In the three years since his arrival, Rachkovsky had transformed a Paris bureau whose operations had lagged far behind the ‘excellent and conscientious’ work being carried out in Berlin and Vienna. Brushing aside rivals with a mixture of cunning and sheer dedication, Rachkovsky had made Paris the main bastion of ‘the systematic and covert surveillance of the Russian emigration abroad’ which Plehve, then overall chief of the police department and now deputy interior minister, had declared to be his top priority.
Nevertheless, the changes came at a price. As well as the basic running costs of the outfit, which included payments to freelance agents and to traitors in the revolutionary ranks for information rendered, there were the portiers and postmen to bribe for turning a blind eye to the perlustration of letters (copied and returned within the day) and fees to pay to prostitutes, whose reports of pillow talk afforded Rachkovsky access to the intimate thoughts of the émigré community. And whilst he had managed to negotiate an increase in the bureau’s budget, first to 132,000 francs and then by a further 50 per cent, there were fresh mutterings in St Petersburg about the lack of any conspicuous return on its investment, with Kropotkin’s release and Tikhomirov’s continued propaganda activities causing particular unease. Hampered by the bureaucracy of the Sûreté that impeded any cooperation, Rachkovsky had been playing a clever game, designed to ensure steady rather than spectacular results. It was now becoming clear, though, that to secure his position he needed a sensational success. The opportunity finally presented itself at the end of 1886.
‘On Saturday night printing press in Geneva successfully destroyed by me, fifth volume of the Herald and all revolutionary publications. Details by post,’ Rachkovsky telegraphed to St Petersburg on 11 November, signing himself off as Monsieur Léonard, his wife’s maiden name. And he was more than happy to oblige when the reply came through from Interior Minister Dmitri Tolstoy breathlessly requesting ‘the technical details of the operation, how you infiltrated, at what time, how long was needed for the destruction, what measures were taken not to be noticed’. The enterprise, Rachkovsky informed his superiors, had been initiated following the receipt of high-quality information about the location of the press from a disgruntled ex-associate of the People’s Will. Based on this, Rachkovsky had drawn up a plan of the building, subsequently refined by enquiries carried out by his agent Wadyslaw Milewski in Geneva, whose powers of persuasion had convinced the caretaker that he was the rightful owner of the presses and secured access to the premises.
Milewski, Henri Bint and another man, quite possibily the agent Cyprien Jagolkovsky, had embarked on their methodical destruction of the works at nine in the evening and had continued through the night. The personal risk to them was great, since under Swiss law anyone who killed an intruder on their property was immune from prosecution, and as they moved from shelf to shelf the agents allowed themselves only the light of matches to work by, to avoid detection from the street. Gallons of acid, brought from Paris for the purpose, were poured on to the type, melting several hundred kilograms of metal beyond use or repair; a similar quantity of type would be scattered in the streets as the intruders left. Hundreds of copies of the Herald too were destroyed, past and present editions, along with editions of Herzen’s and Tikhomirov’s works due for clandestine delivery into Russia; Rachkvosky’s agents tore them up, page by page, until knee-deep in shredded paper and barely able to move.
It was half-past four in the morning when they finally left, breaking the lock to indicate forced entry and protect the caretaker from retribution, and planting false evidence to suggest that the crime was the direct responsibility of a rival political group rather than simple vandalism. As they travelled back to Paris that morning on separate trains, their blistered hands testified to a gruelling and nerve-racked night, but the rewards were considerable, both for them as individuals and for Rachkovsky’s organisation. Amidst much rejoicing in St Petersburg, Rachkovsky received 5,000 francs and the Order of St Anna, Third Class; his agents got 1,500 apiece, while any questions that had remained over the effectiveness of the Paris agentura were, for the moment, answered.
Such an audacious cross-border incursion may well have been without precedent in the history of policing, and owed its success to the operational shortcomings of the Sûreté. Its ex-director, Gustave Mace, was one of those frustrated by the Sûreté’s inefficiency, explicitly citing its overly laborious process when pursuing fugitive criminals to the frontier. He described how a report filed in the early morning had to pass through the municipal police, the first bureau of the first division to the local commissaire where ‘after a respectable sojourn in various offices, [it would be] examined by a clerk, who draws up a memorandum some lines long in which there does not always appear all the information of value in seeking the suspect’, before finally returning to the Sûreté for action late in the evening. Had French policing been more efficient, things could have been different: Le Journal de Genève might have been printing news of the Russians’ arrest, rather than lapping up stories planted by Rachkovsky to feed the internecine squabbles of the revolutionary exiles.
There was relief in St Petersburg that the Geneva venture had passed off without an international incident. Eager to avoid anything that could prompt further questions about the raid, Count Tolstoy declined Rachkovsky’s request to be allowed to press his advantage by planting further forged documents apportioning blame for the press’ destruction that would undermine both Plekhanov and Tikhomirov. Rachkovsky was not easily deterred. Having proved to himself how a maverick approach to the niceties of policing and diplomacy could reap results, he set about harrying the revolutionaries in both Switzerland and France with even greater vigour, and scant regard to propriety.
