The World That Never Was (67 page)

As the French political Establishment struggled to suppress the far greater scandal of the widespread corruption surrounding the collapse of the Panama Canal Company, which had already seen official investigations begun into Gustave Eiffel and the ninety-six-year-old national hero
Lesseps, it was little wonder that agents of the French police watched Rochefort so closely on his surreptitious trips to Belgium. The marquis’ ostensible purpose there was to gamble in the casinos at Ostende or else to fight duels, banned in England and France but possible in the nearby sand dunes, against those whom he had defamed or who had slandered him. And whilst spies noted the packet of documents slipped to him at Boulanger’s funeral in Brussels, Rochefort himself would later boast that he regularly shook off those who tailed him to make secret forays to Paris, no doubt in search of damning evidence to use against his enemies.

With three Jewish promoters in the frame for organising the gargantuan bribes paid out by the Panama Canal Company to cover up its losses, one of whom was Baron Jacques de Reinarch, uncle of Rochefort’s bête noire, the scent of an anti-Semitic scoop had him salivating. But more than that, as the Third Republic teetered on the brink, nothing could have delighted him more than to harness his countrymen’s disaffection in order finally to drive it to destruction. It was an ambition shared, of course, by the anarchists, to whom he now reached out.

Money supplied by Rochefort to Louise Michel, which trickled down to those in the colony she deemed most worthy, accompanied perhaps with an acknowledgement of her affluent friend’s largesse, may have helped restore his reputation with anyone willing to take a pragmatic view of his past unreliability and egregious Boulangism. Michel, though, while still voluble in her denunciation of injustice and calls for revolution, had increasingly retreated from the intractable human mess of the here and now, for which she could offer only the same old angry nostrums, into a world of animals and the imagination. Her home provided a sanctuary for a menagerie of unfortunates, including a parrot that was reputed to squawk out a parody of her choicest invective; meanwhile she conjured Verne-like visions of the world to come: a global federated society, inhabiting ‘underwater cities, contained in submarine ships as large as whole provinces; cities suspended in mid-air, perhaps orbiting with the seasons’. Rochefort indulged her but she was of little use to him. Instead, by hiring Charles Malato as his secretary, Rochefort bought himself direct access to the core of the ‘individualist’ faction of anarchists. His memoirs are uncharacteristically reticent on the subject, the extent of his dealings with the extremists only glimpsed from police reports, and the reason for them even then obscure. Rather, it is a work of fiction published fifteen years later but looking back to the early 1890s that most vividly evokes Rochefort’s clandestine activities at the time.

The clear identification of Rochefort with the sinister ‘Comrade X’ in Joseph Conrad’s short story ‘The Informer’ surely came close to breaching Britain’s libel laws. ‘A revolutionary writer whose savage irony has laid bare the rottenness of the most respectable institutions’, the character is a cynical, nihilistic coward, described as having ‘scalped every venerated head, and…mangled at the stake of his wit every received opinion and every recognised principle of conduct and policy’. Comrade X is described as having been born into the nobility and ‘could have called himself Vicomte X de la Z if he chose’, collects exquisite antiques and works of art, eats bombe glacée and sips champagne in the finest restaurants. Conrad might as well have mentioned the marquis de Rochefort-Luçay’s recent endorsement of a proprietary brand of bath salts.

Steeped in the underworld of the London anarchist émigrés, Conrad had published his early poems on the presses of the
Torch
newspaper, while his friend Ford Madox Ford was close to Kropotkin, Kravchinsky and Morris. The impressive factual detail that Conrad included in his stories of this milieu makes his insistence that he drew purely on his imagination, understandable in a novelist, demonstrably disingenuous. When his narrator claims to know about Comrade X ‘as a certainty what the guardians of social order in Europe had at most only suspected. Or simply guessed at’, his insight need not be dismissed as simple authorial invention. The great secret? That ‘this extreme writer has been also… the mysterious unknown Number One of desperate conspiracies, suspected and unsuspected, matured or baffled’.

What, though, was the nature of the conspiracies in which Rochefort may have played such a role? Events would soon enough reveal their terrible outcome, but beyond the marquis himself and the anarchists to whom Malato introduced him, it was his trips to the Belgian coast that may provide the best clue as to the third man. For it was there, with the full knowledge and cooperation of the Belgian Sûreté, whose officers Rochefort was said to tip off in advance of any duel that might threaten his health, that Rachkovsky’s star agent Landesen had set about establishing himself under a new identity: Arkady Harting.

