The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents

by Alex Butterworth

  Once in Geneva, it took Kropotkin a certain amount of trial and error to discover his natural political allies. Home to the city’s branch of the International, the Masonic Temple Unique was an obvious first port of call for someone of his background and socialist inclinations. In Russia, Freemasonry had for a century provided a haven for, in Bakunin’s words, ‘the choicest minds and most ardent hearts’ from among the gentry, where they could nurture their social conscience. But whilst it had been Masons who were imprisoned in Schlüsselburg for their radicalism under Catherine the Great, the fire had long since gone out. ‘A jabbering old intriguer… useless and worthless, sometimes malevolent and always ridiculous,’ was Bakunin’s verdict of Italian Freemasonry when he had tried to co-opt it to the revolutionary cause, and Kropotkin could only concur. And whilst Kropotkin admired the enthusiasm of the workers attending the classes run by the International, ‘the trust they put in it, the love with which they spoke of it, the sacrifices they made for it’ seemed to him wholly misguided. Dominated by the followers of Marx, its meetings struck him as fatuous: a display of intellectual vanity that bamboozled those who deserved better.

  Preferring the company of the workers to that of the Marxists from the International, Kropotkin, ‘with a glass of sour wine…sat long into the evening at some table in the hall among the workers, and soon became friendly with some of them, particularly with one stonemason who had deserted France after the Commune.’ The stonemason, like many hundreds of Communards who had flooded into Switzerland in the wake of the Bloody Week, had little left to do but reminisce.

  Tales of the utopian dreams that had briefly flickered into life in Paris the previous spring touched Kropotkin with inspiring visions of a future in which society might be comprehensively refashioned. The contrast between this spirit of optimism and the power-hungry machinations of the local Marxists shocked Kropotkin – in particular, reports of how Utin was conniving to get an influential Geneva lawyer elected to the local government by suppressing workers’ plans for strikes – and brought a moment of revelation. ‘I lived through it after one of the meetings at the Temple Unique,’ he recollected in his memoirs, ‘when I felt more acutely than ever before how cowardly are the educated men who refuse to put their education, their knowledge, their energy at the service of those who are so much in need of that education and that energy.’ If his friends and acquaintances in Zurich, most of them supporters of Bakunin, had left him in any doubt of where he should look for a political ideal that still burned hot, the Communard workers in Geneva set him firmly on the right path. The final stage of his journey of self-discovery led him to the Jura, where Bakunin had his strongest following.

  The industry that had made the Jura so hospitable to federalist, anti-authoritarian politics – the dawning ‘anarchist’ movement – owed its origins, ironically, to the autocratic instincts of a radical who had preceded Marx by three and a half centuries. As part of Jean Calvin’s programme of moral reforms, the wearing of jewels had been banned in 1541, driving the city’s goldsmiths into a new trade that would employ their miniaturist skills towards a utilitarian rather than sumptuary end: watchmaking. By the end of the century, Geneva boasted the first watchmaker’s guild in the world, and the success of the industry during the following hundred years led its practitioners to spread out from the saturated confines of the city along the Jura mountain range. Over time, villages set amid the meadows of the Jura became home to specialist workshops that worked in a process of cooperative manufacture, each contributing distinct parts of the mechanisms. This innovative division of labour helped make the region a centre of precision horology, with the Grand Council of Neuchâtel founding an observatory in 1858 to provide a chronometric service, and the initiation of the Jura’s famous time-keeping competitions. Accuracy to within one second a day was the minimal requirement for all products, with prizes for the watches that best withstood a range of environmental factors. Little can the winners – Edouard Heuer with his workshop in Saint-Imier, and Georges Piaget in nearby La Côte-aux-Fées – have guessed the glamour and prestige that before long their names would represent.

