Late the following evening, police raided the Autonomie Club, to which Melville gained entry by means of the secret password of knocks. While the chief inspector disdainfully puffed on a cigar, all those present were detained and interrogated, and the premises was subsequently closed until further notice. There were no angry crowds to block his exit this time, though, as there had been when he had visited Richard’s shop with Houllier eighteen months before; as the dramatic news sank in, popular feeling turned against the anarchists as never before, and the next time the police were called out in force to the Charlotte Street area it would be to protect its radical citizens against an angry English mob.
Many émigrés reacted with consternation to the news from Greenwich: ‘Anarchists were not so blind to their own interests and well-being as to forgo by their conduct the right to asylum that England so generously offered to political refugees,’ one told the Morning Leader. But whilst an attack that killed or injured innocent victims, like those perpetrated by Ravachol or Henry, would surely have caused the British press to close ranks in outrage, the mysterious circumstances of Bourdin’s death in Greenwich simply invited further investigation.
Among the anarchists themselves, rumours of provocation were rife in the days following the debacle, with the greatest suspicion focused on Henry Samuels, whose influence on the younger man David Nicoll would express in his recollection of a scene from the Autonomie Club a few weeks earlier, of ‘little Bourdin sitting at the feet of Samuels, and looking up into his eyes with loving trust’. Nicoll’s own misgivings about Samuels had long been a matter of record but already that January the first edition of the newspaper Liberty – founded by James Tocchati, a veteran of Morris’ Socialist League, in order to provide a moderate counterbalance to Commonweal – had explicitly accused him of working for Melville.
Determined to exculpate himself, Samuels briefed the press about Bourdin’s ‘erratic behaviour’ at their lunch on the fateful day, but professed himself certain that when they had parted – insisting that this was outside the restaurant at 2.50 p.m. – his brother-in-law had no intention of bombing the Observatory: his plan, he thought, must have been ‘either to buy the explosive or to experiment’. Samuels’ purpose was clearly to put time and space between himself and the incriminating material but his version of events rapidly began to unravel when a witness came forward to testify that he had seen them together in Westminster. Forced to concede that he had lied, Samuels now volunteered that on their journey across the city they had been ‘pursued by’ detectives. His new contortions, though, raised as many questions as they answered. If Samuels had known that he and Bourdin were under surveillance, why had he tried to pretend that they had parted earlier, unless he could rely on the police to keep his secret? Was it not more likely that Samuels himself was both the source of the bomb and the money that Bourdin collected along the way, and in league with the police?
While Samuels’ amateurish attempts at deception were easily exposed, his old friend and colleague Auguste Coulon, still on the Special Branch payroll, played the journalist from the Morning Leader with an altogether more deft professionalism. Speaking anonymously, and unidentifiable to his old colleagues, Coulon was interviewed in the jeweller’s shop in South London in which he now maintained an office lined with books on the theme of anarchism, the better to understand the subjects of his infiltration. As an array of clocks and watches ticked away the time, as if in portentous countdown, and his Swiss assistant tinkered at a workbench, Coulon divulged that he had been aware of plots brewing and had recently been on Bourdin’s trail, but had relaxed his attention on the fateful day in the mistaken belief that the plot would not come to a head until the following Saturday. Having established his authority on the subject, he then persuasively asserted that the authorities would have to take ‘steps to cleanse from their midst the criminals that now infest London. Too long has London been an asylum for European murderers, forgers, and thieves.’
The argument that Coulon advanced for the benefit of the newspaper’s readers would have been welcomed by Melville, as by his associates abroad, but all were likely to have been disconcerted by his accompanying boast that ‘I am in the service of the International Secret Police, which is subsidised by the Russian, German and French governments.’ That Coulon may have been taking money from all three in a freelance capacity was perfectly possible, but the idea that cooperation between the national police forces amounted to anything like the official organisation he evoked was as fanciful as the much-touted notion of a vast concerted anarchist conspiracy. Yet Coulon’s self-regarding admission perhaps hinted at something almost as extraordinary, whose existence none of those involved would wish revealed: a clandestine arrangement that had grown out of Melville’s back-channel offer to Rachkovsky of his personal assistance, two years earlier. It may moreover have been upon such a foundation that the Okhrana chief hoped to build when he had approached the French foreign ministry, only weeks before Bourdin’s death, to call for an anti-anarchist convention, in the move that had so angered his superiors in St Petersburg.
