The World That Never Was (24 page)

The
Virginie
cast anchor in Nouméa harbour on 10 December 1873, four months to the day after leaving Orléron, having made up time since
rounding the Horn. After countless days in the vast emptiness of the Pacific Ocean, even those passengers due to begin a sentence of hard labour must have felt some relief at stepping ashore. But as the new arrivals were separated out into three categories of convict and led off to their respective grades of punishment, New Caledonia quickly revealed itself to be among the harshest of colonial territories.

Two hundred miles from tip to tip and twenty-five or so across, the long, thin strip of the main island is surrounded by coral reefs and distinguished by two mountain peaks that rise from a ridge running most of its length. First occupied by France in 1853, its geographical features served to demarcate the island’s various communities. North of the larger mountain lay the area to which the indigenous Kanaks were now mostly restricted, their population already plummeting from an original 100,000 due to a range of nefarious French practices (though not yet halfway to the mere one in ten who would be left at the end of the century). On Nou Island, out in the ocean to the east, the harshest regime of all awaited those transported as violent criminals, who were clapped into manacles to drag out their sentence of ‘double chains’, under threat of further dire punishments for recalcitrance. For those ‘Deported to a fortified place’, the Ducos peninsula near Nouméa, the island’s capital, offered a marginally less arduous environment, and it was thence that Rochefort and Michel were first taken, the latter in transit to the Île des Pins, fifty miles off the southern tip of the main island, which was home to those for whom deportation alone was deemed sufficient hardship.

Eager crowds of Communard exiles from the earlier convict ships, promised that their families would one day be able to join them, had gathered to welcome the new arrivals. Their hopes were swiftly dashed when they saw no sign of their relatives. Rochefort and Michel, too, experienced a sinking of the spirits. After they absorbed the immediate shock of finding such a concentration of notorious radicals so far from home – among the non-Communard prisoners, was the tsar’s would-be assassin from 1867, Berezowsky – they would have noticed the emaciated faces of ragged creatures who had all but given up on life in the fourteen months since their arrival.

Rochefort was grateful to be delivered from the pathetic scene as Olivier Pain and Paschal Grousset intervened to usher him towards their huts, which they had newly extended to offer their old journalistic colleague temporary accommodation. If, as credible rumours in France suggested, it had indeed been Grousset who had tipped off the Versaillais authorities about Rochefort’s planned escape from Paris in the dying days
of the Commune, then this hospitality was the least he could offer by way of amends.

Michel, reunited with her bosom friend from the barricades, Natalie Lemel, was also drawn into life on the Ducos peninsula, where she wisely insisted on staying despite demands from the administration that she be moved on. The sketches she made here are deceptively picturesque, almost Arcadian, with the huts of the small prisoner communities grouped around a central fire and cooking area, implying the kind of simple conviviality enjoyed by native tribes the world over. By day, the convicts followed the custom of the Kanaks: fishing for lampreys and hunting the island’s kangaroos, though the physical gulf between the sickly, clumsy Communards and the strong and graceful natives, with their traditional Stone Age methods, was all too obvious. By night, especially in the high summer of December and January, the Europeans escaped the clouds of mosquitoes by retreating to the basalt rocks by the sea and the shelter of nets.

The reality, unfiltered by idealising draughtsmanship, was less comfortable. The Communards’ solidarity with their fellow men only went so far, a fact noted by Rochefort as he pottered about in his regulation straw hat and ungainly moccasins, with sailor’s culottes exposing his spindly calves. During his days as a newspaper editor, Rochefort had become known to the Arabs as ‘the good man’ for his advocacy of the rights of the North African peoples who had participated in the South Oranian insurrection against French rule; and yet on New Caledonia he found himself almost alone in treating the Algerian Arab prisoners with comradely respect. Although victims themselves, the heroes of the Commune were only too ready to vent their frustrations on the Africans in displays of vicious disdain that would eventually take a more deadly form in their dealings with the Kanaks.

Then there were the cases of ‘fatal nostalgia’. Although it did not suit the resolute tone of Rochefort’s later accounts to discuss it, he must have found it awful to watch as, one by one, his fellow prisoners succumbed to the condition. Though not recognised by the colony’s doctors, who preferred to record anaemia or dysentery as the causes of death, terminal grief was all too real for those who had been transported. Its favourite victims were the heartbroken fathers of small children, but 251 Communard prisoners were said to have been afflicted during the first three years, with the eight-month lapse between sending and receiving letters home making the torture of homesickness a perpetual feature of New Caledonian life. Some simply wandered off into the forest to die, others wasted away, like the Communard
Passedouet, who, watched by Rochefort, sat endlessly rocking and intoning ‘Proudhon, Proudhon’.

Survival depended on maintaining one’s morale. While awaiting transportation, Louise Michel had secured permission from the French Geographical society to serve as its correspondent in New Caledonia. The society perhaps hoped that she would supply observations on the nickel deposits that had been discovered there a few years earlier and for which state companies had begun to mine. Michel, however, chose to disregard the public demands of the society’s president that members embrace ‘besides a scientific end, a political and commercial object’, and busied herself with gentler plans to experiment with the cultivation of papayas and record Kanak folklore. Meanwhile, to vent her fury at those who now ruled France, on the 28th of every month, without fail, she wrote a letter of remonstration to ‘
la Commission dite des Graces’
that had failed to commute the execution of her beloved Ferré on that day in November 1871.

