The World That Never Was (26 page)

For his next haven, Rochefort chose Switzerland, from where the smugglers’ routes to Paris were less well guarded than those across the Channel, allowing him to maintain distribution of
La Lanterne
. Not long after his arrival, however, he sat for a portrait by Courbet, who had escaped back to his native region of the Jura, on the Swiss side of the frontier, only to be declared liable by the French government for the 320,000-franc bill to rebuild the Vendôme Column. It was a chastening experience. Courbet’s still lifes of the time expressed a soul locked into trauma, struggling to free itself but numbed in the attempt. Trout lie glassy-eyed, the hooks caught in their mouths and the fishing line tugging tortuously from out of frame, their blood dripping on stones that recall the slippery red cobbles of the Paris killing fields.

Invited by Courbet to view his portrait, Rochefort revealed a rare glimpse of self-loathing, recoiling from what he saw as the image of a Portuguese diamond merchant: shallow, mercenary and self-regarding.
Trapped among the dispossessed and embittered, it would not be easy for Rochefort to reconcile himself to his own company.

For Louise Michel, left to languish in New Caledonia, Rochefort’s escape had made life far harder, with the imposition of a new regime whose severity would have been unrecognisable to the fugitives. The slightest infraction of the rules was punished with a spell in the sweltering cells, while the only work by which the deportees could now earn subsistence wages was on the chain gangs. The days of night swims, fishing and hunting were over, and while the ‘harmonious cooperation’ of the Kanaks in the face of ever more demeaning colonial oppression continued to encourage Louise Michel’s belief in the perfectibility of man and society, any residual hopes of building a Rousseauist Utopia on the island crumbled away. Money orders from Georges Clemenceau and letters from Victor Hugo kept her spirits up, along with wholly impractical plans for an escape by raft, but the prurient interest shown by both her fellow Communards and the authorities in her ménage with Natalie Lemel soured her existence. Michel resisted attempts to separate them, insisting as always that her only passion was for the revolution, but the malicious rumour that they were lovers eventually led to an acrimonious split between the two women.

The Nouméa of 1876 was a far cry from the titular
Mysterious Island
of Jules Verne’s new masterpiece, whose five fugitives are escaping not to America but from Confederate captivity in the Civil War, and by balloon rather than ship. Driven out into the Pacific by a storm, they land on a seemingly enchanted, uninhabited island where strange forces assist them in gradually reconstructing the sum of civilisation’s knowledge. The novel’s revelation that the guiding hand behind the marooned soldiers’ achievements belongs to Captain Nemo, who survived the
Nautilus’
cataclysmic underwater battle and is in hiding on the island, is surely all Verne’s own. But in its sympathy for those cut off by fate from their homeland, and its strangely inverted echoes of the Communards’ experiences of exile, the influence of Paschal Grousset, who would collaborate on Verne’s next book, may already be discernible. And for all the rancour between the fellow fugitives from New Caledonia, even Rochefort might have found some solace in the novel’s optimistic vision of human resourcefulness, and a consoling echo of his own isolation in that of the proud Nemo.

5
To the People

Russia and Switzerland, 1874–1876

On 22 March 1874, as the humming wires of the telegraph cables carried news of Rochefort’s audacious escape from New Caledonia around the world, St Petersburg awoke to startling news of its own. The previous evening, Prince Peter Kropotkin had been taken into custody by the infamous Third Section of the police while on his way home from the Geographical Society after delivering a long-awaited lecture expounding his new theories about the Ice Age in Siberia. St Petersburg society was stunned, its salons feverish with rumour and outrage. Apparently Kropotkin had been tricked into responding when an undercover police agent, feigning distress, called to him by the code name ‘Borodin’. Now he was being held at police headquarters, awaiting interrogation about his suspected involvement in the city’s foremost subversive organisation, the Chaikovsky Circle.

A few weeks earlier, nearly all those members of the Chaikovsky Circle still at liberty had escaped south from St Petersburg in the hope of inciting a popular uprising. Kropotkin alone had insisted on remaining in the capital as part of a desperate recruiting drive intended to rebuild the underground networks that the police were busy uprooting. The plan had been that Kropotkin would join the others at the crucial moment of rebellion, but his obstinate confidence that his apparent respectability would protect him from arrest had proved pitifully misplaced.

Still wearing the formal dress required by the Geographical Society at its public events, Kropotkin was led into the Third Section’s headquarters in the Summer Garden, up several flights of stairs and past endless pairs of guards, to the suite of cells on the top floor. While other detainees had often been left to stew, sometimes for months, before they were interrogated, at four o’clock in the morning, three days later, Kropotkin was dragged to the hot seat. Bleary-eyed, he refused to divulge anything but
his name and a smattering of irrelevant detail and was soon transferred to solitary confinement in the notorious Peter and Paul fortress. His cell was in the old artillery embrasure of the Trubetskoy tower, whose walls had been padded to prevent the tapped communication that kept the other inmates sane. It was a chilling end to an adventure that had begun with so much hope.