In Russia, surveillance units strove to be inconspicuous, assisted by the extensive wardrobe of disguises held by the police department in Moscow. Among the émigrés abroad, however, the aim was to intimidate rather than simply to gather intelligence, and Rachkovsky’s agents made their presence known in the most sinister of ways, generating the illusion of ubiquity. So effective were they in this that many émigrés succumbed to paranoia that a vast network of mouchards was on their tail, rather than the few dozen that Rachkovsky actually employed. Once again Rachkovsky’s policy was vindicated when, in 1887, contrary to all previous policy, the Russian government formally requested that France actually desist from expelling any further nihilists, realising that whilst under the keen eyes of the Paris agentura they would pose far less of a threat than if they were sent to England or Switzerland.
Intoxicated by his successes, Rachkovsky began to seek even greater prizes. Strolling out of the embassy building in the rue de Grenelle in 1886 and 1887, he would have heard newspaper vendors tickling the interest of passers-by with news of an anarchist bomb thrown into the Paris Bourse, or the dramatic theft by ‘The Panthers of Batignolles’ of money and jewels from a socialite painter’s apartment ‘in the name of Liberty’. Meanwhile, wherever he looked, the freshly rebuilt architecture of the area around the embassy would have provided a visual reminder of the fatal last days of the Commune, when cannon fire from the rampaging Versaillais had devastated the nearby Croix-Rouge crossroads. The latent anxieties of the French were transparent to Rachkovsky, as they were to the futurological artist Robida, and would provide a broad canvas for his psychological games. A dab of terrorism here, a flick of anti-Jewish incitement there, all mixed in with a spot of warmongering, and the spymaster might just be able to bring Russian autocracy and French republicanism into the improbable alignment that had proved elusive for so long. For the moment, though, his usual duties had to come first.
To judge by the circulation of anarchist newspapers in France in the mid-1880s, the movement could claim at most a few tens of thousands of followers, including casual sympathisers. Yet circumstances could hardly have been more propitious for the growth of an ideology that was internationalist and egalitarian. In the vexed area of labour relations, the troubles ar
ound Lyons in which Kropotkin had been caught up had migrated to Anzin, on the Belgian border in the north-east, then flared up too at Decazeville in the Aveyron, hundreds of miles to the south-west, where the government was obliged to station troops in the spring of 1886 to deal with the violence. Meanwhile, following France’s occupation of Tunisia in 1881, its overseas activities once again became a source of shame and anger to the socialists. Since 1883 Jules Ferry’s government had pursued a policy of colonial expansion in South East Asia, to offset the effects of economic recession at home and help assuage the loss of Alsace and Lorraine to Germany. War with China was the result: a piece of adventurism that enjoyed only fragile support at home. When faulty intelligence reported that the Battle of Bang Bo was a defeat for the French expeditionary force in Tonkin, the belief in Paris that the force was in an irredeemable position precipitated the fall of Ferry’s administration.
The leading figures of the radical left were quick to trace the common thread between the diverse iniquities of the age. ‘We didn’t want to send troops to Tonkin and Tunisia,’ Louise Michel raged to audiences who were easily roused. ‘High finance becomes high crime.’ Rochefort spoke out tirelessly for the oppressed of Tunisia, arguing for the release of those who had resisted French rule, and when a subscription in L’Intransigeant raised funds to help strikers arrested in confrontations at the Anzin colliery, he delivered the money in person. France’s industrial workers and her young soldiers were victims alike, he proclaimed, sent to die for the profit of their masters, whether killed in the fighting for Tonkin or mangled in machinery, as many hundreds were every year.
There were others, though, Rochefort told his readers, who were prepared to go far further in their opposition to colonialism, revealing that Olivier Pain, his companion in the escape from New Caledonia and his secretary since, had been executed by Lord Kitchener in the Sudan as a spy for the Mahdi, the mystical Arab leader who besieged the British in Khartoum and shook Britain with the killing of General Gordon. And once again, Verne seemed to echo the experiences of those associated with his occasional co-author, Paschal Grousset, when in 1886 he presented the eponymous Robur the Conqueror to the world. A pioneer adventurer of the skies, the hero’s fearsome vessel the Albatross, a heavier-than-air equivalent of Nemo’s Nautilus, serves the cause of liberation by turning its firepower on the exploiters of Africa. Rochefort himself, ever the egotist, would have been more likely to see in Robur’s adventures a metaphor for his own contrarian campaigns.
Having been elected to Parliament as a Blanquist in 1885, and having then resigned in high dudgeon to publicise the crimes of colonialism, Rochefort was now eager for a new tub to thump. Edouard Drumont, whose father had hired Rochefort thirty years earlier for his first job at the department of architecture, was championing one promising cause with his newly founded La France Juive: a periodical that was sworn to expose the undermining of French society by cosmopolitan Jews. The subject, already close to Rochefort’s heart, had additional appeal at a time when the uncle of Joseph Reinarch – the object of Rochefort’s personal loathing over the exposure of his special pleading to the tribunal that had tried the Communards – was among three Jewish ‘promoters’ mounting a public-relations whitewash on behalf of the Panama Canal Company. For bubbling under the surface of the company’s reassuring message were rumours about delays and mismanagement in the construction of the canal and fears of economic scandal and collapse.
