The World That Never Was (42 page)

Against this sombre backdrop, and despite the sympathetic minds he encountered in Britain, Kropotkin could not help feeling enervated by the country’s political stolidity, just as he had done on his first arrival. Two decades before, his compatriot and ideological forebear Alexander Herzen had called life in London ‘as boring as that of worms in a cheese’. It was a sentiment that Kropotkin now echoed and acted upon, rashly
announcing ‘Better a French prison than this grave.’ His wish would be answered all too soon.

Having left his story of the assassin-duellist in the safe hands of the British press, by way of insurance, Kropotkin next made directly for the epicentre of social conflict in France: the strike-bound second city of France, industrial Lyons, in whose recession-hit mines and silk factories workers had risen up in protest at their working conditions. Louise Michel, who had addressed the local silk workers on a number of occasions in 1881 and 1882, described their campaign as ‘a savage revolt against management and church oppression’, which had as its target the symbols of Church power: in night-time raids, crosses were stolen from religious sites and thrown down wells or otherwise desecrated. However, the wild, carnivalesque atmosphere had soon turned into something darker and more dangerous as the Black Band, as they became known, appeared to turn its ire on individuals.

Threatening letters to leading figures in Montceau-les-Mines were followed by physical attacks. The campaign of violence reached its highest pitch on 22 October 1882, with a bomb thrown into the Bellecour theatre in Lyons, fatally wounding one of its staff. It was a turning point in public perception of the strikers, who despite having had little contact with local anarchists were seen as terroristic conspirators. Cyvoct, an anarchist, was accused of the bomb-throwing but fled to Belgium before he could be apprehended, while claims that the bomb itself had been donated by the nihilists of Geneva further fed the myth of an international revolutionary party.

Interviewed by
L’Express
newspaper, Sophie Bardina, the ‘Auntie’ of the old Fritsche group of female medical students, tried to make clear the distinction: ‘Yes, we are anarchists,’ she said of the Russians who had recently killed the tsar, ‘but, for us, anarchy does not signify disorder, but harmony in all social relations; for us, anarchy is nothing but the negation of oppressions which stifle the development of free societies.’ Despite the scrupulous semantics of Reclus’ definition that ‘All revolutionary acts are by their very nature anarchical, whatever the power which seeks to profit from them’, neither he nor Kropotkin, both of whom were in Thonon at the time of the Bellecour bombing, appeared eager to dissociate themselves from the violence. After the shooting dead of a minor industrialist in the French transportation hub of Roanne by a disgruntled ex-employee in the spring of 1882,
Le Révolté
incautiously hailed the act as
a laudable example of ‘propaganda by deed’, while Kropotkin’s speeches to the Lyons strikers would be eagerly seized upon as evidence of incitement.

It was against the backdrop of the ongoing strikes that Emile Zola wrote
Germinal
. Set twenty years earlier in the fictional northern coal town of ‘Montsou’, its hyper-realist depiction of the landscape around the ravenous maw of the La Voreux coal mine, and its vision of poverty making animals of men, carry powerful echoes of the strikes of August 1882. The novel is interesting too, for the fictional portrait it paints of the Russian anarchist Souvarine: a cerebral, sensitive but outspoken opponent of the protagonist’s Marxist ‘balderdash’, whose semi-detached advocacy of the need to tear down the old world and start afresh drip-feeds the violence that rages around him. Bakunin is usually thought the model, though the characterisation is perhaps closer to a demonic version of Kropotkin: indeed Souvarine’s fondness for his pet rabbit echoes Kropotkin’s passion for the species as ‘the symbol of perdurability [that] stood out against selection’.

Whilst not culpable of the kind of gargantuan act of destructiveness ultimately carried out by Zola’s Souvarine, Kropotkin found himself squarely in the frame for encouraging the violence of the current strikers. Following the arrests of close associates, he came under intense surveillance, pending the authorities’ decision on how to deal with such a high-profile offender. ‘Flocks, literally flocks of Russian spies besieged the house,’ he wrote, ‘seeking admission under all possible pretexts, or simply tramping in pairs, trios, and quartets in front of the house.’

