The World That Never Was (89 page)

Prologue

My account of Kropotkin’s involvement in the 1908 Jury of Honour draws on descriptions of visits he had made to France in recent years. When Kropotkin had disembarked at Dieppe in 1896, the French police had been forewarned by Special Branch and put him straight back on the next boat to England: only in 1905 had his return been officially sanctioned. Confino offers a vivid account of his illicit visit in 1901, based on letters and police reports: the trips to a Turkish hammam, visits to Clemenceau and tea with girls in Tyrolean straw hats all under surveillance by the ‘international police’. On that occasion he gave agent ‘Sambain’ the slip and would have recognised him again in 1908. In fact the jury first convened in the home of Roubinovitch, only moving to Savinkov’s apartment shortly afterwards, while for security Kropotkin stayed with the artist Bréal, as G. Marx observes. Some licence is therefore taken in re-creating the street scene, and Kropotkin’s reflections on a changed Paris and his journey through its streets, though less than by Gaucher in his description of the three old revolutionaries descending from a carriage; in other respects, however, his account of the trial is informative. Figner’s memoirs tell of life in Schlüsselburg, and the eighteen years Lopatin spent in solitary confinement; Fischer mentions her suggestion to Burtsev of suicide. Miller discusses Kropotkin’s concern with agents provocateurs and fears regarding penetration of the anarchist movement; he also elucidates how dispirited Kropotkin was by the experience of the trial. Accounts of the investigation and trial appeared in Burtsev’s journal of history,
Byloe
, though a degree of ambiguity surrounds Lopukhin’s testimony and the ex-police chief’s motivation for cooperating, as Ruud and Stepanov consider. Zuckerman, Rubinstein and Geifman all survey the career and trial of Azef; the latter favours an interpretation that he was never more than incidentally disloyal to his police employers, lending too little credence to the testimony of revolutionaries. My sense of the iconoclastic optimism represented by art nouveau comes from Sutcliffe. The various recollections of the Commune are noted in Kropotkin’s autobiographical writings, while the papers that Savinkov had to clear each day were work in progress on his novel
Pale Horse
.

1
A Distant Horizon

The description of Reclus’ early life is drawn largely from his own correspondence and from Fleming; Heath informs my evocation of his time in London, Nord his involvement in the Peace League, Rykwert the background of French socialist thought in Saint-Simon, Fourier and Proudhon. Dunbar’s article introduced me to Reclus’ fascination with Wyld’s Globe, while Sennett and Welter illuminated the influence of Etienne-Louis Boullée. The letters from Reclus to Nadar during the period of the siege suggest a significant involvement by Reclus in the aerostatic experiments to which both Ishill and Kropotkin allude in their obituaries of the geographer, rather than the more cautious interpretation in Dunbar. The scene of Reclus’ balloon flight is nevertheless imagined, the aeronaut’s experience drawing on Fisher, whose research into the imaginative struggle to maintain communication links from Paris was informative, as was his evocation of the ballooning events at the Expo. The extraordinary snails, however, are found in Horne’s incomparable history of the war and Commune, while the revolutionary resonance of ballooning, and the Montgolfier tradition, is from Schama. Costello makes the connections between Verne and Nadar, the anagrammatic hero Ardan in
From the Earth to the Moon
, and explores the cultural importance of the submarine. In light of the uncertain reliability of Stieber’s memoirs, corroboration of his claims from secondary sources has been sought, both in the writings of his near contemporaries such as Tissot, in the
Byloe
article ‘Count Bismarck’, and in more recent scholarly works by Höhne, Wilms and Schoeps. Stieber’s perspective on the meteorological tests is also an invented vignette; Deacon informs my sense of Stieber’s early foray to London, while Wheen gives Marx’s side of the story. Marx’s antipathy to Proudhon and Bakunin and his attempt to counter their influence is apparent in his letters; Engels’ notion of Reclus as contaminated by their influence is reported in W. O. Henderson as is Engels’ role in reporting the Franco-Prussian War and the fact that he filed reports for the
Pall Mall Gazette
from London, out of fear of how Stieber might treat him were he in Versailles; from Henderson is also the glee that he and Marx felt at the fate of France. Avineri explores Marx’s original attempts to avert the Paris insurrection. Williams contextualises and often subverts Rochefort’s own account of the autobiographical
Adventures of My Life
, whose extraordinary appeal to France in what Flaubert called its ‘abnormal mental state’ is explored by Christiansen. Molnár is referred to for the socialist reaction to the birth of the republic; Bury for the overheated Vatican Council on infallibility on the very eve of the outbreak of war, where cardinals were accused by the Pope of revolutionary tendencies; Jellinek for the social effects of the war and the fumigation after the victory parade.

