The World That Never Was (19 page)

As dawn broke on 23 May, Louise Michel was back in Montmartre where the adventure had begun, awaiting an assault more ferocious by far than when General Lecomte had come for the guns. In the quiet of the night, amid the perfume of early summer, she picked flowers for the dead, and must have wondered whether she would join them before the day’s end. There were scarcely a hundred Guardsmen to defend the Buttes, while in the previous six weeks the cannon in the artillery park had been allowed to rust beyond use. Once again descending the hill to summon help, Michel found herself caught up in the fighting in the streets below. Before she could return, the hill had fallen. The captured National Guard were marched directly to the garden of the rue des Rosiers guardhouse where the generals had been killed, one of the many liquidation centres that were springing up across the city, and massacred.

East along the boulevard de Clichy the Commune fighters were pushed back. A fierce resistance was mounted in place Blanche, where a battalion formed from the Union des Femmes and led by Michel’s friend, Natalie Lemel, was said to have been in the thick of it; women whose loved ones had died and had nothing left to lose, they fought with abandon. Falling back, Michel passed General Dombrowski, the Polish commander of the Right Bank, who shouted that all was lost; the next moment a bullet knocked him dead from his horse. His comrades improvised a shroud out of blue silk sheets they found in the nearby home of Baron Haussmann, whose urban redesign with its long straight boulevards was proving so useful to the Versaillais army’s manoeuvres.

‘I proclaim war without truce or mercy upon these assassins,’ the Versaillais commander General Gallifet had warned more than a month earlier. It was the women of the Commune above all who were demonised by the Catholic country boys of Thiers’ army, the sexual revolution that had taken place an unwelcome challenge to their conventional sense of masculine prerogatives. At Chateau d’Eau, among the last of the barricades to fall three days later, the female defenders would be stripped and brutalised before being slaughtered. Michel, captured at some point along the way, miraculously managed to avoid their fate, but with every misstep by the Commune’s defenders, any hope of quarter receded.

During the weeks since Rigault had taken them hostage, the Archbishop of Paris and his fellow prisoners had remained untouched, despite mounting Communard losses. Now, finally, Rigault’s self-restraint cracked. Ferré, his recent successor as prefect of police, signed the death warrant for the archbishop, who had generously written of his persecutors that ‘the world judged them to be worse than they really were’; Rigault himself commanded the firing squad at Saint-Pelagie prison. Though he and the archbishop had been bitterly at odds during the recent Vatican Council, Pius IX would condemn his murderers as ‘devils risen up from hell bringing the inferno to the streets of Paris’, and the Versaillais treated them accordingly. The harshest persecution of all, though, was reserved for the
pétroleuses
, crones rumoured to have set Paris ablaze in a diabolical hysteria, in what rapidly came to resemble a witch hunt.

‘I am known to be cruel, but I am even crueller than you can imagine,’ Gallifet snarled at a column of prisoners containing Michel. She sang a mocking tune in reply, but once more seemed strangely invulnerable, amid scenes that became more hellish by the hour. Among the general population, any suspects found with powder-blackened hands or shoulders bruised from the recoil of rifles were selected for summary execution, while the general himself picked out others to die simply for their ugliness. Somewhere among the carnage, Rigault was killed by a shot to the head, his body dumped in a gutter among the piles of corpses.

‘All around us fall from the skies, like black rain, little fragments of burned paper; the records and the accounts of France,’ wrote the novelist Edmond de Goncourt, reminded of the ash that had smothered Pompeii. For others the agony of the city brought to mind ‘a great ship in distress, furiously firing off its maroons’. From the boulevard Voltaire, the last small remnant of the Commune’s soldiers retreated, but with almost nowhere left to go. Turning, they saw their leader Delescluze climb the barricade and offer himself to the enemy’s rifles, silhouetted against the sunset. ‘Forgive me for departing before you,’ he had scribbled to his sister, ‘but I no longer feel I possess the courage to submit to another defeat, after so many others.’ The report of the shots that felled him would have merged into the ambient noise of killing that filled the balmy, sun-soaked evening.

