Rachkovsky’s diplomatic and propagandist sidelines were proving ever more absorbing to him. Besides lobbying for the French foreign ministry to decline to take Bulgaria’s side in a disagreement with Russia, there would soon be the delicate matter of the rifles manufactured by the French company Lebel on which to keep an eye. While the initial order, after a sample had impressed Grand Duke Vladimir, commander of the Russian Imperial Guard, might only be for 5,000, if every member of the Russian army received the weapon, as their French counterparts had, it would facilitate military coordination between the countries. But Rachkovsky was stretching himself thin. If he was to be effective in pursuing his other interests, it was essential that he maintain the indispensable nature of his counter-subversive work as the Okhrana’s spymaster.
With the centenary of the French Revolution in 1889 fast approaching, when Paris was to host a Universal Exposition, there would be abundant opportunities for him to work his wiles. That Russia would not officially attend – having used Kropotkin’s release as a pretext to announce its withdrawal from a celebration of democracy that the tsar would, in any circumstances, have found distinctly uncomfortable – need not impede his intrigues.
One thing was certain, as the great Exposition prepared to open in May 1889: it wasn’t going to be Boulanger who brought about a Franco-Russian coalition. Ironically, it was an eccentric Russian religious adventurer by the name of Ashinov who helped precipitate the final collapse of the Boulangist project, when his missionaries mistakenly occupied the fort in the small port of Obock, a French colonial possession in the Gulf of Aden. The new French minister of the interior, Ernest Constans, indicated that he was inclined to treat the incursion as a declaration of war. Perhaps, too, he saw the political potential of the situation, for when the journal of the Boulangist League of Patriots accused the government of betraying the national interest by its hostility to Russia, Constans promptly announced that its editor would be charged with treason, with Boulanger and Rochefort implicated by association. Boulanger promptly took fright and, rather than lead the crowds who were once again baying for a march on the Elysée Palace, allowed the crafty chief of police, Louis Lepine, to bundle him and his mistress on to a train to Belgium, and into exile.
‘Not a man, but a wet rag,’ Duchess d’Uzès said of her ex-protégé. To all practical purposes, Boulangism was finished, the general’s sudden departure seen by most as an admission of guilt. Rochefort’s faltering influence over French public opinion could no longer ensure his safety from arrest, and he soon followed his hero into exile. To Louise Michel, the threatened trial and Boulanger’s departure were ‘just another burlesque, signifying a society in its slow death throes’, but the opportunists in government could, for the moment, breathe a sigh of relief. For the few months of the Expo, it was hoped the simmering discontent of the past few years might be contained, or else subsumed in the ferment of artistic creativity that was its correlative. And what better symbol of their optimism than the edifice that had won the competition to be the centrepiece of the Exposition: Eiffel’s extraordinary iron pylon, which for the past two years had been gradually rising skyward over Paris, its four great feet held steady by the use of pneumatic props as it grew.
The Panama project may have collapsed, deeply compromising Gustave Eiffel, who had designed the locks needed to lift the boats over the mountains of the isthmus through which dynamite could not blast a path, but his tower now stood as alternative proof that French ingenuity could raise a monument of an unprecedented scale. Conservatives railed against it on aesthetic grounds, filling the letter columns of the press with attacks on how its brute presence overshadowed the elegance of Haussmann’s boulevards. To the bourgeoisie, however, Eiffel’s great feat of engineering, together with the vast Gallery of Machines, offered conspicuous reassurance that the process of industrialisation that had driven their rising affluence was again gathering pace after years of recession. The tower even held something for all those women who had been such strong adherents of the cult of Boulanger: one admirer of its sheer, phallic assertiveness wrote to Eiffel that ‘it makes me quiver in all my emotions’, and anecdote suggests that in this she was far from alone.