The first issue of shares in the Panama project in 1881 had been quickly taken up, with those who had missed out on the 300 per cent profit made by the early investors in Ferdinand de Lesseps’ Suez project determined not to do so again. Eight years was what they had been told it would take for de Lesseps, the universally acknowledged genius of the age and France’s national treasure, to reshape the world by cutting a forty-five-mile canal through mountain ranges 800 feet high to link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Five years on, however, the proceeds of that first feverish sale of stock had been all but spent on barely one sixth of the construction, necessitating further investment, with a lottery loan the proposed means of raising it. De Lesseps was brazenly dismissing concerns and again promising completion by 1889, in time for the centenary of the Revolution, but the newspapers were unearthing buried reports about delayed progress and the story refused to die. Anti-Semitism and the merry-go-round of political folly and incompetence alone, however, were not sufficient to boost either Rochefort’s profile or the languishing circulation of L’Intransigeant. In desperate need of a cause to promote, fortune now brought him General Boulanger.
It had been Georges Clemenceau’s idea to appoint the glamorous Boulanger as minister for war in de Freycinet’s reformist government of 1886, with a brief to deliver an army reformed on truly republican lines. The choice was an odd one for an old radical to make, given that Boulanger was an ex-Versaillais officer. Louise Michel remembered only too well Boulanger’s part in the savage defeat of the Communard soldiers who had set out for Versailles on Gustave Flourens’ grande sortie in a spirit of fraternity. The memory of most on the left, though, appeared to be shorter, and the wounds that had prevented Boulanger from participating personally in the Bloody Week continued to provide him with dispensation from any lingering blame. Eventual victory in the colonial war for control of Tonkin, achieved while he was director of the war office, had burnished the general’s prestige, but it was his attitude towards those two bugbears of the left – colonial occupation and the treatment of strikers – that helped extend his appeal beyond the usual constituency for a military hero. His expressions of unease over the French strategy in North Africa had cost him his command of the garrison there, while as the minister responsible for troops sent to pacify strike-racked mines in the Aveyron, he had announced to the Chamber of Deputies in April 1886 that ‘at this very moment, every soldier is perhaps sharing his rations with a miner’.
Soft soap it may have been, but the sentiment endeared Boulanger to those for whom an army commander with the common touch, alive to the suffering of the hungry masses and to their deeper emotional need for a sense of national purpose, was a most appealing prospect. Moreover, he was handsome and dashing, with an elegantly styled beard, handlebar moustache and an impressive black steed, on which he regularly rode out in public; and what France truly craved in late 1886, with the most wanton part of her soul, was the immediate glory of the cavalry charge: the chance for revenge on Germany. At the Bastille Day celebrations at Longchamp in July 1886, President Grévy was left waiting in vain to receive the salutes of the column of soldiers who, rather than looking right, towards him, as they passed, instead turned left to Boulanger.
Rochefort had always had something of a soft spot for a man in uniform, especially one who could combine the smack of firm leadership with liberal tendencies: during the dying days of the Commune in 1871 he had, after all, pressed the young General Rossel to assert himself as a military dictator. In Boulanger the ideal was made incarnate: a tribune of the people who had not flinched when it fell to him to inform his old mentor, the duc d’Aumale, that as an Orléanist claimant to the throne he was to be discharged from the army, yet who would equally readily speak hard truths to the tired old professional politicians in the council of ministers. And during the winter of 1886, mounting military tension with Germany allowed Boulanger to establish a reputation as ‘General Revenge’, a national saviour who strengthened frontier fortifications and sought to even ban performances of Wagner’s operatic paean to Teutonic chivalry, Lohengrin.
With conflict in the air, the anarchists saw an opportunity for revolution. Elisée Reclus came under suspicion from the French police of planning ‘a seditious movement whose aim is to thwart the efforts of the French armies’; so too did Kropotkin, who proposed that each French city should declare itself a revolutionary commune as a focus for resistance. Friedrich Engels, meanwhile, demonstrated his usual perspicacity in military matters by warning the German high command that, were hostilities to break out,
the conflict would rapidly turn into a continent-wide conflagration, as deadly as the Thirty Years War and bringing in its wake ‘the collapse of countless European states and the disappearance of dozens of monarchies’.
Seventy thousand troops were mobilised across the border, in response to Boulanger’s bellicose statements, with the result that nearly every other continental power stepped up its military preparations. Rochefort weighed in to fuel war fever, revealing in L’Intransigeant that Bismarck had warned the Red Cross to prepare field hospitals, and had offered Provence, Nice and Savoy to Italy if it would join the attack: a Boulanger dictatorship, the newspaper proposed, was France’s only hope. That he was providing Bismarck with the pretext to rouse nationalistic support in the weeks before the German elections did nothing to dent the general’s rising popularity. Yet wiser heads, fearing what might happen if actions were allowed to match the rhetoric, held France back from mobilisation, and once the elections in Germany had passed, the situation began to cool. Clemenceau now realised, however, that in underestimating ‘Boulboul’ he had loosed on to the political stage a man of dangerous charisma.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 36