For Rachkovsky, a brinksman and provocateur by instinct, the situation must have held a fascination that was far from disinterested. Although Boulanger’s belligerence made him an unnerving figure for the Russian government, which knew itself to be in a parlous state of military unreadiness, the Okhrana chief deployed his propagandists in the French press to publish spuriously alarmist assessments of German intentions. For whilst not in Russia’s national interest, by encouraging heightened tension in the Franco-German relationship Rachkovsky could promote his own importance as a conduit for key intelligence, and he doubtless drew on the contacts he had made among Boulanger’s associates to monitor and influence the general.
Keeping track of Boulanger’s alliances was a complex business, though, since the ‘man on the horse’ acted as a magnet for malcontents from across the political spectrum. The Blanquists, still in thrall to the myth of their own revolutionary chief who had died in 1881, eagerly gravitated to the general’s camp in the hope of causing the kind of social crisis from which they might profit. Ambitious men like Louis Andrieux, the ex-prefect of police and bitter antagonist of Rochefort, were lured by the hope that working with Boulanger would propel them into power. And crucially, the funding for Boulanger’s political insurgency came from the likes of the fabulously wealthy Duchess d’Uzès, inheritor of the Cliquot family’s champagne fortune. An arch-monarchist, who under the pseudonym ‘Manuela’ pursued an artistic sideline sculpting statues of saints for the Sacré-Coeur, it seemed scarcely credible that d’Uzès should bankroll the atheist populist that Boulanger appeared to be. Everyone had their reasons, though, and agendas of their own to advance.
While Juliette Adam handed over the editorship of La Nouvelle Revue to Elie de Cyon, in order that he might better coordinate with Katkov’s Moskovskie vedomosti over their campaign for a Franco-Russian alliance, others in her circle took a more purely esoteric approach to international affairs. The occultists’ first foray into geopolitics had been to court the maharajah Dalip Singh to stage an insurrection against British rule, offering the inducement of a Franco-Russian alliance that they were in no position to deliver. Their fanciful aim then may have been to facilitate access to the technologically and spiritually advanced Holy Land of Agartha, buried deep under the mountains of Asia, from whose Grand Pandit their own guru d’Alveydre claimed to have learned the secrets of synarchy. In 1887, however, they turned their attention to matters closer to home.
Gérard Encausse, the scientific hypnotist at the Salpêtrière who was now beginning to establish himself as a mystical visionary under the name ‘Papus’ had, together with Paul Adam, a bon viveur, Boulangist and literary acolyte of Fénéon’s decadent movement, been engaged for some time in the investigation of consciousness, and the possible interpenetration of times past, present and future. History as it was experienced, they had come to understand, was merely an echo of strife and turmoil in the spiritual realm, and France’s defeat at the Battle of Sedan was the clear consequence of the superior invocatory powers of Prussia’s scryers. At a personal level, Encausse fought duels over accusations that he had attacked his enemies with volatised poison, but was alert too to conflict on a larger scale. If Boulanger was going to wage war, they must have concluded, then it was the patriotic duty of France’s psychic brigade to be in peak condition and free of earthly distractions.
It was Encausse who remarked at around this time on the feline cunning that Rachkovsky concealed beneath his jovial exterior, but as ‘Papus’ he too knew how to bear a grudge, and whilst his revenge would be slow in coming and far from ethereal, the Okhrana chief ignored him at his peril. In the present circumstances, though, Rochefort must have seemed to offer Rachkovsky a more reliable means to influence the international situation. After all, he had predicted with suspicious clairvoyance the next flashpoint in the stand-off with Germany: a border incident involving espionage, such as was triggered by the arrest in German Alsace of the French police superintendent, Schnaebele. Moreover, with the secret documents in question concerning Bismarck’s intrigues in the Balkans, the situation had a Russian angle that de Cyon and Katkov were quick to exploit. Russia and Germany squared up in a war of words, with the Russian government rejecting Bismarck’s offer of a free hand in the East in return for being allowed to act with impunity in the West, asserting that if Europe was to be the theatre of war, then it was ready.
