The World That Never Was (53 page)

Louise Michel was made for suffering and martyrdom, wrote the publisher Monsieur Roy in his preface to her memoirs. ‘Born 1,900 years earlier, she would have faced the wild animals of the amphitheatre; born during the Inquisition, she would have died in the flames.’ Others in thrall to Louise Michel’s magnetism reached for similar images. In his ballad Verlaine depicted her as Joan of Arc, perhaps thinking of the ‘exalted’ state Michel entered in moments of political passion: the anarchist equivalent of the religious ecstasies that the Church believed were being blasphemed in Charcot’s public experiments involving his hysterics. Alternatively, Verlaine may simply have been hinting at the fate she courted, at a time when the nationalistic right was erecting a rash of statues to the Maid of Orleans, while the left countered with effigies of its own freethinking martyr, Etienne Dolet. And indeed, only two months after the hanging of the Haymarket martyrs, little noticed for the moment in a Paris caught up in its own drama, Louise Michel did come close to a kind of martyrdom of her own.

She was addressing a meeting in the Channel port of Le Havre, challenging her bourgeois audience to see the light before the revolution overwhelmed them. The mood was hostile to her, but not more so than in most of the provincial towns she visited. Then, without warning, a young man approached the stage. He proudly declared himself a Breton
before raising a pistol and firing twice. One bullet lodged in Michel’s hat, the other deep in her left temple.

‘I’m fine, really fine’ she wrote to a solicitous Rochefort the next day, but she was putting on a brave face. Despite the game attempts of a local doctor to extract the bullet from her cranium with his pen, it had lodged too deep to be easily retrieved. Journalists were issued with accounts dismissing the wound’s severity, but the police in Paris soon learned the truth from their agents: ‘she is fainting frequently and the problem with her sight gets worse every day,’ wrote one. Yet somehow she survived. The wound would not kill Michel, an expert confirmed, but the long-term effects as the bullet wandered through her brain were unpredictable.

Forgiving to a fault, Michel swiftly turned her attention to her would-be assassin, whose acquittal she was determined to secure. He was a ‘subject of hallucination’, she informed the readers of
L’Intransigeant
, ‘a being from another age’ made brutal by living in a tumultuous era of transition, and like the patients in the Salpêtrière, not to be held responsible for his actions. A week after the attack, she even wrote to Charcot himself, pleading for science to come to the defence of her assailant. In the era of the freelance assassin that was now dawning, of the terrorist armed with his bomb and revolver and a mania to make his voice heard, the sanity or otherwise of those convicted would assume a new political significance. For was anarchism itself a form of madness, or was it the rest of the world that was insane?

15
The Revolution is Postponed

London, 1887–1890

So sweeping had been Peter Kropotkin’s dismissal of England as a ‘land impermeable to new ideas’ after the anarchists’ London Congress of 1881 that the transformation in its radical life in the six years that had passed took him aback. Addressing the Socialist League’s anniversary commemoration of the Paris Commune in March 1886, he left his audience at the South Place Institute in no doubt of his conviction that they were meeting ‘on the eve of one of those great uprisings which periodically visit Europe’. George Bernard Shaw, who was probably present that evening, would later remark of Kropotkin that ‘his only weakness was a habit of prophesying war within the next fortnight’, with revolution to follow in its wake. Few could have denied, though, that the period between Kropotkin’s imprisonment in 1883 and his release from Clairvaux prison in January 1886 had seen tensions rise across the Continent and beyond, with Britain no exception.

‘How to promote the greater happiness of the masses of the people, how to increase their enjoyment of life, that is the problem of the future,’ Joseph Chamberlain, the reforming Liberal mayor of Birmingham had recently diagnosed. By extending the franchise to all working men, his party had already fulfilled the key demand of the Chartist movement twenty years earlier but times and expectations had moved on. The Liberals’ failure to adopt his proposals to guarantee the property of the rich in return for welfare protection for the poor, led the working masses to question whether the cosy duopoly of political parties, whose alternating rule Morris would liken to a politely fixed football match, could ever deliver effective representation for their views.

