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

by Alex Butterworth

  It was no accident, however, that the real business of the congress was ultimately settled in camera. While many delegates may have been emotionally inclined to fall in with his absolute advocacy of extremism, Serreaux had clearly sensed the suspicions of Kropotkin and Malatesta about his true identity, and had attempted to allay them by taking the pair to visit his venerable aunt in her long-established London home. Malatesta, however, recognised in the aunt’s house furniture from a second-hand shop that he regularly passed, confirming the agent’s subterfuge. Cunning rather than confrontation was deemed the wisest response, and mixed into the congress’ final resolutions – the reaffirmation of the policy of ‘propaganda by deed’ in a moderated form, and the agreement to learn the handling of chemicals, for purposes of self-defence and revolutionary warfare rather than terrorist aggression – were concessions to Serreaux that could be quickly discarded.

  The proposed creation of a central bureau of information, supposedly to channel communications and give focus to the movement’s disparate activities, would provide the authorities with a convenient junction at which to intercept intelligence on anarchist plans, while allowing them to give substance to the notion of an international conspiracy whose tentacles reached around the globe. It was everything Andrieux must have dreamed of. After discussing its organisation with Lev Hartmann, however, Malatesta let the idea wither from neglect. ‘It is not by an International League, with endless letters read by the police, that the conspiracy will be mounted,’ of that he was certain, ‘it will be mounted by isolated groups.’

  The loss did not matter to Andrieux personally, however, who had resigned as prefect of police within a week of the congress concluding. Political interference and the removal of the prefect’s independent power were the reasons cited, but his real concern may have been what might be revealed about his operational methods, once subject to political scrutiny.

  On one subject, at least, the congress had been able to agree wholeheartedly: the injustice of Johann Most’s trial. The English delegates in particular saw it as their duty to rally to his defence, inspired, perhaps, by Most’s counsel, who claimed to have taken on the case in order to ensure that English rather than Russian law prevailed. Standing on the steps of the Old Bailey, when the congress was not in session, they peddled copies of Freiheit. Meanwhile, public meetings at the Mile End Waste provided delegates with an opportunity to let off steam, after hours cooped in a small and smoky room. Their efforts had no influence on the outcome, though. The jury’s guilty verdict was delivered promptly, having needed little discussion, and its pleas for clemency in the sentencing, out of sympathy for all Most had suffered abroad, were just as quickly disregarded. In light of the Establishment’s opprobrium of Most, the maximum sentence was a foregone conclusion. Condemned to two years’ hard labour, the unfortunate Most was dragged off to pick oakum in the medieval conditions of Clerkenwell gaol: forced to split tarred rope down to its fibres, with bleeding fingernails, for ten hours a day.

  If the aim of his prosecution had indeed been to influence the American policy on the extradition of Fenians, it failed: a week after the verdict, the State Department refused Britain’s request point blank, leaving Gladstone to personally pursue other, less orthodox methods of counter-terrorism. Among the last letters that Allan Pinkerton would write on behalf of his agency, before it passed into his sons’ hands following his death a year later, was one to the British prime minister, pitching for work in the delicate matter of disrupting the Fenian’s fund-raising in the United States. Unsurprisingly, it was not only the European democracies who were prepared to deal with the Pinkertons: before long the tsarist police would be among the agency’s clients.

  It had been a significant achievement for so many anarchists to convene in London from so many distant countries, even while the aftershocks of the tsar’s murder continued to reverberate. For those more rootless émigrés among the delegates who stayed on for some weeks after the congress, as Kropotkin did to address several public meetings, the risks entailed in their visit to the British capital grew. When the time came for them to leave, the climate across the Continent had become significantly more hostile to political troublemakers, and their destination a matter of doubt. In the more sensationalist French press, whose reports fed off propaganda out of Russia and the fears of its own population, the ‘nihilists’ who had killed the tsar were firmly conflated with native anarchists. In Switzerland, as Malatesta could have warned Kropotkin, a new intolerance was abroad. Yet it was nevertheless to Switzerland, through France, that he now travelled, drawn back by the presence of his young wife of two years, Sofia, whose medical studies tied her to Geneva.