Among the Expo’s thirty-two million visitors that summer, though, seditious elements lurked. Workers descended on Paris in their thousands from the industrial heartlands of Europe, including a sizeable contingent, conspicuous only to the surveillance agents detailed to spy upon them, who had come for the socialist congresses convened to commemorate the revolution of 1789. For residents and visitors alike, the recent launch of Emile Pouget’s scabrous newspaper Père Peinard, modelled on the revolutionary Père Duchesne that had thrived from 1790 and through the Terror, offered a crude call to arms against contemporary injustice, written in the argot of working-class Paris, which its critics claimed to be symptomatic of moral decay. It was with very different eyes that its readers viewed the tower, and the celebrations that surrounded it.
Many of the anarchists from Belgium carried in their minds images glimpsed in the studios of the radical artists’ group Les XX, that tore up the rulebook of artistic propriety. James Ensor’s depiction of Christ’s Entry into Brussels, above all – which usurped the Church’s monopoly on the most potent icon of spiritual renewal by taking the figure of the Messiah and submerging him in a carnivalesque crowd of self-satisfied bourgeoisie, fringed by vignettes of scatological satire – was an image so shocking that even his colleagues in the group suppressed its public exhibition. The crazed mood that Ensor captured, however, must have seemed close to quotidian in the Paris of the Exposition: a city whose facelift extended far beyond the public monuments to include even the ‘maisons closes’, all redecorated in anticipation of the surge in business.
For Elisée Reclus, meanwhile, whose vast and widely acclaimed Universal Geography was nearing its nineteenth volume, Eiffel’s tower represented a missed opportunity. For in its place might have stood a symbol that would have gladdened the hearts of all believers in social revolution: the Great Globe, of which Reclus had dreamed since his days in London almost forty years earlier. A statement of universal brotherhood and promise of enlightenment, the design on which he would shortly begin work would pay homage to the ideals of the Revolution, referencing the vast domed ‘Temple to Nature and Reason’ that the visionary Etienne-Louis Boullée had planned in the 1780s, barely escaping the Terror after being named one of the parasitical ‘madmen of architecture’. Even Reclus, however, might have acknowledged that a tower rather than a globe offered a better symbol of the myriad congresses under way in 1889: a tower of Babel.
Two years earlier Louise Michel had embraced the putative new lingua franca of Esperanto, certain that linguistic innovations could facilitate the unity of mankind. ‘Everything leads to the common ocean, solicited by the needs of renewal,’ she wrote, adopting Elisée Reclus’ favourite aquatic metaphor. ‘The human species which since the beginning of ages had ascended from the family to the tribe, to the horde, to the nation, ascends again and forever, and the family becomes an entire race.’ Yet in the absence of any gathering of Esperanto evangelists, the rival followers of Volapük set new standards of confusion by insisting that delegates to their congress communicate only in the notoriously complex invented language.
Elsewhere in the city, the ideological incompatibility and barely suppressed factionalism of the socialists produced a similar effect, with the sects refusing even to accept temporary coexistence under the same roof. The International Socialist Workers, with their collectivist tendency, convened on 14 July in a tiny music hall, the Fantaisies Parisiennes in the rue Rochecouart, while another congress nearby for the ‘Possibilists’ was attended by the likes of Henry Hyndman of the Social Democratic Federation, who were committed to operating within the existing framework of politics. Much time and effort at each was devoted to the question of whether to fuse.
Edward Carpenter, whose friendship with William Morris had led him to the congress of Internatio
nal Socialist Workers in its crowded, smoky music hall, reported back to his friends in Sheffield on the chaos of the debate: ‘The noise and excitement at times was terrific, the president ringing his bell half the time, climbing on his chair, on the table, anything to keep order.’ But with figures of the stature of Vera Zasulich, Plekhanov, Kropotkin and Kravchinsky from the Russian contingent, Liebknecht from Germany, Malatesta’s friend Merlino from Italy, and Louise Michel and Elisée Reclus from France, the cacophony was strangely rewarding to those who had previously only read their heroes’ words. ‘All this’, enthused Carpenter, ‘was to feel the pulse of a new movement extending throughout Europe, and emanating from every branch and department of labour with throbs of power and growing vitality.’
