David Nicoll evoked the human cost of such tactics with great pathos. ‘Romance and novelty there are,’ he wrote of the anarchist’s life, ‘though sometimes the delightful vision comes to an abrupt termination, changing suddenly like a lovely face into an opium vision of something horrible and devilish. This was the fate of some friends of ours, who dreamed of regenerating the world, and found themselves, thanks to the machinations of a police spy, doomed to a long term of penal servitude.’ The fate of others was more abrupt.
The twenty-first of May 1894 was a day of executions. In Paris, Emile Henry was guillotined, while in Barcelona, the six men convicted of the Liceo opera house bombing faced a firing squad. As widely expected, their deaths heralded the next wave of revenge attacks. Three weeks later, an anarchist assassin tried and failed to shoot dead the Italian prime minister, Crispi, whom he held accountable for the imprisonment of over 1,000 socialists after the risings in the south of the country. Eight days after that, in Lyons, another Italian, Sante Geronimo Caserio, would meet with greater success: dashing from the crowd as the French president Sadi Carnot’s carriage passed, he hauled himself up on to the running board and plunged a dagger into his victim’s chest. Few were convinced by the assassin’s insistence that he had acted on his own initiative, having simply caught a train from his home near the Mediterranean and then walked the rest of the distance to carry out the act, nor by the anarchists’ disavowal of all knowledge of him.
Around the world, increasingly draconian measures were taken to counter the terrorist threat. In America, mere adherence to the anarchist cause had already become a crime, and any who espoused it were barred from entering the country. In July, France added a Press Law to the antianarchist armoury that the ‘Wicked Laws’ already constituted. The same month, Italy caught up by enacting three exceptional laws to ensure public security, known collectively as the ‘Crispi Dictatorship’, that imposed harsh restrictions on freedom of speech and association. Sentiment in Britain too was swinging against the anarchists.
‘Society is asking how long the British metropolis will be content to afford a safe asylum for gangs of assassins, who there plot and perfect atrocious schemes for universal murder on the Continent,’ opined the leader article in the Globe. Alarmist accounts of the terrorist threat, previously the preserve of the sensationalist novels, now became the subject of supposedly factual reportage in the popular magazines. The Strand published an article entitled ‘Dynamite and Dynamiters’ which disingenuously denied any intention to ‘give rise to alarm or be an incentive to disturbed or restless nights’, while offering the most blood-chilling accounts and illustrations of the destructive power of anarchist bombs. Tit Bits upped the ante, scooping an interview with a ‘gentleman holding a high position in the detective force’ who confided his concern that the anarchists were now turning their attention from conventional to biological terrorism, using the spores of typhus and yellow fever to spread viral contamination. Following the model of Rachkovsky’s anti-Semitic propaganda, the immigrant masses were to be transformed in the popular imagination from inadvertent vectors of disease into intentional agents of infection.
21
A Time of Harmony
Paris, London and New York, 1894–1896
The Utopia for which veterans like Reclus and Kropoktin had strived for so long was finally plain to see. Paul Signac had begun work on his vast canvas In the Time of Anarchy in 1894, while the campaign of bombings and assassinations was at its most intense, but the scene he envisioned was a world apart from the chaos and ruination to which most now thought anarchism aspired. In Signac’s modern-day Eden, fruit hung from trees within easy reach, babies explored freely, women danced in elegant but loose dresses and men read or played petanques, stripped to the waist, while couples gazed out over the sea. A distant steam tractor implied the benefits of technology but did not intrude on the balmy peace of the Mediterranean landscape.
Signac had ignored Kropotkin’s famous call of a decade earlier for artists to ‘depict for us in your vivid style or in your fervent paintings the titanic struggle of the people against the oppressors’ or ‘show the people the ugliness of contemporary life and make us touch with a finger the cause of this ugliness’. Instead, his restorative paradise evoked the kind of world in which Reclus had advised workers to spend their leisure, the better to counteract the bestiality of their labour, and for which Kropotkin had more recently supplied the logistical foundation in Fields, Factories and Workshops. Reclus himself would have been in his element there. ‘I see him yet,’ a friend of the geographer would later recollect, ‘close to the waterside, making islands, capes and archipelagos in the sand with his stick, to amuse some child, and saying, “This is the ideal place to teach geography.”’
The influence of the two venerable anarchists on Signac went far deeper, though, than his choice of subject matter. The pointillist method of constructing images through the application of minute paint dabs, that characterised the neo-Impressionist style of Signac and his late friend Seurat, had first been inspired by Reclus’ descriptions of running water, and only later developed by reference to recent innovations in optical theory. Reclus, a true poet of nature as Kropotkin said of him, saw how closely mankind and its environment were informed by one another: that aesthetic harmony encouraged social well-being, promoting the intellectual, moral and spiritual growth of its members and, conversely, that ‘the planet’s characteristics will not have their complete harmony if men are not first united in a concert of justice and peace’. Signac had visualised that reciprocity at its most benign, and for him the very perceptual process by which adjacent spots of colour blended into a shimmering whole in the eye of the beholder, as musical notes did in a complex composition, was itself a potent metaphor of the political harmony that the coming social revolution would herald. To many of his artistic peers, however, Signac’s gesture of solidarity with the older generation of anarchists must have seemed curiously anachronistic, at the very least.
