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

by Alex Butterworth

  No one who had seen the pitiful hulk of the Virginie, languishing on mudflats off the Atlantic coast, could have doubted the legitimacy of Hugo’s concern. The long line of sea-salts who declined to captain the ship may well have suspected that President MacMahon considered a deep-water grave to be the most convenient end for her undesirable cargo. Destined to be sold as firewood at the end of the journey, the ship’s minimal refit allowed only just enough time for the Communards’ last appeals to prove futile. Finally accepting his hazardous fate, Rochefort signed the papers appointing Juliette Adam – outspoken feminist, wife to Edmond Adam, and Rochefort’s own ex-lover – as guardian to his children, and instructing the sale of his property for their benefit. The anxiety he felt at his predicament as he clambered on board was enough to have turned even a strong stomach queasy.

  The first Rochefort knew of Louise Michel’s presence on the Virginie were the jokes she cracked across the narrow corridor that divided their cages. ‘Look at the pretty wedding trousseau MacMahon has sent me,’ she had offered by way of introduction, posing her gangly, angular body in the regulation navy-issue clothes with which the prisoners had been supplied. Rochefort, of course, knew of the Red Virgin by repute. He could hardly have avoided the tall tales of her courage during the dying days of the Commune and had read, in prison, Victor Hugo’s poem in celebration of her metamorphosis into the ‘terrible and superhuman’ figure of Virgo Major. He was glad of her company.

  On the face of it, Rochefort and Lousie Michel had little in common. Rochefort was a philandering aristocrat, a potentially bitter reminder to Michel of her own father, with whom he shared a predatory taste for servant girls. Moreover, in contrast to the marquis’ supplicatory contrition before the tribunal’s authority, Michel had been unflinching in her resolve. ‘Since it appears that any heart which beats for liberty has only one right, and that is to a piece of lead, I ask you for my share,’ she had declared, calling the judges’ bluff, while threatening that ‘if you permit me to live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance.’ From Rochefort’s perspective, in turn, Michel might have seemed the revolutionary counterpart of those deluded Joans of Arc whose appearance across France as putative saviours in the face of the Prussian invasion had attracted his scorn. Nevertheless, in the close confines of the Virginie, they discovered a complicity that went beyond the terrible oath of loyalty and vengeance that the imprisoned Communards had sworn. When Rochefort was moved to a private cabin for the sake of his health, and served seven-course dinners from the officers’ table, Michel did not join in the sniping of those who suspected favouritism due to his Freemasonic connections. And when Michel gave up her own warm clothes and shoes to other prisoners, Rochefort passed on a pair of felt boots supplied by the captain, claiming that they had been given to him by his daughter, but were too small.

  Without steam engines to assist the Virginie when she was becalmed, the journey was long enough for a firm friendship to form, even before unforeseen revisions to the planned route. The ship had only just left port when the French admiralty issued the captain with orders to steer clear of the waters around Dakar, lest she be intercepted by a revolutionary fleet from the Spanish port of Cartagena, where insurrectionists had declared a republic. The ship’s lookouts scoured the horizon for sight of the old red and yellow pennant of Spain with the royal crest ripped out, and a lengthy detour was charted by way of the Canary Islands. In reality, however, whilst Elisée Reclus, in Switzerland, might dream that a revolutionary Mediterranean federation had risen to assume the mantle of the Commune, by the time the Virginie had set sail Cartagena was already under intense siege by monarchist forces, and about to fall.

  The hysterical propaganda that had enveloped the Commune had left nervous officials susceptible to even the most improbable scares. Just a few weeks earlier, the military governor of Marseilles had assembled a hundred-strong posse of mariners to hunt down a school of killer sharks that proved to be wholly imaginary. The source of the misleading intelligence was letters purporting to be from local fishermen but in reality forged by a disgruntled cub journalist on the local paper. It was a first coup in the career of Gabriel Jogand-Pages, as he was then known, on his way to becoming the greatest hoaxer of his era. For decades to come he would expose with mounting ruthlessness the true depths of prejudice and credulity that was rotting French society from the core.

