The World That Never Was (50 page)

Typically Michel had stood on principle when news of her release came through and reacted to the interior minister’s order – ‘Extreme urgency Stop Liberate Louise Michel immediately Stop’ – by refusing to leave her cell. Since there had been no pardon for either her colleague Emile Pouget or the strikers from Montceau-les-Mines, Michel insisted, she could not accept privileged treatment. Increasingly desperate messages were exchanged between the prison and the ministry of the interior in search of a solution until, Michel would later claim, her pity for the painfully perplexed gaoler finally persuaded her to go.

The political climate she discovered outside the prison walls was much changed. Continuing arrests and trials in Lyons and the suppression of the émigré population in Switzerland had transformed Paris into the new heartland of a strengthening French anarchist movement. Groups clustered in the old Communard areas to the north and east of Paris – Belleville, Ménilmontant and Batignolles – with others scattered across the city and its suburbs. But it was in Montmartre that radical sentiment was to be found in its most concentrated form, with clubs on nearly every corner in the maze of streets that clung to the hillside, and the new bohemian bars and cabarets as congenial neighbours. ‘If there is a thing to be mocked, a convention to be outraged, an idol to be destroyed, Montmartre will find the way,’ wrote one observer of the bohemian demi-monde.

Nowhere epitomised the bonfire of deference better than the great cabaret Le Chat Noir, founded in 1881. Outside, bouncers dressed parodically in the uniform of the Pope’s Swiss Guard saw off the gangs of youths that roamed the area; inside was a topsy-turvy world of misrule. Waiters were dressed in the regalia of members of the Académie française, and the patron, Rodolphe Salis, accompanied visitors to their seats with mocking servility, while in the murals behind them, the skeletal figure of Death led a troupe of Pierrot clowns in a
danse macabre
.

Fuelled by wine, consumption of which soared during the 1880s, and the mind-altering absinthe for which France had acquired a taste during
the years when the phylloxera virus had decimated the country’s vines, the denizens of Montmartre seemed to inhabit a permanent party. From the Hydropathes to Les Incohérents, the Hirsutes to the Zutistes, myriad groups of revellers and entertainers proclaimed their proud devotion to the sybaritic cause. They found a welcoming home in the newly deregulated cafés, many of which were owned and run by refugees from Alsace and Lorraine, after they had been ceded to Germany following the war. The refugees had nothing to live on but profits from long hours of opening and a dipsomaniac clientele. On the once bucolic slopes of Montmartre, only the nascent sect of Naturiens held true to the pastoral ideal. Self-righteous vegetarians whose extreme ecological conscientiousness had grown out of a Proudhonist anarchism, the Naturiens eschewed all the fruits of progress, protested at the noxious smoke and effluent of factories, and longed for a return to a state of subsistence.

Louise Michel, who had little truck with either the frivolity of the cabaret or the triviality of the proto-ecologists, reserved her greatest disgust for the church of Sacré-Coeur, a work in progress that loomed from the top of the hill as ‘an insult to our consciences’. At least the anarchists of Montmartre could appease themselves with the thought that, eleven years after the first stone was laid, the walls had only just begun to peep above the scaffolding, while unexpected modifications to the design had added close to 500,000 francs to its cost. It was just such profligacy and poor management in the civic sphere, all too often accompanied by an undertow of corruption, that had begun to rouse even the docile citizens of the Third Republic to indignation. Such discontent afforded the anarchist movement a rare opportunity to reach out and embrace a new section of society. However, the chances of this happening appeared dim while the movement remained so partial to factionalism that the proudest announcement made by one congress, meeting at Cette on the Mediterranean coast, was that ‘We are anarchists because we can’t agree.’

