The World That Never Was (41 page)

In the event, Kropotkin agreed to attend, playing along with the fiction by which delegates represented cities and countries from across the world, though most had only a tenuous link to the place in question. Chaikovsky joined him. Malatesta appeared as the delegate from Constantinople and Egypt, where he had participated in the fight against the colonialist British, as well as Turin, the Marches, Tuscany, Naples, Marseilles and Geneva. Taking time off from the ice-cream vending business that he had established since arriving in England a couple of months before, following his expulsion from Switzerland and France, he was accompanied by the Italians Merlino and Carlo Cafiero. John Neve, Most’s publisher and right-hand man, was among the forty-five delegates, as were Frank Kitz and Joseph Lane from England; Madame LeCompte from Boston reported back to the
Paterson Labor Standard
, which was widely read by the émigré French and Italian factory workers in New Jersey. Louise Michel came too, back in London after her fleeting visit in the fog, as the delegate from the city of Reims. Also from France was Prefect Andrieux’s plant, the provocative newspaper proprietor Serreaux, ready to exploit any fault lines that opened up.

The previous October, in Clarens, Kropotkin and Reclus had worked hard together to prepare a secret agenda for the congress that would emphasise the need to bring about the total destruction of all existing institutions before a genuine social revolution could take root. It was a
triumph of hope over experience. Both believed that, after years in the wilderness, anarchism’s day was fast approaching: that whilst hard evidence of a society in crisis was not yet to hand, the scent of trouble and opportunity was unmistakable. The moment must not be missed. And yet when Brocher was approached with their proposals, he showed infuriatingly little sense of urgency, merely asking whether it was ‘really necessary to fix in advance the terms of a vote that might not take place?’ The principles of anti-authoritarianism, it seemed, would govern the running of the congress as well as the content of the debates.

Malatesta’s own behaviour in the weeks preceding the arrival of the international contingent hardly helped establish a mood of harmony: he had challenged his lover’s adoptive brother Giuseppe Zanardelli to a duel for his vicious attempts to undermine the anarchists at the Ghent Congress four years earlier. But in the hothouse of the Charrington Street pub, differences quickly multiplied and the old resentments resurfaced. Blanquists from France, Germany and Belgium pressed their simplistic arguments for immediate revolution; Most’s acolytes, Neve and Joseph Peukert, self-styled leader of the Autonomie group, wrangled in the background over their relative seniority during his imprisonment; while those with a lingering respect for Marx were ready to put their oar in, eager as ever to assert control over anything that might resemble a revival of the First International. While no minutes were taken of the congress, with even its delegates kept officially anonymous, the focus of the heated debates can be gauged from Malatesta’s record of his own contributions.

Attempting to seize the initiative, Malatesta appealed to those ‘who have no faith in legal methods and no wish to participate in political life, who want to fight with the greatest haste against those who oppress, and to take by force that which is denied by force’; there was no place for ‘innocent utopianists’ who favoured union with other socialist factions. He was not alone in recognising that victory would not come without struggle and sacrifice. ‘Death by rifle: is it less terrible than death by explosion,’ read a bullish letter from the anarchist miners of Belgium, whose friends had recently been shot by soldiers. Cafiero’s manifesto would doubtless also have been heard: ‘The bomb is too feeble to destroy the autocratic colossuses. Kill the property owners at the same time, prepare the peasant risings.’ Serreaux’s work was being done for him.

Although not intrinsically opposed to violence in a just cause, Kropotkin viewed such bloodlust as something like a mania, and there were others too who would have sought to temper the rush to terror tactics.
Underlying even Malatesta’s bellicose rhetoric, however, was the frustrated concern, expressed to delegates, that ‘we are fast approaching the point where a party must act or dissolve and where, if it is neither victor nor vanquished, it will die of corruption.’ And whilst Kropotkin may have struggled to communicate the subtlety of his and Reclus’ ideas amid the welter of opinionated debate, he did somehow manoeuvre the congress around the most dangerous pitfalls.