For such opinions to be proclaimed in public, however, was profoundly unnerving for those in authority, and the police were called upon to intervene. Dod Street in the East End had seen the first concerted action
against the Socialist League, when socialist street preachers had been driven from their pitches while trying to address a crowd of 10,000 demonstrators against the curtailment of free speech. Then, when the packed public gallery of the courtroom shouted its fury at the sentences passed on eight men arrested, who included Frank Kitz, the police waded in with sticks and fists. Attempting to shield Marx’s daughter Eleanor from the fray, William Morris was among those beaten and taken into custody. But in the spectacle of violence deployed to protect the interests of a complacent middle class, Morris saw similarities with pre-revolutionary France and declared that by dragging this hypocrisy into the open the socialists had ‘gained a complete victory over the police’.

If Morris’ optimism about a British revolution had seemed fanciful in the autumn of 1885, within a few weeks of Kropotkin’s release from prison early in the New Year, events in London appeared a harbinger of class war. The occasion, at which Morris was not personally present, was a march from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park by those who had lost their jobs in the difficult economic circumstances. An initial blow would be delivered the following February when, in Morris’ absence, another meeting of the unemployed marched the same route. Ten thousand strong, as the crowd passed the Tory Carlton Club and the Liberal Reform Club, insults and missiles were hurled, with one army veteran memorably raging that ‘we were not the scum of the country when we were fighting for bond-holders in Egypt, you dogs!’ Peering from their windows, outraged members jeered back that the mob needed the smack of firm discipline, although the sound of breaking windows in Piccadilly, where the indigent of Whitechapel, Shoreditch and Limehouse were looting the shops, may have made them tremble that they might rather be on the receiving end of physical chastisement.

In the aftermath of the riot, even
Blackwells Magazine
had written of ‘Black Monday’ as the germ of a British revolution, while for days London had quaked at rumours that an army from the East End was preparing to attack under cover of the thick fog that had descended. Seeing a middle class ‘so terrified of the sight of the misery it has created that at all hazards it must be swept out of sight’, Morris looked forward to further repression that would feed the fires of popular discontent. Readiness, though, was essential. ‘We have been taken over unprepared by a revolutionary incident,’ he wrote in the
Commonweal
, urging his readers to become quickly ‘educated in economics, in organisation, and in administration’ so as to be ready when such an opportunity presented itself.

Sentiment may have led Kropotkin to esteem France as the cradle of
revolution, but improbable as the situation must have seemed to him, in early 1886 Britain held out the riper promise. Although thousands turned out in Paris to hear him speak after his release from prison, hungry for words of guidance and inspiration from anarchism’s lost leader, he had no further taste for the rough hospitality of the Third Republic. Weakened by illness and with a wife and young child to support, the idea of a secure refuge clearly appealed; news of the suicide of his brother Alexander in Siberia, unable to face the prospect of release after fourteen years’ internal exile, would shortly confirm his own determination to avoid further spells in prison. Moreover, Britain promised him a vehicle for his developing ideas, for during the latter months of Kropotkin’s incarceration in Clairvaux he had been approached by Charlotte Wilson, the Cambridge-educated wife of a stockbroker and sister of a Liberal Member of Parliament, with a proposal to establish an anarchist newspaper in London. Crossing the Channel in March, he settled his family as temporary guests in the home of his old friend Kravchinsky.

The intellectual environment of London to which Kravchinsky introduced Kropotkin was highly congenial: one peopled by men who were at least intrigued by his ideas, like William Morris, and often wholly sympathetic to them, and women who were frequently as smitten by the charm of the unlikely revolutionary as by his impressive and enquiring mind. Coming in the immediate aftermath of the Black Monday riot, the annual commemoration of the Paris Commune had special piquancy, and the following months witnessed a slew of works that engaged with the unfulfilled promise of 1871 and its continued relevance to the political life of Kropotkin’s new friends. Eleanor Marx led the way, with her translation of Lissagaray’s ten-year-old magisterial work of myth-making,
Histoire de la Commune;
William Morris and Belfort Bax revisited the subject, yet with the same romantic desire to cast the victims of the Bloody Week as having chosen ‘to bury themselves in the smoking ruins of Paris rather than…allow socialism and the revolution to be befouled and degraded’. Then, in 1887, Henry Hyndman drew out the urgent relevance of their historical accounts in his provocatively titled pamphlet
A Commune for London
. ‘It is in the power of London’, he wrote, ‘to lead the way in the great social revolution which will remove the crushing disabilities, physical, moral and intellectual, under which the great mass of our city populations suffer at the present time.’