With his wife’s sick brother to nurse, and their new baby daughter to attend to, it was a testing, nervous time for Kropotkin, whose family was living in straitened circumstances. In the space of a few hours, however, overnight on 21 December 1882, matters were resolved in the saddest fashion when the death of his brother-in-law was followed, at dawn, by Kropotkin’s arrest. His friends rallied round: Reclus immediately offered to give himself up to the authorities, in the hope that it would shame those persecuting his friend. In the prevailing climate, though, even Reclus’ intellectual status counted for little. With Switzerland slipping ever further towards political and moral intolerance, he had also recently come close to expulsion for the scandalous indecency of allowing his two daughters to marry their sweethearts with neither priest nor mayor in attendance.

Kropotkin’s long, tightly controlled speech to the Lyons court was a masterpiece of anarchist oratory: ‘We want liberty, that is to say that we
reclaim for every human being the right and the means to do as he pleases, and not to do what he does not like; to satisfy fully all his needs, with no other limit than the impossibilities of nature and respect for the equal needs of his neighbours…we believe that capital, the common inheritance of all humanity, since the fruit of collaboration of past and present generations, must be at the disposal of all.’ And when cross-examined he challenged the loose logic employed by the prosecution, setting a precedent of witty sidestepping for future anarchists on trial. The verdict and heavy sentence, though, had been widely predicted. Most of the sixty-five other anarchists with whom he shared the dock were imprisoned for six months or a year, on the spurious grounds of membership of the defunct International. Kropotkin was condemned to a full five years, incurred a 2,000-franc fine and was placed under official surveillance for a further decade. The tsar could scarcely have hoped for a harsher punishment had he dictated it himself.

Neither a grand petition from ‘English savants’, inscribed in fine calligraphy, and bristling with the names of professors, editors and luminaries of the Royal Societies, urging that Kropotkin’s intellectual importance warranted special treatment, nor the intervention of Victor Hugo, made any impression on the procurator general or the minister of the interior. The French authorities looked to Andalucia, where their Spanish counterparts were busy suppressing rural insurrections coordinated by what they took to calling La Mano Negra, the Black Hand, purely on the basis of the imprint of an ink-stained hand found on a wall near the scene of one crime. ‘At a time when anarchism is on the march, we can see no reason to grant mercy,’ they concluded, remarking snidely that the special treatment that Kropotkin received in Clairvaux prison, thanks to donations from well-wishers, had already aroused the resentment of his fellow inmates.

The next of the congress delegates to find themselves back behind bars was Louise Michel. After spending ten days in prison in January 1883 for commemorating the anniversary of Blanqui’s death, she spent the rest of the year working tirelessly to help the amnestied Communards, even returning to London to try to raise funds for a Paris soup kitchen. Accepting all invitations to speak at meetings, she frequently had to disappoint audiences when she was accidentally double – or triple-booked. ‘The cause of the revolution is not served by pointless murder’, she told one packed hall, but was uncompromising in her threat that ‘If they import the Russian system to fight us, we’ll have the courage of the
Russians to detroy it!’ Shouts of ‘Long live dynamite!’ punctuated her speeches, and her pledge to march henceforth behind the black flag of mourning rather than the red of revolution did nothing to reassure the police.

It was under the black flag that she and Emile Pouget led a demonstration in March to the politically sensitive site of Les Invalides, the resting place of Bonaparte’s sarcophagus, where Michel offered an impassioned defence of the people’s right to bread. Roused by her speech, the marchers became a mob, ransacking the bakeries of l’esplanade des Invalides and rue de Sèvres, before heading off towards the Elysée Palace. Alive to how bread riots could presage revolution, the police speedily intervened, but apprehending Michel herself proved far from straightforward. For three weeks one of the most closely watched figures in the country simply disappeared. Posters bearing her iconic features were circulated internationally, with false sightings reported as far apart as London and Geneva. Then, out of the blue, Michel simply presented herself for arrest at her local Paris police station. Having all the while been holed up in a nearby flat, tending her sick mother, she revelled in having made fools of the prefecture.

