The World That Never Was (68 page)

The notion that the entire
Commonweal
editorial team should, unbeknownst to one another, have been informants may seem far-fetched, but it was standard practice for the Okhrana, at least, to secure two sources or more in every key group it was monitoring, in order to guarantee the reliability of their reports by means of comparison. As to Henry Samuels, future events would prove the pernicious nature of his influence. What, though, did it say about the effectiveness of Special Branch and Inspector
Melville, if a large proportion of the most incendiary figures in the anarchist movement were indeed in their employ? Handled with skill and integrity, the level of information such informants could provide would certainly vindicate official claims, offered in part as reassurance to foreign forces, that any action the anarchists planned would almost immediately become known to them. It could be counted a success too if they could seed uncertainty and dissent in the movement. Beyond that, though, there were obvious risks.

Even Chief Inspector Littlechild would soon have to admit that ‘the “nark” is very apt to drift into an agent provocateur in his anxiety to secure a conviction’. Melville, by secretly offering his services to Rachkovsky, head of the foreign intelligence of Britain’s foremost recent enemy on the international stage, had surely come close to treasonable behaviour. So far he had been lucky. The worst result that Walsall had produced was the conviction of hotheads on charges that, unprovoked, their behaviour is unlikely to have warranted: a gross abuse of the justice system but no more. However, were a repeat of the provocation that had brought about the arrest of the Walsall men to result instead in death or injury, the full moral obscenity of the strategy would surely be revealed. Certainly it was one with which neither the people nor the political leaders of the country Melville was meant to serve would have had any truck.

‘We who, in our houses, seclude ourselves from the cry and sight of human sufferings, we are no judges of those who live in the midst of all this suffering…who are driven to despair,’ had long been Kropotkin’s default position with regard to those anarchists who lashed out at society, as Ravachol, Meunier and the others had done. Personally, though, he was quite explicit that he hated the explosions, concerned that as well as damaging the movement’s reputation, they risked attracting criminal elements with no higher purpose, or else young men who craved the easy adrenaline rush of terrorism but lacked the stamina and dedication for the arduous task of building a broad and popular movement. Worse still, he feared that the effects of such violent acts might contaminate the revolution, when it happened, and propel it not towards a Utopia of freedom but instead into the hands of an oppressive dictatorship.

Both he and Malatesta were wary of the Autonomie Club anarchists, men and women of all nationalities who drank and talked amidst a fug of smoke, reclining on the comfortable chairs and sofas beneath portraits
of such heroes as Ravachol and the Fenian, O’Donnell, and a poster proclaiming ‘Death to Carnot’, the French president. ‘It is no longer a love for the human race that guides them, but the feeling of vendetta joined to a cult of an abstract idea, of a theoretical phantasm,’ Malatesta wrote of Ravachol’s disciples in his 1892 essay ‘Nécessité et bases d’une entente’, in what was an attempt to guide the young, headstrong anarchists away from the doctrine of dynamite. But the new generation of French anarchists, many of whom had flocked to London, were not so easily persuaded.

That summer, before handing over the onerous editorial duties on
L’EnDehors
to Félix Fénéon, the twenty-year-old Emile Henry used the pages of the newspaper to challenge Malatesta’s argument. Taking issue with the Italian’s assertion that ‘hate does not produce love, and by hate one cannot remake the world’, he replied that ‘To those who say that hate does not give birth to love, I reply that it is love, human love, that often engenders hate.’ From an early age Henry had seen how painful a thwarted love for mankind could be, watching his father, an elected member of the Commune, live out his final years as an exile in Catalonia. Emile himself, a brilliant and diligent student at school despite all the disadvantages of his upbringing, had just missed out on the place at one of Paris’
grandes écoles
that might have allowed him to participate in building the bright future to which he aspired. As it was, rejection had set in motion a train of events that over several years would crystallise his sense that ‘only cynics and sycophants get a seat at the feast’.

After fleeing his call-up papers, as a criminal deserter every step that Henry took seemed to lead deeper into the political underworld. Seeing Emile in search of a political purpose, his brother Fortune had introduced him to the moderate anarchist teachings of Kropotkin, but when Emile’s new interest was discovered, it cost him his job. Then, despite Emile’s own rejection of Ravachol’s methods as inhumane and counterproductive, Fortune’s outspoken support for the bombings led his brother to be arrested in his own apartment and briefly taken into custody. It was a rapid process of radicalisation, accelerated by the sense that he was being persecuted and marginalised. Hard-line veterans of anarchism, the likes of Malato, d’Axa, Fénéon and Constant Martin were now the only friends on whom he could rely, and thrilling discussions about how destruction was the purest form of artistic expression surrounded him.

The bomb that Emile Henry left outside the door of the offices of the Carmaux Mining Company on avenue de l’Opéra on 8 November 1892 was intended to cause the maximum loss of life. An inversion device
made according to a design of his own, it was aimed primarily at the bosses of a business that had, in the course of the previous few months, brutalised the striking workers at its mines in the Aveyron. But Henry’s definition of economic guilt had become wide enough for him to feel no disquiet that the bourgeois residents of the nearby apartments might die too. Having used a meeting across town as cover for his murderous expedition, Henry returned to his workplace confident that the ghost of Ravachol would soon once again be stalking the streets of Paris. By then, however, the bomb had already exploded, with a rather different effect from that intended.

