The World That Never Was (13 page)

Although reluctant to strengthen the extremists’ hand, the new government agreed to throw open recruitment to the National Guard to all able-bodied men of military age. Elisée Reclus was among the 350,000 volunteers who would enlist in the weeks that followed, but he at least was under no illusion that the Guard alone would be able to raise the siege. That would require the reserve Army of the Loire to be marshalled to liberate the capital. With this in mind, Gambetta was chosen for an audacious mission: to leave the encircled city by balloon for Tours, from where he would rally the counter-attack. It was a venture in which there was a promising role for Reclus, who had recently written to Félix Nadar, now head of emergency aerostatic operations, to offer his services as ‘an aspiring aeronaut…and something of a meteorologist’.

Whilst the preceding month had been warm and breezy, the September nights starry over Paris, now that the survival of the newborn republic hung in the balance, the windmills on the slopes of Montmartre had suddenly stopped turning. On 6 October 1870, an accurate forecast of the
easterly winds that could carry Gambetta safely across the Prussian lines was of vital importance. Elsewhere in the city that day, Gustave Flourens, the political firebrand from
La Marseillaise
, led a demonstration that demanded the restoration of the municipal government of Paris, banned during the Second Empire. The marchers’ cries of
‘Vive la Commune!’
recalled the insurrectionary government of 1792. That evening, though, in the place Saint-Pierre, revolutionary fervour was set aside and all thoughts anxiously fixed on the present, as sailors paid out the tethering ropes of a meteorological balloon that rose slowly into the misty sky.

Other novice aeronauts who rode up into the Paris sky in the weeks that followed would recount how, as the horizon curved with increasing altitude, they experienced a revelatory oneness with the ‘pantheistic “Great Whole”’. The globe was already long established as a potent symbol of the deep brotherhood of man for Reclus, a committed advocate of the fledgling International League of Peace and Liberty, whose congresses called for a United States of Europe as a solution to the hazard posed by feuding dynasties and a precursor to a federal republic that would span the world. Strikingly tall, gaunt and bearded, forty years of asceticism had sculpted him into the image of a medieval saint, and he had the temperament and kind but penetrating gaze to match. Yet his days of religious devotion had long since given way to a faith only in a new and just social order. As he peered down from the balloon, between taking measurements of air pressure, the view below would have revealed to him a future fraught with difficulties.

Away to the south-east, Paris lay spread out below in all its glory, Haussmann’s great radial boulevards arrowing out to the suburbs, evidence of France’s defeat and not far beyond. Along the roads that extended towards the forty miles of walls that girdled the city, lines of yellow tents marked where the reserve battalions of the French army were encamped, mingling with those defeated units that had fallen back on the capital following the recent debacle in Alsace. Meanwhile, in the Bois de Boulogne – laid out by Haussmann as a great, green public space – evidence of the siege was everywhere. Hardly a tree remained standing amidst a stubble of stumps, while the grass was cropped by a flock of 250 sheep brought into Paris in a wholly inadequate gesture towards self-sufficiency.

From time to time, close to the perimeter of Paris, a dark droplet of troops would coalesce and trickle out in formation through the city’s gates to relieve the garrison in one or other of the fourteen great fortresses that comprised the capital’s outermost line of defence. Every such
movement drew heavy fire from German rifles and cannon. For outside the embrace of the ramparts, 200,000 conscripts from Prussia and the North German Confederation sat warming themselves beside braziers, ready to starve the City of Light into submission.

From his headquarters at Versailles, Colonel Wilhelm Stieber, secret councillor to Bismarck’s government and head of military intelligence for the North German Confederation, could have watched the speck of the tethered meteorological balloon with a degree of equanimity, confident that the dice were increasingly loaded against any aeronautic politician foolish enough to attempt an escape.

For more than a week, Stieber’s agents had been close to choking the last lines of communication in and out of Paris. They had tapped and then cut a telegraph cable laid secretly in the waterways between Paris and Tours as the Prussian armies approached; meanwhile, all possible sites of signal exchange with the semaphore stations on the Arc de Triomphe, the Panthéon and the roof of the newly built Opéra were under tight surveillance. To interdict the return flights of hundreds of homing pigeons that had been exchanged between Paris and the provinces prior to hostilities, Stieber had equipped the army with trained falcons. And as for the decrepit balloons that occasionally limped out of the city with no hope of return, delivery was expected any day of a new wagon-mounted gun from Krupps, with a trajectory high enough to send whatever small store of the gas-filled leviathans remained in Paris plummeting to the earth in flames. But sealing the city off from the world was only the start of Stieber’s strategy.

Stieber had first applied his talents to military intelligence during Prussia’s rapid victory over Austria in 1866, but it was in the clandestine struggle against revolutionary elements that he had made his name. Amply rewarded for his nefarious efforts, he could boast the unique honour of having served concurrently as a leading figure in the political police of both Prussia and Russia and, even as he masterminded the intelligence campaign against France for Bismarck, he remained a senior security adviser to the tsar. The key to his success, in conventional war as in the fight against subversion, lay in a simple truth: that by controlling the flow of information, he could shape reality to his own design. It was a lesson he had learned long before and whose application he had been refining ever since.

Though Stieber would not have known it, his path and that of the geographer in the balloon had run strangely parallel. Some years the senior of Elisée Reclus, when Stieber was dispatched to London in 1851 by the Prussian police, he already had several notable successes under his belt as a deep-cover agent, first during the bloody suppression of an uprising by Silesian weavers in 1844, then six years later in Paris, when his intrigues at the heart of the Communist League had destroyed the organisation from within. The former escapade had led the police president to dub him a ‘degenerate subject’, but the latter had won him the admiration of the Prussian minister of the interior, Ferdinand von Westphalen, who promptly handpicked him for the delicate mission in England. Its ostensible purpose was the protection of precious objects loaned to the Great Exhibition of that year; the real aim, though, was to discover evidence for the prosecution of Karl Marx, who had married the minister’s own half-sister and dragged her into shameful and penurious exile.

