19 Wicked Laws
This chapter and those on either side warrant a book in themselves to tease out the intricacies of the relationships, motivations, intrigues that gave rise to a period of little more than two years that were rich in incident, and their social, political and cultural impact. Merriman’s recent volume achieves this admirably for France by focusing on Emile Henry, though it is an account that gives scant attention to the influence of Russia and to the unseen but guiding hand of the Okhrana, in relation to which the bombs and hysteria appear to me to be at most surface turbulence. The somewhat synoptic and reductive account given in this book covers territory familiar from many sources, from Joll to Kedward, Anderson to Vizetelly. It finds little space for the tensions and distrust in the émigré colonies of London, the nuanced ideological differences that the bombings generated or the sense of eavesdropping and claustrophobia that is evoked by running reports of French police agents and informants, and the multiple perspectives they offer. Among the more unusual details of the chapter, Rollin is the source for Dupuy’s promise to de Mohrenheim, the payment to Vaillant to rent a room for his bomb-making, and Jacot’s mockery of Dupuy’s foreknowledge. Rollin’s extraordinary work of investigation into the deep historical origins of the Protocols was published in 1939 but ruthlessly suppressed during the Nazi occupation of Paris, never to receive the attention it deserved, and in the course of my research I have repeatedly found myself treading in his footsteps. Porch writes about Boulanger’s plan to intern anarchists and Bazaries, while the APP émigrés anarchist files contain both examples of the code and reports of concerns about it; Lavenir writes about the course of the idea of ‘terrorism’ and the ‘terrorist’ from the revolutionary State Terror of Robespierre and the guillotine. Shattuck briefly explores the invocation by the anarchist martyrs of their scientific and artistic heroes, Darwin, Spencer, Ibsen and Mirbeau, though how violence became aestheticised, in parallel to criminals adopting anarchist ideas, is a subject that warrants further study. B. Anderson is moving on the subject of the future care of the daughters of condemned anarchists: Santiago, convicted of the Liceo bombing, pitifully remarked of his own that ‘If they are pretty the bourgeois will take care of them’; Vaillant’s only child was fought over by his comrades and Duchess d’Uzès, but eventually became the ward of Sébastien Faure and, before long, his underage lover. Clutterbuck first revealed Littlechild’s parting entry in the Special Branch accounts ledger, Porter his comment on ‘narks’, Dilnot the assumption of disguises by Melville, Bantman the French perspective on the British watchers at French ports and the surveillance of Melville mounted by the anarchists; my research in the Special Branch ledgers indicated Mowbray’s role helping organise the surveillance of the anarchists. The image of Melville telephonically connected is from the Westminster Budget of 23 February 1894. As well as dealing with Conrad’s treatment of the Greenwich bombing, Sherry examines the literary references to ‘The Professor’, a mysterious figure in the context of Le Raincy, mentioned by Ruud and Stepanov quite vaguely: my own research has noted his appearances in APP, which suggests his identification with the ‘Professor Mezenoff’ who lectures on dynamite in Paterson and is reported occasionally elsewhere in America as carrying a bomb in his pocket for demonstration purposes. Rachkovsky’s reprimand for promoting an anti-anarchist congress is found in 34, VA, 2 of the Okhrana archive, as is the menu for the agency’s celebration of the Franco-Russian alliance. Beaumont summarises The Year of Miracle, with its purging plague, while Weindling considers the cultural impact of epidemics and how it overlaps with justifications for later genocide; the Verne novel criticised by the rabbi was The Carpathian Castle; Huysmans’ farewell to the year 1893 is from a letter to Arij Prins.
