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

by Alex Butterworth

  What, though, was the nature of the conspiracies in which Rochefort may have played such a role? Events would soon enough reveal their terrible outcome, but beyond the marquis himself and the anarchists to whom Malato introduced him, it was his trips to the Belgian coast that may provide the best clue as to the third man. For it was there, with the full knowledge and cooperation of the Belgian Sûreté, whose officers Rochefort was said to tip off in advance of any duel that might threaten his health, that Rachkovsky’s star agent Landesen had set about establishing himself under a new identity: Arkady Harting.

  After many more twists and turns in his extraordinary career, years later Harting would take over the ownership of one of the casinos where, in the early 1890s, Rochefort played the roulette wheels and laid his bets at baccarat. Now, though, Harting was running a game with far higher stakes, in which he could doubtless have found a seat for the polemical French aristocrat with the anarchist friends.

  19

  Wicked Laws

  London and Paris 1892–1894

  Rochefort’s trips from London to Belgium in 1892 ran against the tide. Until recently the boat train from France had often carried artists and activists on ‘un go back’, or day return to London, the police crackdown in Paris following Ravachol’s bombings had now made single fares the rule. Meunier, a wanted man for the Lobau barracks and Café Véry bombings, and Jean-Pierre François, who had been named as his accomplice, on flimsy grounds had already gone to ground in the British capital. Now anyone who feared being swept up in the prefecture’s broadening search for co-conspirators and the missing dynamite, or who had got wind of the French government’s decision to adopt the old plan drawn up by Boulanger to intern 100,000 suspected anarchists in the event of war, planned their escape to England.

  Prominent figures like Zo d’Axa, the founding editor of the avantgarde cultural and political magazine L’EnDehors, departed as early as April 1892, hastily handing over the running of the magazine to an inexperienced office junior called Emile Henry. With Charles Malato tempting others with the idea that they could ‘jump on the train illegally at Bougainville – buy a Dieppe-Newhaven ticket’, the only anarchists left in Paris by the late summer were those who did not have so much as a guilty conscience to hide. And even some of them may have been persuaded to think again by the arrest and imprisonment of Parmeggiani, caught on a clandestine foray to Paris that August, although his crimes of expropriation, attempted murder and incitement to terroristic slaughter were all too tangible.

  ‘Enough of organisation…let’s busy ourselves with chemistry and manufacture: bombs, dynamite and other explosives are far more capable than rifles and “barricades” of destroying the present state of things, and above all to save our own precious blood.’ Such was the cowardly and vicious doctrine preached by L’International, established in London by Parmeggiani with Bordes, the ex-manager of Père Peinard who would shortly be revealed as a provocateur in the pay of the French police. Yet despite the newspaper’s pillorying of Kropotkin and his ilk as ‘papacy’, ‘flatfoots’ and ‘orators of the philosophical class’, Louise Michel, Malatesta and others rallied to Parmeggiani’s cause, protesting against his extradition to Italy and fund-raising to pay for a visit by his wife, with Rochefort a generous contributor.

  ‘Oh great metropolis of Albion,’ wrote Charles Malato in The Delights of Exile, a bittersweet evocation of the anarchists’ life in London, ‘your atmosphere is sometimes foggier than reason allows, your ale insipid and your cooking in general quite execrable, but you show respect for individuality and are welcoming to the émigrés.’ With anarchist visitors like Parmeggiani to contend with, though, it was doubtful how long Britain could remain so tolerant. ‘Be proud of these two qualities and keep them,’ Malato urged Albion, but the warm welcome and the respect would soon run thin and cold.

  The dispatch of the Sûreté’s finest, Inspector Prosper-Isidore Houllier, to assist Scotland Yard in the hunt for Ravachol’s accomplices had, for a while, provided the anarchists with some levity. Seemingly pursuing a personal mission to seek out the best of Britain’s much-derided gastronomy, Houllier’s fancy was particularly taken with the whitebait served at the Criterion, though he was partial as well to lunch in the gilded surroundings of the Café Royal. At least he could claim that they were both close to Piccadilly Circus, where he had tried to lure ‘Biscuit’, now going under the name of ‘Quesnay’, by posing as a Figaro reporter looking for an interview. Needless to say, his target failed to show: that Quesnay was the name of the French procurator general should have warned Houllier that he was being led a dance. But the French inspector appeared oblivious to how farce followed him around.