‘Take away Louise Michel and her party would collapse,’ wrote
Le Figaro
in a backhanded compliment. ‘She is far and away the most interesting figure of the Third Republic.’ Tirelessly she toured the clubs in the years after her release, always passionate in her outrage, but increasingly anxious to persuade her audiences that the disparate strands of the radical left should rediscover the solidarity they had shown at the time of her arrest. Her approach won few friends. Barbed comments from erstwhile colleagues, and their vicious innuendoes of collusion with the police, now augmented the usual loathing directed at Michel by moderates
and reactionaries. Beyond the doors of the anarchist clubs, however, the alienation that underwrote much of the movement’s appeal was finding new and purposeful expression in the artistic field, where the desire to destroy and renew assumed tangible form.

The French Establishment might scrutinise and disparage the radical left as morally and even medically degenerate, but as the editor of
Le Décadent
, Anatole Baju, made clear, the suspicion was perfectly mutual; the school from which his publication took its title had ‘burst forth in a time of decadence, not to march to the beat of that time but “against the grain,” in opposition to its time’. Two years earlier, Joris-Karl Huysmans had published his stories alongside Kropotkin’s essays in a short-lived publication called the
Revue Indépendant
, founded by Félix Fénéon, a tall, lean and dandified twenty-three-year-old. Since then Huysmans had won notoriety for the elegant evisceration of the corruption and banality of the contemporary world in his novel
A Rebours
, which charted its protagonist’s withdrawal into a world of absolute artifice. Now the writer was a leading contributor to Baju’s magazine, together with Laurent Tailhade, Mallarmé, Rimbaud and Verlaine. And when Louise Michel lectured a gathering of decadent writers in Montmartre that ‘Anarchists, just like decadents, want the end of the old world… Decadents are creating an anarchy of style’, it was in its pages that Verlaine returned the compliment in the form of a paean dedicated to the Red Virgin, with the refrain
‘Louise Michel est très bien.’

It was not only in the avant-garde salons, however, that Michel found encouraging signs of creative destruction, but among the most downtrodden and deprived in society. As a writer and poet she understood the power of words to liberate or subjugate, and in prison had relished hearing the argot of the prostitutes with whom she lived, whose improvised words ‘mixed up together like writhing monsters and yet sometimes assuming charming shapes, for slang is living language. Its imagery either touchingly innocent, or violently bloody.’ Predictably, the criminal anthropologist Lombroso adduced such private languages, with their primal rhythms and squawking, rumbling use of onomatopoeia, as evidence of atavism: ‘They speak differently because they feel differently; they speak as savages because they are true savages in the midst of our brilliant European civilisation.’ To Michel, however, the energy of argot offered simple proof that ‘there are geniuses among the people who speak slang, they’re artists and creators’, and that its challenge to bourgeois proprieties was of no less value than the more self-conscious efforts of the Decadents.

Among Félix Fénéon’s most notable discoveries of the period, as the
journalistic champion of avant-garde art, were two young painters who, in their daring experiments with colour and brushwork, were pushing the earlier experiments of Monet and his fellow Impressionists to startling new levels of control and refinement. Having first met in 1884 as exhibitors at the Salon des Indépendants, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac had become familiar faces in Le Chat Noir, which was within spitting distance of their studios next door to one another on the boulevard de Clichy. They were habitués of the decadent literary circles and, in Signac’s case especially, sympathisers with the anarchist cause and admirers of its leading theorists, though their work was not yet overtly political. Both artists were concerned, above all, with the attempt to confer on nature ‘an authentic reality’ through their development of a method they called
la division –
the pointillist application of discrete touches of paint, inspired by the researches of the colour theorist Michel Chevreul. Nevertheless, the style they innovated made possible a revelatory critique of society of a kind that Kropotkin can scarcely have imagined when calling upon artists, in his 1885 book
Paroles d’un révolté
, to create an ‘aesthetic socialism’.

