The World That Never Was (71 page)

The café, situated in the facade of the grand Hôtel Terminus at the entrance to Saint-Lazare station, was already filling up with after-work drinkers on that February evening, but Henry waited until he was satisfied that he could cause the greatest mortality. At that instant, he lifted his large bomb from its hiding place and launched it towards the diners nearest the orchestra. The noise and devastation were terrible, the blast destroying the immediate area and shattering the windows, while shrapnel ripped through flesh and furnishings and embedded itself in the ceiling and walls, leaving two dead and others dying. Henry, clutching a pistol beneath his jacket, made a bid to escape, but a crowd gave chase, persisting even when he turned and fired, emptying the chambers of his revolver. Two of his pursuers, one of them a policeman, were wounded by bullets before Henry was finally brought to bay.

The trial would be a tense affair. Bulot, the prosecuting lawyer, had been the intended victim of one of Ravachol’s bomb attacks, and was determined not only to secure justice but to humiliate Henry in the process, while all Henry’s wasted education welled up into angry wit and bilious eloquence that would prove endlessly quotable. ‘Your hands are stained with blood,’ the judge told him. ‘Like the robes you wear, Your Honour,’ Henry quipped back. His display delighted the likes of the aesthetic Félix Fénéon, who claimed that Henry’s acts had ‘Done far more for propaganda than twenty years of brochures by Reclus and Kropotkin’. It was the rousing conclusion to Henry’s final speech, though, that would truly resonate with the friends he was leaving behind:

You have hanged us in Chicago, beheaded us in Germany, garrotted us in Jerez, shot us in Barcelona, guillotined us in Montbrison and Paris, but anarchy itself you cannot destroy. Its roots are deep: it grows from the heart of a corrupt society that is falling apart, it is a violent reaction to the established order, it represents the aspiration to freedom and equality that struggles against all current authority. It is everywhere, which means it cannot be beaten, and ultimately it will defeat you and kill you.

20
The Mysteries of Bourdin and the Baron

London and Liège, 1894

At around one o’clock on 15 February 1894, three days after Emile Henry’s bombing of the Café Terminus, Special Branch was on a high state of alert. Henry Samuels was meeting his younger brother-in-law Martial Bourdin for lunch in the International Restaurant near Fitzroy Square. The same day, a French informant penned the only report that the prefecture ever received that focused exclusively on the two men. Neither the source nor the nature of the intelligence that prompted such attentiveness by the police on either side of the Channel is known. However, the sighting of a ‘Bourdin brother’ in Paris a week earlier, in conversation with Henry, may well have raised the alarm.

Leaving the restaurant Samuels and Bourdin travelled together to Westminster where they parted, Bourdin crossing Westminster Bridge to the south side of the Thames. It was at that moment too, by curious coincidence, that the Special Branch undercover agent also lost the scent. ‘I never spent hours of greater anxiety than…when [the] information reached me,’ Sir Robert Anderson, Melville’s superior, would remember. ‘To track him was impracticable. All that could be done was to send out officers in every direction to watch persons and places that he might be likely to attack.’ Where and when Bourdin had collected the small, homemade grenade that Special Branch clearly knew to be in his pocket by this stage, together with £13 worth of gold, would remain a mystery.

Boarding a tram in the direction of East Greenwich, Bourdin took a seat at the rear, but gradually moved forward towards the driver, eager perhaps to peer through the windscreen at what lay ahead, or else from a fearful man’s simple instinct for company. It was half-past four when he reached his stop near the edge of Greenwich Park and the afternoon
light was already dying away in the west. He began to climb the zigzagging path up the hill. Behind him lay the Thames, on either side of which London stretched away beneath a hanging blanket of smoke from its fires and factories; ahead, the powerful symbol of the Greenwich Observatory, named a decade earlier as the site of the Prime Meridian, in the face of competition from Jerusalem and Paris, a decision to which the latter still refused to acquiesce. Was revenge for Henry’s arrest on his mind, and was the Observatory truly his target: the guardian of the point in space from which the worldwide tyranny of time, oppressor of the working man, was calibrated? Or was it merely that the park was the agreed venue for him to hand over the bomb to whoever had commissioned its production?