After the new French foreign minister, the late Gustave’s younger brother, Emile Flourens, finally secured the release of the spy a week later, Boulanger recklessly taunted Bismarck with having run scared of the Russian press, while from the sidelines Rochefort lambasted the Jewish financiers of Germany for their supposed role in orchestrating the crisis. With forgery, intrigue, nihilists, anti-Semitism and geopolitical manipulation all involved in the debacle, if Rachkovsky did not have a hand in it, then he would surely have had sleepless nights calculating how he might claim this territory as his own.
Concerned by the rising tide of popular acclaim for Boulanger, the general’s colleagues in the cabinet finally realised that they must act to curb his power, but when ousted from his post, Boulanger immediately received 100,000 write-in votes at the next by-election, and had to be hurriedly ‘promoted’ to command the army division based in Clermont-Ferrand, deep in the Auvergne. Unfortunately, sending an idol into the wilderness wasn’t so easy. Tens of thousands of grief-stricken Boulangists turned out to block the path of his train in July, before at last letting it roll with plangent cries of ‘You’ll be back! You’ll be back!’ And return he did, sooner than the crowds might have expected. A corruption scandal involving the sale of state honours by Daniel Wilson, the son-in-law of President Grévy, led to the fall of Grévy’s government and a power vacuum just waiting for the general to fill. From November 1887, throughout the following year, France was a frenzy of Boulangism.
Such was the extremity of emotion around Boulanger that it had even begun to attract the attention of researchers at the Salpêtrière and elsewhere, for whom the psychology of the crowd rather than the individual posed interesting new challenges. Their studies diagnosed Boulanger’s fanatical supporters as suffering from hysteria, a symptom of which, as Encausse knew very well, was the susceptibility to hypnosis. As Jules Liégeois, of the rival Nancy school of psychologists, would write, ‘Nihilists, anarchists, socialists, revolutionaries – all kinds of political and religious fanatics – don’t they become… criminals by the force of suggestion? On days of popular agitation, the crowd – composed of many good individuals – turns fierce and bloodthirsty…the beast is unleashed.’
From her magnificent town house on the Champs-Elysées, plumply louche in black gown and diamonds, the Duchess d’Uzès pumped out money to the general’s campaign in the vain hope of seeing the republic brought down, while the general himself seemed ready to horse-trade his principles for monarchist support. It was a vision of anarchy, in its most pejorative sense: of myriad factions each hell-bent on destruction and chaos in the search for power; and a Boulangist campaign without even the self-respecting consistency to decline contributions from rich Jews, despite its overt anti-Semitism. And within this broad church, there was even a place for the anarchists themselves, whose affections were bought with some part of the campaign’s three million francs of champagne money.
Louise Michel herself, who had previously disdained the general, discovered enough cynicism to see how Boulanger might serve her political purposes, and finally agreed to accept donations from Duchess d’Uzès on behalf of her various charitable interests. ‘She confirmed that the extreme left will ally itself with the right,’ wrote one police informant, seemingly well placed to know her mind. ‘She believes that the demonstrations being organised by Rochefort will be extremely effective, and will help spread anarchist ideas.’ Michel even allowed herself to be drawn into involvement with the Ligue des Femmes, established by d’Uzès, who had charmed her by requesting a copy of Kropotkin’s Paroles d’un révolté.
T
hen, at the end of the year, the Panama Canal Company went bankrupt. The tens of thousands of bourgeois who had staked their savings on an engineering project so strongly tied to national pride, were devastated. Little in French national life, it seemed, could any longer be believed in; everything was a fraud, an illusion, a sleight of hand. ‘One can no longer mistake that what is taking place today, what the coming year has in store, is the decisive crisis of the republic, coinciding, by a singular irony, with the ostentatious celebration of the French Revolution,’ wrote one veteran political commentator at the turn of the year. It seemed that the general’s time had truly come.
