The World That Never Was (49 page)

In Britain, as throughout Europe, the Haymarket debacle galvanised both extremes of the political spectrum. While those on the left rallied to the accused during the trial and afterwards, collecting petitions and addressing public meetings, the Tory press inveighed against the defendants, in a displaced expression of the loathing it felt for the immigrant and native socialists closer to home. For William Morris, the event exposed at a stroke the hypocrisy surrounding the vaunted ideal of Anglo-Saxon liberal democracy, on both sides of the Atlantic. ‘Will you think the example of America too trite?’ he asked an audience of moderate Fabians, challenging their willingness to operate within existing political structures. ‘Anyhow consider it! A country with universal suffrage, no king, no House of Lords, no privilege as you fondly think; only a little standing army, chiefly used for the murder of red-skins; a democracy after your model; and with all that, a society corrupt to the core, and at this moment engaged in suppressing freedom with just the same reckless brutality and blind ignorance as the Tsar of all the Russias uses.’

After visiting the condemned men in prison, Marx’s daughter Eleanor returned to England on the eve of their execution to report the belief, common among the working men of Chicago, that the true guilt for the bomb-throwing lay with a police agent. Subsequent investigations never
settled the matter, though the corruption in the Chicago police and judiciary at the time was eventually laid bare and officially acknowledged. Foreign powers also had a hand in manipulating the aftermath of the Haymarket Affair, however, and the possibility of their prior involvement in provoking the bombing cannot be discounted; certainly, the most vociferous calls for vengeance came from a certain Heinrich Danmeyere, a deep-cover agent of the Imperial German Police.

It may well have been Danmeyere too who, in the guise of an American-based inventor known as ‘Meyer’, played a supporting role in a police plot of 1887 to entrap Most’s accomplice Johann Neve. The bait offered was a new terror weapon he had supposedly devised, called the ‘scorpion’: a poisoned needle resembling that which Jules Allix had proposed during the Siege of Paris as an effective means for Frenchwomen to kill Prussians. The key figure in the plan was a certain Theodore Reuss: one of the more flamboyant émigrés in London, where – on behalf of the Imperial Police – he had been making mischief among the socialists for the past couple of years, repeatedly evading exposure.

Even before the London Anarchist Congress, when the French spy Serreaux had required such careful handling and Malatesta had almost fought a duel with his lover’s brother Giuseppe Zanardelli over attempts to discredit the movement, there had been considerable unease about police infiltration of the émigré communities in Britain. When Theodore Reuss joined the Socialist League in 1885, the sincerity of his conversion should immediately have been in doubt: a Wagnerian tenor who claimed to have taken a lead role in the world premiere of
Parsifal
at Bayreuth and to have re-founded the mystical Order of the Illuminati in Munich, his shared interest in medievalism with William Morris was insufficient by way of explanation. As it was, however, neither his decision to enrol under the pseudonym of Charles Theodore, nor the generosity with which he funded the league’s propagandist activities at a level far beyond his ostensible means, appear to have caused any initial suspicion.

Within a few months, however, with Reuss installed as ‘Lessons Secretary’ for the League, coaching recent arrivals in the English language and cultivating the most extreme of them, his more cautious colleagues intuited a troublesome presence, and when he convened a conference to propose that an international centre should coordinate the league’s activities, veteran delegates surely recalled Serreaux’s ruse in 1881. Perhaps when Eleanor Marx lamented the vulgarity of the songs Reuss chose for
a recital, or a German colleague contradicted the verdict of the music critics by declaring Reuss to have ‘a harsh voice’, they were giving vent to a deeper-seated but unspoken unease. While the German émigrés could deal with traitors ruthlessly – a spy who had revealed details of the operation to smuggle
Freiheit
to the Continent had been ‘accidentally’ shot during a picnic on Hampstead Heath – for the moment a lack of evidence against Reuss saved him from a similar fate.