The eventual vote accepted a compromise resolution, expressing a desire for union with the members of the other congress but coyly postponing action until it had expressed a preference. Fusion of a kind was swiftly achieved, however, by the arrival of a wave of defectors from the ‘Possibilists’. For many of those who had travelled as representatives of their own small clubs – among the British, Frank Kitz from the Socialist League, Eleanor Marx’s husband Edward Aveling from East Finsbury, Joseph Deakin and Fred Charles from Walsall and North London, and even Auguste Coulon from Dublin – it was a chance to meet their foreign counterparts, and form international relationships that held the promise of future grass-roots cooperation in building the new world. The small army of translators struggled to keep pace, in the hall itself and as the debates overflowed into the more convivial surroundings of the Taverne du Bagne.
At the heart of the factional differences, though rarely explicit in discussions, was the contested interpretation of the Revolution that was being celebrated. For many, even the year chosen for the centenary was wrong. The Marxists viewed 1789 as the date of significant rupture, when the destruction of the feudal system laid the ground for the next stage on the long journey to a socialist Utopia. It was one that would be brought about by the inherent contradictions of the new, capitalist economic system which, under pressure from a growing class consciousness among the industrial proletariat, would tear itself apart in a second revolution. To those of the anarchist persuasion, by contrast, Marx’s Hegelian vision of historic forces slowly shifting like tectonic plates to reshape the landscape of society denied the power of individual will to effect change. For them 1789 was merely a moment of half-hearted compromise, and it was from the subsequent, genuinely populist achievements of the revolutionaries that contemporary socialists should draw their inspiration.
Above all, the anarchists should look to the brief moment before the Terror turned cannibalistic, when the sans-culottes, hungry for justice, gloriously demonstrated the potential of the workers to strike out against the tide of history. The blood shed so copiously by the guillotine should not be allowed to obscure that simple truth. By this logic, some even considered Robespierre a martyr to the anarchist cause, having advocated the continuation of the Revolution to its just conclusion, before his excessive zeal had provided the inadvertent catalyst of reaction. The anarchist’s highest esteem, however, was reserved for Gracchus Babeuf, the inspiration behind Sylvain Maréchal’s Manifesto of Equals, the first coherent expression of the anarchist creed, who had lost his life conspiring in bloodthirsty fashion against the Thermidorian Reaction of the mid-1790s.
To accept the version of 1789 promoted by the Third Republic was misleading, Elisée Reclus warned, and it was especially ‘important to see how the Revolution helped establish the modern nation-state that has progressively annihilated an invaluable legacy of decentralised, communal institutions.’ Yet it was perfectly palatable to the followers of Marx who, as Félix Fénéon observed, preferred ‘the complexity of a clock to that of a living body’, and longed for ‘a society in which every citizen carries a number’. The struggle to realise anarchism’s dream of society in an organic state of harmony nevertheless raised profound ethical challenges along the way. Reclus’s position, in particular, midway between the anarchist-communists and the pure Bakuninists, left him struggling to square a number of circles, foremost among which was the issue of ‘conscientious’ criminality, which believed in its right to flaunt the rules of a corrupt society, despite causing injury to others.
‘Equality is the ensemble of social facts which permit each man to look another man in the eye and to extend his hand to him without a second thought,’ Reclus had written to Louise Michel in 1887, and it was with the same saintly attitude that, in 1889, he revealed the secret of his equanimity: ‘to love everyone always, including even those whom one must fight against with unflagging energy because they live as parasites on the social body.’ But could violence and mutuality coexist? Was it possible to draw a moral distinction between theft from the rich, and the exploitation of others that had made them so? Where should the limits of acceptability be drawn for acts of ‘propaganda by the deed’?
Events only a fortnight before the opening of the congress had brought these issues into sharp focus, when an anarchist group calling itself the Intransigents, though with no connection to Rochefort’s paper, was revealed to have emulated the spree of burglaries committed by the Panthers of Batignolles. The Italian Pini, already a wanted man for his murderous escapades in Italy with Parmeggiani, and two Belgian brothers called Schouppe had been arrested after a police raid had found them in possession of a sizeable hoard of goods from homes in France and La Révolte defended the crime, insisting that the robberies were carried out solely for propaganda purposes. Reclus too came down decisively in favour of those driven to seek restitution from a bourgeois society whose own wealth had been iniquitously acquired. For interwoven with his deep benevolence was the same steely pragmatism that, ten years earlier, had insisted that the young would have to be prepared to lay down their lives to achieve the social revolution, and who in 1885 was said to be advising his acolytes on how to ensure the success of any repeat of the Commune uprising by seizing the Bank of France and the major rail companies.