  The luxury enjoyed by those who bought their products, however, was not reflected in the lives of the majority of watchmakers. Working within a scientific context, and with high demands made of their skill by the intricate engineering, they were nevertheless part of a community that was intellectually alive and receptive to new political ideas. Already living on the poverty line and now threatened by the mass-production processes being developed in the United States, those working on a small scale from their homes were ready recruits to a movement that drew inspiration from their own autonomous society. Content in its isolation and self-sufficiency, how glorious it would be, the Jurassian Federation argued, if its example could only convert the world.

  Kropotkin’s way into Jurassian society was through James Guillaume, a young teacher from the Jura town of Le Locle and Bakunin’s trusted lieutenant. The young ladies of the Fritsche circle had met Guillaume at the congress of the anti-authoritarian International at the village of Saint-Imier in the autumn of 1871 but any initial introduction they provided was not effective. At first Guillaume received Kropotkin frostily, being overwhelmed by his many responsibilities as an editor of the movement’s newspaper. It was only when Kropotkin volunteered to help in the task that he received a warm handshake. In return for his work, he would be introduced to the community of watchmakers and learn all he wished about the federation. Kropotkin felt that he had found his spiritual home, and was determined to adopt a trade that would allow him to remain, after his twenty-eight-day travel permit had expired.

  The months that Kropotkin spent in the Jura exposed him to yet more stories of the Paris insurrection of spring 1871. Among the illustrious Communards who had sought refuge there was Benoît Malon, ex-mayor of the Batignolles district, now working as a basket maker in Neuchâtel and also assisting Guillaume with his newspaper. Malon’s stories of the Commune brought the dream to life for Kropotkin in a way that the testimony of the Geneva exiles had failed to do. They also reinforced the true horror of the Commune’s suppression. Kropotkin recalled how ‘the lips of Malon trembled and tears trickled from his eyes’ when he recollected the tragic slaying during Bloody Week of thousands of young men who had rallied to the radical cause. Trawling the international press to better understand the disaster in Paris, Kropotkin was ‘seized by a dark despair’.

  It was while Kropotkin was staying in the Jura that Elisée Reclus too finally reached Switzerland, arriving on 14 March. After months of imprisonment, his sentence of transportation had finally been commuted to ten years’ exile thanks to the good offices of the American ambassador to France, an admirer of his four-volume geological history The Earth. The experience had left him traumatised: ‘I felt around me the impenetrable wall of hate, the aversion of the entire world to the Commune and the Communards,’ he wrote. But in Switzerland he could at last begin the slow process of recovery.

  There is no record that the two great geographers met in 1872, though had they done so, the grey-faced, haunted survivor of the prison barges with the faint aura of holiness would surely have made a strong impression on Kropotkin. It would be three decades before Reclus agreed to set down in writing his thoughts on the Commune, but he had resolutely upheld the prisoners’ oath to defend it. He later recollected how, on his first day in Switzerland, he gently converted an old woman from her horrified prejudices about the insurrection in Paris to a warm respect for its aims. Bakunin, who had some years earlier turned his back on Reclus, having erroneously suspected him of sympathising with Marx, could not help but be reconciled to him. ‘There is the model of a man,’ the old Russian is reported to have said, ‘so pure, noble, simple, modest, self-forgetting… a valuable, very earnest, very sincere friend and completely one of ours.’ In light of Bakunin’s own uncertain temperament, even his slight criticism that Reclus was ‘perhaps not so completely the devil of a fellow, as might be desir
ed’ might be taken as a recommendation.

  Kropotkin found it harder to gain Bakunin’s attention. Though he longed for an audience with the great man, no invitation was forthcoming – this despite Kropotkin’s passionate belief that his was the right side of the socialist schism. At a time when even Bakunin’s most fervent acolytes were beginning to question his judgement, Kropotkin was unreserved in his admiration for the old man’s achievements. In particular, the failed expedition that Bakunin had led in 1870 to establish a commune in Lyons – which Marx had brusquely dismissed – struck Kropotkin as ‘the first case in recent years, if I am not mistaken, of a serious protest against a war from the side of the population.’