20 The Mysteries of Bourdin and the Baron
The propaganda successes of which Rachkovsky boasted to Durnovo in January 1894, and for which he was rewarded that April, effectively entailed, as the Daily Chronicle acknowledged on 28 February, the publication of an abridged version of the Russian Memorandum. The seizure of Henry’s private papers by the French ministry of the interior were disclosed by La Patrie on 22 May; B. Anderson, quotes Clemenceau on society’s equally savage revenge for the bomber’s own savagery The reports of Malato’s concerns about Dumont and about the ‘Bourdin brother’ present in Paris that January come from the APP, as does information about Rochefort’s dinner with anarchists in March; R. Henderson considers the identity of ‘Bourdin’ in the context of British Museum Library membership in his Library History article. The core examination of the press reaction to Greenwich and the contribution of Samuels and Coulon is provided by Sherry and Quail, while the background to the tension between Samuels and Nicoll and the latter’s suspicion of Coulon, along with his cover as ‘Diamond Setter and Jeweller’ is derived from IISH files (2011 and 2018 respectively), as is Nicoll’s claim, at the time of his second arrest, that ‘Under the rule of Lord Salisbury and his political police, Russian methods are coming into fashion’ (2016). It is interesting to note that the sell-out first printing of Nicoll’s ‘Walsall Anarchists’ pamphlet appeared on the very day of the Greenwich explosion. His correspondence with Nettlau, in the IISH, indicates his belief that Bourdin’s accidental death was due to the inadvisability of carrying ‘sulphuric acid and chlorate of potash…in close combination’, remarked on by the Home Office’s Colonel Majendie. Dipaola’s Italian sources suggest that the spy Lauria led to Farnara’s arrest, while Clutterbuck quotes the redacted Special Branch ledgers as listing for 30 June, ‘Blanqui (Lauris for Farnaro) – £10’, a very sizeable payment: Quail suggests the involvement of a mysterious third man, Pemble a context for Polti’s supposed anti-tourist motive. The change in British attitudes following the bombings is traced by Shpayer-Makov, the response in the sensationalist fiction and journalism of the time by Porter, Eisenzweig and Melchiori. For the recent history of anarchist militancy and police intrigue in Belgium, Linotte, Keunings and Moulaert are excellent sources, though the documents mentioned by the former as held by the Liège archives now appear to have been lost, compounding the problem caused by the removal of the file for Jagolkovsky/Ungern-Sternberg from the Sûreté archives at AGR, by the cabinet office. To reconstruct events in Liège required painstaking cross-reference of diverse archival sources: Vervaeck is an invaluable guide to those in Brussels, from which so much of the ‘lost’ life of Hekkelman aka Landesen aka Harting can be reconstructed; APP BA 1510 provides a French perspective on activities in Belgium, including useful press reports; the Okhrana archive, suspiciously muted regarding Liège, does include a document in French from 5 May about the unknown visitor to the rue de Grenelle embassy urgently demanding to see M. Léonard. Coming at the moment when the Belgian police were searching for the Léonard mentioned in the letters abandoned by Ungern-Sternberg as living at that address, the scene in the embassy has been imagined: Plaisirs de Paris mentions its restricted opening hours. It is curious but surely only coincidental that Encausse attended an esoteric congress in Liège only days before the first bomb exploded. In the absence of available official records of the trial, I tracked down a running daily transcript in the local Belgian socialist paper, La Peuple, which illuminates the ‘fix’ to conceal the Okhrana’s role; reports by agents Z1 and Jarvis in June 1894 in the APP files go some way to tying up the London end of the network of provocation. MacIntyre’s confessions about Special Branch provocation and its corrupt practitioners were in Reynold’s News starting 14 April 1895, and are discussed in Porter. Agafonov reports Rachkovsky’s meeting with Pope Leo XIII and discussion of ecumenicalism; Fischer the proposed exchange of diplomats between Russia and the Vatican.
21 A Time of Harmony
Clark and Martin consider Reclus’ progressive educational ideas, Jacqmot and Fleming the crisis around his university appointment in Brussels and the creative reaction to it: the Flemish he had learned from a fellow prisoner in the barges after his capture in 1871 stood him in good stead. This instance of diso
wning association with individualist anarchism is found in Reclus’ letter to Renard of 27 December 1895; his revival of ideas for a Great Globe, thoroughly explored by Dunbar and Welter, first found expression in Reclus’ pamphlet, ‘Project de construction d’un Globe terrestre a l’échelle du cent-millième’. The punctured ‘exaltation’ of the London colony is the subject of many agent reports in the APP; Rochefort’s Adventures cast an alarmist eye on the well-documented Trial of the Thirty as the prelude to an 18 Fructidor, date of the coup d’état of 1797 by the Directory. Lee’s work once again parallels my own curious concatenation of interests in Verne and Pompeii, in his examination of the metaphors of a Paris haunted by the Commune, the ‘political volcano’ in Zola’s Paris, and the Vesuvius that Montmartre might become were anarchist plans for the bombing of the Sacré-Coeur to come to fruition. The intended title of Signac’s painting was taken from the popular ballad ‘Quand nous serons au Temps de l’Anarchie’, such songs being a pronounced feature of the anarchist cultural landscape; Malato’s line on the future Golden Age is from an 1893 article of his in La Revue Anarchiste; Signac’s adoption of it and response to Kropotkin’s demands is quoted by Herbert, his acknowledgement of his debt to Grave, by Varias. Roslak’s superb study of Signac’s art deftly draws together science, politics and aesthetics, to my sense of which Hutton, Shattuck and Sweetman also contribute; Joll in Anarchists quotes Fénéon that ‘Old fools must die’; Clark, writing about Seurat, astutely observes that ‘rather than being anarchism’s painter he was the painter anarchism made possible’, which applies in slightly different terms to Signac too; tangentially, Boime draws attention to how long it took the painter Luce to reconcile himself to the traumatic memories of the Bloody Week of 1871 in his work. Gaucher is my source for the organisation and schematic representation of the Okhrana’s surveillance of revolutionaries within Russia and R. Garnett for the expedition on which Kravchinsky sent Constance Garnett: an adventure that seems particularly appealing in the context of Kropotkin’s comment in his memoirs that Alexander III felt intimidated by ‘educated women … wearing spectacles and a garibaldi hat’. The Garnett family variously remembered Kravchinsky’s promise of a ham and loss of hearing in the Turkish prisons, and his desire to elope: David and Olive, in her diaries, respectively. The account of his death is from Taratuta, with a nod to Senese; of his funeral from The Times of 30 December; and of his posthumous popularity at seances from the Hon. John Harris, Inferences from Haunted Houses and Haunted Men. McCarthy is the source for Morris’ last year, his words to Webb and his death. Kropotkin’s recurrent overwork and grippe is tracked by Slatter, Marshall mentions Landauer’s appeal to the 1896 congress, whose schism is analysed by Joll, Michel spoke optimistically of ‘harmony and reconciliation’ to Le Paris, while Thomas recounts how the Dreyfus Affair caused her to become isolated.