  Turning their attention to Théodule Meunier, Houllier and Melville descended on Victor Richard’s grocery store in Charlotte Street with the deputy director of the Sûreté, Fedée, in tow, chasing up a tip-off. Their informant, it seemed, was in on the joke. When the crack police team emerged empty-handed, a mob was waiting, and it took uniformed reinforcements to extract them, in scenes played out to the accompaniment of Zo d’Axa’s barrel organ. Subsequently, Houllier and his Special Branch colleagues would chase around London after the vans belonging to a removals company mistakenly linked with the fugitives, while Melville donned the disguise of a hygiene inspector for some unsavoury undercover work, though dressing up seems always to have appealed to him. That the French took to calling Special Branch’s favoured son ‘Le Vil Melville’ points to a more intimidating and nefarious side to his methods, however, confirmed by the decision of Richard, the grocer, and Brocher, who had convened the congress of 1881, to put the inspector himself under surveillance by the anarchists.

  Melville’s harassment of the anarchist émigrés in London did not stop after Meunier’s flight to Canada and Houllier’s departure, or with François’s return to France, where he was soon arrested. Special Branch agents, often themselves ‘in a state of beastly intoxication’, according to anarchist accounts, resorted to bully-boy tactics, bribing gangs of ‘corner boys’ to attack speakers at public meetings before themselves weighing in with ‘kicking and thumping’. Even the banana wine that the old Communard exiles to New Caledonia brewed as ersatz champagne, and then drank to their undying comradeship and to drown their sorrows, was prone to being impounded as a potentially explosive concoction.

  Nor were the English anarchists excused Melville’s rougher methods. After rejecting his offer of £500 to reveal the whereabouts of Meunier (‘and that’s just for starters’), Charles Mowbray’s wife received a sinisterly worded warning from Melville that ‘It’ll be no joke when your children are howling from hunger.’ He was true to his word a few weeks later when, hours after her death, he arrested Mowbray, leaving the infants alone in the house with their mother’s corpse. The grounds for Mowbray’s arrest were provided by an article published in Commonweal concerning the miscarriage of justice in the Walsall case, which asserted that ‘Jesuit Home Secretary Matthews, Inspector Melville, and Coulon are the principal actors and two of them must die’. Melville’s primary target, though, was the newspaper’s co-editor David Nicoll, whom Sergeant Sweeney of Special Branch would testify to having heard deliver the threat verbally during a public meeting in Hyde Park.

  Not only had Nicoll dared to challenge the official account of Special Branch’s activities in Walsall but he also took every opportunity to publicise his suspicions of provocation and entrapment. In a likely attempt by Special Branch to intimidate him into stopping the dissemination of uncomfortable truths, he had already been arrested shortly after the Walsall debacle for defaming the queen: a charge so ludicrous that a local councillor had felt compelled to stand bail for him. But in court this time neither Sweeney’s admission that he had noted down Nicoll’s speech from memory only, half an hour after the event, nor Nicoll’s insistence to the jury that ‘anarchists in the country [are] quiet, peaceable people. Anarchism [does] not necessarily spell dynamite’ cut any ice. The eighteen-month sentence he
received must have come as a relief to Melville, who may have had more personal reasons for his vindictiveness towards Nicoll.

  Since William Morris’ withdrawal from the editorial board of the Commonweal in 1890, the tight-knit group of ‘individualists’ whose wearisome advocacy of violent means forced Morris’ depature, had gradually turned on one another. Accusations of treachery flew, with Samuels, Mowbray and Coulon all the object of Nicoll’s suspicions. What plots were ‘Lady’ Mowbray and Melville concocting when they were seen drinking together? And what was Henry Samuels thinking of, using his impressionable young brother-in-law, Martial Bourdin, to circulate pamphlets filled with slanderous attacks on Nicoll that Coulon had printed? Inevitably, those Nicoll accused turned the tables on him with counter-accusations, and Frank Kitz’s uncharacteristic decision to embezzle the newspaper’s funds and flee town left Nicoll isolated and vulnerable.

