Nor was it only in the realm of social reform that the Expo exhibited the overconfidence of the Second Empire. The crowds in the Champs-de-Mars who inspected the impressive scale model of the submarine Le Plongeur, and watched demonstrations of the secret mitrailleuse machine gun, spitting fire from concealment in a tent, were comforted that France possessed the ingenuity to protect her status as the Continent’s pre-eminent military power. They admired with misguided equanimity the steel bulk of the enormous Krupps cannon sent to represent Prussia, Europe’s rising power. And when the hot-air balloon Géant, owned by the satirical caricaturist and pioneering photographer and aeronaut Nadar, or the Impérial, Napoleon’s state-commissioned balloon, carried tourists up for a bird’s-eye panorama of the exhibition, few remarked on the stinking gas leaks that made their ascent so laborious, any more than they had concerned themselves over Le Plongeur’s failed tests of seaworthiness. Rather, they covered their noses and imagined themselves pioneering passengers on what Henry Giffard, the other aerostatic impresario at the Expo, brazenly touted as a journey to the first station of a Paris–Moon Railway.
Yet whilst the technological sensations on display appeared to promise a future of brilliant accomplishments, one dramatic incident two months into the Exposition came far closer to revealing what the immediate future would hold. Nine years had passed since the bomb attack on Napoleon III by Felice Orsini had left eight people dead and 156 bystanders injured. During recent months, however, first Tsar Alexander II of Russia and then Chancellor Bismarck of Prussia had narrowly escaped assassination at the hands of the young radicals Dmitri Karakozov and Ferdinand Cohen Blind. That both King Wilhelm and Tsar Alexander were to visit the Expo at the same time and appear alongside Napoleon III for a military parade at Longchamp racecourse should have seen the French police at their most vigilant. Somehow, though, a young Pole by the name of Boleslaw Berezowski, seeking vengeance for the brutal repression of a revolt in his Russian-occupied homeland, took his place in the crowd and discharged a pistol at the tsar, only narrowly missing his target.
The event represented the coincidence of the two great threats that faced Napoleon, and would trouble the Continent for decades to come. For it was from the Red clubs of Batignolles that Berezowski had emerged to make his attempt on the tsar’s life, one of many foreign revolutionaries who swelled the ranks of the indigenous radicals, and fired their imaginations with tales of political uprisings. And it was France’s desire to redress a prospective imbalance of power in Europe that suffered as a consequence of his attack.
Industrialisation in the German states was rampant, their birth rate growing even faster than France’s declined, and their production of coal – the key energy source of the age – was approaching that of France and Belgium combined, with no slowdown in sight. Whilst little love was lost between the tsar and the parvenu Bonaparte, whose ancestor had once entered Moscow as conqueror, France courted Russian friendship as a much-needed counterweight to the growing power across the Rhine. Now, though, Napoleon III had failed adequately to protect his guest from attack. In an attempt to redeem the situation, the French emperor turned to the tsar, who was flecked with the blood of the horse that the bullet had struck. ‘Sir, we have been under fire together; now we are brothers-in-arms.’ Alexander’s brusque response saw any small chance of an alliance disappear almost before the smoke of the assassin’s pistol.
The three years following the Exposition saw the emperor’s authority at home further eroded and the opposition to his regime mount as republicans of all colours increasingly made common cause. A disastrous intervention in Mexico, where France installed a puppet king only to abandon him in the face of a powerful insurgency, was compounded by a messy victory for French auxiliaries over an Italian nationalist force led by Garibaldi, whose attempt to liberate Rome from the deeply reactionary Pope Pius IX enjoyed the approval of the French left. Sensing Napoleon’s weakness, the republican press in Paris tested his powers of censorship with growing audacity until, in January 1870, journalistic activism crossed from the page on to the streets.