At eight minutes to five, a flash suddenly lit up the fog-laden air: jolted by the sound of a ‘sharp and clear detonation’, two assistants in the Observatory’s Computing Room noted the time. Whether pausing to prime the bomb, or tripping on the path, Bourdin had accidentally triggered the device. Two children were the first to reach the dying man, on their way home from school. The scene that greeted them was appalling: flesh and fragments of bone had been flung through the air to hang in trees, while the force of the impact had wrapped a section of sinew around the iron railings of a nearby fence. ‘Take me home’ was all Bourdin could gasp, his left hand and forearm blown off, his entrails spilling out, but instead he was carried to the nearby Seamen’s Hospital, where shortly afterwards he expired.

Late the following evening, police raided the Autonomie Club, to which Melville gained entry by means of the secret password of knocks. While the chief inspector disdainfully puffed on a cigar, all those present were detained and interrogated, and the premises was subsequently closed until further notice. There were no angry crowds to block his exit this time, though, as there had been when he had visited Richard’s shop with Houllier eighteen months before; as the dramatic news sank in, popular feeling turned against the anarchists as never before, and the next time the police were called out in force to the Charlotte Street area it would be to protect its radical citizens against an angry English mob.

Many émigrés reacted with consternation to the news from Greenwich: ‘Anarchists were not so blind to their own interests and well-being as to forgo by their conduct the right to asylum that England so generously offered to political refugees,’ one told the
Morning Leader
. But whilst an attack that killed or injured innocent victims, like those perpetrated by Ravachol or Henry, would surely have caused the British press to close
ranks in outrage, the mysterious circumstances of Bourdin’s death in Greenwich simply invited further investigation.

Among the anarchists themselves, rumours of provocation were rife in the days following the debacle, with the greatest suspicion focused on Henry Samuels, whose influence on the younger man David Nicoll would express in his recollection of a scene from the Autonomie Club a few weeks earlier, of ‘little Bourdin sitting at the feet of Samuels, and looking up into his eyes with loving trust’. Nicoll’s own misgivings about Samuels had long been a matter of record but already that January the first edition of the newspaper
Liberty –
founded by James Tocchati, a veteran of Morris’ Socialist League, in order to provide a moderate counterbalance to
Commonweal –
had explicitly accused him of working for Melville.

Determined to exculpate himself, Samuels briefed the press about Bourdin’s ‘erratic behaviour’ at their lunch on the fateful day, but professed himself certain that when they had parted – insisting that this was outside the restaurant at 2.50 p.m. – his brother-in-law had no intention of bombing the Observatory: his plan, he thought, must have been ‘either to buy the explosive or to experiment’. Samuels’ purpose was clearly to put time and space between himself and the incriminating material but his version of events rapidly began to unravel when a witness came forward to testify that he had seen them together in Westminster. Forced to concede that he had lied, Samuels now volunteered that on their journey across the city they had been ‘pursued by’ detectives. His new contortions, though, raised as many questions as they answered. If Samuels had known that he and Bourdin were under surveillance, why had he tried to pretend that they had parted earlier, unless he could rely on the police to keep his secret? Was it not more likely that Samuels himself was both the source of the bomb and the money that Bourdin collected along the way, and in league with the police?

While Samuels’ amateurish attempts at deception were easily exposed, his old friend and colleague Auguste Coulon, still on the Special Branch payroll, played the journalist from the
Morning Leader
with an altogether more deft professionalism. Speaking anonymously, and unidentifiable to his old colleagues, Coulon was interviewed in the jeweller’s shop in South London in which he now maintained an office lined with books on the theme of anarchism, the better to understand the subjects of his infiltration. As an array of clocks and watches ticked away the time, as if in portentous countdown, and his Swiss assistant tinkered at a workbench, Coulon divulged that he had been aware of plots brewing and had recently been on Bourdin’s trail, but had relaxed his attention on the fateful day
in the mistaken belief that the plot would not come to a head until the following Saturday. Having established his authority on the subject, he then persuasively asserted that the authorities would have to take ‘steps to cleanse from their midst the criminals that now infest London. Too long has London been an asylum for European murderers, forgers, and thieves.’

