The World That Never Was (11 page)

Though consistent with anarchism’s idealistic tenets, such a creed was a recipe for disaster in a flawed society whose injustices already drove men to insanity and crime. For when the movement’s ideological leaders refused on principle to disown murder, violent theft or even paid collaboration with the police, if it helped feed a starving mouth or might advance the cause, the scope for the malicious manipulation of susceptible minds was boundless.

The world was far from what Kropotkin had dreamed it might become, but was there no hope for the future? Adjoining Savinkov’s apartment block in rue La Fontaine stood the architect Guimard’s newly constructed art nouveau masterpiece, Castel Béranger. In the sinuous, organic forms of its gated entrance – in the mysterious leaves and tendrils of its decorative wrought iron, that curled up from the ground like smoke, then whiplashed back – ideas central to his political creed had been distilled into a compelling visual form: individualism challenged uniformity, while progress vanquished convention. And yet the Paris in which he had spent the last three weeks – a belle époque city of exclusive pleasures and spasmodic street violence – fell far short of the aspirations expressed in its architecture.

The filigree ironwork that vaulted the new Grand Palais, the crowds that issued periodically from the stations of the recently tunnelled Métro, and the soaring pylon of the Eiffel Tower eloquently expressed the great era of change that had passed since Kropotkin’s first visit to the city three decades before. But there was scant evidence that the human ingenuity expended on the technological advances of the age had been matched by developments in the political and social spheres. While the years had mellowed the elegant masonry in which Baron Haussmann, Emperor Napoleon III’s prefect of the Seine, had rebuilt Paris in the 1860s, the crushing bourgeois values of self-interest and conformity celebrated in his mass-produced blocks still held sway. Fear of a rising Germany had ten years earlier driven the French Republic into a shameful alliance with despotic Russia, and more recently it had become a full and eager signatory to the draconian St Petersburg protocol on international anti-anarchist police cooperation. Worst of all, it was old radical associates of Kropotkin’s like Georges Clemenceau, prime minister for the past two years, who bore much of the responsibility for betraying the principles on which the Third Republic had been founded.

Kropotkin nevertheless retained an unshakeable faith that the rebirth of society was imminent. Perhaps in tacit acknowledgement of his part in allowing the creation of monsters like Azef, he would devote his last years to the culminating project of his life: a work of moral philosophy for the dawning age of social revolution. That future, Kropotkin was quite certain, would be born in war and strife. A renewal of hostilities between Germany and France, which had threatened repeatedly during the three decades and more since Bismarck’s armies had besieged Paris, would at long last precipitate a fight for justice against the forces of reaction. It would come soon – next week, perhaps, or the week after – and its challenges could only be met if the lessons of past failures had been fully addressed. Those who remained of his generation, who had lived through those failures, must point the way.

He would have thought of them often during his time in Paris: the men and women of the Commune, who for eight extraordinary weeks of insurrection during the spring of 1871 had risen up to create their own autonomous government in the city. Some of them, now dead of old age, had become Kropotkin’s closest friends: the geographer Elisée Reclus, who had been captured during the Communards’ first, disastrous sortie against the Versaillais forces intent on crushing their social experiment; Louise Michel, the Red Virgin, who had still been there at the doomed defence of the Issy fortress, and throughout the Communards’ tragic, fighting retreat across the city.

It had been stories of the Paris Commune that had helped inspire Kropotkin to leave behind his life as a leading light of Russia’s scientific Establishment and devote himself to the revolutionary cause. Ten years after first hearing the wistful recollections of Communard exiles, drinking in a Swiss tavern in the immediate aftermath of defeat, he had written them down. ‘I will never forget’, one had said, ‘those delightful moments of deliverance. How I came down from my supper chamber in the Latin Quarter to join that immense open-air club which filled the boulevards from one end of Paris to the other. Everyone talked about public affairs; all mere personal preoccupations were forgotten; no more thought of buying or selling; all felt ready to advance towards the future.’ Both Reclus and Michel had died in 1905, the year when revolution had finally touched Russia, only to end before it could begin, but that optimism remained alive.