  Even since March, Russian pressure had been building on Switzerland to expel its anti-tsarist refugees, the threatened sanctions severe and escalating: diplomatic relations would be broken off, Swiss citizens expelled from St Petersburg and prohibitive tariffs imposed on trade. Failure to cede, it was implied, would ultimately incur the same penalty as had loomed after the revolutions of 1848: annexation by Germany, only this time with Russian acquiescence. A small country, Switzerland was in no position to resist, and there were few fugitives whose presence was more likely to rile Russia than Kropotkin’s. Barely had he arrived when a theoretical article published by him in Le Révolté concerning the tsar’s assassination was seized upon as a pretext for his detention and expulsion. Dissuaded by friends from the suicidal madness of returning to Russia, where no one could be trusted and he would soon be betrayed, Kropotkin found himself adrift.

  Events in France that autumn fuelled fears that a home-grown campaign of terror was imminent, when a young weaver called Florian murdered a middle-aged doctor, mistaking him for a politician; despite having no ostensible anarchist affiliations, he cited the ideology as justification for his act. The febrile atmosphere was exacerbated by growing political instability when Léon Gambetta, on beginning his first and long-awaited ministry that November, staked his political career on a policy of electoral reform, in a quest to end the factionalism that racked France’s political life. When financial fears surrounding the viability of the Catholic Union Générale bank were added to the mix, the situation seemed highly volatile. In other circumstances, Kropotkin would surely have stayed to reap the revolutionary benefits when, within days of the New Year dawning, the bank crashed and Gambetta fell from office. As it was, the warning of a threat to his life by a secret society of diehard tsarist partisans, communicated to him through back channels by a high-ranking source in the Russian government, forced his return to London just before Christmas.

  Though the threat was apparently real, the plot against Kropotkin might have sprung direct from the pages of an adventure story, and surely made for good telling during the festive season, as the émigrés moved between the Patriotic Club and celebrations with the old English radicals in Clerkenwell, and one another’s homes. The tsarist assassins meant to avenge the late tsar and defend the new by hiring a ‘consummate swordsman’ who would kill Kropotkin in a duel; Rochefort was to be similarly challenged, and if the strategy was successful then further swashbuckling assassinations were to follow, with Hartmann next on the hit list.

  Hartmann would, at least, have been able to counter Kropotkin’s party piece with a compelling tale of his own, concerning the Italian spies who dogged him and Malatesta during their studies in chemistry and mineralogy in the British Museum. But any laughter their stories evinced, nervous or otherwise, would have been tinged with sadness at the condition of one of their fellow guests. The aggressive paranoia that Kropotkin had detected in Cafiero during their dealings earlier in the year had begun to manifest itself in a peculiar new symptom: he was ‘haunted by the notion that he might be enjoying more than his fair share of sunlight’. It was a tragic, if strangely appropriate ailment to afflict the anarchist aristocrat who had devoted years of strain and suffering to the cause, and one that marked the beginning of a slow and pitiful decline into insanity.

  Agains
t this sombre backdrop, and despite the sympathetic minds he encountered in Britain, Kropotkin could not help feeling enervated by the country’s political stolidity, just as he had done on his first arrival. Two decades before, his compatriot and ideological forebear Alexander Herzen had called life in London ‘as boring as that of worms in a cheese’. It was a sentiment that Kropotkin now echoed and acted upon, rashly announcing ‘Better a French prison than this grave.’ His wish would be answered all too soon.

  Having left his story of the assassin-duellist in the safe hands of the British press, by way of insurance, Kropotkin next made directly for the epicentre of social conflict in France: the strike-bound second city of France, industrial Lyons, in whose recession-hit mines and silk factories workers had risen up in protest at their working conditions. Louise Michel, who had addressed the local silk workers on a number of occasions in 1881 and 1882, described their campaign as ‘a savage revolt against management and church oppression’, which had as its target the symbols of Church power: in night-time raids, crosses were stolen from religious sites and thrown down wells or otherwise desecrated. However, the wild, carnivalesque atmosphere had soon turned into something darker and more dangerous as the Black Band, as they became known, appeared to turn its ire on individuals.

