Made into a 1967 film by Louis Malle and never before available in English, this classic of anarchist literature follows a once well-to-do young man forced into an itinerant life of crime.

The Thief is a picture of the sleezy underbelly of the Belle Époque, a broadside fired against the corruptions of power and privilege. Written by the anarchist activist Georges Darien (a pseudonym that can be translated as “Lord Nothing”), it found almost no readers when it came out at the end of the nineteenth century, though Alfred Jarry embraced it as one of his favorite books.

Over the years, however, this picaresque masterpiece with shades of black comedy has found a growing number of admirers, from the surrealist capo dei capi André Breton to Lucy Sante. It is a book of wild, comic, profane energy that, in its luxuriant nihilism, anticipates Céline’s Journey to the End of Night.

Georges Randal is the titular thief, a young Frenchman of good family who, having been deprived of his inheritance by a conniving uncle, takes to a life of crime. Moving between London, Brussels, and Paris, in a world of hookers, drifters and grifters, revolutionaries and politicians, bankers and thieves, he is in a position to reveal modern society in all its teeming corruption.

The thief is no hero. Like everyone else in this decadent society, he is a trafficker and exploiter—and a wounded soul. At least, however, he has the courage of his disaffection, his fury warmed by self-hatred. And he does seem a somewhat distant cousin of Robin Hood, targeting the wealthy and helping the needy when the opportunity arises.

After more than a hundred years, Georges Darien’s vision of our fallen modern world—the inhuman comedy he proposed to set beside Balzac’s human one—seems especially pertinent to our current Gilded Age. Jacques Houis’s new translation is the first ever into English.

"We are on the eve of 1900, when decadentism and anarchy join hands to bring the century to an end. Georges Randal, a young man from a good family, an orphan ruined by an indelicate uncle, when the time has come to take on a situation, decides to become a thief. For what? Like that. For nothing. To say no to society, to the bourgeoisie, to order, to the socialists who jiggle on the stage and to the moralists who flush the toilet with humanitarian tears. In short, Randal, like a good nihilist, says no to everything and to the thieves themselves: "I do a dirty job, it's true; but I have an excuse: I do it dirty. " Not quite. Because there is in our thief a bit of the Baudelairian dandy, a bit of Arsáene Lupine mixed with Jarry and Alphonse Allais. And an intact, almost virginal taste for revolt, a sensitive and good heart, "beating too well, said Breton, not to hit the walls of the cage in all directions""--