On the ethical underpinning of anarchism, Kropotkin talked down Serreaux’s demands that any mention of ‘morality’ be excised: ‘Morality is to be understood in the sense that today’s society is founded on immorality; the abolition of immorality, through any means, will inaugurate morality’, he insisted on recording. But that did not imply any softening of anarchism’s militant stance, as he had made clear in a pamphlet published only two months earlier. ‘Acts of illegal protest, of revolt, of vengeance’ perpetrated by ‘lonely sentinels’, may well be necessary, he had concluded, while as part of a wider strategy of popular agitation they might even advance rather than set back the cause of revolution, since ‘by actions which compel general attention, the new idea seeps into people’s minds and wins converts’. As to the paradox of leadership in an anti-authoritarian movement, while the hierarchical character of the People’s Will displeased Kropotkin, Reclus had persuaded him of the advantages of small conspiratorial groups over pure collective action.

It was no accident, however, that the real business of the congress was ultimately settled in camera. While many delegates may have been emotionally inclined to fall in with his absolute advocacy of extremism, Serreaux had clearly sensed the suspicions of Kropotkin and Malatesta about his true identity, and had attempted to allay them by taking the pair to visit his venerable aunt in her long-established London home. Malatesta, however, recognised in the aunt’s house furniture from a second-hand shop that he regularly passed, confirming the agent’s subterfuge. Cunning rather than confrontation was deemed the wisest response, and mixed into the congress’ final resolutions – the reaffirmation of the policy of ‘propaganda by deed’ in a moderated form, and the agreement to learn the handling of chemicals, for purposes of self-defence and revolutionary warfare rather than terrorist aggression – were concessions to Serreaux that could be quickly discarded.

The proposed creation of a central bureau of information, supposedly to channel communications and give focus to the movement’s disparate activities, would provide the authorities with a convenient junction at which to intercept intelligence on anarchist plans, while allowing them
to give substance to the notion of an international conspiracy whose tentacles reached around the globe. It was everything Andrieux must have dreamed of. After discussing its organisation with Lev Hartmann, however, Malatesta let the idea wither from neglect. ‘It is not by an International League, with endless letters read by the police, that the conspiracy will be mounted,’ of that he was certain, ‘it will be mounted by isolated groups.’

The loss did not matter to Andrieux personally, however, who had resigned as prefect of police within a week of the congress concluding. Political interference and the removal of the prefect’s independent power were the reasons cited, but his real concern may have been what might be revealed about his operational methods, once subject to political scrutiny.

On one subject, at least, the congress had been able to agree wholeheartedly: the injustice of Johann Most’s trial. The English delegates in particular saw it as their duty to rally to his defence, inspired, perhaps, by Most’s counsel, who claimed to have taken on the case in order to ensure that English rather than Russian law prevailed. Standing on the steps of the Old Bailey, when the congress was not in session, they peddled copies of
Freiheit
. Meanwhile, public meetings at the Mile End Waste provided delegates with an opportunity to let off steam, after hours cooped in a small and smoky room. Their efforts had no influence on the outcome, though. The jury’s guilty verdict was delivered promptly, having needed little discussion, and its pleas for clemency in the sentencing, out of sympathy for all Most had suffered abroad, were just as quickly disregarded. In light of the Establishment’s opprobrium of Most, the maximum sentence was a foregone conclusion. Condemned to two years’ hard labour, the unfortunate Most was dragged off to pick oakum in the medieval conditions of Clerkenwell gaol: forced to split tarred rope down to its fibres, with bleeding fingernails, for ten hours a day.

If the aim of his prosecution had indeed been to influence the American policy on the extradition of Fenians, it failed: a week after the verdict, the State Department refused Britain’s request point blank, leaving Gladstone to personally pursue other, less orthodox methods of counter-terrorism. Among the last letters that Allan Pinkerton would write on behalf of his agency, before it passed into his sons’ hands following his death a year later, was one to the British prime minister, pitching for work in the delicate matter of disrupting the Fenian’s fund-raising in the
United States. Unsurprisingly, it was not only the European democracies who were prepared to deal with the Pinkertons: before long the tsarist police would be among the agency’s clients.