The propaganda value of all the articles written by Reclus and Kropotkin were as nothing, Félix Fénéon had pronounced, beside the bomb attacks by Vaillant and Henry, with the latter’s attack on the Café Terminus especially noteworthy, ‘being directed toward the voting public, more guilty in the long run, perhaps, than the representatives they elected’. In 1890, Signac had painted a full-length portrait of Fénéon in profile, in which the swirling psychedelic background, ‘Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones and Tints’, suggested the lily-carrying impresario of the post-Impressionist and Symbolist movements conjuring an unknown aesthetic cosmos into existence. ‘Everything new to be accepted requires that old fools must die. We are longing for this to happen as soon as possible’ Fénéon had since written, in this case out of impatience for Camille Pissarro’s work to receive due recognition. Increasingly, though, his belief in violent rupture as the necessary mechanism of progress had spilled over from his artistic concerns into political activism. In common with the large numbers of Signac’s cultural peers who had spent months or years in a self-imposed London exile among the most extreme of the ‘individualist’ anarchists, the aura that surrounded Fénéon by 1894 was that of the dynamite blast.
That spring, when police raids were netting more than 400 anarchists suspected of conspiracy, Elisée Reclus was in Belgium, where he had finally gone with the intention of taking up a fellowship at the Free University in Brussels, which he had delayed until the nineteenth and final volume of the Universal Geography was complete. Wisely, the French authorities declined to pursue him, recognising that quite apart from the international furore his arrest might cause, the prosecution of a man of such high intellectual standing would muddy the convenient image of anarchism as the preserve of thugs and degenerates. Signac too was left unmolested, despite his name appearing, together with those of many other cultural figures, on a document seized by the police that listed the circulation of La Révolte. Yet when thirty anarchists accused of promulgating terror were a
rraigned in France that August, Fénéon found himself in the dock, together with the artist Maximilien Luce. Alongside them were Grave and Sébastien Faure, both of whom were reluctant speakers, together with a selection of other journalists and a handful of inarticulate career criminals from among Parmeggiani’s gang of expropriators, many of them recent members of the London colony. With Emile Pouget and Constant Martin both in hiding, Fénéon was free to command the stage.
The charge against him was of conspiring with anarchists and keeping explosive materials concealed in his desk at the war ministry, in relation to the bombing of the Café Foyot. The incidental accusation of having spied for Germany was clearly absurd, but in other respects the case against him had a firmer foundation than certain outraged sections of the press claimed. By making the case as much about crimes of thought as of action, however, the authorities provided Fénéon with a field of battle tailored to his talents.
‘You were seen conversing with an anarchist behind a gas lamp,’ challenged Bulot, who was once again prosecuting for the state, his occasional fumbling of the cross-examination perhaps explained by the emotion of having himself narrowly escaped one of Ravachol’s bombs. ‘Could you explain to me,’ Fénéon asked, turning insouciantly to the president of the court, ‘which side of a gas lamp is its behind?’ And when the president reminded the court how the mercury that Fénéon had admitted keeping for Henry might easily be made into an explosive fulminate, Fénéon had a smart riposte: just as it could be made into thermometers and barometers. Emile Henry had shown a quick tongue too, of course, until silenced by the guillotine, but the glowing tributes paid to Fénéon by such respectable character witnesses as the poet Mallarmé lent the acerbic logic of his responses something like a moral weight when set beside the sophistry of the prosecution.
The French authorities had intended the Trial of the Thirty, as it became known, to be a slick spectacle that would demonstrate the necessity and efficacy of the ‘Wicked Laws’ in defending the state and its citizens. Having started its hearings less than a month after President Carnot’s assassination, only one outcome to the trial seemed likely. The police, though, had overreached themselves in attempting to construct a case that conflated the theorists of anarchism with those who merely used the ideology as political cover for their habitual violent criminality. The result was that by the end of the trial in late October 1894, in all but three instances of serious but non-political violence, either the charges were dropped or acquittal ensued. ‘Not since Pontius Pilate has anyone washed their hands with such solemnity,’ Fénéon had quipped after Bulot opened a package from a ‘well-wisher’ that proved to be full of human excrement. However, although his facetious wit had afforded the ‘individualist’ anarchists outside the courtroom a crumb of comfort, the events of the previous year had left the movement high and dry, its press almost silenced and its lost momentum almost impossible to regain.
In retrospect, the Trial of the Thirty can be seen as marking a watershed in the history of French anarchism, between a period of terroristic violence and one of more considered attrition against the existing structures of society. The moderation of the jury’s verdict reflected the unease that was widely felt in French society when people compared the harsh treatment meted out to those conspiring in the cause of a more just society, feared and despised as they widely were, with the leniency shown towards many of those involved in the Panama scandal, which had defrauded the French people of untold millions of francs. But while the trial may have helped release the dangerous pressure that had built up on both sides, the attitude of the authorities towards the anarchists in its immediate aftermath was scarcely conciliatory.
