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

by Alex Butterworth

  Louis Andrieux must have observed the consequences of Rochefort’s campaign with some distaste, if only for the tragic suicide of Albert Joly it caused, his reputation destroyed in the crossfire. It was barely two years since Joly’s brother Maurice, author of The Dialogues between Machiavelli and Montesquieu in Hell, that had satirised the intrigues and ambition of Napoleon III, had also died by his own hand. Amidst the shock surrounding the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, however, it must have been with near disbelief that Andrieux read Rochefort’s article in L’Intransigeant in which he proudly boasted of having received a letter from a Russian in Geneva, signed only ‘D’, inviting him to be the first to hear the full truth about the assassination. For whilst alarming reports flooded in from French police agents that Rochefort ‘has gone to conspire with the nihilists’, the popular impression being propagated by the Russian government was that the murderous conspiracy had a strongly Jewish flavour. Then again, Rochefort had never been known for principled consistency.

  Despite assurances from the informant ‘Hervé’ that Rochefort had known ‘D’ for a couple of years and was simply touting a journalistic scoop, Andrieux must have feared that his visit to Switzerland signified something more sinister. Even ‘Droz’, usually among the more level-headed police assets, reported proposals for the creation of a ‘European revolutionary party’, insisting that among those nihilists who had been frequent visitors to Rochefort’s Geneva apartment, the details of the tsar’s assassination were well known in advance. Most alarmingly of all, however, he warned that ‘Alexander III will be no safer, and be assured that further blows will follow in Italy, Germany and Paris.’

  Primed to swoop, it was frustrating for Andrieux when even his expensive infiltration of the Paris anarchists delivered merely reports of bluster, and none of incriminating action. ‘Imitate the nihilists, and I shall be at your head,’ Michel urged her comrades on 13 May 1881, in explicit contradiction of the eschewal of violence in her homecoming speech. ‘On the ruins of a rotten society …we will establish a new social world.’ Anarchist braggards talked of destroying the Palais Bourbon, the restored seat of the National Assembly, though no one volunteered for the hazardous task of planting the dynamite. Softer targets were then mooted – the Elysée Palace, the ministry of the interior, the Bank of France, even the Prefecture of Police itself – but still nothing definite. Andrieux was growing impatient: ‘it was necessary that the act was accomplished for repression to be possible’, he later admitted. Finally, his agent provocateur coaxed the anarchists to choose a victim: they would strike at Monsieur Adolphe Thiers, the nemesis of the Commune.

  The prefect’s officers were already waiting in the shadows of the Saint-Germain district as the terrorists approached the stately figure of Thiers, who sat stock still and oblivious. Silently, in the moonlight, the conspirators unwrapped a sardine tin stuffed with gun cotton from its protective handkerchief, rested it on the old man’s shoulder and lit the fuse. A flash, a bang, and the police emerged to make their arrests. But the damage was minimal: a smudge of carbon. Thiers himself had died four years earlier, and the bronze statue that the terrorists had targeted to make their statement withstood the blast. Such was the futility of the attack that the authorities decided not even to bring charges: an early, disregarded warning of how provocation could backfire.

  There was, however, the consolation for Andrieux of a tip-off about the forthcoming London Congress at which all the leading anarchists would be present, and which would provide the prefect with a great opportunity for mischief-making. ‘In three months,’ Droz wrote, ‘the congress which will take place in London will give you the secret of this vast organisation, but until then I can only urge you to engage a great deal of surveillance, because it is fascinating to see how the revolutionary spirit has become exalted…’

  10

  Voices in the Fog

  England and France, 1881–1883

  Aboard the John Helder, the last shipment of amnestied Communards from New Caledonia were in high spirits as they passed through the Channel in early November 1880, on their way to disembark in London. The fog awaiting them in the Thames Estuary, however, was so dense that even men whose families had navigated the river for generations refused to pilot the sightless ships to dock. Stranded vessels sounded their horns eerily though the smothering whiteness, and captains fretted over their cargoes, the produce of Britain’s wide empire – Indian tea, exotic fruits from Africa and Caribbean cotton. It was something altogether rarer, though, that was sought by the French émigrés who had chartered pleasure launches and fishing boats and bobbed out through the mist. Denizens of the Charlotte Street colony of ex-Communards and the slums of Saffron Hill, they had spent long years in exile, but now they discerned a glimmer of hope. ‘Bonhomme, bonhomme, il est temps que tu te reveilles’ they chanted, ‘Good fellow, it’s time for you to wake,’ and through the fog Louise Michel replied in kind, her sun-wizened face barely visible over the ghostly gunwale that loomed above them.

  It was an old Communard song, though it might have struck a chord with the exiles and political émigrés of other nationalities who had congregated in London: Russians, Germans, Italians, even the odd Belgian and Spaniard. For on arriving in the world’s great entrepôt, most soon sank into the depressed and somnolent state that prevailed among those who had been resident there for some time, the political activities to which they clung producing more noise than light. There were exceptions, of course. And among the many foreigners then enjoying Britain’s hospitality, none took greater advantage of the liberties it afforded than the German socialist Johann Most.