  Threatening letters to leading figures in Montceau-les-Mines were followed by physical attacks. The campaign of violence reached its highest pitch on 22 October 1882, with a bomb thrown into the Bellecour theatre in Lyons, fatally wounding one of its staff. It was a turning point in public perception of the strikers, who despite having had little contact with local anarchists were seen as terroristic conspirators. Cyvoct, an anarchist, was accused of the bomb-throwing but fled to Belgium before he could be apprehended, while claims that the bomb itself had been donated by the nihilists of Geneva further fed the myth of an international revolutionary party.

  Interviewed by L’Express newspaper, Sophie Bardina, the ‘Auntie’ of the old Fritsche group of female medical students, tried to make clear the distinction: ‘Yes, we are anarchists,’ she said of the Russians who had recently killed the tsar, ‘but, for us, anarchy does not signify disorder, but harmony in all social relations; for us, anarchy is nothing but the negation of oppressions which stifle the development of free societies.’ Despite the scrupulous semantics of Reclus’ definition that ‘All revolutionary acts are by their very nature anarchical, whatever the power which seeks to profit from them’, neither he nor Kropotkin, both of whom were in Thonon at the time of the Bellecour bombing, appeared eager to dissociate themselves from the violence. After the shooting dead of a minor industrialist in the French transportation hub of Roanne by a disgruntled ex-employee in the spring of 1882, Le Révolté incautiously hailed the act as a laudable example of ‘propaganda by deed’, while Kropotkin’s speeches to the Lyons strikers would be eagerly seized upon as evidence of incitement.

  It was against the backdrop of the ongoing strikes that Emile Zola wrote Germinal. Set twenty years earlier in the fictional northern coal town of ‘Montsou’, its hyper-realist depiction of the landscape around the ravenous maw of the La Voreux coal mine, and its vision of poverty making animals of men, carry powerful echoes of the strikes of August 1882. The novel is interesting too, for the fictional portrait it paints of the Russian anarchist Souvarine: a cerebral, sensitive but outspoken opponent of the protagonist’s Marxist ‘balderdash’, whose semi-detached advocacy of the need to tear down the old world and start afresh drip-feeds the violence that rages around him. Bakunin is usually thought the model, though the characterisation is perhaps closer to a demonic version of Kropotkin: indeed Souvarine’s fondness for his pet rabbit echoes Kropotkin’s passion for the species as ‘the symbol of perdurability [that] stood out against selection’.

  Whilst not culpable of the kind of gargantuan act of destructiveness ultimately carried out by Zola’s Souvarine, Kropotkin found himself squarely in the frame for encouraging the violence of the current strikers. Following the arrests of close associates, he came under intense surveillance, pending the authorities’ decision on how to deal with such a high-profile offender. ‘Flocks, literally flocks of Russian spies besieged the house,’ he wrote, ‘seeking admission under all possible pretexts, or simply tramping in pairs, trios, and quartets in front of the house.’

  With his wife’s sick brother to nurse, and their new baby daughter to attend to, it was a testing, nervous time for Kropotkin, whose family was living in straitened circumstances. In the space of a few hours, however, overnight on 21 December 1882, matters were resolved in the saddest fashion when the death of his brother-in-law was followed, at dawn, by Kropotkin’s arrest. His friends rallied round: Reclus immediately offered to give himself up to the authorities, in the hope that it would shame those persecuting his friend. In the prevailing climate, though, even Reclus’ intellectual status counted for little. With Switzerland slipping ever further towards political and moral intolerance, he had also recently come close to expulsion for the scandalous indecency of allowing his two daughters to marry their sweethearts with neither priest nor mayor in attendance.

  Kropotkin’s long, tightly controlled speech to the Lyons court was a masterpiece of anarchist oratory: ‘We want liberty, that is to say that we reclaim for every human being the right and the means to do as he pleases, and not to do what he does not like; to satisfy fully all his needs, with no other limit than the impossibilities of nature and respect for the equal needs of his neighbours…we believe that capital, the common inheritance of all humanity, since the fruit of collaboration of past and present generations, must be at the disposal of all.’ And when cross-examined he challenged the loose logic employed by the prosecution, setting a precedent of witty sidestepping for future anarchists on trial. The verdict and heavy sentence, though, had been widely predicted. Most of the sixty-five other anarchists with whom he shared the dock were imprisoned for six months or a year, on the spurious grounds of membership of the defunct International. Kropotkin was condemned to a full five years, incurred a 2,000-franc fine and was placed under official surveillance for a further decade. The tsar could scarcely have hoped for a harsher punishment had he dictated it himself.

