‘I proclaim war without truce or mercy upon these assassins,’ the Versaillais commander General Gallifet had warned more than a month earlier. It was the women of the Commune above all who were demonised by the Catholic country boys of Thiers’ army, the sexual revolution that had taken place an unwelcome challenge to their conventional sense of masculine prerogatives. At Chateau d’Eau, among the last of the barricades to fall three days later, the female defenders would be stripped and brutalised before being slaughtered. Michel, captured at some point along the way, miraculously managed to avoid their fate, but with every misstep by the Commune’s defenders, any hope of quarter receded.
During the weeks since Rigault had taken them hostage, the Archbishop of Paris and his fellow prisoners had remained untouched, despite mounting Communard losses. Now, finally, Rigault’s self-restraint cracked. Ferré, his recent successor as prefect of police, signed the death warrant for the archbishop, who had generously written of his persecutors that ‘the world judged them to be worse than they really were’; Rigault himself commanded the firing squad at Saint-Pelagie prison. Though he and the archbishop had been bitterly at odds during the recent Vatican Council, Pius IX would condemn his murderers as ‘devils risen up from hell bringing the inferno to the streets of Paris’, and the Versaillais treated them accordingly. The harshest persecution of all, though, was reserved for the pétroleuses, crones rumoured to have set Paris ablaze in a diabolical hysteria, in what rapidly came to resemble a witch hunt.
‘I am known to be cruel, but I am even crueller than you can imagine,’ Gallifet snarled at a column of prisoners containing Michel. She sang a mocking tune in reply, but once more seemed strangely invulnerable, amid scenes that became more hellish by the hour. Among the general population, any suspects found with powder-blackened hands or shoulders bruised from the recoil of rifles were selected for summary execution, while the general himself picked out others to die simply for their ugliness. Somewhere among the carnage, Rigault was killed by a shot to the head, his body dumped in a gutter among the piles of corpses.
‘All around us fall from the skies, like black rain, little fragments of burned paper; the records and the accounts of France,’ wrote the novelist Edmond de Goncourt, reminded of the ash that had smothered Pompeii. For others the agony of the city brought to mind ‘a great ship in distress, furiously firing off its maroons’. From the boulevard Voltaire, the last small remnant of the Commune’s soldiers retreated, but with almost nowhere left to go. Turning, they saw their leader Delescluze climb the barricade and offer himself to the enemy’s rifles, silhouetted against the sunset. ‘Forgive me for departing before you,’ he had scribbled to his sister, ‘but I no longer feel I possess the courage to submit to another defeat, after so many others.’ The report of the shots that felled him would have merged into the ambient noise of killing that filled the balmy, sun-soaked evening.
Mostly it was the whirr of the mitrailleuses doling out deadly punishment: ‘an expeditious contrivance’, said The Times, that ‘standing a hundred yards off, mows them down like grass’. In the Red neighbourhoods its distant sound blended with that of flies that buzzed over the makeshift mortuaries, gorging on the spilled blood. A few score men, the final defenders of a society that believed that ‘property is theft’, would hold out for one more night in the Père Lachaise cemetery, sheltering behind the tombs and gravestones, on plots bought and owned by their occupants ‘in perpetuity’. The following morning they were coralled over the crest of the hill towards the rear wall, against which they would be butchered. And yet the Semaine Sanglante, or Bloody Week, still had several days to run. ‘No half measures this time. Europe will thank us when it’s over,’ a priest in Versailles reassured a friend.
‘Childhood, individual liberty, the rights of man – nothing was respected. It was a mighty letting loose of every sort of clerical fury – a St Bartholomew to the sixth power,’ Rochefort would later record of the Semaine Sanglante, recalling the terrible massacre of Huguenots by Catholics 300 years earlier. He underestimated by half. The death toll of the 1793 Terror too was overshadowed, as was its rate of execution. Then, only 2,500 had been guillotined in eighteen months; in a single week of 1871, ten times that number or more died from bullets sprayed by the mitrailleuses. The Paris municipality paid for the burial of 17,000 Communards, but the bodies of many more disappeared into the fabric of the city, buried haphazardly beneath the overturned barricades, in the Parc Montceau, or in the chalk mines under the Buttes Chaumont, the pleasure garden gifted to the working class four years earlier, where now the tunnels were dynamited to conceal the dead.