22 Conspiracy Theories
The role played by Rachkovsky in the Franco-Russian alliance, referred to as ‘mystical’ by Adam in Le Matin, and how his diplomatic and financial interests courted trouble, are alluded to by Ruud and Stepanov: considered alongside the large number of historians of the Okhrana archive who have already been mentioned, their work is an important source for its activities at home and abroad. Laporte mentions Alexander III’s scribbling of ‘crapule’ next to Rachkovsky’s name, Figes recounts the joke about the fickle Tsar Nicholas, and Byrnes considers the influence of Pobedonostsev’s conception of the ‘good society’. The Dreyfus Affair has generated a mountain of studies: for its anti-Semitism I have looked to Poliakov and Stanislawsky, the former quoting Herzl’s reaction to Dreyfus’ formal humiliation and Zionism, Doise on the suggestion of a Russian angle, which Giscard d’Estaing dismisses, I am not sure reliably. Williams discusses the disdain with which anarchists and nihilists regarded Rochefort, regarding him useful only as a ‘demolition hammer’. De Cyon’s predicament and the raid on his villa are covered by Fox and Kennan, with Cohn’s exploration of the origins of the Protocols admirable if no longer definitive, and with Lepekhine offering new candidates for their authorship and Hagemeister a more circumspect view; it is Svatikov who places Golovinsky in Paris, working for Rachkovsky. Katz touches on Taxil, but details of the ‘historical and philosophical conference, with light projections’ convened by Jogand-Pages at the Paris Geographical Society are taken from the APP file. My understanding of the moral policing undertaken in late 1890s London, including Bedborough and the Legitimation League, comes from Bunyan, Calder-Marshall and Porter: in the aftermath of the Wilde trial, even the homosexual Carpenter found his work sidelined and was cast out by his publisher Fisher Unwin. Sweeney’s memoirs, though, make no bones about his prejudices and conviction that ‘We should at one blow kill a growing evil in the shape of a vigorous campaign of free love and Anarchism’: a far cry from the belief of Home Secretary Harcourt, in the case of the free-thinking Foote’s crime of blasphemy in 1882, that ‘more harm than advantage is produced to public morals by government prosecutions of this kind’. R. Henderson’s thesis, which must now be considered the authoritative source on the prosecution of Burtsev, drew my attention to Bullier’s honeytrap operation against him, with its echoes of the Holy Brotherhood’s plan to use femmes fatales to seduce and kill fleeing terrorists; it also quotes Salisbury’s ‘delicate’ negotiation with Russia over Jewish immigration. His thesis builds on foundations laid by Hollingsworth, Kimball, Senese and Porter, to whose work I also refer. The Foreign Office’s views of 1892 on public hostility to an Aliens Act are in TNA FO 27/3102, its changed position regarding Burtsev in FO 65/1544; the case of Hilda Czarina is discussed in HO 45/9751. Burtsev published his opinion on the ‘regular science’ of Russian policing in Narodovolets 3, 1897; Quail quotes Nicoll’s impression that Fitzrovia was teeming ‘with vermin in the shape of spies’. Kingston recounts Melville’s complaints about hosting Okhrana agents, Cook offers more on his relationship with Rachkovsky: his report to the police department apparently names Melville McNaughten as the source of comments on ‘common murders’, though Chief Inspector William Melville seems a more likely candidate as his ‘longtime associate’ in light of his letter to the latter praising the jury system, in 35/Vc/folder 3. The Corpus Christi meeting in Trafalgar Square is described by Rudolf Rocker, quoted by B. Anderson who traces Angiolillo’s subsequent movements; details of the assassination of Empress Elizabeth are from Jaquet. Majendie’s views on the Anti-Anarchism Conference are in TNA HO45/10254/X36450, those of Michel in the Adult of February 1899 while Quail quotes those of Kropotkin, who considered the murder of Sissi to be an act of insanity. In an intriguing aside, Jensen refers to the bomb attack in Lisbon of February 1896 on a doctor who had certified an anarchist to be insane: an issue considered by Dr Channing soon after McKinley’s murder, which is covered in detail by Rauchway: Trautmann discusses the determination in America to uncover an anarchist conspiracy; Theodore Roosevelt’s bold assertion is found in the Congressional Record.