Those who doubted Reuss’ integrity would soon regret their scruples. Insinuating himself into the trust of Joseph Peukert, who had established the Autonomie group as a means of distancing himself from Most’s influence, Reuss cultivated the tensions between Peukert and his rivals, in particular Neve’s Belgian assistant Victor Dave. Before long each was accusing the other of being a police spy. On a secret visit to the Continent by Dave, the ease with which Reuss was able to address letters to him raised further suspicions that he was in league with the police. These appeared to be confirmed when Dave tested Reuss by providing him alone with information about an imaginary visit to Berlin by Neve, to which police in the city responded. Peukert merely accused Dave of attempting to frame Reuss, and the mutual recrimination continued.

It was now that the agent provocateur Meyer offered Peukert the ‘scorpion’ as a means by which he could regain Neve’s esteem, and when Neve agreed to meet in Belgium, Reuss eagerly tagged along. ‘Now I’ve got him,’ crowed Kruger, the director of the Berlin police, certain that ‘this time he would not escape my grasp.’ But the elusive Neve failed to appear, and the police agents to whom Reuss had signalled his movements returned empty-handed. Then, two days before Reuss was due back in London to perform in a concert, Neve offered to meet him alone.

The rendezvous was arranged for Luttich station. The minutes dragged by in the waiting room, the appointed time came and went, and just as Reuss was about to leave, the door creaked open and Neve entered. He had no real interest in secret weapons; only in reprimanding Reuss for his malicious slanders of Dave. ‘You are a man without character,’ Neve sneered, before making a cautious exit. Leaning on the bar, watching in the mirror, the only other man present was Kruger’s agent, who had got a good enough view of Neve’s reflection to be able to circulate a description.

At the meeting arranged by Reuss a fortnight later in the Autonomie Club in London to debate the expulsion of Dave, the accused read out a letter from Neve detailing how he was now under surveillance. A month
later Neve was snatched in Belgium, bundled over the border and thrown into a German prison from which he would never emerge, abandoned to scratch out the days until his death a decade later. Having served his purpose, Reuss was lucky to escape merely with expulsion from the Socialist League; a shredded document from a meeting in May 1887, now held together by many strips of Sellotape, testifies to the red heat at which tempers ran. Confrontations between the Metropolitan Police and league members, including Morris, during mass demonstrations at Dod Street in the East End and Trafalgar Square, had left even the British socialists with little tolerance for traitors or turncoats.

Now that Neve had been eliminated, almost the only trace that remained in Europe of Johann Most’s revolutionary ambitions took fictional form: while plotting
The Princess Casamassima
in 1886 Henry James struggled to accommodate Most’s demonic personality, in the end deciding to share his unappealing attributes between three characters: a bookbinder, a chemist and a professional German revolutionary. In November 1887, though, America provided the world with an iconic image that for some provided a counterpoint to the diabolical reputation that anarchism was acquiring: that of four gowned men on a gallows, below ropes noosed ready to stretch their sacrificial necks – the Haymarket martyrs.

The actual scene was witnessed by 200 spectators seated in the high, narrow execution chamber at 11.30 on the morning of 11 November. Of the five men sentenced to an exemplary death, Lingg had already cheated the hangman by biting down on an explosive cartridge smuggled into his prison cell, only to die in prolonged agony. The remaining four awaited their fate; while Parsons stood with a semblance of calm, Spies spoke through the hood that had been placed over his head. ‘There will be a time when our silence will be more powerful than the voices you strangle today,’ he began, but before he could finish the trapdoor crashed open beneath him.

14
Decadence and Degeneration

Paris, 1885–1889

‘The city and its inhabitants strike me as uncanny,’ a young Sigmund Freud wrote home from Paris in late 1885, during his visit to observe the experimental work that the neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot was conducting with hysterics at the Salpêtrière hospital. ‘The people seem to me to be of a different species from ourselves; I feel they are possessed of a thousand demons.’ Parisians were given, he believed, to ‘physical epidemics, historical mass convulsions’. And if France’s century-long history of revolution did not offer justification enough for Freud’s thesis, the tumultuous events that had taken place in the French capital the previous May would have confirmed his impression.

