At the meeting arranged by Reuss a fortnight later in the Autonomie Club in London to debate the expulsion of Dave, the accused read out a letter from Neve detailing how he was now under surveillance. A month later Neve was snatched in Belgium, bundled over the border and thrown into a German prison from which he would never emerge, abandoned to scratch out the days until his death a decade later. Having served his purpose, Reuss was lucky to escape merely with expulsion from the Socialist League; a shredded document from a meeting in May 1887, now held together by many strips of Sellotape, testifies to the red heat at which tempers ran. Confrontations between the Metropolitan Police and league members, including Morris, during mass demonstrations at Dod Street in the East End and Trafalgar Square, had left even the British socialists with little tolerance for traitors or turncoats.
Now that Neve had been eliminated, almost the only trace that remained in Europe of Johann Most’s revolutionary ambitions took fictional form: while plotting The Princess Casamassima in 1886 Henry James struggled to accommodate Most’s demonic personality, in the end deciding to share his unappealing attributes between three characters: a bookbinder, a chemist and a professional German revolutionary. In November 1887, though, America provided the world with an iconic image that for some provided a counterpoint to the diabolical reputation that anarchism was acquiring: that of four gowned men on a gallows, below ropes noosed ready to stretch their sacrificial necks – the Haymarket martyrs.
The actual scene was witnessed by 200 spectators seated in the high, narrow execution chamber at 11.30 on the morning of 11 November. Of the five men sentenced to an exemplary death, Lingg had already cheated the hangman by biting down on an explosive cartridge smuggled into his prison cell, only to die in prolonged agony. The remaining four awaited their fate; while Parsons stood with a semblance of calm, Spies spoke through the hood that had been placed over his head. ‘There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today,’ he began, but before he could finish the trapdoor crashed open beneath him.
14
Decadence and Degeneration
Paris, 1885–1889
‘The city and its inhabitants strike me as uncanny,’ a young Sigmund Freud wrote home from Paris in late 1885, during his visit to observe the experimental work that the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot was conducting with hysterics at the Salpêtrière hospital. ‘The people seem to me to be of a different species from ourselves; I feel they are possessed of a thousand demons.’ Parisians were given, he believed, to ‘physical epidemics, historical mass convulsions’. And if France’s century-long history of revolution did not offer justification enough for Freud’s thesis, the tumultuous events that had taken place in the French capital the previous May would have confirmed his impression.
For almost three decades, Victor Hugo, the towering figure of the republican left, had woven a mythology of heroic resistance to injustice in which he played the leading role. Even as his powers as a novelist declined, his privileged position in French society, latterly as a senator, had allowed him to remain a solitary if somewhat ineffectual voice of opposition to the rulers of the Third Republic during the Communards’ exile. His death on 22 May 1885, two days short of the fourteenth anniversary of the Bloody Week, left his thousands of admirers bereft and disorientated. ‘The Panthéon is handed over to its original and legal purpose. Victor Hugo’s body shall be carried to it for burial’, the Chamber of Deputies declared, hopeful that the honour might encourage a dignified and orderly laying to rest. Instead, a spirit of crazed carnival was released in the city that, for the bourgeoisie, echoed with their nightmare imaginings of a recrudescent Commune.
The strangely heightened mood of the city was first apparent in Père Lachaise cemetery, where the annual commemoration for those slaughtered there in 1871 coincided with the period of mourning. Confrontation with police had become a regular feature of the occasion, but this time its ferocity left several radicals dead, and over seventy others injured. When rumours spread that the anarchists meant to channel the emotion around Hugo’s funeral into a popular uprising, three army regiments were drafted in, at significant expense, to accompany the cortège. As it was, the true melodrama on the route to the Panthéon had been scripted by the author himself, in specific instructions that his body should be carried in a pauper’s hearse. Never averse to a sentimental coup de théâtre, the paradox of a state funeral stripped of all the usual trappings tipped Hugo’s public straight from solemnity into the wild abandon of his wake. With the brothels closed for the day, the parks and boulevards hosted scenes of debauchery decried as ‘Babylonian’ by Hugo’s enemies in the Catholic press. But it was not only the whores who offered to celebrate this most priapic of authors with open arms; ‘How many women gave themselves to lovers, to strangers, with a burning fury to become mothers of immortals!’ marvelled one spectator of the night’s revels.