  Kropotkin did not need Guillaume to shower him with evidence of Marx’s monstrous egotism and the simmering vindictiveness of Engels; his experiences in Geneva were enough. He was repelled by Marx’s extraordinary belief that he was owed the gratitude of the Communards for ‘having saved their honour’ in writing The Civil War in France, and by Engels’ vicious slander of a Communard exile in London by the name of Adolphe Smith who had protested about the high-handed behaviour of the Marxists in the International.

  Most of all, Kropotkin distrusted Marx’s claim to have discovered in the nebulous realm of economics a science of human society. Marx and Engels could rant at Bakunin and his followers as ‘babblers of nonsense’ who had ‘no idea of social revolution…only its political phrases; [for whom] its economic conditions have no meaning’, and whose theories were ‘Schoolboyish rot!’ However, the question remained: beneath all the spurious historical analysis and baroque argumentation, was Marx’s hope that the state would ultimately ‘wither away’ really any more hard-headed than Bakunin’s expectation of a spontaneous revolution by the peasantry? The Marxists may have bandied about ‘utopian’ as a term of disparagement, but the vestiges of metaphysical thought were endemic to socialist theory. Surely what mattered most, Kropotkin realised, was the practical means by which society was moved in the right direction. And in Bakunin’s writings – even the shockingly violent Catechism – there was a genuine attempt to answer the question of how it was possible to be both truly democratic and act decisively by embracing collective responsibility and rigorous discipline.

  Kropotkin waited for weeks in the hope of an invitation to visit Bakunin at home in Locarno. Neither the evenings he had shared with Bakunin’s wife and his old gaoler General Kukel in Siberia, nor Bakunin’s friendship with Sofia Lavrova’s flatmate Natalia Smetskaya seemed to help. Was the delay down to Bakunin’s precoccupation with his work on Statism and Anarchy, or with the Nechaev affair, Kropotkin must have wondered, or was the explanation to be found in the imminent return to Russia of Bakunin’s wife and children and, in light of his declining health, their possible last parting? Eventually, Guillaume informed Kropotkin that Bakunin would not be able to see him. He was under too much strain in dealing with the schism. Instead Kropotkin should abandon his plan to learn a trade – a waste of his talents, and a position in which, as a foreign prince, he would struggle to gain acceptance – and return to Russia without delay, where he would be of more use to the cause.

  So it was that the man destined to become Bakunin’s ideological heir never did crunch across the butts of cigarettes and cigars that littered the floor of Bakunin’s study to meet his intellectual mentor. Not until years later did Guillaume divulge that Bakunin had, in fact, disregarded Peter Kropotkin as being, like his brother Alexander, a follower of the more cautious and gradualist ideas of Peter Lavrov, who urged the intellectuals of Russia to teach as well as follow the peasantry. It was perhaps inevitable that Bakunin should shun a fellow aristocrat. In flight from his own privileged origins, and questioning more than ever his right to lead the people while not being of them, even Bakunin’s ill-judged embrace of the ‘authentic’ Nechaev had not taught him to see beyond the guilt he felt for his aristocratic birth.

  Perhaps, though, the fruitless wait was not so arduous or lonely for Kropotkin. It seems that the ‘Fritsche’ girls had developed a taste for the pastoral beauty of the Jura and took to spending their spring vacations there. And the Jurassic landscape, which had already given its name to a whole age in the earth’s development, would have provided the geographer in him with abundant opportunities for observation at a time when he was working out his theory about the ice caps that had once covered northern Europe.

  Three months after arriving in Zurich, and two months after the Russian authorities had expected him home, Kropotkin set off on a circuitous journey back to St Petersburg: first to Belgium, bypassing Paris and the suspicious eyes of post-Commune France, then doubling back to Vienna, before heading to Warsaw, and finally back to Cracow. Somewhere along the way he collected a large cache of banned literature; before crossing the Russian border, he stopped to arrange a smuggling operation that would carry it and future material into the country under the noses of the tsarist police. Having crossed the line of legality, nothing would be the same again for Prince Kropotkin. Years earlier, aged twelve, he had abandoned the use of his title, but only now was he ready to renounce the last ties to his past life and the security that his privileged status had always afforded him.

