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

by Alex Butterworth

  The long and circuitous journey back to Europe began well with a hearty welcome in the Australian port of Newcastle. ‘It is enough for [England] that men who struggle for freedom flee to her for refuge, and the protection of her powerful arm will be at once thrown around them,’ declared the local newspaper, while the celebrity status accorded them by the press in general afforded the fugitives a first inkling of how the outside world was perceiving the Commune as France’s ‘third revolution’. The holiday mood persisted as they set out on a route similar to that taken by Bakunin thirteen years earlier on his escape from Siberia, via South East Asia, with Rochefort using a visit to Fiji and Honolulu to cram his luggage with tribal art. In San Francisco, however, the solidarity of the group began to fracture. Taking umbrage at claims by Grousset that he was reneging on his promise to pay their passage home, Rochefort ignored the eagerness of the city’s socialists to feast their heroes, and the press to hold interviews, and hid himself away. Only two days after arriving, he and Olivier Pain were gone, leaving behind their four companions to accept the lavish plaudits of the city’s well-wishers, together with a £165 collection that, in the absence of Rochefort’s financial help, would eventually cover their Atlantic passage.

  The America that Rochefort travelled through was one whose press was not uniformly indulgent to his escapes. In a country still coming to terms with its own vastly more destructive civil war, the Commune had received a huge amount of coverage, most of it hostile. Even the moderate Harper’s Weekly inveighed against the supposed savagery of the Commune’s ‘cruel and unreasonable’ women, asserting that it would prefer to find itself at the mercy of a horde of Red Indians; while even the more sympathetic Nation swallowed the lie that the transportation of Communards was ‘for their mental and moral health’. Versaillais propaganda had flooded across the Atlantic, finding a sympathetic hearing in a nation whose propertied classes feared the likelihood of social strife closer to home.

  The threat had never been more real. Ever since the 1830s, immigrant labour from the poorer areas of Europe had been lured to the New World of opportunity by promises of good jobs and land for free. The chance to begin afresh appealed powerfully to those who had suffered most from the injustices inflicted by the Old World’s arbitrary authorities. Wave after wave of determined poor had entered the country, to be ruthlessly exploited by established industrialists, only for those who clawed their way up to some small position of power to oppress the new ethnic groups who followed them. It was a brutal and ugly system, yet hugely productive of wealth. Now, though, the monstrous, accelerating engine of unregulated capitalism appeared to have stalled, and the society it had sustained looked likely to collapse into chaos.

  In September 1873 the inconceivable had happened when the great railway entrepreneur Jay Gould went bankrupt, a victim of his own corruption, triggering an economic collapse that, within weeks, had plunged the country into a depression. With unemployment soaring and wages plummeting, the Commune appeared to offer the burgeoning ranks of America’s social malcontents a dangerous example. The New York Times predicted a time when the immigrant ‘socialists of the cities would combine to strike at the wealth heaped up around them’ and the ‘native American’ would respond with arms to the ‘rebellion against property’, just as he had to the ‘rebellion against freedom’ that sparked the Civil War. During that winter, tens of thousands had turned to the International in search of support and representation, and there was widespread fear that a mere spark might ‘spread abroad the anarchy and ruin of the French Commune’. Warnings received by the New York police were terrifyingly unambiguous: plans were in hand for a paramilitary organisation of 1,600 men modelled on the National Guard whose battalions had occupied Paris. The great demonstration in Tompkins Square of January 1874, brutally suppressed by nightstick-wielding mounted police, was only a first skirmish. All New York needed, four months later, was the arrival of France’s most polemical propagandist.

  Having passed through Salt Lake City and Omaha, it was while Rochefort’s train was halted at Chicago station that the press finally caught up with him. The proposition borne by Mr O’Kelly from the New York Herald was a generous one: a fat fee, and a two-page spread guaranteed over two days in return for exclusive rights to Rochefort’s first article about the Commune and life in New Caledonia. The chance to set the record straight, free of censorship and with no concessions required to the prejudices of his readership, attractive in itself, was made irresistible by an undertaking that an edition would be distributed in France, regardless of any possible negative reaction there. While Olivier Pain visited Niagara Falls, Rochefort worked through the night scribbling more than two thousand lines of impassioned prose.