  Already psychologically fragile, the pressures plunged Nicoll into a state of mental turmoil, engendering a paranoia that provided his double-dealing colleagues with a convenient cover. Nicoll’s suspicions about Coulon were, of course, well founded, but Mowbray too, Special Branch ledgers reveal, was ‘organising secret shadowers of anarchists’, while a French agent reported rumours that Mowbray had been involved in the Walsall provocation, working for Russia. Quite when Mowbray was recruited is unclear, but it appears to have been after his arrest by Melville, and may have been a condition of his early release. What, though, of Nicoll himself? Lacking in self-awareness to a painful degree, his own writings seem to hint at some buried connection with the Branch: the nervous crossing out of sensitive passages concerning Melville, or the reference to the inspector’s advice that he should recognise in Coulon and Samuels his truest friends, in letters to those he thought he could trust. For all his denunciation of others, had he too, then, at some point been turned, as was suggested, and was he then victimised for betraying Melville’s trust?

  The notion that the entire Commonweal editorial team should, unbeknownst to one another, have been informants may seem far-fetched, but it was standard practice for the Okhrana, at least, to secure two sources or more in every key group it was monitoring, in order to guarantee the reliability of their reports by means of comparison. As to Henry Samuels, future events would prove the pernicious nature of his influence. What, though, did it say about the effectiveness of Special Branch and Inspector Melville, if a large proportion of the most incendiary figures in the anarchist movement were indeed in their employ? Handled with skill and integrity, the level of information such informants could provide would certainly vindicate official claims, offered in part as reassurance to foreign forces, that any action the anarchists planned would almost immediately become known to them. It could be counted a success too if they could seed uncertainty and dissent in the movement. Beyond that, though, there were obvious risks.

  Even Chief Inspector Littlechild would soon have to admit that ‘the “nark” is very apt to drift into an agent provocateur in his anxiety to secure a conviction’. Melville, by secretly offering his services to Rachkovsky, head of the foreign intelligence of Britain’s foremost recent enemy on the international stage, had surely come close to treasonable behaviour. So far he had been lucky. The worst result that Walsall had produced was the conviction of hotheads on charges that, unprovoked, their behaviour is unlikely to have warranted: a gross abuse of the justice system but no more. However, were a repeat of the provocation that had brought about the arrest of the Walsall men to result instead in death or injury, the full moral obscenity of the strategy would surely be revealed. Certainly it was one with which neither the people nor the political leaders of the country Melville was meant to serve would have had any truck.

  ‘We who, in our houses, seclude ourselves from the cry and sight of human sufferings, we are no judges of those who live in the midst of all this suffering…who are driven to despair,’ had long been Kropotkin’s default position with regard to those anarchists who lashed out at society, as Ravachol, Meunier and the others had done. Personally, though, he was quite explicit that he hated the explosions, concerned that as well as damaging the movement’s reputation, they risked attracting criminal elements with no higher purpose, or else young men who craved the easy adrenaline rush of terrorism but lacked the stamina and dedication for the arduous task of building a broad and popular movement. Worse still, he feared that the effects of such violent acts might contaminate the revolution, when it happened, and propel it not towards a Utopia of freedom but instead into the hands of an oppressive dictatorship.

  Both he and Malatesta were wary of the Autonomie Club anarchists, men and women of all nationalities who drank and talked amidst a fug of smoke, reclining on the comfortable chairs and sofas beneath portraits of such heroes as Ravachol and the Fenian, O’Donnell, and a poster proclaiming ‘Death to Carnot’, the French president. ‘It is no longer a love for the human race that guides them, but the feeling of vendetta joined to a cult of an abstract idea, of a theoretical phantasm,’ Malatesta wrote of Ravachol’s disciples in his 1892 essay ‘Nécessité et bases d’une entente’, in what was an attempt to guide the young, headstrong anarchists away from the doctrine of dynamite. But the new generation of French anarchists, many of whom had flocked to London, were not so easily persuaded.