  It had been shortly after his expulsion from Germany in 1878 that Most had founded the newspaper Freiheit in London, to ‘hurl’, as he put it, ‘a thunderbolt at that miserable state of affairs’ created by Bismarck’s suppression of the socialists. At the time Marx had dismissed Most as a weathercock, while Engels had gleefully predicted that his publication would last no more than six months. Yet with its calls for a ‘revolution of the spirit’ the paper had thrived, consistently outwitting attempts by the German police to infiltrate its distribution network: each edition was published under a different title to avoid censorship and smuggled into Germany inside mattresses exported by a factory in Hull. Most’s audacity and outspokenness had made him something of a celebrity in Britain, not to say a tourist attraction. When the Belgian interior minister, Vandervelde, was in London, it was to observe the German firebrand in action that Sir Howard Vincent of the Metropolitan Police took him, the pair having disguised themselves to blend in with an audience that roared its approval of Most’s attack on the iniquities of society and his pitiless solutions.

  Their expedition was representative, in many respects, of the transformation in the methods and outlook of the British police that was then under way, as well as the factors that made it necessary. Vincent had spent time both in Russia, researching its military organisations, and with the French police in Paris, in his capacity as an unofficial assistant commissioner responsible for the creation of a central investigation department. He brought a new perspective to Scotland Yard, which had previously viewed its counterparts abroad with a certain liberal disdain. The reform of the old corrupt British detective branch had been necessitated precisely because of the opportunities afforded by its collaboration with the Belgian police for racketeering: the operation of private surveillance services by officers, and their sale of alcohol to brothels. Now, though, a growing recognition of the international menace of political subversion provided a new imperative for cross-border cooperation, and the adoption of new methods of working.

  Despite the recruitment of German-speaking detectives by Vincent’s deputy, Adolphus Williamson, however, the British government was finally forced to take action against Most not by reports from its own officers, but by intelligence received from foreign agents. A ‘virulent philippic’, was how a French agent named ‘Star’ described the speech Most delivered to a rally in mi
d-March 1881, celebrating the assassination of the tsar. But whilst the Home Secretary, Harcourt, agreed that Most had preached ‘the most atrocious doctrines’, he insisted that he could do nothing without an ‘authentic record’ of what had been said.

  To many, both in London and abroad, such a circumspect response was unacceptable. Bismarck was furious. Despite having allowed Most to slip through his grasp three years earlier, he now wrote in person to the British government, while his ambassador intervened directly with Queen Victoria, who added her voice to that of the Russian propagandist Madame Novikoff in urging the first prosecution in British history for a statement made in support of a crime committed abroad. Even the British public, which normally prided itself on supporting the liberal principle of freedom of speech, especially when under threat by foreign despots, was temporarily persuaded to view the old enemy, Russia, in a more sympathetic light. ‘The old Russia with the Siberian mines in the background was completely obscured for a time by the much more attractive figure of young Muscovy shedding its heart’s blood in the Balkans,’ the influential editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, W. T. Stead, would later recollect. He had himself ruthlessly exploited the heroic death of Novikoff’s brother in Bosnia to help shift public opinion in favour of Russia; both he and Gladstone were regular attendees at Novikoff’s salon.

  Ultimately, though, it was probably domestic security considerations that precipitated Most’s arrest. Following a Fenian attack on an infantry barracks in Lancashire in January 1881, the bombing campaign by those desiring Irish independence had continued with an attempt to blow up the Mansion House in London using ‘infernal machines’ imported from America in cement barrels. Three months later, with Gladstone’s government in the process of petitioning the United States for the extradition of those responsible for the bombs’ manufacture, it was considered politic for Britain to show itself amenable to similar requests from abroad. Johann Most, usually represented as the vulpine predator, was to be offered up as a sacrificial lamb on the altar of political convenience.

  Most’s own paper provided the requisite ‘authentic record’ of the incriminating speech, by publishing an article expressing the same views, and he was duly arrested. Whether by a quirk of court scheduling, or a clever contrivance to link terrorism and anarchism in the public mind, his trial coincided with the July congress of international revolutionaries of which agent ‘Droz’ had warned Andrieux some months before. The coincidence that the revolutionaries’ conference room above a public house in Charrington Street, Euston, was next door to one booked for a meeting of Fenians must have simplified the surveillance operations of the British police.

  The tense relationship between the neighbouring groups of insurrectionists did not augur well for the smooth running of what the congress organiser, the Communard Gustave Brocher, had advertised as ‘the school of human dignity, the amphitheatre where one vivisects a rotten society and dissects the corpse of misery, the laboratory of the social revolution’. Only a few weeks earlier, the Catholic Fenians had clashed violently with the atheistic anarchists over an allegedly blasphemous banner the anarchists had been carrying during a Hyde Park demonstration against British rule in Ireland. The ructions within the Anarchist Congress threatened to be far more disruptive, however, caused as they were, in large part, by the participation of police spies. Having infiltrated the proceedings, the aim of such agents was to ensure that the image the congress presented to the world at large should be of a ‘laboratory’ dedicated solely to the development of explosives and terror tactics. It was as Kropotkin had feared. ‘Let us go to London,’ he had written with a scathing facetiousness to a colleague some months earlier, ‘Let us cut a pathetic figure in the eyes of Europe.’ Despite Malatesta’s reassurances that he was overstating the problem, Kropotkin’s misgivings about the advisability of the congress, and the scope for humiliating discord that it offered, seemed set to be borne out.