Posing as Herr Dr Schmidt, journalist and physician, Stieber had quickly inveigled his way into the Marx family’s home in Soho. His reports back to Berlin were full of blood and thunder as they attempted to frame Marx and his colleagues as conspirators in a planned campaign of assassination that would usher in a general European revolution. However, his claim that ‘the murder of princes is formally taught and discussed’ failed to persuade a British government whose distaste for foreign spies outweighed that for their victims. Worse for Stieber, Marx deftly outflanked his campaign of provocation, writing to the
Spectator
to denounce the attempt to lure him into a conspiracy. ‘We need not add that these persons found no chance of making dupes of us’, he concluded. Determined to have the last word, Stieber would counter that, on the contrary, Marx had fallen for his medical disguise so completely as to ask his trusted guest to treat his haemorrhoids. Subsequent fabrications by Stieber saw the grudge between the two men deepen into a lifelong vendetta.

Always sailing too close to the wind, Stieber had eventually been dismissed from the Prussian secret police for abuses of power, but the scurrilous charges levelled at him by the press seemed only to excite suitors for his services. Installed as manager of the Kroll restaurant and Opera House in Berlin’s Tiergarten, a sinecure obtained through the good offices of influential friends, Stieber one night received an invitation from the Russian Embassy that would propel him into the secret realm of realpolitik. That it was a pivotal moment in his career is apparent from his excitedly embellished account of his ensuing journey across Berlin,
concealed in a laundry basket, to avoid detection by a mob still thirsty for his blood. Having helped unpack him, the young Arthur von Mohrenheim, a consular attaché, hired him on the spot. After only a short time in St Petersburg, his recruit had transformed his basic intelligence-gathering role into one of effective control over Russia’s entire foreign intelligence service. So impressed was the Prussian ambassador there, Otto von Bismarck, that when appointed president in 1863, he took Stieber back with him to Berlin to serve as director of the very police force which, only a few years earlier, had hung him out to dry.

Stieber’s continued involvement with Russia created inevitable conflicts of interest. He would provide indispensable advice and intelligence to the tsar for many years to come in his struggle against sedition, but from this time on his ultimate loyalty would always be to Prussia, or rather to Bismarck and his vision of a strong and unified German state. No lover of socialists and revolutionaries, it was always a pleasure for Stieber when their persecution was his clear imperative. But when, as occasionally happened, the greater benefit for Bismarck lay in their manipulation, he was quite prepared to do whatever was required, regardless of his other freelance loyalties.

Such, it appears, was the situation in 1867, when Alexander II asked Stieber to contrive for him a seemingly chance meeting with Napoleon III. Fearing that it was cooperation against Prussia that the tsar wished to discuss, according to his own account, Stieber instead worked to keep France and Russia at loggerheads. Among the most valuable resources he possessed was a burgeoning index-card register of subversives, containing information extracted from police and underworld contacts, including at least one from the Batignolles district of Paris. Stieber claimed to have consulted this informant immediately upon arriving for the 1867 Expo on Tsar Alexander’s train, and that it was he who provided the advance warning of Berezowski’s assassination plans.

Tall tales were a speciality of Stieber’s and his memoirs recount them compellingly, but the ability to manipulate or even rescript the seemingly inevitable course of events in the real world was also an essential aspect of his extraordinary talent for intrigue. The
mise en scène
in his recollections of the parade at Longchamp is superbly facetious: the glittering silver cuirasses and polished bayonets of 40,000 French soldiers, lined up to witness the unveiling of the
mitrailleuse
. And then, when the moment arrives to prevent the assassination, technology and cavalry elan are shown to be equally futile beside Prussian good sense: it takes only a well-aimed elbow by Stieber to jog Berezowski’s arm as he steps from the crowd with
a double-barrelled pistol, and so deflect a bullet meant for the tsar. Discrepancies between Stieber’s account and that of other first-hand witnesses are of little consequence. His version might have been true or false, his informant real or not; he might have had no foreknowledge of Berezowski’s attack, or arranged for it to be provoked. All that mattered, finally, for Stieber, was the larger message: that for all its pride and pomp, France could not be relied upon when it came to matters of life or death.

Surveying Paris in the distance that misty October evening in 1870, Stieber could reflect that he had served Bismarck well. France had been provoked to war by the doctored ‘Ems Telegram’, that bore all the hallmarks of Stieber’s cunning, and now, in her hour of greatest need, Alexander II refused to be drawn by the envoys of the Government of National Defence into offering assistance. With a supposed tally of 36,000 agents under his control in the occupied territory, and a base in the pleasant park-city of Versailles, whose monarchist population appeared for the moment to hate the Parisian republic even more than they did the Teutonic invader, the Prussian spymaster could now indulge in a subtler and more finessed form of intrigue.

Already he had rewritten the details of Napoleon’s defeat at Sedan for propaganda purposes, inventing a scene in which Napoleon was seized while struggling to fire a jammed
mitrailleuse
at the approaching enemy. Facile in its symbolism, the account expressed a still unsatisfied desire for France’s utter humiliation. Stieber was astute enough, however, to realise that Bismarck’s plans for German unification were not necessarily best served by a straightforward victory; France must rather be weakened for a generation, divided and impoverished. He would have been pleased to see that in the ranks of her new republican rulers, there were already signs of dissent, ripe for exploitation.