For almost three decades, Victor Hugo, the towering figure of the republican left, had woven a mythology of heroic resistance to injustice in which he played the leading role. Even as his powers as a novelist declined, his privileged position in French society, latterly as a senator, had allowed him to remain a solitary if somewhat ineffectual voice of opposition to the rulers of the Third Republic during the Communards’ exile. His death on 22 May 1885, two days short of the fourteenth anniversary of the Bloody Week, left his thousands of admirers bereft and disorientated. ‘The Panthéon is handed over to its original and legal purpose. Victor Hugo’s body shall be carried to it for burial’, the Chamber of Deputies declared, hopeful that the honour might encourage a dignified and orderly laying to rest. Instead, a spirit of crazed carnival was released in the city that, for the bourgeoisie, echoed with their nightmare imaginings of a recrudescent Commune.

The strangely heightened mood of the city was first apparent in Père Lachaise cemetery, where the annual commemoration for those slaughtered there in 1871 coincided with the period of mourning. Confrontation with police had become a regular feature of the occasion, but this time
its ferocity left several radicals dead, and over seventy others injured. When rumours spread that the anarchists meant to channel the emotion around Hugo’s funeral into a popular uprising, three army regiments were drafted in, at significant expense, to accompany the cortège. As it was, the true melodrama on the route to the Panthéon had been scripted by the author himself, in specific instructions that his body should be carried in a pauper’s hearse. Never averse to a sentimental
coup de théâtre
, the paradox of a state funeral stripped of all the usual trappings tipped Hugo’s public straight from solemnity into the wild abandon of his wake. With the brothels closed for the day, the parks and boulevards hosted scenes of debauchery decried as ‘Babylonian’ by Hugo’s enemies in the Catholic press. But it was not only the whores who offered to celebrate this most priapic of authors with open arms; ‘How many women gave themselves to lovers, to strangers, with a burning fury to become mothers of immortals!’ marvelled one spectator of the night’s revels.

Behind the bars of the Saint-Lazare prison, Louise Michel paid tribute to her mentor, Hugo, in characteristically stormy verse. Her second major bereavement of the year, following the death in January of her beloved mother, Hugo’s death inspired poetry that seethed at the butchery of the defeated Communards, and the terrible weeks that those who escaped the immediate slaughter had spent in the concentration camp at Satory. This wasn’t, however, the only writing that Michel’s incarceration had inspired. Throughout the two years she spent in Saint-Lazare, her pen provided a consistent safety valve for her frustrated idealism and the resulting rage. In overwrought novels written in Vernian vein, she explored the possible futures of mankind.
Les Microbes humaines
offered a robust riposte to those who applied the new language of virology to the slum-dwelling underclass, promising the emergence of a new race that would carry forward the ideals of the social revolution;
L’Ere nouvelle
conjured a vision of nature’s power harnessed for the common good, with whirlpools directed to drive tunnels through mountains, and submarines colonising undersea continents. Then, quite suddenly, in the January after Hugo’s death, the new government of Charles de Freycinet, whose cabinet included four radicals, made an immediate demonstration of its reformist intentions by pardoning both Michel and Kropotkin.

The unexpected move, and Kropotkin’s release in particular, provoked international outrage. ‘I have never had ill feelings towards France, for which I have always felt great sympathy,’ Tsar Alexander III told the departing ambassador General Félix Appert in January 1886, after Appert had been expelled from Russia in protest, ‘but your government is no
longer the republic, it is the Commune!’ Appert, who had headed the military tribunal that judged the Communards at Versailles, may well have sympathised with Russia’s decision to announce its withdrawal from the forthcoming centenary celebrations of the Revolution. Yet the consequent
froideur
between the two nations once again set back hopes of cooperation in confronting the power of Bismarck’s Germany. The delivery of any future alliance, it was clear, would require a cunning and resourceful midwife.