  As the Virginie charted her slow and creaking course south through the Atlantic, other monsters preyed on the minds of the passengers. In 1857, a ship called the Castilian had spotted a terrifying creature in those very waters, while four years later the French naval frigate Alection had barely escaped the clutches of a giant squid. Then, in 1866, there were repeated sightings, of a pulsing, phosphorescent object beneath the waves, far longer than any whale. By 1873, such accounts had become entrenched in the popular mind through the fictional filter of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, which had first been published in the run-up to the Franco-Prussian War: the phosphorescent tube was explained as the submarine Nautilus, with the squid cast as its mortal enemy.

  Verne’s glorious anti-hero, Captain Nemo, held an obvious attraction for the Communards. A brooding champion of freedom and science, he salvaged the treasure of sunken wrecks to fund national liberation movements, and crowned his scientific engagement by recognising the imperative of social revolution. ‘The earth does not want new continents,’ he opined, ‘but new men.’ And quite apart from the inclusion in the book’s second edition of line drawings by newspaper artists who so recently had illustrated the tragedy of the war and the Commune, Verne’s novel contained veiled references to contemporary radical politics. Components of the Nautilus had been fabricated at the Le Creusot steelworks and Cails & Co. in Paris, the two main centres of recent socialist unrest, while only the delicate diplomatic situation between France and Russia at the time of the book’s composition had prevented Verne from making explicit Nemo’s background as a Polish patriot whose young family had died under Russian occupation. The fictional captain may have brought to mind comrades from the Commune like Dombrowski or Wroblewski, his fellow Polish commander in the doomed defence of Paris against the Versaillais. It was his sheer force of will, however, as a traceless ‘Nobody’ hell-bent on vengeance – ‘monstrous or sublime, which time could never weaken’ – that would have resonated most powerfully with the book’s Communard readers. That, together with the fate of the Nautilus, sent tumbling to the seabed by the giant squid in the book’s final scene, another sunken dream.

  So potent and uncannily predictive did the symbolism of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea seem to those left reeling by the Commune’s fall and its pitiless aftermath that later, as the dates and details of the book’s publication faded from memory, rumours even began to circulate that the work’s true creator was none other than Louise Michel herself, paid 200 francs by Verne for a first draft inspired by the Virginie’s crossing to New Caledonia. In reality, Michel’s only personal connection to the underwater tale was the membrane between her toes that she had inherited from her father and which she displayed to Rochefort on board the Virginie; perhaps to reassure him that in her web-footed company he could not drown, or else to illustrate the Darwinism she had learned at night school.

  In later years Rochefort would talk of the kindnesses of ‘his lady neighbour of the starboard side’ but Michel herself was not easy to help, constantly accepting charity, only to give it away. So it was that the felt boots that Rochefort had hoped would protect her from the frost-coated deck were soon warming feet that Michel considered to be needier than her own. According to Michel’s autobiography, however, she treasured far more the intellectual insights with which Rochefort furnished her on the journey: an introduction to ‘anarchism’ that would inform the remaining thirty-five years of her political life.

  Which ideas, though, did Michel mean to encompass, in her somewhat anachronistic application of a term yet to be properly defined in 1873? Doubtless, she
would already have encountered the theories of the leading French exponents of the anti-authoritarian, communistic tradition among friends in the Montmartre clubs. But if not Proudhon or Fourier, perhaps it was the federalist principles of Bakunin that were so thrillingly novel to her when expounded by Rochefort, or else the older example of Gracchus Babeuf, a progenitor of anarchism from the days of the first French Revolution. It might even have been the ancient tradition – that reached from before Jesus Christ, through the Gnostics and Anabaptist sects – which Rochefort used to hook in to Michel’s mystical inclinations, though there is little to suggest that he was a man who took the long view.