After many more twists and turns in his extraordinary career, years later Harting would take over the ownership of one of the casinos where, in the early 1890s, Rochefort played the roulette wheels and laid his bets at baccarat. Now, though, Harting was running a game with far higher stakes, in which he could doubtless have found a seat for the polemical French aristocrat with the anarchist friends.

19
Wicked Laws

London and Paris 1892–1894

Rochefort’s trips from London to Belgium in 1892 ran against the tide. Until recently the boat train from France had often carried artists and activists on ‘
un go back
’, or day return to London, the police crackdown in Paris following Ravachol’s bombings had now made single fares the rule. Meunier, a wanted man for the Lobau barracks and Café Véry bombings, and Jean-Pierre François, who had been named as his accomplice, on flimsy grounds had already gone to ground in the British capital. Now anyone who feared being swept up in the prefecture’s broadening search for co-conspirators and the missing dynamite, or who had got wind of the French government’s decision to adopt the old plan drawn up by Boulanger to intern 100,000 suspected anarchists in the event of war, planned their escape to England.

Prominent figures like Zo d’Axa, the founding editor of the avantgarde cultural and political magazine
L’EnDehors
, departed as early as April 1892, hastily handing over the running of the magazine to an inexperienced office junior called Emile Henry. With Charles Malato tempting others with the idea that they could ‘jump on the train illegally at Bougainville – buy a Dieppe-Newhaven ticket’, the only anarchists left in Paris by the late summer were those who did not have so much as a guilty conscience to hide. And even some of them may have been persuaded to think again by the arrest and imprisonment of Parmeggiani, caught on a clandestine foray to Paris that August, although his crimes of expropriation, attempted murder and incitement to terroristic slaughter were all too tangible.

‘Enough of organisation…let’s busy ourselves with chemistry and manufacture: bombs, dynamite and other explosives are far more capable than rifles and “barricades” of destroying the present state of things, and above all to save our own precious blood.’ Such was the cowardly and
vicious doctrine preached by
L’International
, established in London by Parmeggiani with Bordes, the ex-manager of
Père Peinard
who would shortly be revealed as a provocateur in the pay of the French police. Yet despite the newspaper’s pillorying of Kropotkin and his ilk as ‘papacy’, ‘flatfoots’ and ‘orators of the philosophical class’, Louise Michel, Malatesta and others rallied to Parmeggiani’s cause, protesting against his extradition to Italy and fund-raising to pay for a visit by his wife, with Rochefort a generous contributor.

‘Oh great metropolis of Albion,’ wrote Charles Malato in
The Delights of Exile
, a bittersweet evocation of the anarchists’ life in London, ‘your atmosphere is sometimes foggier than reason allows, your ale insipid and your cooking in general quite execrable, but you show respect for individuality and are welcoming to the émigrés.’ With anarchist visitors like Parmeggiani to contend with, though, it was doubtful how long Britain could remain so tolerant. ‘Be proud of these two qualities and keep them,’ Malato urged Albion, but the warm welcome and the respect would soon run thin and cold.

The dispatch of the Sûreté’s finest, Inspector Prosper-Isidore Houllier, to assist Scotland Yard in the hunt for Ravachol’s accomplices had, for a while, provided the anarchists with some levity. Seemingly pursuing a personal mission to seek out the best of Britain’s much-derided gastronomy, Houllier’s fancy was particularly taken with the whitebait served at the Criterion, though he was partial as well to lunch in the gilded surroundings of the Café Royal. At least he could claim that they were both close to Piccadilly Circus, where he had tried to lure ‘Biscuit’, now going under the name of ‘Quesnay’, by posing as a
Figaro
reporter looking for an interview. Needless to say, his target failed to show: that Quesnay was the name of the French procurator general should have warned Houllier that he was being led a dance. But the French inspector appeared oblivious to how farce followed him around.

Turning their attention to Théodule Meunier, Houllier and Melville descended on Victor Richard’s grocery store in Charlotte Street with the deputy director of the Sûreté, Fedée, in tow, chasing up a tip-off. Their informant, it seemed, was in on the joke. When the crack police team emerged empty-handed, a mob was waiting, and it took uniformed reinforcements to extract them, in scenes played out to the accompaniment of Zo d’Axa’s barrel organ. Subsequently, Houllier and his Special Branch colleagues would chase around London after the vans belonging to a removals company mistakenly linked with the fugitives, while Melville donned the disguise of a hygiene inspector for some unsavoury undercover
work, though dressing up seems always to have appealed to him. That the French took to calling Special Branch’s favoured son ‘Le Vil Melville’ points to a more intimidating and nefarious side to his methods, however, confirmed by the decision of Richard, the grocer, and Brocher, who had convened the congress of 1881, to put the inspector himself under surveillance by the anarchists.