In his obituary of Reclus, Kropotkin had paid tribute to the role played by his fellow geographer during the 1870 Siege of Paris, when he had
served as an assistant to the great balloonist Nadar, whose daring aeronauts ferried messages out of the city and over the Prussian lines. Had his cerebral, reticent old friend really been one of those fearless men who floated aloft in the balloons, braving the Prussian sharpshooters? Had Reclus looked down across Paris from a vantage point higher than that from the tower, that was then not yet even a glimmer in Eiffel’s eye, and dreamed of what the world might be? It mattered so much from where you saw things, and what you wanted to see. For fiction could so easily be confused with truth, and truth relegated to the realm of fiction.

1
A Distant Horizon

Paris, 1870

A blizzard was blowing when Elisée Reclus arrived in London in the winter of 1851 and took lodgings in a modest garret, shared with his older brother, Elie. Yet it was the search for shelter of a very different kind that had brought the twenty-year-old pastor’s son to the British capital: a haven where he could engage in political debate, free of censorship or persecution.

Having abandoned his theological training when the great wave of revolutions had swept Europe in 1848, Reclus had occupied himself in its aftermath with a new course of studies under the radical geographer Carl Ritter in Berlin. On his return to France after graduation, Reclus found himself in a country braced for renewed political turbulence, as Bonaparte’s nephew Louis-Napoleon edged towards the
coup d’état
that would overturn the infant Second Republic and elevate him from the presidency to the imperial throne. Reclus decided to go to London. And if he had any doubts about his decision to leave France again so soon, they were quickly dispelled when he was repeatedly stopped by the police, stationed along the roads to the Channel, and interrogated as to the purpose of his journey.

From the famed Italian socialist Mazzini, to the little-known German political journalist Karl Marx, London alone offered reliable asylum to the political renegades of the Continent. Although 7,000 had fled there after the turmoil of 1848, there was little sign of Britain’s hospitality diminishing; freedom fighter Joseph Kossuth’s arrival only a few weeks before Reclus, after the revolutionary had been ousted by Russia from the presidency of Hungary, had been greeted by cheering crowds. Reclus, who increasingly counted himself a fellow traveller, could venture out without fear to public lectures by such exiled luminaries as Louis Blanc and the Russian Alexander Herzen, or to rub shoulders with the Freemasons of
the Loge of Philadelphes, who were pledged to reverse Napoleon’s usurpation of power. Yet amidst the excitement of open debate, it was Reclus’ visits to a showman’s marvel in Leicester Square that left the strongest impression on him.

Sixty feet in diameter and named after Queen Victoria’s geographer, Wyld’s Globe offered tourists the chance to stand on a central staircase that ran from pole to pole, and gaze up at the contoured map of the world that covered its inner surface. ‘Here a country looks like an immense cabbage-leaf, flattened out, half green and half decayed, with an immense caterpillar crawling right over it in the shape of a chain of mountains,’ reported
Punch
. ‘There a country resembles an old piece of jagged leather hung up against the wall to dry, with large holes, that have been moth-eaten out of it.’ Whatever the globe’s aesthetic shortcomings, crowds were drawn by the chance to wonder at the glorious extent of the British Empire, or identify the provenance of the many luxuries with which global trade provided them. Reclus saw the construction rather differently. Tutored in Ritter’s holistic vision of the natural world, and inspired by his pioneering work on the relationship between mankind and its environment, his thoughts were animated instead by the globe’s potential as an instrument of humanitarian instruction.

Growing up in the countryside of the Gironde, one of fourteen children, Reclus had been forbidden by his strict and self-denying father from wandering in the fields around their home, lest his fascination with nature distract his younger siblings from their devotions. The vision that Wyld’s Globe now afforded Reclus, of a world open to curiosity and enquiry, more than vindicated his conversion from the cast-iron certainties of the Church to the empirical values of science. One inheritance from his father that Reclus had embraced, though, was the desire to evangelise. Recalling proposals for a great spherical ‘Temple to Nature and Reason’ made by the visionary architect Etienne-Louis Boullée at the height of Robespierre’s influence during the French Revolution, Reclus began to dream of building an edifice vaster still. It would celebrate a world stripped of such artificial impositions as national borders, and symbolise one in which race, class and property no longer divided mankind.