2
Communards

Despite the somewhat adulatory tone of her biography of Louise Michel, Thomas provides the core source for her career, embroidered by Michel’s own autobiographical writings and correspondence, while Guillemin’s interpretation of the code of Hugo’s
Carnets Intimes
offers insights into their relationship. Sources for Michel’s involvement in resisting the seizure of the Montmartre guns include Jellinek; Edwards, who surveys the grass-roots enthusiasm for the Commune and its educational imperatives; Christiansen, whose discussion of the Joan of Arc phenomenon in France during the war casts the Red Virgin in an interesting light; and Williams for his account of the murder of the generals. The
Official Journal
and
Le Mot d’Ordre
offer a powerful sense of the internal life of the Commune while Horne and Tombs afford a more considered overall appraisal, the latter evoking the excitement of the Commune and its social reforms, but questioning the reality of the final armed resistance by women. Gildea quotes Edmond Goncourt thanking God for civil war, in words identical to those Horne assigns to Thiers: it has been assumed that their response was indeed shared. Boime conveys Courbet’s unreasonable optimism and explores the iconography of the destruction of the Vendôme column; Pernicone presents Costa’s bewildered reaction to the sense of unreality surrounding the Commune’s impending demise; Costello quotes Verne’s impression of Daumier’s cartoon. Although the paradox of Marx’s minimal and largely unsupportive role in the Commune and the excessive credit he would later be accorded is only touched upon, W. O. Henderson and Avineri suggest a murky cynicism, due in part to letters perhaps forged by Stieber, while Verdes offers an account based on French police reports from London; Dmitrieff’s role is discussed by McClellan. The letters of Elie Reclus recount details of the tragic sortie, while Elisée’s own describe the circumstances of his capture; Rochefort’s autobiography considers Thiers’ role in the original construction of the forts. The English response to events in Paris is largely drawn from Martinez, while my sense of the utopian and dystopian fiction of 1871 is from T. Clark and Beaumont; Beaumont and Tombs both allude to the vicious attitude adopted towards the Communards by the Church: from the Pope down to the priest at Versailles.

3
From Prince to Anarchist

Along with Kropotkin’s own
Memoirs of a Revolutionist
, two biographies have been of particular assistance in describing Kropotkin’s early life: those by Woodcock and Avakumovic, and Miller, to which I have returned for specific investigations. Information on the Fell railways comes from Pemble, Byrnes’ biography of Pobedonostsev explores the residue of French intellectual life left behind by the Grand Armée, while the letters between Kropotkin and his brother Alexander chart their political development. Complemented by Meijer, Figner’s memoirs provide a moving account of the everyday life in the community of émigré Russian students in Switzerland, as do Engel and Faure, who contextualise their studies, in intellectual and political terms. Gaucher examines the appeal to Russia’s youth of Peter Lavrov, who must regrettably remain a background figure in this story, and the compelling charisma of Nechaev, though it is Hingley who quotes Nechaev’s calls to arms: ‘Now, friends, let us start the drama.’ Avrich and Morris have both examined the relationship between Bakunin and Nechaev, while Leier has recently provided an effective survey of Bakunin’s wider career. Wheen, with a biographer’s sympathy for Marx, is unsparing in his attack on Bakunin’s anti-Semitism, which held the Jews to be ‘a single exploiting sect’ and insisted that ‘every popular revolution is accompanied by a massacre of Jews: a natural consequence …’; Jensen lays bare Bakunin’s equally reprehensible belief that all progress must be ‘baptised in blood’. The account of life among the members of the Jurassian federation, ‘the last Mohicans of the International’ according to Bakunin, derives in part from material in Guillaume and from Enckell, with the culture of watchmaking taken from Jaquet and Chapuis. Titov was useful on the origins of the Chaikovsky Circle, as were others concerning the mission ‘to the People’, and Venturi on the naïvety of the idealistic youths in their mission and on Kropotkin’s Manifesto. Tikhomirov’s memoirs of his attempts at propaganda at the time are found in his
Conspirateurs et policiers
. Fleming was once again an important reference point for Reclus’ biography, prompting further research regarding agents’ reports in the AN,
Papiers Elisée Reclus
, and the APP, folders BA a/1502 and 1237.