Rochefort himself was arrested on a train outside Paris, attempting to escape via a route operated by the Masons that had previously spirited Elie Reclus to safety. He had been betrayed, it was said, by Paschal Grousset, one of the Jacobins with whom he had verbally crossed swords. Louise Michel’s route out of Paris was guaranteed, as a member of one of the columns of prisoners a quarter of a mile long that bled out of the city towards the army base on Satory Plain, now a concentration camp. ‘We walked and walked,’ she would recall, ‘lulled by the rhythmic beat of the horses’ hooves, through a night lit by irregular flashes of light… We were marching into the unknown…’
3
From Prince to Anarchist
Russia and Switzerland, 1871–1874
In 1871, Prince Peter Kropotkin, one of Russia’s most eminent young scientists, reached a watershed, his growing awareness of social injustice leading him to question whether he could remain a part of the Establishment. During the previous decade he had led expeditions by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society into Asia and beyond the Arctic Circle, travels that informed his groundbreaking reconstruction of the geological changes that had reshaped the earth during the glacial period. Now, when offered the post of its secretary, he declined. In the face of the widespread human suffering that he had witnessed in the course of his life, the honour struck him as an empty vanity. ‘What right had I to these higher joys,’ he reasoned, ‘when all around me was nothing but misery and the struggle for a mouldy bit of bread?’
For more than ten years, after the ‘Saviour’ tsar, Alexander II, had first granted the serfs their freedom then backtracked on a slew of other reforms that might have made the gesture meaningful, the youth of Russia had postured as nihilists. During that time, Kropotkin and his older brother, Alexander, had remained focused on the theoretical challenges of effecting social change. In 1871, however, a female friend of Alexander’s wife had crystallised Kropotkin’s dilemma. Sofia Nikolaevna Lavrova was a graduate of the Alarchinsky courses, which from 1869 had offered women in Russia a non-degree programme of higher education. She was now studying in Switzerland and, during a trip back home to Russia for the summer, became a regular visitor to Kropotkin’s apartment in St Petersburg, charming him with her intellect and challenging him over his lack of political engagement. When their friendship prompted the political Third Section of the police to search his rooms for smuggled seditious literature, Kropotkin was torn between outrage at the intrusion and contentment from finally being deemed worthy of their attention. When the withdrawal of government funding for his next Arctic expedition was withdrawn, he had the excuse for which he had been waiting: he would visit Sofia in Zurich and use his time in Switzerland to take stock.
Until only a few years earlier, the final stage of the journey would have been arduous, travelling by coach along the military roads that Napoleon had laid across the Alpine passes, before concluding his journey with a rapid descent on the far side of the mountain range by sledge: ‘like being precipitated downstairs in a portmanteau’ according to one English traveller of the time. A Fell railway had offered a questionable improvement in 1868, its locomotive heaving soot-blackened carriages over the Saint-Cenis route by means of a cogged ratchet on a notched rail; by the time Kropotkin set off in February 1872, Alfred Nobel’s dynamite had blasted a route clear through the mountains to the promised l
and beyond. A man used to challenging travel, he would nevertheless have appreciated what it meant to live in an era of remarkable technological progress.
A decade earlier, Kropotkin had graduated from the Academy of the Corps of Pages with the highest distinction and a choice of the most prestigious military commissions. To the shock of the imperial court and his family, he had enrolled instead in a regiment of Cossacks stationed in the depths of Siberia, deliberately cutting himself adrift from his privileged background. His hectoring father was apoplectic: all the military discipline he had imparted to his son, all the gifts of rifles and sentry boxes, had failed to inspire Peter to better his own rather undistinguished army career. It did not help that his late wife, whose memory Peter’s stepmother had done everything she could to erase, had herself been a Cossack, with all that fiery tradition of independence. Peter’s rectitudinous cousin, Dmitri, then serving as Tsar Alexander II’s aide-de-camp, had tried to intervene, urging him to stay and pursue the glittering opportunities that awaited him in St Petersburg. Even the tsar himself had taken an interest, insisting that his erstwhile page de chambre explain his eccentric decision in person. On being told by Kropotkin that he hoped travel might afford him insights into how society could be improved, Alexander II had appeared overwhelmed with world-weariness. Kropotkin would later conclude that the tsar was already predicting defeat in the great programme of reforms that he had set in motion only months before. Fortunately, however, the young Peter was owed a favour. When mysterious fires had swept through the adminstrative district of St Petersburg, the initiative Kropotkin had shown in raising the alarm had saved much of the old wooden city from devastation. He chose the Siberian posting as his reward.