In its review of Wyld’s Globe,
Punch
had commented on how the positioning of the central iron staircase, which impeded a panoramic view, demonstrated ‘how one half of the Globe doesn’t know what the other half is doing’. Several months in London had greatly enhanced Reclus’ understanding of contemporary currents in socialist thought, but his practical ignorance of the world demanded redress. Departing England in the
continued company of Elie, his scientific purpose was to discover those laws of nature that, throughout history, could explain the relationship between the physical environment and the beliefs, institutions and languages on which human society was founded. Above all, though, the journey that would take him halfway around the world over the coming years was to be one of political self-discovery.

At every stage of his travels, Reclus encountered the bitter reality of the division between powerful and oppressed, and the wilful ignorance that sustained it: an Irish farm whose emerald green pastures were used to fatten cattle for export to the English market while famine racked the country; African slaves, torn from their homes and worked like beasts for profit on the plantations of Louisiana; even the rivalries of the supposed free-thinkers in Panama with whom he entered a doomed collaboration in communal living. Yet in the solidarity of the oppressed he detected a glimmer of hope. The displaced Choctaw tribe, on whose ancestral lands the Reclus brothers set up home on first arriving in America, had sent a large donation to the starving Irish, remembering their own suffering on the ‘Trail of Tears’ to the reservation. Equally, the campaign for the abolition of slavery affirmed the survival of a human decency amidst the corrupt capitalism that was visible all around them in America. ‘Every negro, every white who protests in exalted voice in favour of the rights of man, every word, every line in all the South affirms that man is the brother to man,’ Elisée reassured his brother.

Having long since repudiated religious dogma, Reclus embraced the alternative, secular article of faith found in the enlightenment philosophy of Rousseau which had inspired the prime movers of the French Revolution of 1789. Man was innately perfectible, he asserted, not fallen for some long-dead ancestor’s sin; nor was he to be saved by divine intervention, but by his own hunger for justice and equality. Schooled by Elie in the new utopian socialism of Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier and Joseph-Pierre Proudhon, it seemed to Reclus that the old revolutionary doctrines of the previous century merely needed to be recast in new terms.

The France to which Reclus finally returned in 1857 proved even less receptive to radical politics than that which he had abruptly left six years earlier. When Louis-Napoleon had seized power and proclaimed himself emperor as Napoleon III, the move had been presented as a just response to efforts by vested monarchical interests to stymie his supposedly popular policies of paternalistic socialism by refusing to alter the constitution to allow him a second presidential term. Once installed as emperor, however,
he had held back from implementing his progressive vision, on the grounds that ‘liberty has never helped to found a lasting political edifice, it can only crown that edifice once time has consolidated it.’

Not until 1864 did Napoleon’s success in seducing the bourgeoisie, by way of their bulging purses and swelling national self-confidence, create a climate conducive for him to begin the risky transition from autocratic rule to a democratic, liberal empire. In a bold gamble, the prohibition on strikes was lifted and the draconian restrictions on the press eased, but after more than a decade of repression, the radical factions had little appetite for what they perceived as half measures. Every concession Napoleon III granted, it seemed, merely released another outburst of resentment, or provided a further opportunity for plotting against his regime. Nothing better illustrated the emperor’s predicament than his decision to sponsor sixty representatives of France’s workers to attend a conference of their international peers that was to be held in London during the Universal Exposition of 1862, an event that carried considerable significance in an age when a nation’s status was defined by technological change, commercial innovation and the fruits of expanding empire. The relationships they formed led directly to a strong French involvement two years later in the foundation of the International Association of Working Men, which encompassed a wide range of revolutionary socialist views, and whose statement of principles Karl Marx would draft.