The occasion was the funeral of Victor Noir, a journalist with the radical La Marseillaise, who had been shot dead by the emperor’s cousin, Pierre Bonaparte, in murky circumstances, having visited him regarding a challenge to a duel. Up to 200,000 republicans joined the procession, which briefly threatened to become violent before fizzling out for lack of clear leadership. The arrest and imprisonment of the ringleaders bought Napoleon III time, but a month later another journalist from the newspaper, the glamorous and flamboyant Gustave Flourens, attempted to stage an insurrection in Belleville. On that occasion, the weapons issued to his troops proved to be mere replicas, stolen from the props room of the local theatre, but a full performance seemed certain to follow the dress rehearsal before long. Having tried repression, conciliation and reform over many years, the only option left to Napoleon was the fallback of every struggling leader: the distraction of war.
When the Spanish throne fell vacant in the early summer of 1870, Bismarck baited the trap, proposing a Prussian candidate in what was both an affront to French pride and a tacit threat of encirclement. After the French ambassador to Prussia importuned the vacationing King Wilhelm during his morning promenade in the spa town of Bad Ems to express Napoleon’s outrage, Bismarck leaked to the press the king’s version of the encounter, carefully edited to impugn France’s breach of diplomatic etiquette. It was the eve of the 14 July celebration of Bastille Day in France and his timing was perfect. With leisure to debate the insolence of Prussia, and wine coursing hotly through their veins, the French buoyed Napoleon III up and along on a wave of chauvinism. A pope who within days would declare himself infallible gave his blessing, and the emperor declared war on Prussia.
‘A Berlin! A Berlin!’ resounded the cries of the Paris crowds on 19 July, and among the voices were those of many republicans, who later preferred to deny it, or else to claim that they had welcomed France’s aggression only as a prelude to revolution. Inconveniently, though, the archetypal bumbling Teuton pilloried by French popular culture failed to materialise on the battlefield. Instead France was wrong-footed by its own incautious rush to war: its railway system had been too busy introducing its hedonistic citizens to the pleasure of seaside holidays to prepare proper mobilisation plans as Prussia had done; its artillerymen were untrained to operate the army’s secret wonder-weapon, the mitrailleuse, and its regiments were optimistically given maps of Germany but none of France. The result was chaos when, engaged by a well-organised and highly manoeuvrable enemy, the French armies were forced to retreat.
Only six weeks later, the emperor found himself leading the last stand of the Army of Châlons, outside the citadel of Sedan. Nearly 20,000 French soldiers had already been killed in the attempted breakout and a similar number captured, with over 100,000 now encircled. According to the loyalist press, Napoleon rode before the ramparts to rally the defenders; in reality he was dosed with opiates, and courting a bullet to end the agony of his gallstones that France’s military shame exacerbated. The courage he showed the following day, 2 September, was of a greater kind, when his acceptance of the need for surrender to save further futile loss of life led to his own capture and exile.
Despite the military defeat, Napoleon’s opponents in Paris received the news with elation. ‘We shook off the empire as though it had been a nightmare,’ wrote Juliette Adam, the feminist and journalist, as those imprisoned for political crimes were freed and borne aloft on the shoulders of the crowd. Amid rapturous scenes at the Hôtel de Ville, on 4 September Léon Gambetta appeared at a window to proclaim a republic to the packed square below, the names of prospective members of the new Government of National Defence confirmed by popular acclamation. Outspoken critics of the old regime, lawyers who had campaigned against its injustices in particular, received key roles, with Gambetta himself appointed as interior minister. Descending to the crowd that thronged the steps outside, Jules Favre, the new minister fo
r foreign affairs, embraced the most radical figures present, among them students to whom he taught politics and science at night school, calling them ‘my children’ in a gesture of the inclusiveness with which he and his colleagues meant to govern. The harmony did not last long.
France had achieved the creation of a new republic, which all on the left had devoutly craved, but as the armies of general Moltke closed in to encircle the capital, the question of what that republic should aspire to be was thrust to the fore. Informed of developments in Paris, King Wilhelm fretted that France’s new government might somehow conjure a levée en masse. He was old enough to remember tales from his childhood of how, in 1793, just such a popular army had risen to drive out the forces of the First Coalition, Prussia’s among them, when they attempted to suppress the original French Revolution. The mirror image of those thoughts now preoccupied the more extreme radicals who saw, in an embattled France, fertile ground from which a true social revolution might grow, reversing the setbacks of the past eighty years.