A fortnight later, Boulanger won a crushing victory in a Paris by-election. ‘A l’Elysée, à l’Elysée,’ tens of thousands of his supporters cried as they massed outside the Café Durand where their idol was dining, sensing that the coup d’état they had so often called for was now inevitable. Fatally, though, Boulanger hesitated. He would, he told the gathering of his political intimates, rather win power legitimately at the next election; then he promptly disappeared into the night, to celebrate his success in the arms of his beloved mistress. Had Rochefort been right all along in lauding his fundamental modesty and honesty, or did the general merely suffer a loss of nerve?
The acerbic wit of the professional politicians who had stayed up late to gauge the threat to their careers left no doubt as to their disdain: ‘Five-past twelve, gentlemen,’ remarked one, consulting his watch, ‘five minutes ago Boulangism started to fall on the market.’ ‘He’s set us a good example,’ said the president, Sadi Carnot, ‘let’s all go to bed, too.’ But behind the relief and the jokes, those in government must have still felt disquiet: they had come to grips with Boulanger and Boulangism, but what of the deep currents of popular disenchantment on which his rise had depended? Remove the lightning rod, and who might then be struck down?
Louise Michel was made for suffering and martyrdom, wrote the publisher Monsieur Roy in his preface to her memoirs. ‘Born 1,900 years earlier, she would have faced the wild animals of the amphitheatre; born during the Inquisition, she would have died in the flames.’ Others in thrall to Louise Michel’s magnetism reached for similar images. In his ballad Verlaine depicted her as Joan of Arc, perhaps thinking of the ‘exalted’ state Michel entered in moments of political passion: the anarchist equivalent of the religious ecstasies that the Church believed were being blasphemed in Charcot’s public experiments involving his hysterics. Alternatively, Verlaine may simply have been hinting at the fate she courted, at a time when the nationalistic right was erecting a rash of statues to the Maid of Orleans, while the left countered with effigies of its own freethinking martyr, Etienne Dolet. And indeed, only two months after the hanging of the Haymarket martyrs, little noticed for the moment in a Paris caught up in its own drama, Louise Michel did come close to a kind of martyrdom of her own.
She was addressing a meeting in the Channel port of Le Havre, challenging her bourgeois audience to see the light before the revolution overwhelmed them. The mood was hostile to her, but not more so than in most of the provincial towns she visited. Then, without warning, a young man approached the stage. He proudly declared himself a Breton before raising a pistol and firing twice. One bullet lodged in Michel’s hat, the other deep in her left temple.
‘I’m fine, really fine’ she wrote to a solicitous Rochefort the next day, but she was putting on a brave face. Despite the game attempts of a local doctor to extract the bullet from her cranium with his pen, it had lodged too deep to be easily retrieved. Journalists were issued with accounts dismissing the wound’s severity, but the police in Paris soon learned the truth from their agents: ‘she is fainting frequently and the problem with her sight gets worse every day,’ wrote one. Yet somehow she survived. The wound would not kill Michel, an expert confirmed, but the long-term effects as the bullet wandered through her brain were unpredictable.
Forgiving to a fault, Michel swiftly turned her attention to her would-be assassin, whose acquittal she was determined to secure. He was a ‘subject of hallucination’, she informed the readers of L’Intransigeant, ‘a being from another age’ made brutal by living in a tumultuous era of transition, and like the patients in the Salpêtrière, not to be held responsible for his actions. A week after the attack, she even wrote to Charcot himself, pleading for science to come to the defence of her assailant. In the era of the freelance assassin that was now dawning, of the terrorist armed with his bomb and revolver and a mania to make his voice heard, the sanity or otherwise of those convicted would assume a new political significance. For was anarchism itself a form of madness, or was it the rest of the world that was insane?
15
The Revolution is Postponed
London, 1887–1890
So sweeping had been Peter Kropotkin’s dismissal of England as a ‘land impermeable to new ideas’ after the anarchists’ London Congress of 1881 that the transformation in its radical life in the six years that had passed took him aback. Addressing the Socialist League’s anniversary commemoration of the Paris Commune in March 1886, he left his audience at the South Place Institute in no doubt of his conviction that they were meeting ‘on the eve of one of those great uprisings which periodically visit Europe’. George Bernard Shaw, who was probably present that evening, would later remark of Kropotkin that ‘his only weakness was a habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight’, with revolution to follow in its wake. Few could have denied, though, that the period between Kropotkin’s imprisonment in 1883 and his release from Clairvaux prison in January 1886 had seen tensions rise across the Continent and beyond, with Britain no exception.