The argument that Coulon advanced for the benefit of the newspaper’s readers would have been welcomed by Melville, as by his associates abroad, but all were likely to have been disconcerted by his accompanying boast that ‘I am in the service of the International Secret Police, which is subsidised by the Russian, German and French governments.’ That Coulon may have been taking money from all three in a freelance capacity was perfectly possible, but the idea that cooperation between the national police forces amounted to anything like the official organisation he evoked was as fanciful as the much-touted notion of a vast concerted anarchist conspiracy. Yet Coulon’s self-regarding admission perhaps hinted at something almost as extraordinary, whose existence none of those involved would wish revealed: a clandestine arrangement that had grown out of Melville’s back-channel offer to Rachkovsky of his personal assistance, two years earlier. It may moreover have been upon such a foundation that the Okhrana chief hoped to build when he had approached the French foreign ministry, only weeks before Bourdin’s death, to call for an anti-anarchist convention, in the move that had so angered his superiors in St Petersburg.

David Nicoll, at least, was in no doubt that Bourdin had died as the result of an elaborate intrigue involving police agents, and was unafraid to point the finger in print. Even before the explosion at Greenwich, he had charged Coulon with having received £70 to help reignite Melville’s ‘delectable game [of] dynamite outrages’; now Henry Samuels, whom he had previously considered ‘too much of a fool to be a spy, but…the sort of man whom a spy could make good use of’, was elevated to the status of a full-blown agent provocateur. And then there was Dr Fauset MacDonald, a well-heeled medical practitioner who had thrown in his lot with the
Commonweal
group the previous year: he too was now labelled a police agent, from whose surgery the chemicals could be supplied to produce explosives. As for a motive, Nicoll believed that ‘A few dynamite explosions in England would suit the Russian police splendidly, and might even result in terrifying the English bourgeoisie into handing over the refugees to the vengeance of the Russian tsar.’

Nicoll’s apprehension of the conspiracy that had been woven around
Bourdin was corroborated by an improbable source more than a decade later, when Joseph Conrad wrote
The Secret Agent
. Despite Conrad’s assurance to his publisher that the plot was ‘based on inside knowledge of a certain event’, which was clearly the Greenwich bombing, in certain respects the novel presented a rather schematic cross-section of the anarchist world of the period. Comrade Ossipon may be taken as a slightly facetious version of Kropotkin; Yundt of the firebrand Johann Most. But when Verloc, the equivalent of Henry Samuels in Conrad’s account, who habitually works as a nark for Chief Inspector Heat, recruits the Bourdin character, Stevie, into bombing the Observatory, he is in fact acting on the behest of Mr Vladimir, assigned the position of first secretary at the Russian Embassy but an obvious avatar of Rachkovsky.

Conrad would later protest, perhaps too much, that the work was drawn primarily from imagination. In reflecting on a realm where fact and fiction were constantly and intentionally being blurred, however, his well-informed storytelling may come closer to illuminating the truth than documentary sources that are so often partial and distorting. As to the true quality of the ‘inside knowledge’ about which Conrad boasted, the proof lies in the figure of the novel’s purveyor of explosives, ‘The Professor’, whose elusive factual counterpart, bearing the very same sobriquet, is today known only from French police files that remained locked away in the Paris prefecture until long after the novelist’s death. In one intriguing report, the real ‘Professor’ is said to have supplied Emile Henry’s mentor, Constant Martin, with dynamite; in another, more significantly, the French informant states that ‘Russian anarchists have confirmed that the school for the manufacture of bombs is in London and that the Professor is a Russian refugee’.

Unfortunately for the anarchist movement as a whole, in the London underworld of early 1894, it was all too easy for those accused by Nicoll to dismiss his suspicions as far-fetched: a further symptom of his paranoia, whose disruptive effects were beginning to weary even those who had some sympathy for the poor man’s plight. For whilst rumours that Bourdin’s intended destination had been Epping Forest, where he intended to test the bomb, may have carried echoes of the Landesen plot of 1890, they hardly constituted proof of Russian involvement. Furthermore, claims by anarchists to have received unsolicited deliveries of explosive materials, of which they had then wisely disposed, shortly before Special Branch ransacked their homes in search of incriminating evidence, could be easily explained away as anti-police propaganda. And when a pair of anarchists, Ricken and Brall, who had previously been suspected by
neighbours of manufacturing bombs, suddenly disappeared, two days after Bourdin’s death, the move suggested the remaining members of a terrorist cell hastily going to ground, more than it did innocents fleeing persecution.