The twenty-year-old Kropotkin took with him to Siberia a smouldering disdain for all arbitrary authority. As children on the family’s feudal estate in Nikolskoe, deprived of their dead mother’s tender attentions, Peter and his brother Alexander had considered themselves fortunate to enjoy ‘among the servants, that atmosphere of love which children must have around them’. But it was the kindness and fellow feeling of the oppressed. Little had changed for the serfs since the days of Ivan the Terrible, and to Kropotkin’s father and his ilk, they remained mere property: ‘souls’ to be traded without regard to ties of blood or affection and ruthlessly exploited. Not even death could free them from their bondage, as the teenaged Kropotkin would have learned when helping his tutor translate Gogol’s Dead Souls: in the vicious world it satirised, beatings were liberally administered, and those serfs punished by being sent into the army as cannon fodder, where the floggings were still crueller, and those who expired under the whip would have the remaining quota of lashes administered on their corpse. ‘Leave me alone,’ one of his father’s serfs had snapped when Kropotkin tried to comfort him after a whipping at the local barracks, ‘When you grow up, you think that you won’t be exactly the same?’ The rebuke stung the young prince and, as a cadet, a display of intolerance for unjust authority, of the kind that permeated society from top to bottom, had landed him in solitary confinement for six weeks on a diet of bread and water: a foretaste of what was to come.
Kropotkin’s journey to Irkutsk in 1862 offered an education he would not forget. It took him past endless scenes of human suffering: a living hell of a kind he could never before have conceived. In the labour camps of the east, convicts mined gold waist-deep in freezing water, or quarried salt with frostbitten hands for the few short weeks that they could expect to survive the appalling conditions: to be sent there was a death sentence. As fast as they expired, others replaced them, transported from occupied Poland in their thousands, and in soaring numbers after the Polish rebellion of 1863 was ruthlessly suppressed. Kropotkin was relieved to discover that there were at least humane, even liberal men serving among his colleagues in the regiment, though it soon became obvious that they were very far from representative of the imperial administration as a whole.
Shortly after Kropotkin’s arrival, his commanding officer General Kukel, who had taken the new recruit under his wing, was removed and disciplined for wilful negligence, having allowed Michael Bakunin, the lionised revolutionary, to escape and plague the regime with his plotting from abroad. Eager to avoid Kukel’s hard-line successor, Kropotkin volunteered to oversee a convoy of barges along the River Amur, a ‘new world’ ceded to Russia by China only a few years before. But the job served only to deepen his disillusionment. When a storm wrecked the convoy, Kropotkin undertook a breakneck mercy mission back to St Petersburg – by means of sled, horse and train – to demand assistance from the capital. Funds were forthcoming, but soon squandered on personal luxuries by the local officers responsible for the purchase of rescue tugboats.
Promotion brought Kropotkin further dismal insights into the canker of corruption and callous self-interest that infected the Russian Empire. Having secured an appointment as secretary of the prison reform committee, the condition of the Siberian transit camps had horrified him, but his recommendations were disregarded, leaving him no alternative but to resign. Beneath the casual brutality and venal incompetence that confronted him at every turn, in the exploitation of the workers Kropotkin had started to perceive an underlying dynamic that was more pernicious still: the harsh imperatives of Western capitalism, as it rapidly colonised a Russian economy built on the robust and flexible foundation of the village mir. ‘This is where one can gaze every day to one’s heart’s content upon the enslavement of the worker by capital,’ he wrote to his brother Alexander following a visit to the Lena gold mines, ‘and at the great law of the reduction in reward with the increase in work.’