  One old, Enlightenment theme, at least, that seems certain to have arisen in their discussions was that of the ‘noble savage’. Charges of ‘savagery’, sometimes ‘cannibalistic’, had flown in all directions during France’s recent upheavals: against those who had waged war on Prussia, only then to cry foul; against the murderous mob in Montmartre; and the troops who perpetrated the massacres of the Bloody Week. But for the deportees to New Caledonia, home to the aboriginal Kanaks, the question assumed a stark, new relevance. In purging French society of its regressive strain by a policy of transportation, the pseudo-republic of the early 1870s believed that it had definitively reclaimed the high ground of civilised behaviour, on which national moral regeneration might be founded. For those romantic souls who persisted in cherishing both the ideals of social revolution and a faith in noble savagery, the message of their punishment was clear: taste the brute laws of nature in the Antipodes, and then decide whether you were right to reject the solaces of paternalistic government. And once converted, if they chose to act as unofficial agents of French colonialism during their exile among the native Kanaks, then so much the better.

  The Virginie cast anchor in Nouméa harbour on 10 December 1873, four months to the day after leaving Orléron, having made up time since rounding the Horn. After countless days in the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean, even those passengers due to begin a sentence of hard labour must have felt some relief at stepping ashore. But as the new arrivals were separated out into three categories of convict and led off to their respective grades of punishment, New Caledonia quickly revealed itself to be among the harshest of colonial territories.

  Two hundred miles from tip to tip and twenty-five or so across, the long, thin strip of the main island is surrounded by coral reefs and distinguished by two mountain peaks that rise from a ridge running most of its length. First occupied by France in 1853, its geographical features served to demarcate the island’s various communities. North of the larger mountain lay the area to which the indigenous Kanaks were now mostly restricted, their population already plummeting from an original 100,000 due to a range of nefarious French practices (though not yet halfway to the mere one in ten who would be left at the end of the century). On Nou Island, out in the ocean to the east, the harshest regime of all awaited those transported as violent criminals, who were clapped into manacles to drag out their sentence of ‘double chains’, under threat of further dire punishments for recalcitrance. For those ‘Deported to a fortified place’, the Ducos peninsula near Nouméa, the island’s capital, offered a marginally less arduous environment, and it was thence that Rochefort and Michel were first taken, the latter in transit to the Île des Pins, fifty miles off the southern tip of the main island, which was home to those for whom deportation alone was deemed sufficient hardship.

  Eager crowds of Communard exiles from the earlier convict ships, promised that their families would one day be able to join them, had gathered to welcome the new arrivals. Their hopes were swiftly dashed when they saw no sign of their relatives. Rochefort and Michel, too, experienced a sinking of the spirits. After they absorbed the immediate shock of finding such a concentration of notorious radicals so far from home – among the non-Communard prisoners, was the tsar’s would-be assassin from 1867, Berezowsky – they would have noticed the emaciated faces of ragged creatures who had all but given up on life in the fourteen months since their arrival.

  Rochefort was grateful to be delivered from the pathetic scene as Olivier Pain and Paschal Grousset intervened to usher him towards their huts, which they had newly extended to offer their old journalistic colleague temporary accommodation. If, as credible rumours in France suggested, it had indeed been Grousset who had tipped off the Versaillais authorities about Rochefort’s planned escape from Paris in the dying days of the Commune, then this hospitality was the least he could offer by way of amends.

  Michel, reunited with her bosom friend from the barricades, Natalie Lemel, was also drawn into life on the Ducos peninsula, where she wisely insisted on staying despite demands from the administration that she be moved on. The sketches she made here are deceptively picturesque, almost Arcadian, with the huts of the small prisoner communities grouped around a central fire and cooking area, implying the kind of simple conviviality enjoyed by native tribes the world over. By day, the convicts followed the custom of the Kanaks: fishing for lampreys and hunting the island’s kangaroos, though the physical gulf between the sickly, clumsy Communards and the strong and graceful natives, with their traditional Stone Age methods, was all too obvious. By night, especially in the high summer of December and January, the Europeans escaped the clouds of mosquitoes by retreating to the basalt rocks by the sea and the shelter of nets.