23 Agents Unmasked
The notion that Rachkovsky’s life was saved by Kropotkin in 1900 emerges from Confino’s study of his letters, while the causes of his dismissal from his Paris post, including his antagonism to the tsarina’s favourite ‘Master’ Phillipe Vachot and his maverick press campaign for the ‘League for the Salvation of the Russian Fatherland’, are detailed in Byloe’s account of his career, in 1918. Yet the meticulous care with which Rachkovsky had once vetted his agents, dismissing many recommendations from his superiors, is drawn out in Fischer; my sense of the police department at this time is informed by Ruud and Stepanov, Peregudova and Zuckerman, and of its involvement with the extreme right in particular from Lauchlan. Azef’s biography is drawn largely from Rubinstein and Geifman, who disagree substantially on the extent to which he betrayed his police paymasters, with the latter arguing that where possible he remained loyal; on this, bearing in mind the testimony of figures close to Azef, including Savinkov, who Geifman deems less reliable than police sources, I tend to favour Rubin
stein. That the anarchists in the West increasingly looked to Russia for encouragement is apparent long before the revolution of 1905, with Most urging the readers of Freiheit in 1903 to ‘Let your models be comrades in Russia. Their example glows like an ember in the anthracite of anarchist achievement’: at the time of his death the newspaper that Marx and Engels had predicted would survive only six months was approaching its third decade. For Most, Trautman is the source, for Michel’s last years, Thomas. It is in letters of 1902 to Guillaume that Kropotkin dismisses Marx as ‘A German pamphleteer’; Miller and Woodcock both discuss his eagerness to return to Russia, and Reclus’ regrets about his ‘asthmatic puffs’ are expressed in a letter to his old friend found in his own collected correspondence. I regret that narrative logic prevented a closer consideration of the ironies that clustered around Reclus’ declining years. Among these are the characterisation of him as Kaw-djer in Verne’s The Survivors of the Jonathan, which creatively conflates the wreck of the Commune, Reclus as an early guru of South American colonies, and his perceived status as a benign seer: the ‘arch-Druid’ as his friend the educationalist and pioneering urban planner Patrick Geddes described him, while secretly negotiating for none other than Andrew Carnegie, with whom Kropotkin refused all contact, to fund Reclus’ globe. The latter information comes largely from Dunbar, the former from Fleming. Gapon’s activities abroad are illuminated by his APP file, with a sidelight from Madox Ford; Rachkovsky’s near escape when Gapon was entrapped and hanged and Azef’s taunting of his handler come from Gaucher, with information about his renewed career in Russia from Brachev, as well as sources mentioned above. It is Porter who reveals that Special Branch saved Lenin from a lynching as a spy in the East End during one of his five visits to London, Walter who suggests that Kropotkin intervened to secure his release from custody in 1907. The irony that Lenin used the same cover name as Rachkovsky, ‘Richter’, is picked up by R. Henderson while Deacon discusses the revolutionary counter-espionage outfit in the East End, similar perhaps to the ‘Revolutionary Police Department’ set up by Bakai in Paris, who attempted to track down and execute Harting after his exposure. Rubinstein explores the connection between the Okhrana and Lenin’s Bolsheviks, through its agent Malinkovsky, Brackman the recruitment of Stalin, then known as Koba, as an informant by Harting. The sources for the Jury of Honour are substantially covered in the notes for the Prologue. Regarding Harting’s later career, Fischer was useful on surveillance of ports, and Futrell on Harting’s interdiction of arms smuggling, Chaikovsky’s fund-raising for which is found in Budd. The most fascinating detail, however, emerges from AGR, in particular folders SA 126, 32762 and 302: the protection he was accorded by the Belgian Sûreté, and his role in Manchuria during the war against Japan, on the way to which, on board the Esmeralda, he targeted the British fishing fleet. The best source for the drama of his exposure, however, on the very day the Versaillais butcher General Gallifet died, are the AN files. Harris sheds light on the phenomenon of the Apache gangs, Porch quotes Jaures on the affront of Russian agents active in Paris. It is in Misalliance that one of Shaw’s characters observes that ‘anarchism is a game’.
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