‘We amnestied the Communards: look where that’s got us’ complained
Le Figaro
, and was relieved when the error was to some extent rectified, in a sentence for Michel of six years in prison and a further ten under surveillance. Other more moderate publications, however, feared that the severity of the sentence might prove counterproductive, with even one normally hostile journalist going so far as to comment that ‘Two more judgements like those, and the anarchist party might become a reality.’ In fact, while Louise Michel served her time in Saint-Lazare, other factors would decide the matter.

11
The Holy Brotherhood

Russia and Paris, 1881–1885

Retribution against those who plotted the tsar’s death in 1881 had been swift, coming while St Petersburg was still draped in the black crepe of mourning, and Alexander II’s heir sheltered behind the counter-mining fortifications of the palace at Gatchina. Having shown their ineptitude in failing to prevent the attack, Russia’s newly reorganised police department conducted the round-ups with striking efficiency. Rysakov, who had thrown the first bomb, broke under interrogation, and using information he provided, the police soon tracked down the leading plotters and apprehended them amid a flurry of shoot-outs and suicides. On 26 March 1881, seven of the conspirators were put on trial and, a week later, condemned to death. Many fled abroad and by the middle of May, Vera Figner alone of the executive committee remained at liberty in Russia. Thirty-six conspirators would appear in court, eighteen were condemned to death, five executed and the rest sent to prison for a total of 500 years.

The new tsar was adamant that there should be no commutation of sentences, nor the slightest display of mercy. Sofia Perovskaya was hanged alongside her lover Zhelyabov on the Semyonovsky parade ground, a placard naming them as regicides around their necks. Rysakov was one of the three others who died the same day, spurned by his comrades for his treachery; Kibalchich another, his tragic struggle having failed, not only for the social justice which the tsar had appeared to impede, but for the right to intellectual self-fulfilment too. Having spent his last days scrawling plans for directional rocket engines, the specialism he had neglected while at liberty, Kibalchich had entrusted a document describing his vision of an aeronautic machine to the chief of the gendarmerie. His final wish was merely that his scientific peers confirm the practicality of his design – a first step towards space travel – so that he might ‘meet death calmly, knowing that my idea shall not die with me but will benefit
the human race for which I am willing to sacrifice my life’. But as the trapdoor opened beneath his feet, his ideas had already begun to gather dust in the archives of the police department. Its director had concluded that ‘To give this to scientists for consideration now would hardly be expedient since it could only encourage wanton talk.’ Scientific genius and terrorism were disquieting bedfellows.

Alone among the main conspirators in being Jewish, only Gesia Gelfman was spared the noose, on account of her pregnancy. On top of her life sentence, her punishment was to have her child taken from her the moment it was born for an Orthodox Christian upbringing, and shortly after she died of grief. That the authorities considered her much-publicised involvement in the attack insufficient incitement to racially motived revenge was demonstrated by the description that was circulated of another of the conspirators, not as a typical Slav, as he had been referred to in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attack, but an ‘Oriental [with a] hooked nose’. For some, it seemed, the desire to galvanise anti-Semitic sentiment was of at least equal importance to identifying and catching the assassins.

Alexander III’s mentor Pobedonostsev was perfectly sincere in his belief that the Jews were a ‘great ulcer’ eating away at Russia: at once a threat to its spiritual and racial purity and the secret force behind any foreign diplomacy that threatened the national interest. In his ideal world, the five million Jews already restricted to the Pale of Settlement in the west of the country would be reduced by two thirds, half of whom would die and half emigrate, with the remaining third converted to Orthodoxy.