  The reality, unfiltered by idealising draughtsmanship, was less comfortable. The Communards’ solidarity with their fellow men only went so far, a fact noted by Rochefort as he pottered about in his regulation straw hat and ungainly moccasins, with sailor’s culottes exposing his spindly calves. During his days as a newspaper editor, Rochefort had become known to the Arabs as ‘the good man’ for his advocacy of the rights of the North African peoples who had participated in the South Oranian insurrection against French rule; and yet on New Caledonia he found himself almost alone in treating the Algerian Arab prisoners with comradely respect. Although victims themselves, the heroes of the Commune were only too ready to vent their frustrations on the Africans in displays of vicious disdain that would eventually take a more deadly form in their dealings with the Kanaks.

  Then there were the cases of ‘fatal nostalgia’. Although it did not suit the resolute tone of Rochefort’s later accounts to discuss it, he must have found it awful to watch as, one by one, his fellow prisoners succumbed to the condition. Though not recognised by the colony’s doctors, who preferred to record anaemia or dysentery as the causes of death, terminal grief was all too real for those who had been transported. Its favourite victims were the heartbroken fathers of small children, but 251 Communard prisoners were said to have been afflicted during the first three years, with the eight-month lapse between sending and receiving letters home making the torture of homesickness a perpetual feature of New Caledonian life. Some simply wandered off into the forest to die, others wasted away, like the Communard Passedouet, who, watched by Rochefort, sat endlessly rocking and intoning ‘Proudhon, Proudhon’.

  Survival depended on maintaining one’s morale. While awaiting transportation, Louise Michel had secured permission from the French Geographical society to serve as its correspondent in New Caledonia. The society perhaps hoped that she would supply observations on the nickel deposits that had been discovered there a few years earlier and for which state companies had begun to mine. Michel, however, chose to disregard the public demands of the society’s president that members embrace ‘besides a scientific end, a political and commercial object’, and busied herself with gentler plans to experiment with the cultivation of papayas and record Kanak folklore. Meanwhile, to vent her fury at those who now ruled France, on the 28th of every month, without fail, she wrote a letter of remonstration to ‘la Commission dite des Graces’ that had failed to commute the execution of her beloved Ferré on that day in November 1871.

  Rochefort would later insist that he had shown even greater foresight than Michel, researching, even during the Prussian siege, the geogr
aphy of New Caledonia in case one day he should be called to escape from it. In fact, rather than initiating an escape plan Rochefort was fortunate to be allowed to join Pain’s and Grousset’s existing scheme. At huge risk, the pair had been scouting opportunities for several months, concealing themselves at the entrance to the harbour from where they tried to hail passing ships. What Rochefort brought to the project was the cash that could open the reluctant ears of the ships’ masters, and the English captain of a coal supply ship called the PCE – the Peace, Comfort and Ease – was soon recruited. Whilst Rochefort underwent a training regime of nocturnal bathing expeditions to accustom his eyes to the dark nights and toughen his muscles, three Freemasons among the six prospective fugitives persuaded key guards to turn a blind eye.

  By chance, the date chosen for the escape was 18 March 1874, the third anniversary of the confrontation over the Montmartre cannon that had precipitated the Commune. The previous evening, the prisoners had been forced by an approaching storm to seek cover in their huts. Rochefort slept badly; woken in the early hours by a friendly black chicken, he seized upon it as an auspicious sign. When he, Pain and Grousset reached the shore, however, the swollen seascape that stretched out before them was of the kind Michel celebrated in her wild, romantic verse, but which evinced from Rochefort nothing but dread. Recognising that the chance might not come again, all three launched themselves into the heaving darkness. At the appointed rock, the other members of the escape party hauled them out of the water and, before long, a launch appeared to carry them to the PCE. With a 1,000-mile voyage to Australia, they had ample opportunity to celebrate their freedom.