The moral issues at stake were less complex for the man who had become chief of the Service for Judicial Identity at the prefecture of police, Alphonse Bertillon. It had been a rapid rise. Having had his ‘anthropometric method’ dismissed by Andrieux eight years earlier, and only tolerated by Mace, Bertillon was now able to introduce it across the French police force. When Pini and the Schouppes were taken into custody, their heads, faces and limbs would have been measured at eleven points to ensure they could be identified again (no expert in calculating probability, Bertillon omitted the twelfth measurement which would have made his system to all intents infallible). But outside the police force the belief in a physiological difference between the law-abiding citizen and the criminal was more hotly debated. Indeed, at a congress of criminal anthropologists, which also took place during the Exposition, leading experts from France and Italy were at loggerheads.
To the French, drawing on the imagery of Louis Pasteur’s discoveries in the field of microbiology, the most scientifically plausible explanation for criminal degeneracy lay in cultural influences: the social and economic context in which extremists – the equivalent of microbes – lived was the bouillon or ‘soup’ from which their wrongdoing emerged. The Italians, devout followers of Darwin, with Lombroso their high priest, instead argued for a divergence in the evolutionary paths of the pure and the atavistically sinful: a notion dismissed by their rivals as mere pseudoscience. A comparison of the skulls of criminals and non-criminals would reveal the validity of their claims, they asserted, but the French disdained the suggestion, and the congress ended in acrimony. At least the Italians could have consoled themselves before they left Paris, with an excursion to the quai de Branly, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, where the first in a series of tableaux representing the progress of man featured Neanderthals made up with just the heavy brows, misshapen ears and thick lips that they assigned to the atavistic criminal.
In all likelihood, absolute unanimity reig
ned at only one congress: that of the Freemasons. Outrage was what brought them together, in the face of seemingly well-attested accusations that their secret rites entailed the raising of the devil and human sacrifice. The document that formed the basis for these accusations was published – on the very day that Pini and his accomplices were arrested – by a certain Leo Taxil, who claimed to have received it from a mysterious and elusive woman called Diana Vaughan, purportedly the child of the goddess Astarte by her mystical union with the seventeenth-century alchemist Thomas Vaughan. Smuggled from America to Europe by Vaughan, who was resolved to expose the diabolical heart of Freemasonry, it laid bare a Masonic cult called Palladism, based in the American city of Charleston where the Grand Master of the order spoke to the rulers of hell by means of telephonic apparatus. Taxil himself was an ex-Freemason who had turned against the brotherhood in a spectacular way. During his days as an initiate he had been fiercely anticlerical, writing pornographic satires against the Pope that his fellow Masons had considered so far beyond the pale that they had pressured him to resign. Since then he had switched his allegiances dramatically, being granted an audience with the Pope he had previously maligned.
That the Catholic hierarchy proved so receptive to his claims of Masonic devil worship was due to the embattled position in which the Church felt itself to be. Displaced from its traditional role shaping young minds by the French educational reforms of the 1870s and 1880s, pinned back into the Vatican by the encroachments of state power in Italy and stripped of its control over clerical appointments in Germany by Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, across Europe the Church was having to cede power to the state. To explain its difficulties, however, the Catholic Church needed an enemy in its own form: one against which it could pit itself in a Manichaean struggle for which the rhetoric was ready-made. To this end, Leo XIII had dug out an old foe and dressed it up in frightening new clothing: his encyclical Humanum genus, of April 1884, painted Freemasonry as a black sect, the progenitor of the evils of the modern world, with socialism, anarchism and communism its evil cohorts, against which his clergy were instructed to fight back with all the weapons of the Congregation of the Inquisition.
The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents Page 41