Behind the bars of the Saint-Lazare prison, Louise Michel paid tribute to her mentor, Hugo, in characteristically stormy verse. Her second major bereavement of the year, following the death in January of her beloved mother, Hugo’s death inspired poetry that seethed at the butchery of the defeated Communards, and the terrible weeks that those who escaped the immediate slaughter had spent in the concentration camp at Satory. This wasn’t, however, the only writing that Michel’s incarceration had inspired. Throughout the two years she spent in Saint-Lazare, her pen provided a consistent safety valve for her frustrated idealism and the resulting rage. In overwrought novels written in Vernian vein, she explored the possible futures of mankind. Les Microbes humaines offered a robust riposte to those who applied the new language of virology to the slum-dwelling underclass, promising the emergence of a new race that would carry forward the ideals of the social revolution; L’Ere nouvelle conjured a vision of nature’s power harnessed for the common good, with whirlpools directed to drive tunnels through mountains, and submarines colonising undersea continents. Then, quite suddenly, in the January after Hugo’s death, the new government of Charles de Freycinet, whose cabinet included four radicals, made an immediate demonstration of its reformist intentions by pardoning both Michel and Kropotkin.
The unexpected move, and Kropotkin’s release in particular, provoked international outrage. ‘I have never had ill feelings towards France, for which I have always felt great sympathy,’ Tsar Alexander III told the departing ambassador General Félix Appert in January 1886, after Appert had been expelled from Russia in protest, ‘but your government is no longer the republic, it is the Commune!’ Appert, who had headed the military tribunal that judged the Communards at Versailles, may well have sympathised with Russia’s decision to announce its withdrawal from the forthcoming centenary celebrations of the Revolution. Yet the consequent froideur between the two nations once again set back hopes of cooperation in confronting the power of Bismarck’s Germany. The delivery of any future alliance, it was clear, would require a cunning and resourceful midwife.
Typically Michel had stood on principle when news of her release came through and reacted to the interior minister’s order – ‘Extreme urgency Stop Liberate Louise Michel immediately Stop’ – by refusing to leave her cell. Since there had been no pardon for either her colleague Emile Pouget or the strikers from Montceau-les-Mines, Michel insisted, she could not accept privileged treatment. Increasingly desperate messages were exchanged between the prison and the ministry of the interior in search of a solution until, Michel would later claim, her pity for the painfully perplexed gaoler finally persuaded her to go.
The political climate she discovered outside the prison walls was much changed. Continuing arrests and trials in Lyons and the suppression of the émigré population in Switzerland had transformed Paris into the new heartland of a strengthening French anarchist movement. Groups clustered in the old Communard areas to the north and east of Paris – Belleville, Ménilmontant and Batignolles – with others scattered across the city and its suburbs. But it was in Mont
martre that radical sentiment was to be found in its most concentrated form, with clubs on nearly every corner in the maze of streets that clung to the hillside, and the new bohemian bars and cabarets as congenial neighbours. ‘If there is a thing to be mocked, a convention to be outraged, an idol to be destroyed, Montmartre will find the way,’ wrote one observer of the bohemian demi-monde.
Nowhere epitomised the bonfire of deference better than the great cabaret Le Chat Noir, founded in 1881. Outside, bouncers dressed parodically in the uniform of the Pope’s Swiss Guard saw off the gangs of youths that roamed the area; inside was a topsy-turvy world of misrule. Waiters were dressed in the regalia of members of the Académie française, and the patron, Rodolphe Salis, accompanied visitors to their seats with mocking servility, while in the murals behind them, the skeletal figure of Death led a troupe of Pierrot clowns in a danse macabre.