  Concerned that Rochefort should not be distracted by invitations to receptions and dinners, and doubtless to hike the value of his exclusive rights, the Herald’s editor arranged for Rochefort to be taken off the train as it approached New York and conveyed the last few miles of his journey from the outskirts in a covered carriage. Such was the tumultuous reception of the first instalment of his article on 31 May, however, that not even the discretion of the Central Hotel on Broadway could seclude him from the besieging crowds, and he was obliged to retire briefly to the New York countryside in search of peace in which to prepare his speech for the promised public meetings.

  The first lecture, delivered to a highly distinguished audience of several hundred in the New York Academy of Music, moved many who heard it to tears at the plight of the Communards and the fate of the Commune. One reference to the Kanaks claimed the last word on the subject of savagery: ‘We send them missionaries,’ he opined acerbically in a line he would repeat, ‘while it is they who should send us their political leaders.’ Further dates were added to a lecture tour that already included Boston and Philadelphia, but then, quite unexpectedly, Rochefort announced that he was to return to Europe.

  His own explanation was homesickness, an ailment familiar to the exiled Communards of America: men like Edmond Levraud, who wrote of ‘the disgust and the hatred I feel for this rotten race … [where] everyone is corrupt and degraded.’ But Rochefort’s sentimentality and fastidiousness were as nothing compared to his journalistic instinct for the scoop. Grousset suggested that Rochefort had intentionally tricked his companions in order to steal a competitive lead in selling his account to the press back home: Rochefort’s booking of the last berth on the next Atlantic steamer coincided with news that his article had boosted sales of the Herald in Europe fivefold. Alternatively, a peremptory warning from those who feared the incendiary effect of his eloquence may have convinced him to leave.

  Rochefort’s travels of the previous 280 days had taken him almost 30,000 miles. As an achievement it could not rival that of the Bostonian radical and railway magnate George Francis Train, who four years earlier had managed a global circumnavigation in only seventy days, before heading off to France to try to claim the leadership of the Marseilles commune; nor that of Verne’s fictional hero Phileas Fogg, who had scraped in just under the eighty-day limit stipulated by his Reform Club bet in 1873. But considering the extraordinary circumstances under which it was undertaken, and the enforced sojourn of several months in New Caledonia, his adventure surely outshone the Cook’s Tour of 1872, whose well-heeled clients had boasted at every step of their 220-day itinerary in frequent dispatches to The Times of London. One last hazard lay ahead when, after nine days on board, Rochefort decided to land at Queenstown in Ireland. Finding that the Catholic country had little sympathy for a man tarred with the Commune’s killing of the clergy, he was lucky to escape being lynched by a priest-led mob. London, however, promised a warmer reception altogether.

  Of all France’s neighbours, Britain had probably received more refugees from the Commune than any other country. While the fires still raged in Paris, Prime Minister Gladstone had signalled Britain’s hospitality by declaring that there would be no extradition of those fleeing political persecution, despite pressure from cer
tain quarters of the press. For decades it had been a central tenet of British liberalism that where social unrest was widespread, abroad at least, the causes were better dealt with by concessions that repression. Whilst Lord Elcho argued in Parliament that an exception be made for ‘the authors of what can only be regarded by the civilised world as the greatest crime on record’, initially, at least, there was strong sympathy in the country for the Communards and no little distaste for their persecutors.

  Hypocrisy characterised the attitude adopted towards the refugees by the Versailles government, which vehemently complained that Britain was sheltering subversive criminals, yet made no effort to close the French ports. When Gladstone’s government responded that the immigrants imposed a heavy social burden, there even followed an insouciant French offer to hand a subsidy to those departing. Up to 1,500 Communards arrived, their dependants raising the total number close to the 4,500 who had been punitively transported. Some arrived at Dover in chains, abandoned there for the local workhouse to feed before setting them off on the tramp to London, unshod, on blood-caked feet. Not until late 1872 had the stream of vagrants eased, by when the charitable system was overflowing and the capital’s parks were littered nightly with French families sleeping rough.