The mood among the London émigrés was variously depressed, chastened and pathetically vituperative. ‘Most of them have lost their exaltation; others regret having ever become part of the anarchist movement and want to return to France,’ concluded the prefecture’s regular summary of its intelligence in October. The ‘Wicked Laws’ still threatened harsh penalties, though, and even the most remorseful were to remain trapped for the foreseeable future in an exile that became ever less congenial. Colleagues in Paris were warned by both Rochefort and Grave that coming to London had become a risky business and was inadvisable, but they would only have needed to read the articles in French magazines about the constant preparedness of the Home Office’s resident bomb expert, Colonel Majendie, to understand how vigilant the British police remained. A spate of bomb attacks on London post offices in August may have proved to be the work of an indigenous anarchist from Deptford, but the French and Italian émigrés continued to feel the hot breath of Melville’s agents on their necks.
With no other outlet for their violent urges, the expropriators turned on one another. Parmeggiani, frustrated as his gang went their separate ways, waved a revolver when Marocco accused him of stealing his share of the ill-gotten gains. For others, a long visit by Emma Goldman provided a welcome distraction, although her friendship with the informant Mowbray, who had recently accompanied her on a lecture tour of America, said little for her judgement. Her presence at least inspired thoughts of greener pastures, despite the harsh restrictions that the United States had imposed on anarchists entering the country. One French anarchist, Mollet, who had come into a sizeable inheritance, even set up a travel agency in Liverpool to facilitate passage for all those wishing to cross the Atlantic. Louise Michel herself appeared intent on doing so, though she wavered over which side of the equator should be graced with her presence.
The end of the year brought further bad news, this time from the penal colony of Devil’s Island off the coast of Guyana, where many of those responsible for the most notorious crimes of recent years were serving sentences of hard labour. A number of anarchists had risen in revolt, stabbing four of their warders in vengeance for a convict beaten to death by a guard. Forewarned by informers, however, the authorities quickly reasserted control, hunting the miscreants down in bestial fashion. Hiding in a tree, Ravachol’s accomplice Charles Simon (‘Biscuit’) was used for target practice. His body and that of Leauthier, who had stabbed the Serbian ambassador in the Bouillon Duval restaurant, were among eleven to be thrown to the sharks.
At any other time in the previous three years, such brutality would have aroused hot talk of vengeance among the London émigrés, but what meagre conspiracies the French police agents now reported had instead an air of desperate futility. Only the new young Tsar Nicholas in Moscow, who had recently inherited the crown on the death of Alexander III, was deemed a fitting target. With Rochefort turning off the tap of funding to the émigré communities, however, and in the absence of further nefarious investment from Rachkovsky and the Okhrana, any such murderous expeditions seemed certain to remain a pipe dream. Such, at least, must have been the hope of the more senior anarchists in London, who had for some time been edging towards a more outspoken denunciation of dynamite.
The previous March, soon after the bombs at the Café Terminus and in Greenwich, Louise Michel had gone on record as saying that terrorism was irrelevant to the general struggle. It was a view that Malatesta would echo in his critical essay on the subject, ‘Heroes and Martyrs’, observing that ‘with any number of bombs and any number of blows of the knife, bourgeois society cannot be overthrown, being built as it is on an enormous mass of private interests and prejudices and sustained, more than it is by force of arms, by the inertia of the masses and their habits of submission’. However, a reputation, once acquired, is hard to live down.
For many years, Malatesta’s commitment to the cause of social revolution had led him to plot and plan its advent wherever the prospect seemed most promising; it was no accident that his travels around Europe, since his return from South America, had frequently coincided with strikes and demonstrations. The confrontations that ensued often led to violence, initiated by one side or the other. An almost inevitable outcome was the recourse to terrorism by anarchists for purposes of revenge. The repeated linkage of Malatesta�
�s conspiratorial presence and the use of dynamite led many, in the police forces of Europe and even among his colleagues, to suppose a causal relationship where it did not necessarily exist. Even his denunciations of individualistic violence, including his tart exchange of views with Emile Henry in 1893, were consequently seen as a ruse to misdirect attention away from his supposed role in such plots.
The wave of ‘anarchist’ terror that had swept the Continent was a millstone for Malatesta. He had been a suspect in the case of the rue des Bons-Enfants bomb in 1892, which Henry had in fact planned himself, and was thought by many to be the guiding hand behind others in Spain and Italy. During the weeks before the Café Terminus bombing it was his presence rather than that of either Henry or ‘Bourdin’ which attracted the heaviest surveillance, while his movements and contacts in London were consistently reported with an assiduousness that applied to few other émigrés. Accused in one report of having been ‘involved with’ President Carnot’s assassin, Caserio, and in another of being ‘satisfied’ with the result of the attack, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, the image of him presented by French police agents was like that in the Englishman W. C. Harte’s memoir Confessions of an Anarchist: ‘the most dangerous plotter of modern times – who however…when the death of kings and presidents is in the air – appears in the background’. When Malatesta reviled dynamite, the authorities swiftly claimed it was because he ‘prefers daggers that are sure to strike their predetermined target’, and would long continue to insist that ‘he wraps himself in mystery’.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 53