Alerted by the mining company, police officers had taken the infernal machine to the station on rue des Bons-Enfants for inspection; three of them had lifted it carefully upstairs. Shortly afterwards, Henry’s ingenious detonator had triggered. Four officers and the office boy died in terror and agony, their flesh and scraps of uniform spattered over the walls and dangling from the fixtures. It was an act of terrorism quite different in scale and effectiveness from any of the copycat squibs that had followed in the wake of Ravachol. Two days later Henry packed his bags and departed Paris for the safety of London, and the welcoming bosom of his anarchist family. He left behind a France racked by anxieties.

It was the nationalistic newspaper
La Libre parole
, published by the notorious anti-Semite Edouard Drumont – with its motto ‘France for the French’ – which had broken the story of the Panama scandal in September 1892, filling the pages across which it had previously splashed reports of Ravachol’s arrest and trial. Its revelations were surely the outcome of the neo-Boulangist and anti-Semitic campaign against the French authorities that Rochefort had been reported as formulating that summer. The outrage over Panama felt by the French public made Rochefort a serious political player once again, visited in London by the ex-prefect of police, Louis Andrieux. He was courted too by those with something to hide, including Cornelius Herz – one of the three Jewish ‘promoters’ who had arranged the Panama scandal bribes – who offered him 300,000 francs to moderate the follow-up attacks in
L’Intransigeant
, without success. News that Baron de Reinarch, one of Herz’s two colleagues, had been found dead the day after his nephew had tipped him off that he was to be prosecuted, and with many doubting the official account of suicide, must have doubly delighted
Rochefort, coming as it did within days of the rue des Bons-Enfants explosion.

‘Gradually the land is passing from the native to the foreigner. Jews are becoming the proprietors of the finest farms mortgaged to their advantage,’ complained a character in Jules Verne’s novel
The Carpathian Castle
, published in 1892, fifteen years after the chief rabbi in Paris had felt compelled to write to Verne’s publisher to complain against racial stereotyping. Such anti-Semitism was pervasive in French society in the period, however, and rarely remarked upon. Now, though, a dangerous confluence of circumstances, further excited by some propagandist contrivance, raised the level of anti-Semitic rhetoric to an almost hysterical pitch. An impression of conspiracy was being woven around the Panama scandal with little regard to the collateral damage: the burial of Reinarch’s body without an autopsy raised suspicions of foul play, while almost the entire political Establishment, including even Clemenceau, were seemingly implicated in a five-year-long deception of the French people.

The conspiracy had an international angle too with ‘X’, described as ‘the ambassador of a very great power friendly to France – a dashing gentleman, actually, whose financial embarrassments [have long been] a matter of common knowledge in Paris’, said to be a beneficiary of bribes on a vast scale. Nor were comments on the recent ostentatious affluence of Baron de Mohrenheim limited to the French press: in a letter to Pobedonostsev, de Cyon calculated the sum total of the kickbacks de Mohrenheim had received at half a million francs, while the same sum had been paid to the late Katkov’s Russian newspaper. Most unnerving, though, for the French was surely the queasy sense that not only had the Jewish financiers got their hooks into the ambassador, on whom they pinned their hopes for a geopolitically crucial alliance, but that they were simultaneously in league with those who sought the destruction of their society. Such at least was the drift of an article in Drumont’s
La Libre parole
headed ‘Rothschild and the Anarchists…An International Conspiracy’. The malign influence of the Jews was, it seemed, truly ubiquitous, corroding western civilisation from above and below.

Following the demise of Boulanger and the disgrace of the aged Lesseps, sentenced to prison for five years in 1893, the subject of the most popular souvenir photographs in France would be Louis Pasteur. And it was all too easy for those with half a grasp of his bacteriological ideas, or those of his German rival and colleague Robert Koch, to extrapolate from their findings metaphors for the spread of alien stock by emigration, especially that of eastern European Jewry. Known vectors of disease, with cholera
a particular problem that caused a devastating outbreak in the transit port of Hamburg in 1893, the Jewish refugees from the pogroms began to be perceived as a disease themselves, whose virulence must be addressed. In ‘The Invasion of Destitute Aliens’ of 1892, the earl of Dunraven had written of ‘the superiority of the lower order over the higher order of organism – the comparative indestructibility of lower forms of animal life’, with veiled reference to the influx of immigrants to the East End. The same year, quarantine officials in New York came under pressure to weed out ‘the diseased, defective, delinquent and dependent’.

Even without the learned contribution of such criminal anthropologists as Lombroso, the same principle could be readily extended to foreign subversives entering Britain or America, many of whom were Jewish. Indeed, Sir Basil Thomson, later head of the CID, would look back on the early 1890s with the lamentation that ‘if the pharaoh Memptah had been given an efficient intelligent service, there would have been no exodus’. There were, though, other perspectives on the teeming immigrant world of London’s East End, which saw not only the difficulties but also the promise and potential of the tens of thousands of new arrivals who were pouring through London docks at an unprecedented rate, and prized the social example that they set.

It was a process that the Fabian Beatrice Webb charted with brio. ‘Let us imagine ourselves on board a Hamburg boat steaming slowly up the Thames in the early hours of the morning,’ she began her lengthy account of the journey of one exemplar of the 45,000 émigrés from Lithuania, Russia and Poland to disembark in 1891, to the point where ‘In short, he has become a law-abiding and self-respecting citizen of our great metropolis and feels himself the equal of a Montefiore or a Rothschild.’ The social reformer Olive Schreiner might not have appreciated the capitalistic aspirations imputed to the Jewish families with whom she worked and wrote, but she too felt a passionate admiration for how the tight bonds of the family provided the necessary support and security in a largely hostile environment for members to undertake, with a high frequency of success, a relatively rapid rise through the established society.