David Nicoll, at least, was in no doubt that Bourdin had died as the result of an elaborate intrigue involving police agents, and was unafraid to point the finger in print. Even before the explosion at Greenwich, he had charged Coulon with having received £70 to help reignite Melville’s ‘delectable game [of] dynamite outrages’; now Henry Samuels, whom he had previously considered ‘too much of a fool to be a spy, but…the sort of man whom a spy could make good use of’, was elevated to the status of a full-blown agent provocateur. And then there was Dr Fauset MacDonald, a well-heeled medical practitioner who had thrown in his lot with the Commonweal group the previous year: he too was now labelled a police agent, from whose surgery the chemicals could be supplied to produce explosives. As for a motive, Nicoll believed that ‘A few dynamite explosions in England would suit the Russian police splendidly, and might even result in terrifying the English bourgeoisie into handing over the refugees to the vengeance of the Russian tsar.’
Nicoll’s apprehension of the conspiracy that had been woven around Bourdin was corroborated by an improbable source more than a decade later, when Joseph Conrad wrote The Secret Agent. Despite Conrad’s assurance to his publisher that the plot was ‘based on inside knowledge of a certain event’, which was clearly the Greenwich bombing, in certain respects the novel presented a rather schematic cross-section of the anarchist world of the period. Comrade Ossipon may be taken as a slightly facetious version of Kropotkin; Yundt of the firebrand Johann Most. But when Verloc, the equivalent of Henry Samuels in Conrad’s account, who habitually works as a nark for Chief Inspector Heat, recruits the Bourdin character, Stevie, into bombing the Observatory, he is in fact acting on the behest of Mr Vladimir, assigned the position of first secretary at the Russian Embassy but an obvious avatar of Rachkovsky.
Conrad would later protest, perhaps too much, that the work was drawn primarily from imagination. In reflecting on a realm where fact and fiction were constantly and intentionally being blurred, however, his well-informed storytelling may come closer to illuminating the truth than documentary sources that are so often partial and distorting. As to the true quality of the ‘inside knowledge’ about which Conrad boasted, the proof lies in the figure of the novel’s purveyor of explosives, ‘The Professor’, whose elusive factual counterpart, bearing the very same sobriquet, is today known only from French police files that remained locked away in the Paris prefecture until long after the novelist’s death. In one intriguing report, the real ‘Professor’ is said to have supplied Emile Henry’s mentor, Constant Martin, with dynamite; in another, more significantly, the French informant states that ‘Russian anarchists have confirmed that the school for the manufacture of bombs is in London and that the Professor is a Russian refugee’.
Unfortunately for the anarchist movement as a whole, in the London underworld of early 1894, it was all too easy for those accused by Nicoll to dismiss his suspicions
as far-fetched: a further symptom of his paranoia, whose disruptive effects were beginning to weary even those who had some sympathy for the poor man’s plight. For whilst rumours that Bourdin’s intended destination had been Epping Forest, where he intended to test the bomb, may have carried echoes of the Landesen plot of 1890, they hardly constituted proof of Russian involvement. Furthermore, claims by anarchists to have received unsolicited deliveries of explosive materials, of which they had then wisely disposed, shortly before Special Branch ransacked their homes in search of incriminating evidence, could be easily explained away as anti-police propaganda. And when a pair of anarchists, Ricken and Brall, who had previously been suspected by neighbours of manufacturing bombs, suddenly disappeared, two days after Bourdin’s death, the move suggested the remaining members of a terrorist cell hastily going to ground, more than it did innocents fleeing persecution.
