Éric Vuillard traces the footsteps of Billy the Kid to explain the great inequalities in the United States

BarcelonaHollywood has made multiple versions about Billy the Kid: from King Vidor's 1930 one to Sam Peckinpah's 1973 one, without forgetting the interpretation Paul Newman gave in 1958. But the surgical gaze of the French writer Éric Vuillard (Lyon, 1968) shows another type of violence, far removed from any romanticism. After narrating the French Revolution from the point of view of the people on the street in 14 July (2016), and unmasking the great economic powers that made possible the rise of Nazism in The Order of the Day (Goncourt Prize 2017), Vuillard returns to put the magnifying glass on the dirty laundry of power in The Desperate Ones. A History of Billy the Kid (Edicions 62 / Tusquets), with a Catalan translation by Jordi Martín Lloret.

For Vuillard, the legend of the North American Wild West bandit is nothing more than a mirage to hide another, more uncomfortable history: the appropriation of land in the United States and the birth of great inequalities. The French writer connects the petty crime of the frontier with the genesis of modern capitalism. The expansion towards the West was not carried out by the army, the writer explains, but by bandits and precarious cowboys who stole cattle to sell them for a pittance to large landowners.

The first death

"What interested me was not Billy the Kid as an isolated case, but Billy immersed in this mass of precarious bandits," says Vuillard, who researched thoroughly to find out something quite impossible: who was the young man who died at just 21 years old and whose real name we do not even know for sure. He grew up without a father and his mother died when he was 14. His first robbery could have been, according to Vuillard, a few pounds of butter. At 17, he killed a man, a first death that the French writer portrays in a radically different way than it had been done until now: his opponent, Frank Cahill, was not an honest craftsman who had the bad luck of running into a thug, but a burly ex-soldier who had participated in the slaughter of indigenous people and who was linked to prostitution. Billy, on the other hand, was a scrawny young man, notes Vuillard, who, in the midst of the violence of the moment, was simply trying to save his skin. He was the complete opposite of the self-made man: he remained poor and got nowhere.

"Nobody loves small-time criminals like Billy the Kid," the author reflects. "Obviously, honest people like us don't like being robbed, but neither do the Marxists. It must be remembered that Marx, and rightly so, considered them non-revolutionary. They are unreliable people, but they are part of the immense cohort of the poor and the migrants." For the French writer, contemporary culture has taken a dangerous turn regarding these groups: "In the 70s or 80s, people sought to understand the causes of delinquency; there was social compassion. Today the discourse has been reversed: there is a desire to erase criminals from the social space, to forget the causes, and to focus only on the fact that the established order has been altered."

On the other side, in the story told by Vuillard, is the lawyer Thomas Benton Catron, who lived to be 80, was mayor of Santa Fe and a senator, and whose firm still exists. "Benton Catron interests me as one of the elements of a class that would be at the origin of American democracy. That is to say, an elite that would impose a system that is democratic in appearance—and it is in some respects, because it allows people to vote—but which at the same time is articulated through a kind of census filter: that of large private property," asserts the author.

The systematic plunder

It was these great entrepreneurs who drove "a systematic looting," says Vuillard. Figures like the Republican politician James Dolan made fortunes supplying stolen cattle to the army, and large landowners built empires with thousands of head of cattle obtained thanks to the dirty work of these marginalized young people. This concentration of wealth required, inevitably, a control apparatus. "When the great landowners had already accumulated the land and the herd, they hired the same former bandits to form the forces of order, under the command of sheriffs like Pat Garrett [the man who killed Billy the Kid and wrote a book about it], the son of slave-owning landowners," explains the author.

"This means that American law enforcement was built on the basis of petty criminals, and that the police, to do their job well, were born with the idea that sometimes they have to commit illegal acts," denounces Vuillard, establishing a direct common thread with the present: "Between Pat Garrett and the death of George Floyd there is a clear continuity. One only needs to look at Trump. When power is expressed without restraint, as is the case with the president of the United States today, it can be of very, very great violence".

Vuillard's analysis transcends the 19th century to become a warning about the current world, marked by the extreme accumulation of wealth in few hands. "We live in a moment in which inequalities are reinforced. In the United States, the impression was given of a democracy in which everyone could prosper, but inequality was imposed. One only needs to see today that there is a man at the head of the United States who possesses, by himself, a net worth greater than that of all American senators combined to realize that we are not at all far from this logic," he explains.

Vuillard vindicates literature as an act of disobedience, and cites the orphans of Dickens, the Gavroche of Les Misérables, byVictor Hugo, and the Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë, to say that the desperate people in the book are neither heroes nor romantic villains: they are the visible symptom of a structural violence.