenoît was born on April 4, 1899, in Paris.
During his childhood, in the 1900s, Belbenoît was abandoned by his mother, Louise Daumière, while she was working as a teacher for the children of the Czar of Russia. Belbenoît's father, Louis Belbenoît, who worked as the conductor of the Paris-Orleans Express, was rarely at home and could not raise the young René himself. Belbenoît was then sent to live with his grandparents.
In 1911, when Belbenoît was 12 years old, his grandparents died suddenly and he, again in need of a parental figure, went to Paris where he lived with, and worked for, his uncle at a popular nightclub.
Between 1913 and 1916, Belbenoît worked in uncle's nightclub, the Café du Rat Mort on Place Pigalle in Paris. A teenager left to his own devices, he quickly became known to the law for petty shoplifting in 1916 and did not escape the house of correction.
From 1916 to 1917, Belbenoît served with distinction in the French army during World War I. He survived the Battle of Verdun when he was only 17 years old.
Belbenoît had volunteered before the conscription call in 1918, when he was 19, and he was carrying out his military service while the French Army signed the Armistice between France, the United Kingdom and Germany on November 11, 1918. He left the army in 1920.
During the period 1920/1921, Belbenoît committed several scams, burglaries and shoplifting offences. Belbenoît committed various crimes in Tours, Saint-Nazaire, Chartres, in company which he had come to know in the past. Aged 21, then 22, when he defrauded, burgled, and robbed people — these events taking place over a year — Belbenoît accumulated a large number of victims. Belbenoît had no particular criteria for the victims, because he sometimes knew them very well, sufficiently well, less well, little, or even not at all.
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