Although reluctant to strengthen the extremists’ hand, the new government agreed to throw open recruitment to the National Guard to all able-bodied men of military age. Elisée Reclus was among the 350,000 volunteers who would enlist in the weeks that followed, but he at least was under no illusion that the Guard alone would be able to raise the siege. That would require the reserve Army of the Loire to be marshalled to liberate the capital. With this in mind, Gambetta was chosen for an audacious mission: to leave the encircled city by balloon for Tours, from where he would rally the counter-attack. It was a venture in which there was a promising role for Reclus, who had recently written to Félix Nadar, now head of emergency aerostatic operations, to offer his services as ‘an aspiring aeronaut…and something of a meteorologist’.
Whilst the preceding month had been warm and breezy, the September nights starry over Paris, now that the survival of the newborn republic hung in the balance, the windmills on the slopes of Montmartre had suddenly stopped turning. On 6 October 1870, an accurate forecast of the easterly winds that could carry Gambetta safely across the Prussian lines was of vital importance. Elsewhere in the city that day, Gustave Flourens, the political firebrand from La Marseillaise, led a demonstration that demanded the restoration of the municipal government of Paris, banned during the Second Empire. The marchers’ cries of ‘Vive la Commune!’ recalled the insurrectionary government of 1792. That evening, though, in the place Saint-Pierre, revolutionary fervour was set aside and all thoughts anxiously fixed on the present, as sailors paid out the tethering ropes of a meteorological balloon that rose slowly into the misty sky.
Other novice aeronauts who rode up into the Paris sky in the weeks that followed would recount how, as the horizon curved with increasing altitude, they experienced a revelatory oneness with the ‘pantheistic “Great Whole”’. The globe was already long established as a potent symbol of the deep brotherhood of man for Reclus, a committed advocate of the fledgling International League of Peace and Liberty, whose congresses called for a United States of Europe as a solution to the hazard posed by feuding dynasties and a precursor to a federal republic that would span the world. Strikingly tall, gaunt and bearded, forty years of asceticism had sculpted him into the image of a medieval saint, and he had the temperament and kind but penetrating gaze to match. Yet his days of religious devotion had long since given way to a faith only in a new and just social order. As he peered down from the balloon, between taking measurements of air pressure, the view below would have revealed to him a future fraught with difficulties.
Away to the south-east, Paris lay spread out below in all its glory, Haussmann’s great radial boulevards arrowing out to the suburbs, evidence of France’s defeat and not far beyond. Along the roads that extended towards the forty miles of walls that girdled the city, lines of yellow tents marked where the reserve battalions of the French army were encamped, mingling with those defeated units that had fallen back on the capital following the recent debacle in Alsace. Meanwhile, in the Bois de Boulogne – laid out by Haussmann as a great, green public space – evidence of the siege was everywhere. Hardly a tree remained standing amidst a stubble of stumps, while the grass was cropped by a flock of 250 sheep brought into Paris in a wholly inadequate gesture towards self-sufficiency.
From time to time, close to the perimeter of Paris, a dark droplet of troops would coalesce and trickle out in formation through the city’s gates to relieve the garrison in one or other of the fourteen great fortresses that comprised the capital’s outermost line of defence. Every such movement drew heavy fire from German rifles and cannon. For outside the embrace of the ramparts, 200,000 conscripts from Prussia and the North German Confederation sat warming themselves beside braziers, ready to starve the City of Light into submission.
From his headquarters at Versailles, Colonel Wilhelm Stieber, secret councillor to Bismarck’s government and head of military intelligence for the North German Confederation, could have watched the speck of the tethered meteorological balloon with a degree of equanimity, confident that the dice were increasingly loaded against any aeronautic politician foolish enough to attempt an escape.