Melville’s harassment of the anarchist émigrés in London did not stop after Meunier’s flight to Canada and Houllier’s departure, or with François’s return to France, where he was soon arrested. Special Branch agents, often themselves ‘in a state of beastly intoxication’, according to anarchist accounts, resorted to bully-boy tactics, bribing gangs of ‘corner boys’ to attack speakers at public meetings before themselves weighing in with ‘kicking and thumping’. Even the banana wine that the old Communard exiles to New Caledonia brewed as ersatz champagne, and then drank to their undying comradeship and to drown their sorrows, was prone to being impounded as a potentially explosive concoction.

Nor were the English anarchists excused Melville’s rougher methods. After rejecting his offer of £500 to reveal the whereabouts of Meunier (‘and that’s just for starters’), Charles Mowbray’s wife received a sinisterly worded warning from Melville that ‘It’ll be no joke when your children are howling from hunger.’ He was true to his word a few weeks later when, hours after her death, he arrested Mowbray, leaving the infants alone in the house with their mother’s corpse. The grounds for Mowbray’s arrest were provided by an article published in
Commonweal
concerning the miscarriage of justice in the Walsall case, which asserted that ‘Jesuit Home Secretary Matthews, Inspector Melville, and Coulon are the principal actors and two of them must die’. Melville’s primary target, though, was the newspaper’s co-editor David Nicoll, whom Sergeant Sweeney of Special Branch would testify to having heard deliver the threat verbally during a public meeting in Hyde Park.

Not only had Nicoll dared to challenge the official account of Special Branch’s activities in Walsall but he also took every opportunity to publicise his suspicions of provocation and entrapment. In a likely attempt by Special Branch to intimidate him into stopping the dissemination of uncomfortable truths, he had already been arrested shortly after the Walsall debacle for defaming the queen: a charge so ludicrous that a local councillor had felt compelled to stand bail for him. But in court this time neither Sweeney’s admission that he had noted down Nicoll’s speech from memory only, half an hour after the event, nor Nicoll’s insistence to the jury that ‘anarchists in the country [are] quiet, peaceable people.
Anarchism [does] not necessarily spell dynamite’ cut any ice. The eighteen-month sentence he received must have come as a relief to Melville, who may have had more personal reasons for his vindictiveness towards Nicoll.

Since William Morris’ withdrawal from the editorial board of the
Commonweal
in 1890, the tight-knit group of ‘individualists’ whose wearisome advocacy of violent means forced Morris’ depature, had gradually turned on one another. Accusations of treachery flew, with Samuels, Mowbray and Coulon all the object of Nicoll’s suspicions. What plots were ‘Lady’ Mowbray and Melville concocting when they were seen drinking together? And what was Henry Samuels thinking of, using his impressionable young brother-in-law, Martial Bourdin, to circulate pamphlets filled with slanderous attacks on Nicoll that Coulon had printed? Inevitably, those Nicoll accused turned the tables on him with counter-accusations, and Frank Kitz’s uncharacteristic decision to embezzle the newspaper’s funds and flee town left Nicoll isolated and vulnerable.

Already psychologically fragile, the pressures plunged Nicoll into a state of mental turmoil, engendering a paranoia that provided his double-dealing colleagues with a convenient cover. Nicoll’s suspicions about Coulon were, of course, well founded, but Mowbray too, Special Branch ledgers reveal, was ‘organising secret shadowers of anarchists’, while a French agent reported rumours that Mowbray had been involved in the Walsall provocation, working for Russia. Quite when Mowbray was recruited is unclear, but it appears to have been after his arrest by Melville, and may have been a condition of his early release. What, though, of Nicoll himself? Lacking in self-awareness to a painful degree, his own writings seem to hint at some buried connection with the Branch: the nervous crossing out of sensitive passages concerning Melville, or the reference to the inspector’s advice that he should recognise in Coulon and Samuels his truest friends, in letters to those he thought he could trust. For all his denunciation of others, had he too, then, at some point been turned, as was suggested, and was he then victimised for betraying Melville’s trust?