  Neither a grand petition from ‘English savants’, inscribed in fine calligraphy, and bristling with the names of professors, editors and luminaries of the Royal Societies, urging that Kropotkin’s intellectual importance warranted special treatment, nor the intervention of Victor Hugo, made any impression on the procurator general or the minister of the interior. The French authorities looked to Andalucia, where their Spanish counterparts were busy suppressing rural insurrections coordinated by what they took to calling La Mano Negra, the Black Hand, purely on the basis of the imprint of an ink-stained hand found on a wall near the scene of one crime. ‘At a time when anarchism is on the march, we can see no reason to grant mercy,’ they concluded, remarking snidely that the special treatment that Kropotkin received in Clairvaux prison, thanks to donations from well-wishers, had already aroused the resentment of his fellow inmates.

  The next of the congress delegates to find themselves back behind bars was Louise Michel. After spending ten days in prison in January 1883 for commemorating the anniversary of Blanqui’s death, she spent the rest of the year working tirelessly to help the amnestied Communards, even returning to London to try to raise funds for a Paris soup kitchen. Accepting all invitations to speak at meetings, she frequently had to disappoint audiences when she was accidentally double – or triple-booked. ‘The cause of the revolution is not served by pointless murder’, she told one packed hall, but was uncompromising in her threat that ‘If they import the Russian system to fight us, we’ll have the courage of the Russians to detroy it!’ Shouts of ‘Long live dynamite!’ punctuated her speeches, and her pledge to march henceforth behind the black flag of mourning rather than the red of revolution did nothing to reassure the police.

  It was under the black flag that she and Emile Pouget led a demonstration in
March to the politically sensitive site of Les Invalides, the resting place of Bonaparte’s sarcophagus, where Michel offered an impassioned defence of the people’s right to bread. Roused by her speech, the marchers became a mob, ransacking the bakeries of l’esplanade des Invalides and rue de Sèvres, before heading off towards the Elysée Palace. Alive to how bread riots could presage revolution, the police speedily intervened, but apprehending Michel herself proved far from straightforward. For three weeks one of the most closely watched figures in the country simply disappeared. Posters bearing her iconic features were circulated internationally, with false sightings reported as far apart as London and Geneva. Then, out of the blue, Michel simply presented herself for arrest at her local Paris police station. Having all the while been holed up in a nearby flat, tending her sick mother, she revelled in having made fools of the prefecture.

  ‘We amnestied the Communards: look where that’s got us’ complained Le Figaro, and was relieved when the error was to some extent rectified, in a sentence for Michel of six years in prison and a further ten under surveillance. Other more moderate publications, however, feared that the severity of the sentence might prove counterproductive, with even one normally hostile journalist going so far as to comment that ‘Two more judgements like those, and the anarchist party might become a reality.’ In fact, while Louise Michel served her time in Saint-Lazare, other factors would decide the matter.

  11

  The Holy Brotherhood

  Russia and Paris, 1881–1885

  Retribution against those who plotted the tsar’s death in 1881 had been swift, coming while St Petersburg was still draped in the black crepe of mourning, and Alexander II’s heir sheltered behind the counter-mining fortifications of the palace at Gatchina. Having shown their ineptitude in failing to prevent the attack, Russia’s newly reorganised police department conducted the round-ups with striking efficiency. Rysakov, who had thrown the first bomb, broke under interrogation, and using information he provided, the police soon tracked down the leading plotters and apprehended them amid a flurry of shoot-outs and suicides. On 26 March 1881, seven of the conspirators were put on trial and, a week later, condemned to death. Many fled abroad and by the middle of May, Vera Figner alone of the executive committee remained at liberty in Russia. Thirty-six conspirators would appear in court, eighteen were condemned to death, five executed and the rest sent to prison for a total of 500 years.