For more than a week, Stieber’s agents had been close to choking the last lines of communication in and out of Paris. They had tapped and then cut a telegraph cable laid secretly in the waterways between Paris and Tours as the Prussian armies approached; meanwhile, all possible sites of signal exchange with the semaphore stations on the Arc de Triomphe, the Panthéon and the roof of the newly built Opéra were under tight surveillance. To interdict the return flights of hundreds of homing pigeons that had been exchanged between Paris and the provinces prior to hostilities, Stieber had equipped the army with trained falcons. And as for the decrepit balloons that occasionally limped out of the city with no hope of return, delivery was expected any day of a new wagon-mounted gun from Krupps, with a trajectory high enough to send whatever small store of the gas-filled leviathans remained in Paris plummeting to the earth in flames. But sealing the city off from the world was only the start of Stieber’s strategy.
Stieber had first applied his talents to military intelligence during Prussia’s rapid victory over Austria in 1866, but it was in the clandestine struggle against revolutionary elements that he had made his name. Amply rewarded for his nefarious efforts, he could boast the unique honour of having served concurrently as a leading figure in the political police of both Prussia and Russia and, even as he masterminded the intelligence campaign against France for Bismarck, he remained a senior security adviser to the tsar. The key to his success, in conventional war as in the fight against subversion, lay in a simple truth: that by controlling the flow of information, he could shape reality to his own design. It was a lesson he had learned long before and whose application he had been refining ever since.
Though Stieber would not have known it, his path and that of the geographer in the balloon had run strangely parallel. Some years the senior of Elisée Reclus, when Stieber was dispatched to London in 1851 by the Prussian police, he already had several notable successes under his belt as a deep-cover agent, first during the bloody suppression of an uprising by Silesian weavers in 1844, then six years later in Paris, when his intrigues at the heart of the Communist League had destroyed the organisation from within. The former escapade had led the police president to dub him a ‘degenerate subject’, but the latter had won him the admiration of the Prussian minister of the interior, Ferdinand von Westphalen, who promptly handpicked him for the delicate mission in England. Its ostensible purpose was the protection of precious objects loaned to the Great Exhibition of that year; the real aim, though, was to discover evidence for the prosecution of Karl Marx, who had married the minister’s own half-sister and dragged her into shameful and penurious exile.
Posing as Herr Dr Schmidt, journalist and physician, Stieber had quickly inveigled his way into the Marx family’s home in Soho. His reports back to Berlin were full of blood and thunder as they attempte
d to frame Marx and his colleagues as conspirators in a planned campaign of assassination that would usher in a general European revolution. However, his claim that ‘the murder of princes is formally taught and discussed’ failed to persuade a British government whose distaste for foreign spies outweighed that for their victims. Worse for Stieber, Marx deftly outflanked his campaign of provocation, writing to the Spectator to denounce the attempt to lure him into a conspiracy. ‘We need not add that these persons found no chance of making dupes of us’, he concluded. Determined to have the last word, Stieber would counter that, on the contrary, Marx had fallen for his medical disguise so completely as to ask his trusted guest to treat his haemorrhoids. Subsequent fabrications by Stieber saw the grudge between the two men deepen into a lifelong vendetta.
Always sailing too close to the wind, Stieber had eventually been dismissed from the Prussian secret police for abuses of power, but the scurrilous charges levelled at him by the press seemed only to excite suitors for his services. Installed as manager of the Kroll restaurant and Opera House in Berlin’s Tiergarten, a sinecure obtained through the good offices of influential friends, Stieber one night received an invitation from the Russian Embassy that would propel him into the secret realm of realpolitik. That it was a pivotal moment in his career is apparent from his excitedly embellished account of his ensuing journey across Berlin, concealed in a laundry basket, to avoid detection by a mob still thirsty for his blood. Having helped unpack him, the young Arthur von Mohrenheim, a consular attaché, hired him on the spot. After only a short time in St Petersburg, his recruit had transformed his basic intelligence-gathering role into one of effective control over Russia’s entire foreign intelligence service. So impressed was the Prussian ambassador there, Otto von Bismarck, that when appointed president in 1863, he took Stieber back with him to Berlin to serve as director of the very police force which, only a few years earlier, had hung him out to dry.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 8