Fuelled by wine, consumption of which soared during the 1880s, and the mind-altering absinthe for which France had acquired a taste during the years when the phylloxera virus had decimated the country’s vines, the denizens of Montmartre seemed to inhabit a permanent party. From the Hydropathes to Les Incohérents, the Hirsutes to the Zutistes, myriad groups of revellers and entertainers proclaimed their proud devotion to the sybaritic cause. They found a welcoming home in the newly deregulated cafés, many of which were owned and run by refugees from Alsace and Lorraine, after they had been ceded to Germany following the war. The refugees had nothing to live on but profits from long hours of opening and a dipsomaniac clientele. On the once bucolic slopes of Montmartre, only the nascent sect of Naturiens held true to the pastoral ideal. Self-righteous vegetarians whose extreme ecological conscientiousness had grown out of a Proudhonist anarchism, the Naturiens eschewed all the fruits of progress, protested at the noxious smoke and effluent of factories, and longed for a return to a state of subsistence.
Louise Michel, who had little truck with either the frivolity of the cabaret or the triviality of the proto-ecologists, reserved her greatest disgust for the church of Sacré-Coeur, a work in progress that loomed from the top of the hill as ‘an insult to our consciences’. At least the anarchists of Montmartre could appease themselves with the thought that, eleven years after the first stone was laid, the walls had only just begun to peep above the scaffolding, while unexpected modifications to the design had added close to 500,000 francs to its cost. It was just such profligacy and poor management in the civic sphere, all too often accompanied by an undertow of corruption, that had begun to rouse even the docile citizens of the Third Republic to indignation. Such discontent afforded the anarchist movement a rare opportunity to reach out and embrace a new section of society. However, the chances of this happening appeared dim while the movement remained so partial to factionalism that the proudest announcement made by one congress, meeting at Cette on the Mediterranean coast, was that ‘We are anarchists because we can’t agree.’
‘Take away Louise Michel and her party would collapse,’ wrote Le Figaro in a backhanded compliment. ‘She is far and away the most interesting figure of the Third Republic.’ Tirelessly she toured the clubs in the years after her release, always passionate in her outrage, but increasingly anxious to persuade her audiences that the disparate strands of the radical left should rediscover the solidarity they had shown at the time of her arrest. Her approach won few friends. Barbed comments from erstwhile colleagues, and their vicious innuendoes of collusion with the police, now augmented the usual loathing directed at Michel by moderates and reactionaries. Beyond the doors of the anarchist clubs, however, the alienation that underwrote much of the movement’s appeal was finding new and purposeful expression in the artistic field, where the desire to destroy and renew assumed tangible form.
The French Establishment might scrutinise and disparage the radical left as morally and even medically degenerate, but as the editor of Le Décadent, Anatole Baju, made clear, the suspicion was perfectly mutual; the school from which his publication took its title had ‘burst forth in a time of decadence, not to march to the beat of that time but “against the grain,” in opposition to its time’. Two years earlier, Joris-Karl Huysmans had published his stories alongside Kropotkin’s essays in a short-lived publication called the Revue Indépendant, founded by Félix Fénéon, a tall, lean and dandified twenty-three-year-old. Since then Huysmans had won notoriety for the elegant evisceration of the corruption and banality of the contemporary world in his novel A Rebours, which charted its protagonist’s withdrawal into a world of absolute artifice. Now the writer was a leading contributor to Baju’s magazine, together with Laurent Tailhade, Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Verlaine. And when Louise Michel lectured a gathering of decadent writers in Montmartre that ‘Anarchists, just like decadents, want the end of the old world… Decadents are creating an anarchy of style’, it was in its pages that Verlaine returned the compliment in the form of a paean dedicated to the Red Virgin, with the refrain ‘Louise Michel est très bien.’
It was not only in the avant-garde salons, however, that Michel found encouraging signs of creative destruction, but among the most downtrodden and deprived in society. As a writer and poet she understood the power of words to liberate or subjugate, and in prison had relished hearing the argot of the prostitutes with whom she lived, whose improvised words ‘mixed up together like writhing monsters and yet sometimes assuming charming shapes, for slang is living language. Its imagery either touchingly innocent, or violently bloody.’ Predictably, the criminal anthropologist Lombroso adduced such private languages, with their primal rhythms and squawking, rumbling use of onomatopoeia, as evidence of atavism: ‘They speak differently because they feel differently; they speak as savages because they are true savages in the midst of our brilliant European civilisation.’ To Michel, however, the energy of argot offered simple proof that ‘there are geniuses among the people who speak slang, they’re artists and creators’, and that its challenge to bourgeois proprieties was of no less value than the more self-conscious efforts of the Decadents.