‘How to promote the greater happiness of the masses of the people, how to increase their enjoyment of life, that is the problem of the future,’ Joseph Chamberlain, the reforming Liberal mayor of Birmingham had recently diagnosed. By extending the franchise to all working men, his party had already fulfilled the key demand of the Chartist movement twenty years earlier but times and expectations had moved on. The Liberals’ failure to adopt his proposals to guarantee the property of the rich in return for welfare protection for the poor, led the working masses to question whether the cosy duopoly of political parties, whose alternating rule Morris would liken to a politely fixed football match, could ever deliver effective representation for their views.
For such opinions to be proclaimed in public, however, was profoundly unnerving for those in authority, and the police were called upon to intervene. Dod Street in the East End had seen the first concerted action against the Socialist League, when socialist street preachers had been driven from their pitches while trying to address a crowd of 10,000 demonstrators against the curtailment of free speech. Then, when the packed public gallery of the courtroom shouted its fury at the sentences passed on eight men arrested, who included Frank Kitz, the police waded in with sticks and fists. Attempting to shield Marx’s daughter Eleanor from the fray, William Morris was among those beaten and taken into custody. But in the spectacle of violence deployed to protect the interests of a complacent middle class, Morris saw similarities with pre-revolutionary France and declared that by dragging this hypocrisy into the open the socialists had ‘gained a complete victory over the police’.
If Morris’ optimism about a British revolution had seemed fanciful in the autumn of 1885, within a few weeks of Kropotkin’s release from prison early in the New Year, events in London appeared a harbinger of class war. The occasion, at which Morris was not personally present, was a march from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park by those who had lost their jobs in the difficult economic circumstances. An initial blow would be delivered the following February when, in Morris’ absence, another meeting of the unemployed marched the same route. Ten thousand strong, as the crowd passed the Tory Carlton Club and the Liberal Reform Club, insults and missiles were hurled, with one army veteran memorably raging that ‘we were not the scum of the country when we were fighting for bond-holders in Egypt, you dogs!’ Peering from th
eir windows, outraged members jeered back that the mob needed the smack of firm discipline, although the sound of breaking windows in Piccadilly, where the indigent of Whitechapel, Shoreditch and Limehouse were looting the shops, may have made them tremble that they might rather be on the receiving end of physical chastisement.
In the aftermath of the riot, even Blackwells Magazine had written of ‘Black Monday’ as the germ of a British revolution, while for days London had quaked at rumours that an army from the East End was preparing to attack under cover of the thick fog that had descended. Seeing a middle class ‘so terrified of the sight of the misery it has created that at all hazards it must be swept out of sight’, Morris looked forward to further repression that would feed the fires of popular discontent. Readiness, though, was essential. ‘We have been taken over unprepared by a revolutionary incident,’ he wrote in the Commonweal, urging his readers to become quickly ‘educated in economics, in organisation, and in administration’ so as to be ready when such an opportunity presented itself.
Sentiment may have led Kropotkin to esteem France as the cradle of revolution, but improbable as the situation must have seemed to him, in early 1886 Britain held out the riper promise. Although thousands turned out in Paris to hear him speak after his release from prison, hungry for words of guidance and inspiration from anarchism’s lost leader, he had no further taste for the rough hospitality of the Third Republic. Weakened by illness and with a wife and young child to support, the idea of a secure refuge clearly appealed; news of the suicide of his brother Alexander in Siberia, unable to face the prospect of release after fourteen years’ internal exile, would shortly confirm his own determination to avoid further spells in prison. Moreover, Britain promised him a vehicle for his developing ideas, for during the latter months of Kropotkin’s incarceration in Clairvaux he had been approached by Charlotte Wilson, the Cambridge-educated wife of a stockbroker and sister of a Liberal Member of Parliament, with a proposal to establish an anarchist newspaper in London. Crossing the Channel in March, he settled his family as temporary guests in the home of his old friend Kravchinsky.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 37
