Thèse de Doctorat en Histoire et civilisations : histoire des mondes modernes ; histoire du monde contemporain ; de l’art ; de la musique - Spécialité : Histoire contemporaine de l’Université Nancy 2, soutenue le 27 juin 2006, Lettres et Sciences Humaines, Nancy,
sous la direction de Monsieur François ROTH.

Author’s Summary

This thesis aims at placing Alexandre Marius Jacob in the course of social and political history. The man owes his reputation to his fallacious comparison with Arsène Lupin which was developed by his first three biographers (Alain Sergent, Bernard Thomas and William Caruchet). But Jacob is more than just an adventurer. Everything he did bear the stamps of anarchy. He is the theorist of an original activist practice, robbery, as his trial in Amiens in 1905 proves it. The history of Alexandre Jacob has many different aspects. It is certainly more than just an evocation of the social robbery which develops in the late XIXth century. It allows us to discover a peculiar form of prison life : penal colony. But above all, it also enables us to have a glimpse of the anarchist movement through the eyes of the individual, from 1894 to 1954.