  That summer, before handing over the onerous editorial duties on L’EnDehors to Félix Fénéon, the twenty-year-old Emile Henry used the pages of the newspaper to challenge Malatesta’s argument. Taking issue with the Italian’s assertion that ‘hate does not produce love, and by hate one cannot remake the world’, he replied that ‘To those who say that hate does not give birth to love, I reply that it is love, human love, that often engenders hate.’ From an early age Henry had seen how painful a thwarted love for mankind could be, watching his father, an elected member of the Commune, live out his final years as an exile in Catalonia. Emile himself, a brilliant and diligent student at school despite all the disadvantages of his upbringing, had just missed out on the place at one of Paris’ grandes écoles that might have allowed him to participate in building the bright future to which he aspired. As it was, rejection had set in motion a train of events that over several years would crystallise his sense that ‘only cynics and sycophants get a seat at the feast’.

  After fleeing his call-up papers, as a criminal deserter every step that Henry took seemed to lead deeper into the political underworld. Seeing Emile in search of a political purpose, his brother Fortune had introduced him to the moderate anarchist teachings of Kropotkin, but when Emile’s new interest was discovered, it cost him his job. Then, despite Emile’s own rejection of Ravachol’s methods as inhumane and counterproductive, Fortune’s outspoken support for the bombings led his brother to be arrested in his own apartment and briefly taken into custody. It was a rapid process of radicalisation, accelerated by the sense that he was being persecuted and marginalised. Hard-line veterans of anarchism, the likes of Malato, d’Axa, Fénéon and Constant Martin were now the only friends on whom he could rely, and thrilling discussions about how destruction was the purest form of artistic expression surrounded him.

  The bomb that Emile Henry left outside the door of the offices of the Carmaux Mining Company on avenue de l’Opéra on 8 November 1892 was intended to cause the maximum loss of life. An inversion device made according to a design of his own, it was aimed primarily at the bosses of a business that had, in the course of the previous few months, brutalised the striking workers at its mines in the Aveyron. But Henry’s definition of economic guilt had become wide enough for him to feel no disquiet that the bourgeois residents of the nearby apartments might die too. Having used a meeting across town as cover for his murderous expedition, Henry returned to his workplace confident that the ghost of Ravachol would soon once again be stalking the streets of Paris. By then, however, the bomb had already exploded, with a rather different effect from that intended.

  Alerted by the mining company, police officers had taken the
infernal machine to the station on rue des Bons-Enfants for inspection; three of them had lifted it carefully upstairs. Shortly afterwards, Henry’s ingenious detonator had triggered. Four officers and the office boy died in terror and agony, their flesh and scraps of uniform spattered over the walls and dangling from the fixtures. It was an act of terrorism quite different in scale and effectiveness from any of the copycat squibs that had followed in the wake of Ravachol. Two days later Henry packed his bags and departed Paris for the safety of London, and the welcoming bosom of his anarchist family. He left behind a France racked by anxieties.

  It was the nationalistic newspaper La Libre parole, published by the notorious anti-Semite Edouard Drumont – with its motto ‘France for the French’ – which had broken the story of the Panama scandal in September 1892, filling the pages across which it had previously splashed reports of Ravachol’s arrest and trial. Its revelations were surely the outcome of the neo-Boulangist and anti-Semitic campaign against the French authorities that Rochefort had been reported as formulating that summer. The outrage over Panama felt by the French public made Rochefort a serious political player once again, visited in London by the ex-prefect of police, Louis Andrieux. He was courted too by those with something to hide, including Cornelius Herz – one of the three Jewish ‘promoters’ who had arranged the Panama scandal bribes – who offered him 300,000 francs to moderate the follow-up attacks in L’Intransigeant, without success. News that Baron de Reinarch, one of Herz’s two colleagues, had been found dead the day after his nephew had tipped him off that he was to be prosecuted, and with many doubting the official account of suicide, must have doubly delighted Rochefort, coming as it did within days of the rue des Bons-Enfants explosion.