Rochefort would later insist that he had shown even greater foresight than Michel, researching, even during the Prussian siege, the geography of New Caledonia in case one day he should be called to escape from it. In fact, rather than initiating an escape plan Rochefort was fortunate to be allowed to join Pain’s and Grousset’s existing scheme. At huge risk, the pair had been scouting opportunities for several months, concealing themselves at the entrance to the harbour from where they tried to hail passing ships. What Rochefort brought to the project was the cash that could open the reluctant ears of the ships’ masters, and the English captain of a coal supply ship called the
PCE –
the
Peace, Comfort and Ease –
was soon recruited. Whilst Rochefort underwent a training regime of nocturnal bathing expeditions to accustom his eyes to the dark nights and toughen his muscles, three Freemasons among the six prospective fugitives persuaded key guards to turn a blind eye.

By chance, the date chosen for the escape was 18 March 1874, the third anniversary of the confrontation over the Montmartre cannon that had precipitated the Commune. The previous evening, the prisoners had been forced by an approaching storm to seek cover in their huts. Rochefort slept badly; woken in the early hours by a friendly black chicken, he seized upon it as an auspicious sign. When he, Pain and Grousset reached the shore, however, the swollen seascape that stretched out before them was of the kind Michel celebrated in her wild, romantic verse, but which evinced from Rochefort nothing but dread. Recognising that the chance might not come again, all three launched themselves into the heaving
darkness. At the appointed rock, the other members of the escape party hauled them out of the water and, before long, a launch appeared to carry them to the PCE. With a 1,000-mile voyage to Australia, they had ample opportunity to celebrate their freedom.

The long and circuitous journey back to Europe began well with a hearty welcome in the Australian port of Newcastle. ‘It is enough for [England] that men who struggle for freedom flee to her for refuge, and the protection of her powerful arm will be at once thrown around them,’ declared the local newspaper, while the celebrity status accorded them by the press in general afforded the fugitives a first inkling of how the outside world was perceiving the Commune as France’s ‘third revolution’. The holiday mood persisted as they set out on a route similar to that taken by Bakunin thirteen years earlier on his escape from Siberia, via South East Asia, with Rochefort using a visit to Fiji and Honolulu to cram his luggage with tribal art. In San Francisco, however, the solidarity of the group began to fracture. Taking umbrage at claims by Grousset that he was reneging on his promise to pay their passage home, Rochefort ignored the eagerness of the city’s socialists to feast their heroes, and the press to hold interviews, and hid himself away. Only two days after arriving, he and Olivier Pain were gone, leaving behind their four companions to accept the lavish plaudits of the city’s well-wishers, together with a £165 collection that, in the absence of Rochefort’s financial help, would eventually cover their Atlantic passage.

The America that Rochefort travelled through was one whose press was not uniformly indulgent to his escapes. In a country still coming to terms with its own vastly more destructive civil war, the Commune had received a huge amount of coverage, most of it hostile. Even the moderate
Harper’s Weekly
inveighed against the supposed savagery of the Commune’s ‘cruel and unreasonable’ women, asserting that it would prefer to find itself at the mercy of a horde of Red Indians; while even the more sympathetic
Nation
swallowed the lie that the transportation of Communards was ‘for their mental and moral health’. Versaillais propaganda had flooded across the Atlantic, finding a sympathetic hearing in a nation whose propertied classes feared the likelihood of social strife closer to home.

The threat had never been more real. Ever since the 1830s, immigrant labour from the poorer areas of Europe had been lured to the New World
of opportunity by promises of good jobs and land for free. The chance to begin afresh appealed powerfully to those who had suffered most from the injustices inflicted by the Old World’s arbitrary authorities. Wave after wave of determined poor had entered the country, to be ruthlessly exploited by established industrialists, only for those who clawed their way up to some small position of power to oppress the new ethnic groups who followed them. It was a brutal and ugly system, yet hugely productive of wealth. Now, though, the monstrous, accelerating engine of unregulated capitalism appeared to have stalled, and the society it had sustained looked likely to collapse into chaos.

In September 1873 the inconceivable had happened when the great railway entrepreneur Jay Gould went bankrupt, a victim of his own corruption, triggering an economic collapse that, within weeks, had plunged the country into a depression. With unemployment soaring and wages plummeting, the Commune appeared to offer the burgeoning ranks of America’s social malcontents a dangerous example. The
New York Times
predicted a time when the immigrant ‘socialists of the cities would combine to strike at the wealth heaped up around them’ and the ‘native American’ would respond with arms to the ‘rebellion against property’, just as he had to the ‘rebellion against freedom’ that sparked the Civil War. During that winter, tens of thousands had turned to the International in search of support and representation, and there was widespread fear that a mere spark might ‘spread abroad the anarchy and ruin of the French Commune’. Warnings received by the New York police were terrifyingly unambiguous: plans were in hand for a paramilitary organisation of 1,600 men modelled on the National Guard whose battalions had occupied Paris. The great demonstration in Tompkins Square of January 1874, brutally suppressed by nightstick-wielding mounted police, was only a first skirmish. All New York needed, four months later, was the arrival of France’s most polemical propagandist.