Years later, Kropotkin made an even bolder claim in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary. ‘I may say now, that in Siberia I lost all faith in state discipline. I was prepared to become an anarchist.’ The sight of hungry peasants handing crusts to prisoners more famished than themselves, the ‘semi-communistic brotherly organisation’ of the political prisoners, and the non-hierarchical structure of the indigenous tribes of Asia all seemed evidence that altruism, mutuality and cooperation were the true bedrock of a well-functioning human society. Meanwhile, his experience of military command, in the most adverse conditions, reinforced the belief that collective effort lies at the heart of all successful social enterprises, while the best leadership inspires rather than directs.
During the latter years of the 1860s, as vested interests at court seized upon any pretext to roll back the reformist agenda initiated by the tsar, Alexander Kropotkin was the more active of the brothers in opposing the tsarist regime, while Peter continued to enjoy many fringe benefits from membership of the Russian elite. Geography rather than politics claimed most of his attention, on expeditions that filled the state’s coffers: charting new routes to the gold fields to increase their profitability helped win him a gold medal from the Imperial Society. When the hazardous dynamiting of cliffs for the construction of one road prompted a revolt by the Polish slave gangs, leading to the execution of five of their number, Kropotkin was sickened. Nevertheless, he found it hard to renounce the joy of scientific discovery that his work afforded him: ‘the sudden birth of a generalisation, illuminating the mind after a long period of research’, such as he felt on apprehending how geological folding had formed the Asiatic mountain ranges. And his glittering career promised many more such moments.
In years to come, Kropotkin applied these same powers of analytical and synthetic thought to the question of how to create the ideal human society, and the form it should take, dismissing any ‘study of nature without man [as] the last tribute paid by modern scientists to their previous scholastic education’. For the moment, though, he salved his conscience by compiling a comprehensive guide to the soils and topography of Russia, to assist the peasants in their productive cultivation of the land. It was a token gesture of solidarity with the twenty million or more serfs, whose predicament had only worsened under the ill-considered terms of their recent emancipation.
The greatest threat
to the peasants’ economic independence, however, came not from any shortcomings in their husbandry of the land but from the rapacious attitude of their former masters, whose greed had not been satisfied by compensation with government bonds. Once released from the tacit contract of mutual obligation that had provided the foundation for centuries of feudalism, Russia’s landowners embraced the capitalist ethos of the market with a rough passion, while continuing to pocket the government’s cash. Rents were doubled, land reclaimed for the slightest infraction on the part of its new owners, and every effort made to claw back property through the landed class’ domination of local government. Still tied to their village communities, unable to afford better land elsewhere, those serfs who had been freed looked back on their indentured days with more than a little nostalgia.
Under intense lobbying by vested interests and the grinding pressure of a deeply conservative culture, Alexander II’s bold plans had crumbled faster even than Napoleon III’s progressive social schemes had in France. With unrest brewing among large elements of society, ambitious reforms to the army, judiciary and the education system were all reversed: schools, maternity facilities and homes for injured workers were either closed or else never opened, and censorship was reimposed. The second wave of emancipation, which many hoped would prove more thorough and genuine than the first, broke and lost its force before it reached land. And following the attempt by the young radical Dmitri Karakozov to assassinate the tsar in 1866, hardliners had the perfect excuse to reassert themselves at court, accelerating the drift towards repression; ineptitude and a lack of resources were the only brake on the conservative backlash.
The educated youth of Russia felt the collapse of the reforms as both a moral outrage and a personal disaster, restricting as it did their own intellectual and political freedoms, while exposing the hypocrisy of their parents’ generation. Seeing how their fathers shamelessly mouthed idealistic platitudes while continuing to act as petty autocrats, they had adopted an attitude of excoriating candour, in defiance of all the hollow proprieties of social convention. Where they could be acquired, the writings of foreign authors and philosophers were read and discussed in search of possible solutions to the extreme injustices of a sclerotic society, a process stymied by the tsarist censor’s restrictions on books and papers that contained the faintest hint of sedition. Among home-grown writers, the St Petersburg novelist Nicholas Chernyshevsky developed a huge following: ‘there have been three great men in the world,’ wrote one prominent young firebrand at the time, ‘Jesus Christ, Paul the Apostle, and Chernyshevsky.’
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 13