Seurat’s
A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte
, displayed at the last Impressionist exhibition in May 1886, was the product of four years of preparation, as he edged his way through a multitude of sketches and oil studies towards a
mise en scène
in which nearly fifty figures stand in a frozen evocation of the bourgeoisie at leisure. There is nothing in the painting to suggest social upheaval. Seurat’s gaze is averted from the tawdry bars and dance halls that covered La Grande Jatte at the time, and the factories on the far banks of the Seine, just as his Impressionist precursors had turned their eyes from the effects of Prussian shelling when they painted the same location a decade earlier. Human forms dressed in the height of contemporary fashion are freed from time in the grid-like fixity of a classical frieze, their life a world apart from the vitality and hardship of Montmartre. The result, however, is unnerving: the optical mixing of the tiny points of colour creates a strange and luminous evocation of a sterile society, blind to itself and trapped within a straitjacket of artifice. Intentionally or not, in its own quiet way the painting offers a critique of the belle époque as devastating as Huysmans’
A Rebours
, with its closing sentiment ‘So, crumble away society! Perish old world!’

It was a no less innovative, if more obviously acerbic, examination of the contemporary social malaise that could be seen at Le Chat Noir on those nights when the projection apparatus invented by the cartoonist Caran d’Ache lit up a shadow play of images drawn by Alfred Robida. A
guidebook illustrator by trade, Robida’s true genius lay in the narrow field of satirical futurology. In the panoramas and vignettes of Paris depicted in his book
The Twentieth Century
, the city has one foot in the mundaneness of contemporary bourgeois life, the other in the furthest corners of an imagination stranger even than that of Jules Verne. And yet preparations for war lurk in nearly every picture. While the skies teem with airship taxis, and genteel bus passengers listen to music pumped through pipes into headphones, barricades and gun emplacements intimate imminent international conflict and civil strife. It was an astute extrapolation of the flaws of the Third Republic, peopled by a complacent bourgeoisie lulled by luxury and leisure, whose anxiety that war or revolution might not be far away would render them highly susceptible to unscrupulous manipulation.

‘Two thousand men who smoke, drink and chat, and seven or eight hundred women who laugh, drink, smoke, and offer the greatest gaity in the world,’ marvelled one Russian aristocrat after his first visit to the Folies-Bergère. It was a world in which Peter Rachkovsky had made himself at home, a spider at the heart of his expanding web of spies and informants, alert for the slightest sign of weakness or insecurity that he might exploit, yet utterly insouciant. ‘Nothing in his appearance reveals his sinister affairs,’ one acquaintance of the time would recall. ‘Fat, restless, always with an ever-present smile on his lips, he made me think of some genial fellow on an excursion.’ The perfect disguise in a city where, it was observed, ‘pleasure is a social necessity’. It is all too easy to imagine Rachkovsky sweet-talking international dignitaries at such nightspots, between indulging his well-attested appetite for the petite young women of Paris. And while the hedonistic Russian aristocrat concluded his letter to his mistress in the St Petersburg ballet by joking that ‘We must annex Russia to this capital city, or else for preference this city to Russia’, Rachkovsky treated the proposition more seriously.

In the three years since his arrival, Rachkovsky had transformed a Paris bureau whose operations had lagged far behind the ‘excellent and conscientious’ work being carried out in Berlin and Vienna. Brushing aside rivals with a mixture of cunning and sheer dedication, Rachkovsky had made Paris the main bastion of ‘the systematic and covert surveillance of the Russian emigration abroad’ which Plehve, then overall chief of the police department and now deputy interior minister, had declared to be his top priority.

Nevertheless, the changes came at a price. As well as the basic running costs of the outfit, which included payments to freelance agents and to traitors in the revolutionary ranks for information rendered, there were the
portiers
and postmen to bribe for turning a blind eye to the perlustration of letters (copied and returned within the day) and fees to pay to prostitutes, whose reports of pillow talk afforded Rachkovsky access to the intimate thoughts of the émigré community. And whilst he had managed to negotiate an increase in the bureau’s budget, first to 132,000 francs and then by a further 50 per cent, there were fresh mutterings in St Petersburg about the lack of any conspicuous return on its investment, with Kropotkin’s release and Tikhomirov’s continued propaganda activities causing particular unease. Hampered by the bureaucracy of the Sûreté that impeded any cooperation, Rachkovsky had been playing a clever game, designed to ensure steady rather than spectacular results. It was now becoming clear, though, that to secure his position he needed a sensational success. The opportunity finally presented itself at the end of 1886.