Among Félix Fénéon’s most notable discoveries of the period, as the journalistic champion of avant-garde art, were two young painters who, in their daring experiments with colour and brushwork, were pushing the earlier experiments of Monet and his fellow Impressionists to startling new levels of control and refinement. Having first met in 1884 as exhibitors at the Salon des Indépendants, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac had become familiar faces in Le Chat Noir, which was within spitting distance of their studios next door to one another on the boulevard de Clichy. They were habitués of the decadent literary circles and, in Signac’s case especially, sympathisers with the anarchist cause and admirers of its leading theorists, though their work was not yet overtly political. Both artists were concerned, above all, with the attempt to confer on nature ‘an authentic reality’ through their development of a method they called la division – the pointillist application of discrete touches of paint, inspired by the researches of the colour theorist Michel Chevreul. Nevertheless, the style they innovated made possible a revelatory critique of society of a kind that Kropotkin can scarcely have imagined when calling upon artists, in his 1885 book Paroles d’un révolté, to create an ‘aesthetic socialism’.
Seurat’s A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, displayed at the last Impressionist exhibition in May 1886, was the product of four years of preparation, as he edged his way through a multitude of sketches and oil studies towards a mise en scène in which nearly fifty figures stand in a frozen evocation of the bourgeoisie at leisure. There is nothing in the painting to suggest social upheaval. Seurat’s gaze is averted from the tawdry bars and dance halls that covered La Grande Jatte at the time, and the factories on the far banks of the Seine, just as his Impressionist precursors had turned their eyes from the effects of Prussian shelling when they painted the same location a decade earlier. Human forms dressed in the height of contemporary fashion are freed from time in the grid-like fixity of a classical frieze, their lif
e a world apart from the vitality and hardship of Montmartre. The result, however, is unnerving: the optical mixing of the tiny points of colour creates a strange and luminous evocation of a sterile society, blind to itself and trapped within a straitjacket of artifice. Intentionally or not, in its own quiet way the painting offers a critique of the belle époque as devastating as Huysmans’ A Rebours, with its closing sentiment ‘So, crumble away society! Perish old world!’
It was a no less innovative, if more obviously acerbic, examination of the contemporary social malaise that could be seen at Le Chat Noir on those nights when the projection apparatus invented by the cartoonist Caran d’Ache lit up a shadow play of images drawn by Alfred Robida. A guidebook illustrator by trade, Robida’s true genius lay in the narrow field of satirical futurology. In the panoramas and vignettes of Paris depicted in his book The Twentieth Century, the city has one foot in the mundaneness of contemporary bourgeois life, the other in the furthest corners of an imagination stranger even than that of Jules Verne. And yet preparations for war lurk in nearly every picture. While the skies teem with airship taxis, and genteel bus passengers listen to music pumped through pipes into headphones, barricades and gun emplacements intimate imminent international conflict and civil strife. It was an astute extrapolation of the flaws of the Third Republic, peopled by a complacent bourgeoisie lulled by luxury and leisure, whose anxiety that war or revolution might not be far away would render them highly susceptible to unscrupulous manipulation.
‘Two thousand men who smoke, drink and chat, and seven or eight hundred women who laugh, drink, smoke, and offer the greatest gaity in the world,’ marvelled one Russian aristocrat after his first visit to the Folies-Bergère. It was a world in which Peter Rachkovsky had made himself at home, a spider at the heart of his expanding web of spies and informants, alert for the slightest sign of weakness or insecurity that he might exploit, yet utterly insouciant. ‘Nothing in his appearance reveals his sinister affairs,’ one acquaintance of the time would recall. ‘Fat, restless, always with an ever-present smile on his lips, he made me think of some genial fellow on an excursion.’ The perfect disguise in a city where, it was observed, ‘pleasure is a social necessity’. It is all too easy to imagine Rachkovsky sweet-talking international dignitaries at such nightspots, between indulging his well-attested appetite for the petite young women of Paris. And while the hedonistic Russian aristocrat concluded his letter to his mistress in the St Petersburg ballet by joking that ‘We must annex Russia to this capital city, or else for preference this city to Russia’, Rachkovsky treated the proposition more seriously.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 35