4
Around the World in 280 Days

Rochefort’s own
Adventures
provides the main source for my description of his circumnavigation of the globe, tempered by Williams’ eagle eye for his subject’s manifold hypocrisies, as for example in the rumours that his escape from Paris had been betrayed by Grousset. Jellinek, however, is the major source for the activities of the tribunal operated by the council of war. Similarly, Thomas’ biography of Louise Michel, and Michel’s own writings provide the mainstay for Michel’s journey to New Caledonia, supplemented by additional sources for the digressions along the way. The correspondence of Engels and of Reclus illuminate perceptions of the Spanish uprising, while Anderson in
Under Three Flags
affords a useful summary of the situation in that country, as part of a far wider history of Hispanic anarchism at the time. The imaginary sharks between Prato and the Catamans are inevitably the work of Jogand-Pages, or Taxil, and form part of his own account of his hoaxes, delivered to the Paris Geographical Society in 1897, but appear too in his APP files. Costello considers contemporary myths of the sea and its monsters, as transformed by Verne’s imagination; Day examines the suggestions that Michel was the original author of
20,000 Leagues
, dismissing her candidacy in favour of George Sand; the world tours are Pemble’s subject. As for the anarchist ideas discussed on board
La Virginie
, Rykwert is helpful; the key document regarding anarchism from the time of the French Revolution is the Babouvist
Manifeste des Egaux
. Pain’s memoir of Rochefort, along with the accounts of other escapees, gives a colourful picture of New Caledonia, as does Gauthier, but the indispensable work is Bullard’s exceptional study of the deportee’s life. The account of the escape is largely taken from Rochefort’s own
From Nouméa to Newcastle
, though corroborated by others: his companions recorded his souvenir-hunting en route to America. I would have liked to quote Whitman’s
Oh Star of France
at length, but it can be found in Boime, who expertly distils the impact of the Commune in America, as well as its aftermath in an amnesiac France, through the transformation of the Parc Monceau. An old doctoral thesis by Martinez remains the definitive source for the Communard emigration to London, evoking the Charlotte Street colony and its inhabitants’ antipathy to Rochefort’s hauteur, with further information from Kellet. Madox Ford sheds light on growing up with Communard domestic staff, Bertall on the contemporary belief that ‘the actors have but retired behind the scenes’. Porter examines British policing at the time, for which documents in Home Office files 9335 29553 and 45 9303 11335 at TNA are essential reading.

5
To the People

The activities of the Chaikovsky Circle are well represented in Venturi and Footman, with Kravchinsky’s
Revolutionary Russia
providing a propagandist account that reveals much about how the radical youth of Russia understood their mission, including the assertion that ‘in 1870 the whole of advanced Russia was anarchist’, and his
Career of a Nihilist
gives a fictional interpretation of similar experiences; Taratuta draws on a mass of Russian material for her narrative of his life. Billington examines the positive beliefs that impelled the radical movement, whose sense of intellectual suppression fuelled its drift towards violent tactics, and the role of the journal
Znanie
, as does Coplestone, with his interest in Pisarev. Suvin and Fetzer explore the Russian science fiction of the period and its utopian content, Fetzer as editor of a useful anthology. Doskoevsky’s visions of a utopian society on another planet corrupted by a lie, in
The Dream of a Ridiculous Man
, and of the proto-blogging habits of a future society are particularly intriguing. In light of the many deaths of radicals while held in prison without charge, Florovsky’s discussion of the belief held by the Comtean, Nicholas Fedorov, that ‘the new age of science would make possible even the resurrection of the dead’, is plangent. The descriptions of Cyon’s confrontation with the St Petersburg students in Kennan and Fox are complementary; my sense of the reactionary backlash to such ideas derives from Byrnes and Berglund; Figner, Hingley, and Daly are, with ascending degrees of critical distance, informative regarding the police crackdown on the activists. Dr Veimar’s insistence on retaining some independence and that ‘I cannot join any circle’, whilst facilitating prison breaks and assassinations – an interesting position – comes from Miller who, once again together with Woodcock and Avakumovic, supplies the core of Kropotkin’s story.