  Through a mixture of self-help and public benevolence, by the time of Rochefort’s arrival the Communards had begun to put down roots. For the most part they congregated in the rookeries of St Giles or Saffron Hill, or else the marginally better slums around Charlotte Street, north of Soho, that became an expatriate Belleville or Montmartre-in-miniature. From a top floor in Newman Passage, a cooperative marmite fed several hundred a day, while small tailors’ and cobblers’ workshops began to market the craft skills of which Paris found itself suddenly deprived. Keeping the Communards at arm’s length, most middle-class British benefactors preferred to channel their donations through the Positivist Society. Others shamelessly submitted their requirements, as if to an employment agency: for every £100 from an MP, or £5 from a cautious housekeeper, there was a request from a brothel owner in search of willing seventeen-year-olds, or a ‘pinching housewife’ offering £1 a year for a cut-price maid-of-all-work. Compassion fatigue soon set in, and suspicion displaced pity.

  Although the British government declined to pass on surveillance reports to their Continental counterparts, such dossiers were nevertheless compiled, with the Communards subject to frequent night raids by the Metropolitan Police. Inhabiting the dystopian metropolis depicted in Gustave Doré’s London: A Pilgrimage of 1872, or Thomson’s epic 1874 poem ‘City of Dreadful Night’, morale among the London émigrés suffered, and paranoia took hold. News of the escape of the New Caledonia fugitives provided a welcome boost, and Rochefort’s arrival in London, just in advance of Grousset, was a rare opportunity for festivity. His decision to decline the invitation to a banquet held in honour of the escapees on the grounds that it might appear ‘incendiary and saturnalian’ sounded a misjudged note, however, that was at once pious, high-handed and cowardly. It seemed to confirm what his detractors had alleged: that he was an egotistical dilettante, a mere contrarian whose radicalism was superficial and self-serving. ‘Rochefort is not a revolutionary,’ a police informer claimed to have been told by the journalist Félix Pyat, ‘he is a boy who stands next to the revolution in order to advance himself, but he has none of its principles; he has only hatred of governments.’ Despite being Rochefort’s most venomous rival, and a possible police agent, Pyat’s character observations were rarely less than astute.

  Rochefort’s revival of La Lanterne in London, and his spirited if thwarted attempts to have it smuggled into France using techniques developed during the Prussian siege for the pigeon post, do not suggest a man who planned to retire his pen from the polemical struggle. But social standing mattered to the marquis, who was stung to discover that Madame Tussaud’s waxworks museum had moved his statue from the company of France’s elite to the Chamber of Horrors. Having excited the interest of the high-society hostess Madame Olga Novikoff, neither he nor Grousset were in any position to decline invitations to her cosmopolitan soirées at Claridge’s that were attended by such luminaries as Gladstone, Matthew Arnold and the newspaper editor W. T. Stead. In her role as an arch tsarist propagandist and occasional Russian police agent, however, Novikoff always played a long game, and it is tempting to imagine that her cultivation of Rochefort was no exception.

  During the few months that Rochefort remained in London, he monitored events in France closely in the fervent hope of a general amnesty that would allow the convicted Communards to return home. It was not to be. France had plunged into collective amnesia, and memories of the Commune and of those diverse characters associated with it had been hastily brushed under the carpet. Tourists continued to visit Paris as they might the ruins of Pompeii, to witness the archaeology of catastrophe, but the City of Light was already rising from the ashes. Observing the flowers that had begun to grow among the ruins of Paris, the patron of the Café Guerbois in Montmartre, a favourite haunt of the Impressionist artists, remarked that ‘Inanimate matter, no more than men, is not made to suffer protracted grief.’ He perfectly expressed the mood of the times. The artist Monet, recently returned from England where he had spent the war, enjoyed glittering success for the first time in his career with paintings informed by a similar sentiment. His famous views of the riverbanks at Argenteuil and Asnières give no hint of the fierce fighting that had taken place there, focusing instead on scenes of middle-class leisure, while the Parc Monceau, one of the bloodiest butcher’s yards of the Versaillais execution squads, is depicted drowning in blossom.