  4

  Around the World in 280 Days

  New Caledonia to Switzerland, 1873–1875

  Henri Rochefort felt seasick from almost the moment he set foot on the frigate Virginie. Only a few dozen metres into his four-month ocean journey and he was already retching: not the mere queasiness of a sensitive stomach first encountering rough waters, but hearty vomiting that would continue for days on end until he was bringing up only bile. Among the five men with whom he shared his cage in the cargo hold, and the twenty-one women in the enclosure opposite, there were those who remembered quite well the sudden illness that had felled him during the Noir funeral demonstration three years earlier, and the eye infection that kept him away from Paris, recuperating, in the prelude to the Commune. Forced to listen to Rochefort’s groans night and day, they must have wondered whether he was not in fact suffering a nervous reaction to the turbulent circumstances of his embarkation.

  The period since Rochefort’s capture in the dying days of the Commune had held horrors and humiliations far worse than he had experienced during previous spells in prison in the Second Empire. Arraigned before the military tribunal, the charges had threatened his dignity as much as his freedom: not grand accusations of treason or conspiracy that he might have batted aside with a rhetorical flourish, but demeaning insinuations that he had stolen artworks from the Louvre and bronzes from Thiers’ ransacked home. And when it came to his inflammatory journalism, the fact that Rochefort had cunningly continued to propose hypothetical violence to his readership whilst dismissing the awful notion at the same time cut little ice. ‘You turned this government to ridicule in your articles,’ inveighed the president of the tribunal, enthroned beneath a vast painted crucifixion scene, ‘and you know that in France ridicule kills.’

  Brutal and exemplary sentences were being handed down unstintingly: twenty-five of the Commune’s leaders and fiercest proponents, including Ferré and General Rossel, were shot at Satory military camp in short order. Influential friends were concerned that Rochefort might suffer a similar fate, or that his name might at least slip on to the lengthening lists of lesser miscreants due for deportation to France’s distant penal colonies in South America or the Pacific. The price of clemency, they ascertained, would be Rochefort’s acceptance of humiliation. When Edmond Adam, hero of the 1870 stand-off at the Hôtel de Ville, testified that his ex-colleague was merely a ‘fantasist who lacked prudence’, Rochefort had sat in chastened silence; when summoned to the dock, he bore himself with a meekness that few would have recognised. His lawyer, Albert Joly, even persuaded him to compose a compromisingly abject letter pleading with Gambetta to secure his release. The strategy of self-abasement appeared to work and the threat of transportation lifted, though Rochefort is unlikely to have felt much gratitude as he s
at shackled atop a stinking mattress, as a Black Maria juddered its way to the prison fortress of La Rochelle.

  Imagining himself the romantic heir of the Calvinist rebels three centuries earlier, who had held out there against an interminable Catholic siege, Rochefort enjoyed sufficient freedom in prison to start work on a novel, buying off the antagonism of inmates with abundant gifts of contraband tobacco. Even after his transfer a year later to the slightly less congenial conditions of Fort Boyard between Île d’Aix and Île d’Oléron, he had watched unperturbed as the frigates Danae and then Guerrière steamed away over the horizon, carrying his old comrades to the penal colonies. The worst that fate might have in store, solicitous friends assured him, was a brief spell in an apartment on the prison island of Sainte-Marguerite followed by early release. But then, on 23 May 1873, the hard-line General MacMahon, ex-commander of a French army whose officers found it easier to blame the Communards for the country’s defeat than their own shortcomings, became president of the republic.

  Rochefort, it was announced, would join the final consignment of Communards to be shipped to New Caledonia. His friends were horrified. What of the compassionate considerations that had weighed upon the original judges: his weak health, and the children he would be leaving as virtual orphans, following the death of their mother, a servant whom Rochefort had finally married while in prison? Victor Hugo took up the cudgels, arguing that transportation exceeded the court’s terms: ‘By it, the punishment is commuted into a sentence of death!’