For all his personal antipathy to Hyndman, his old sparring partner from the Social Democratic Federation, Morris undoubtedly shared his sentiments. ‘The East End of London is the hell of poverty,’ John Henry
Mackay would write. ‘Like an enormous black, motionless, giant Kraken, the poverty of London lies there in lurking silence and encircles with its mighty tentacles the life and wealth of the City and of the West End.’ Venturing frequently into the maw of the monster for speaking engagements in Shoreditch and Whitechapel, or simply to research and more fully understand its misery, Morris was shocked by what he found. Commenting on the hovel in which the Socialist League stalwart Kitz lived, he confided to a friend: ‘It fairly gave me the horrors to see how wretchedly off he was; so it isn’t much wonder that he takes the line he does.’ Affluent London society was, he believed, ‘so terrified of the misery it has created that at all hazards it must be swept out of sight’. And yet, all the while, the finely appointed homes of the wealthy, some furnished from Morris’ own interior design shop on Oxford Street – which had itself narrowly escaped the Black Monday window-breaking – offered the dispossessed a tantalising, infuriating glimpse of warmth, satiety, ease and comfort. ‘If you want to see the origin and explanation of an East London rookery you must open the door and walk in upon some fashionable dinner party at the West End,’ remarked Edward Carpenter, whose absence from the capital gave him an outsider’s clear perspective on its iniquities.

Despite criticising Carpenter for his withdrawal from the political fray, Morris clearly found the simple life at Millthorpe in Derbyshire deeply appealing, with its sparse furnishings and meals of home-grown vegetables shared from a single wooden plate. It was during a visit in 1886 that he read the newly published novel by Richard Jefferies,
After London
, a vision of a post-apocalyptic Britain returned to the state of untamed nature that its countryman author so cherished. ‘Absurd hopes curled around my heart as I read it,’ Morris wrote and the book’s premise lodged in his imagination. A country lapsed into barbarism and dominated by feuding warlords was scarcely what Morris aspired to, but the notion of beneficent erasure – of a London reduced to ruination and submerged in swampland, and a society purged of all the corrupt influences that had led mankind astray since the Middle Ages – spoke directly to Morris’ deepest political and imaginative instincts.

The affinity between Kropotkin and Morris was apparent to both, even though their political positions remained distinct, and frequently at odds. The Russian found in his new friend a shared aptitude for viewing contemporary issues with a long historical perspective, and this would lead to a fruitful cross-fertilisation of ideas in the years to come. For the moment, however, Morris allowed himself to indulge his taste for fantasy – whether dreaming of revolution tomorrow, or the distant prospect of Utopia – while
Kropotkin’s attention was drawn to concrete planning for the day after the existing authorities and institutions had been toppled.

During his years in Clairvaux, experimental gardening had provided Kropotkin with a seemingly harmless occupation. And though the scurvy from which he had suffered suggests he lacked green fingers, tilling the soil had focused his thoughts on the necessity of ensuring tangible benefits to the masses in the immediate aftermath of social upheaval, in order to cement their loyalty and avoid the problems of starvation that he mistakenly saw as having helped defeat the Commune. ‘To what should the two million citizens of Paris turn their attention when they would be no longer catering for the luxurious fads and amusements of Russian princes, Romanian grandees and wives of Berlin financiers?’ he pondered. His proposals would not be published in book form until some years later, as
The Conquest of Bread
, but it was already clear to him that the equal distribution of food was key. He imagined parklands and aristocratic estates handed over to smallholders as common land, along with the credible promise of ‘a more substantial well-being than that enjoyed today by the middle classes’.