It was perhaps fortunate for the sake of Nicoll’s sanity that he did not know what the agents of the Paris prefecture had reported about the comings and goings of the London anarchists in Paris in the weeks before the Henry and Bourdin bombings. Had he done so, his paranoia would surely have reached a dangerous pitch. He would have been disturbed enough to learn that Dumont, an ex-colleague of Ravachol who was now part of the clique around Coulon that Nicoll had named as provocateurs, had been troublemaking in the city: indeed, early in January, Charles Malato had been so infuriated by Dumont’s incendiary rhetoric in Paris that he had threated to go there ‘to sort him out’.
What, though, would Nicoll have made of the reported meeting between Emile Henry and a ‘Bourdin Brother’ only days before the attack on the Café Terminus? If it were Martial Bourdin who had crossed the Channel to meet his fellow bomber, that would surely point simply to some coordination of their attacks. But what if it was Henry Samuels who had made the trip to meet Henry, using his wife’s name as he sometimes did, not least when applying for the British Museum Library card that was used to gain entry to specialist works on the manufacture of explosives? Both recent bombs could then have been linked to one suspected agent provocateur, with others in the background. And what questions might then have been asked about the true provenance of the earlier attacks in which Henry had been involved, or that committed by Vaillant, or even those carried out by the anarchist Christ, Ravachol, Dumont’s late friend?
No such doubts about who truly benefited from the self-sustaining cycle of anarchist terrorism seem to have troubled Emile Henry’s associate Louis Matha, whom Agent Z6 had reported leaving London on the day of the Greenwich bombing to rejoin Henry’s brother Fortune in Paris, where they meant to stage another dynamite outrage. Exactly a month later, however, while Henry read Don Quixote to pass the time as he awaited trial, it was another of his old accomplices by the name of Pauwels who set out for La Madeleine, in what was to have been the latest of a series of attacks on ecclesiastical targets in Paris. Yet in a near repeat of the accident that had befallen Bourdin, the device he was carrying exploded prematurely as he entered the church.
If the two events suggested a consistent flaw in design or manufacture of bombs supplied to the anarchists, however, whether accidental or preconceived, it did not deter the part-time art impresario Félix Fénéon – who had earlier stored bomb components in his desk at the war ministry on Henry’s behalf – from venturing what seemed like a small-scale attack on his own initiative. The bomb he concealed in a flowerpot on the windowsill of the Café Foyot, just across the road from the Senate chamber in the Palais de Luxembourg and a favourite watering hole of its members, exploded as intended, but injured only his old friend Tailhade who happened to be drinking nearby. That it took out his eye seemed oddly like poetic justice for the man who had so coldly acclaimed Henry’s destructive artistry, and yet the bomb’s effect was to sustain the widespread sense of terror.
Paris once again lived in fear, as it had after the attacks by Ravachol and his gang: the bourgeoisie stayed at home and policemen handed in transfer requests, while the sound of scenery collapsing backstage at the Gaîté theatre was enough to send the audience rushing for the exits. The Third Republic and its new left-leaning government, patently incapable of defending the institutions of politics or religion against the anarchist bombers, and with the general public now in the firing line, had been further destabilised. For Henri Rochefort, dining with anarchist friends in London on the very day that Pauwels had blown himself up, the situation must have seemed quite satisfactory.
The previous year had seen Rochefort substantially repair his relationship with the anarchists themselves, telling Le Gaulois that they were more sinned against than sinning: ‘the true anarchist is not dangerous for he tolerates without complaint the promiscuous presence of agents provocateurs’. Furthermore, Louise Michel had recently extracted a large donation from him on their behalf, while police agents reported that anarchists and nihilists regularly visited his home to solicit his largesse. Did this generosity, that might be considered material assistance to those involved in the violence, buy him the kind of malign influence enjoyed by Conrad’s fictional Comrade X? If so, it might have made for a rather uncomfortable evening on 15 March, when his fellow diners included Constant Martin, a linchpin of the campaign of robberies that had involved Emile Henry, and Emile Pouget who had been sent to prison with Louise Michel for the bread riots a decade earlier. For on their way to the dinner from the Charlotte Street enclave, some would have passed the window of the undertaker’s shop in Tottenham Court Road, where the image of Martial Bourdin’s face, photographed as he lay in his coffin and showing all the puncture marks of the shrapnel from his bomb, offered a grim reminder of what waging war against the state could cost.