  Those seeking to lose themselves further in the Catholic and bourgeois mythology being laid down by the Third Republic need only have wandered up through the narrow, twisting streets of Montmartre, inhabited now only by widows and grieving mothers, to where the foundations were being laid for the most strident symbol of what that ideal republic had become. The decision to build the Sacré-Coeur marked an incontrovertible reassertion of Catholic France’s dominance over its capital city. Designed in a neo-Romanesque style intended to evoke the churches of the pious, peasant south, its bleached dome would, its architects planned, loom above the city, a purifying presence. When it was revealed that the site purchased for its erection in 1875 included the very garden where the generals Lecomte and Thomas has been killed on the first day of the Communard insurrection, the Catholic Bulletin du Voeu expressed disingenuous surprise at the coincidence. Oriels of sunlight breaking from behind clouds over Montmartre had demonstrated divine approval of the site, declared the newly installed Archbishop Guibert, but the true reason for the choice was clear: to expiate the crimes of the Church’s enemies, on ground made sacred by those martyred in the Catholic cause.

  The Catholic Church was again ascendant, flush with new state subsidies and with its educational function, of which it had been stripped by the first act of the republican government, now restored by MacMahon’s government. It was confident too, unequivocally damning the Commune as ‘the work of Satan’ at the ceremony to lay the first stone of the Sacré-Coeur’s choir. There was clearly no place in this France for Henri Rochefort, the Mephistophelian polemicist whose deference-defying journalism many blamed for the country’s descent into nihilist chaos. Even Gambetta appeared to turn his back on his erstwhile ally, arguing, not unreasonably, that the country was not ready for his return. And if Rochefort were tempted to test the vigilance of the country’s security arrangements with a clandestine foray across the border, his expedition would have been short-lived. For in the previous three years, five million pages from the prefecture’s archive of criminal records, destroyed by Raoul Rigault in the Commune’s dying days, had been painstakingly reconstructed by cross-referencing with those of every court, tribunal and prison in France.

  For his next haven, Rochefort chose Switzerland, from where the smugglers’ routes to Paris were less well guarded than those across the Channel, allowing him to main
tain distribution of La Lanterne. Not long after his arrival, however, he sat for a portrait by Courbet, who had escaped back to his native region of the Jura, on the Swiss side of the frontier, only to be declared liable by the French government for the 320,000-franc bill to rebuild the Vendôme Column. It was a chastening experience. Courbet’s still lifes of the time expressed a soul locked into trauma, struggling to free itself but numbed in the attempt. Trout lie glassy-eyed, the hooks caught in their mouths and the fishing line tugging tortuously from out of frame, their blood dripping on stones that recall the slippery red cobbles of the Paris killing fields.

  Invited by Courbet to view his portrait, Rochefort revealed a rare glimpse of self-loathing, recoiling from what he saw as the image of a Portuguese diamond merchant: shallow, mercenary and self-regarding. Trapped among the dispossessed and embittered, it would not be easy for Rochefort to reconcile himself to his own company.

  For Louise Michel, left to languish in New Caledonia, Rochefort’s escape had made life far harder, with the imposition of a new regime whose severity would have been unrecognisable to the fugitives. The slightest infraction of the rules was punished with a spell in the sweltering cells, while the only work by which the deportees could now earn subsistence wages was on the chain gangs. The days of night swims, fishing and hunting were over, and while the ‘harmonious cooperation’ of the Kanaks in the face of ever more demeaning colonial oppression continued to encourage Louise Michel’s belief in the perfectibility of man and society, any residual hopes of building a Rousseauist Utopia on the island crumbled away. Money orders from Georges Clemenceau and letters from Victor Hugo kept her spirits up, along with wholly impractical plans for an escape by raft, but the prurient interest shown by both her fellow Communards and the authorities in her ménage with Natalie Lemel soured her existence. Michel resisted attempts to separate them, insisting as always that her only passion was for the revolution, but the malicious rumour that they were lovers eventually led to an acrimonious split between the two women.