It had been a significant achievement for so many anarchists to convene in London from so many distant countries, even while the aftershocks of the tsar’s murder continued to reverberate. For those more rootless émigrés among the delegates who stayed on for some weeks after the congress, as Kropotkin did to address several public meetings, the risks entailed in their visit to the British capital grew. When the time came for them to leave, the climate across the Continent had become significantly more hostile to political troublemakers, and their destination a matter of doubt. In the more sensationalist French press, whose reports fed off propaganda out of Russia and the fears of its own population, the ‘nihilists’ who had killed the tsar were firmly conflated with native anarchists. In Switzerland, as Malatesta could have warned Kropotkin, a new intolerance was abroad. Yet it was nevertheless to Switzerland, through France, that he now travelled, drawn back by the presence of his young wife of two years, Sofia, whose medical studies tied her to Geneva.

Even since March, Russian pressure had been building on Switzerland to expel its anti-tsarist refugees, the threatened sanctions severe and escalating: diplomatic relations would be broken off, Swiss citizens expelled from St Petersburg and prohibitive tariffs imposed on trade. Failure to cede, it was implied, would ultimately incur the same penalty as had loomed after the revolutions of 1848: annexation by Germany, only this time with Russian acquiescence. A small country, Switzerland was in no position to resist, and there were few fugitives whose presence was more likely to rile Russia than Kropotkin’s. Barely had he arrived when a theoretical article published by him in
Le Révolté
concerning the tsar’s assassination was seized upon as a pretext for his detention and expulsion. Dissuaded by friends from the suicidal madness of returning to Russia, where no one could be trusted and he would soon be betrayed, Kropotkin found himself adrift.

Events in France that autumn fuelled fears that a home-grown campaign of terror was imminent, when a young weaver called Florian murdered a middle-aged doctor, mistaking him for a politician; despite having no ostensible anarchist affiliations, he cited the ideology as justification for his act. The febrile atmosphere was exacerbated by growing political instability when Léon Gambetta, on beginning his first and
long-awaited ministry that November, staked his political career on a policy of electoral reform, in a quest to end the factionalism that racked France’s political life. When financial fears surrounding the viability of the Catholic Union Générale bank were added to the mix, the situation seemed highly volatile. In other circumstances, Kropotkin would surely have stayed to reap the revolutionary benefits when, within days of the New Year dawning, the bank crashed and Gambetta fell from office. As it was, the warning of a threat to his life by a secret society of diehard tsarist partisans, communicated to him through back channels by a high-ranking source in the Russian government, forced his return to London just before Christmas.

Though the threat was apparently real, the plot against Kropotkin might have sprung direct from the pages of an adventure story, and surely made for good telling during the festive season, as the émigrés moved between the Patriotic Club and celebrations with the old English radicals in Clerkenwell, and one another’s homes. The tsarist assassins meant to avenge the late tsar and defend the new by hiring a ‘consummate swordsman’ who would kill Kropotkin in a duel; Rochefort was to be similarly challenged, and if the strategy was successful then further swashbuckling assassinations were to follow, with Hartmann next on the hit list.

Hartmann would, at least, have been able to counter Kropotkin’s party piece with a compelling tale of his own, concerning the Italian spies who dogged him and Malatesta during their studies in chemistry and mineralogy in the British Museum. But any laughter their stories evinced, nervous or otherwise, would have been tinged with sadness at the condition of one of their fellow guests. The aggressive paranoia that Kropotkin had detected in Cafiero during their dealings earlier in the year had begun to manifest itself in a peculiar new symptom: he was ‘haunted by the notion that he might be enjoying more than his fair share of sunlight’. It was a tragic, if strangely appropriate ailment to afflict the anarchist aristocrat who had devoted years of strain and suffering to the cause, and one that marked the beginning of a slow and pitiful decline into insanity.