The Chaikovsky Circle had its origins in the socialist library that a young Mark Natanson had created for his fellow students at the Medical-Surgical Academy in 1869, so that they might read and discuss banned works of political theory from abroad and censored Russian literature. Not until 1871, however, had the circle coalesced into something close to its final form. That summer, mathematics student Nicholas Chaikovsky graduated into a world rocked by the events of the Paris Commune. To meet the urgent need for a safe space in which the most daring young freethinkers of St Petersburg could take stock and look ahead, he arranged a retreat in the village of Kusheliovka, a few miles upstream from the city on the River Neva. Devoting themseles to study, those present fully embraced the circle’s ethos of earnest commitment and austerity.

As well as Chaikovsky himself and Mark Natanson, the group included German Lopatin, a member of the general council of the International and a young veteran of conspiracy, Sofia Perovskaya, the estranged daughter of the ex-Governor General of the capital, and two sisters by the name of Kornilova. Their course of reading and discussion was sustained on a monotonous diet of soup and horse-flesh meatballs, varied only when they resolved to sacrifice the puppies who played under their balcony, ‘so that in the name of the struggle against prejudice we might try dog’. That summer also provided most with their first taste of Third Section tactics when the students were first raided and then, despite the absence of incriminating evidence, hauled in for intensive questioning and photographed for the police records.

The attention of the authorities was not easy to shake off and the arrest of Natanson the following February brought home to members the seriousness of the risks. The less resolute soon withdrew, concerned that being implicated in such an enterprise would cause irreparable damage to their academic careers. Behind them, though, they left a determined core of activists, eager to carve their mark on Russian history.

Beside the Paris Commune, the other event that had marked the year 1871 for radical thinkers was the trial
in absentia
of Bakunin’s dangerously charismatic protégé Nechaev, whose belief in the role of violence in maintaining discipline within his revolutionary groupuscule had led to the brutal murder of Ivanov. In reaction to this, the tight-knit Chaikovsky Circle adopted a firm policy of rational persuasion and set out to propagate further groups on the model of their own. Rejecting the strict hierarchy that Nechaev had espoused, the circles were to be characterised by equality and transparency, in which each member could be trusted to play their part. A national organisation for the publication and distribution of affordable editions of banned texts was rapidly established, the professionalism of which was said to have shamed the legitimate book trade. Seminal works, the most illicit of them printed in Switzerland and smuggled into the country, became available to readers for the first time: familiar names like Chernyshevsky, Dmitri Pisarev and Peter Lavrov, but also revolutionary French texts from the eighteenth century, as well as books by Marx (the translation of whose
Das Kapital
Lopatin initiated), Herbert Spencer, J. S. Mill and, perhaps most inspiringly of all, Charles Darwin.

It had long been a corrosive paradox of Russian intellectual life that a fierce passion for imaginative science among many in the educated sections of society was matched by indifference, or even outward hostility on the part of the authorities. Ever since Catherine the Great had failed to invest in Ivan Polzunov’s refinement of the steam engine for the gold-mining industry in favour of the tried and tested British model, Russia’s discoverers and inventors had struggled for lack of encouragement. Whilst groundbreaking research continued to thrive in the country’s chemistry, engineering and medical faculties, society rarely saw the practical benefits.

The military ministry was the solitary exception, in the intermittent support it gave to aeronautical and rocket technology. Indeed, the previous twenty-five years had seen striking proposals emerge for balloon guidance systems such as might well have altered the outcome of the Franco-Prussian War, had they been available to the besieged Parisians. Whilst the ministry backed Alexander Mozhaisky’s development of a prototype aeroplane during the early 1870s, even the successful flight of a scale model could not sustain its interest for long. Scant attention was paid either to the invention, some years before Edison’s success, of the filament light bulb by Alexander Lodygin, as the curious by-product of his work on helicopter design.

Ironically, the very lack of any Russian tradition of implementing such innovations afforded great freedom to the empire’s most enquiring minds, which were left untramelled by the practical requirements of production. Every conceptual breakthrough, however, appeared only to feed the growing tension between the claims of progressive thought, which challenged convention and pushed the boundaries of knowledge, and a moribund regime intent on holding the line. It was a tension symptomatic of that between reform and conservatism with which tsarist society as a whole was riven.

Throughout the 1860s, the positivist philosophy of Auguste Comte – a ‘religion of humanity’ whose central article of faith was the potential of scientific enquiry to reveal solutions to society’s problems – had become a touchstone for progressive Russians. These were ‘civilised’ men, as the exiled political theorist Lavrov termed them,
intelligentnyi
and
kul’turnyi
, who understood Pisarev’s imperative to test both scientific knowledge and atrophying cultural convention to the point of destruction. In a letter to the tsar, Comte even offered his scientific system as an audacious means for Russia to bypass the interim phase of democratic rule and head straight for a new dispensation based on the religion of humanity, but his proposal went unanswered. Instead, the tsarist regime became ever less tolerant: practitioners of science were no longer to be considered irrelevant bores, but as possible threats to the state. At a moment rich in scientific promise – from Dmitri Mendeleev’s classification of the elements by their chemical properties in his Periodic Table of 1869, to Viacheslav Manassein’s overlooked discovery of the properties of penicillin two years later – the censor’s blue pencil regularly filleted
Znanie
, Russia’s first popular scientific journal, of any taint of positivism.