By April, it was once again Meunier’s dossier that topped the pile on Chief Inspector Melville’s desk. With the bomber of the Café Véry said to have returned from Canada, the hunt was resumed. The associates of known militants found themselves under pressure to provide information, presumably in return for indemnity from prosecution. Bourdin’s close friend Charpentier was arrested for burglary, while Rousseau, the watchmaker who had given Henry work, was also detained. In due course, he and Coulon were considered the most likely candidates to have betrayed details of Meunier’s movements.
Melville’s coup in Walsall had briefly won him celebrity status and now the chance finally arrived for him to cement his reputation for decisive action. Having forewarned journalists, on 12 April the chief inspector and his troops staked out the boat train preparing to depart from Charing Cross station. Then, just as Meunier was about to board, Melville himself appeared from his hiding place and wrestled the outlaw to the ground. Lively representations of the scene were rushed out in the illustrated magazines: real-life detective heroism for a public whose appetite for such things had soared since the Strand began publishing the Sherlock Holmes stories by Conan Doyle in episodic form two years earlier. But where the phenomenal popularity of the fictional sleuth was based on regular monthly instalments of his adventures, Melville would have been confident, as he escorted Meunier out of Charing Cross station, that he could provide his public with a dramatic sequel far sooner than that.
In fact, it was only two days after Meunier’s arrest that Inspector Sweeney took a seat at the front of a bus bound for Clerkenwell, next to a twitchy Italian teenager. For the previous fortnight Special Branch agents had been watching the eighteen-year-old Francis Polti, knowing that some weeks earlier a middle-aged anarchist drifter calling himself Emile Carnot had approached Polti to take part in a bomb plot. Since then, the police had shadowed him up to the hospital in Highgate, where his wife lay dangerously ill after the recent birth of their twins, and around pharmacists’ shops closer to his home in Saffron Hill, observing as he assembled the necessary components.
It was ‘a weary and thankless task’ for the surveillance agents, Sweeney would complain, ‘telegraphing for relief to come to one place when you’ve already had to leave to go halfway across London in pursuit’. Finally,
however, they had tailed him to Mr Cohen’s iron foundry in Clerkenwell, from where he and Carnot – whose real name was Giuseppe Farnara – had commissioned the bomb’s casing. Realising that once Polti was back in the slums of the Italian quarter he might ‘easily give his pursuers the slip in the maze of alleys and courts’, and fearing that the device might prematurely explode as Bourdin’s had done, Sweeney moved to make the arrest as soon as he saw Polti’s hand enter the bag.
The motive for his planned attack, Polti declared, was to avenge himself on the British tourists who deluged the cities of his native Italy in droves each year: those Cookites who were ‘destroying the natural beauties of the place and making scorching, sunbaked boulevards where were formerly olive-shaded lanes’. The outraged eloquence, though, was that of a journalist writing in a Pall Mall Gazette article two years earlier; Polti’s explanation appeared quite bathetic in light of the bombs that had recently shaken the ministries in Rome in revenge for the government’s brutal suppression of the anarchist uprising. An unsent letter from Polti to his parents left no doubt that he had indeed planned a suicide attack for the following day, but his words lacked the brazen clarity of Farnara’s ‘I am guilty; I wanted to kill capitalists.’ Perhaps, to the impoverished teenager, the glory of martyrdom in the anarchist cause simply offered an escape from the burden of fatherhood. What seems certain is that he was a dupe, his reference to the ‘Royal Exchange’ rather than the ‘Stock Exchange’ as the intended target, an obvious example of poor rote learning. The crucial question was on whose behalf, if any, Farnara had put him up to it.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 51