  In the event, Kropotkin agreed to attend, playing along with the fiction by which delegates represented cities and countries from across the world, though most had only a tenuous link to the place in question. Chaikovsky joined him. Malatesta appeared as the delegate from Constantinople and Egypt, where he had participated in the fight against the colonialist British, as well as Turin, the Marches, Tuscany, Naples, Marseilles and Geneva. Taking time off from the ice-cream vending business that he had established since arriving in England a couple of months before, following his expulsion from Switzerland and France, he was accompanied by the Italians Merlino and Carlo Cafiero. John Neve, Most’s publisher and right-hand man, was among the forty-five delegates, as were Frank Kitz and Joseph Lane from England; Madame LeCompte from Boston reported back to the Paterson Labor Standard, which was widely read by the émigré French and Italian factory workers in New Jersey. Louise Michel came too, back in London after her fleeting visit in the fog, as the delegate from the city of Reims. Also from France was Prefect Andrieux’s plant, the provocative newspaper proprietor Serreaux, ready to exploit any fault lines that opened up.

  The previous October, in Clarens, Kropotkin and Reclus had worked hard together to prepare a secret agenda for the congress that would emphasise the need to bring about the total destruction of all existing institutions before a genuine social revolution could take root. It was a triumph of hope over experience. Both believed that, after years in the wilderness, anarchism’s day was fast approaching: that whilst hard evidence of a society in crisis was not yet to hand, the scent of trouble and opportunity was unmistakable. The moment must not be missed. And yet when Brocher was approached with their proposals, he showed infuriatingly little sense of urgency, merely asking whether it was ‘really necessary to fix in advance the terms of a vote that might not take place?’ The principles of anti-authoritarianism, it seemed, would govern the running of the congress as well as the content of the debates.

  Malatesta’s own behaviour in the weeks preceding the arrival of the international contingent hardly helped establish a mood of harmony: he had challenged his lover’s adoptive brother Giuseppe Zanardelli to a duel for his vicious attempts to undermine the anarchists at the Ghent Congress four years earlier. But in the hothouse of the Charrington Street pub, differences quickly multiplied and the old resentments resurfaced. Blanquists from France, Germany and Belgium pressed their simplistic arguments for immediate revolution; Most’s acolytes, Neve and Joseph Peukert, self-styled leader of the Autonomie group, wrangled in the background over their relative seniority during his imprisonment; while those with a lingering respect for Marx were ready to put their oar in, eager as ever to assert control over anything that might resemble a revival of the First International. While no minutes were taken of the congress, with even its delegates kept officially anonymous, the focus of the heated debates can be gauged from Malatesta’s record of his own contributions.

  Attempting to seize the initiative, Malatesta appealed to those ‘who have no faith in legal methods and no wish to participate in political life, who want to fight with the greatest haste against those who oppress, and to take by force that which is denied by force’; there was no place for ‘innocent utopianists’ who favoured union with other socialist factions. He was not alone in recognising that victory would not come without struggle and sacrifice. ‘Death by rifle: is it less terrible than death by explosion,’ read a bullish letter from the anarchist miners of Belgium, whose friends had recently been shot by soldiers. Cafiero’s manifesto would doubtless also have been heard: ‘The bomb is too feeble to destroy the autocratic colossuses. Kill the property owners at the same time, prepare the peasant risings.’ Serreaux’s work was being done for him.

  Although not intrinsically opposed to violence in a just cause, Kropotkin viewed such bloodlust as something like a mania, and there were others too who would have sought to temper the rush to terror tactics. Underlying even Malatesta’s bellicose rhetoric, however, was the frustrated concern, expressed to delegates, that ‘we are fast approaching the point where a pa
rty must act or dissolve and where, if it is neither victor nor vanquished, it will die of corruption.’ And whilst Kropotkin may have struggled to communicate the subtlety of his and Reclus’ ideas amid the welter of opinionated debate, he did somehow manoeuvre the congress around the most dangerous pitfalls.

  On the ethical underpinning of anarchism, Kropotkin talked down Serreaux’s demands that any mention of ‘morality’ be excised: ‘Morality is to be understood in the sense that today’s society is founded on immorality; the abolition of immorality, through any means, will inaugurate morality’, he insisted on recording. But that did not imply any softening of anarchism’s militant stance, as he had made clear in a pamphlet published only two months earlier. ‘Acts of illegal protest, of revolt, of vengeance’ perpetrated by ‘lonely sentinels’, may well be necessary, he had concluded, while as part of a wider strategy of popular agitation they might even advance rather than set back the cause of revolution, since ‘by actions which compel general attention, the new idea seeps into people’s minds and wins converts’. As to the paradox of leadership in an anti-authoritarian movement, while the hierarchical character of the People’s Will displeased Kropotkin, Reclus had persuaded him of the advantages of small conspiratorial groups over pure collective action.