Mostly it was the whirr of the
mitrailleuses
doling out deadly punishment: ‘an expeditious contrivance’, said
The Times
, that ‘standing a hundred yards off, mows them down like grass’. In the Red neighbourhoods its distant sound blended with that of flies that buzzed over the makeshift mortuaries, gorging on the spilled blood. A few score men, the final
defenders of a society that believed that ‘property is theft’, would hold out for one more night in the Père Lachaise cemetery, sheltering behind the tombs and gravestones, on plots bought and owned by their occupants ‘in perpetuity’. The following morning they were coralled over the crest of the hill towards the rear wall, against which they would be butchered. And yet the Semaine Sanglante, or Bloody Week, still had several days to run. ‘No half measures this time. Europe will thank us when it’s over,’ a priest in Versailles reassured a friend.

‘Childhood, individual liberty, the rights of man – nothing was respected. It was a mighty letting loose of every sort of clerical fury – a St Bartholomew to the sixth power,’ Rochefort would later record of the Semaine Sanglante, recalling the terrible massacre of Huguenots by Catholics 300 years earlier. He underestimated by half. The death toll of the 1793 Terror too was overshadowed, as was its rate of execution. Then, only 2,500 had been guillotined in eighteen months; in a single week of 1871, ten times that number or more died from bullets sprayed by the
mitrailleuses
. The Paris municipality paid for the burial of 17,000 Communards, but the bodies of many more disappeared into the fabric of the city, buried haphazardly beneath the overturned barricades, in the Parc Montceau, or in the chalk mines under the Buttes Chaumont, the pleasure garden gifted to the working class four years earlier, where now the tunnels were dynamited to conceal the dead.

Rochefort himself was arrested on a train outside Paris, attempting to escape via a route operated by the Masons that had previously spirited Elie Reclus to safety. He had been betrayed, it was said, by Paschal Grousset, one of the Jacobins with whom he had verbally crossed swords. Louise Michel’s route out of Paris was guaranteed, as a member of one of the columns of prisoners a quarter of a mile long that bled out of the city towards the army base on Satory Plain, now a concentration camp. ‘We walked and walked,’ she would recall, ‘lulled by the rhythmic beat of the horses’ hooves, through a night lit by irregular flashes of light… We were marching into the unknown…’

3
From Prince to Anarchist

Russia and Switzerland, 1871–1874

In 1871, Prince Peter Kropotkin, one of Russia’s most eminent young scientists, reached a watershed, his growing awareness of social injustice leading him to question whether he could remain a part of the Establishment. During the previous decade he had led expeditions by the Imperial Russian Geographical Society into Asia and beyond the Arctic Circle, travels that informed his groundbreaking reconstruction of the geological changes that had reshaped the earth during the glacial period. Now, when offered the post of its secretary, he declined. In the face of the widespread human suffering that he had witnessed in the course of his life, the honour struck him as an empty vanity. ‘What right had I to these higher joys,’ he reasoned, ‘when all around me was nothing but misery and the struggle for a mouldy bit of bread?’

For more than ten years, after the ‘Saviour’ tsar, Alexander II, had first granted the serfs their freedom then backtracked on a slew of other reforms that might have made the gesture meaningful, the youth of Russia had postured as nihilists. During that time, Kropotkin and his older brother, Alexander, had remained focused on the theoretical challenges of effecting social change. In 1871, however, a female friend of Alexander’s wife had crystallised Kropotkin’s dilemma. Sofia Nikolaevna Lavrova was a graduate of the Alarchinsky courses, which from 1869 had offered women in Russia a non-degree programme of higher education. She was now studying in Switzerland and, during a trip back home to Russia for the summer, became a regular visitor to Kropotkin’s apartment in St Petersburg, charming him with her intellect and challenging him over his lack of political engagement. When their friendship prompted the political Third Section of the police to search his rooms for smuggled seditious literature, Kropotkin was torn between outrage at the intrusion and contentment from finally being deemed worthy of their attention. When the
withdrawal of government funding for his next Arctic expedition was withdrawn, he had the excuse for which he had been waiting: he would visit Sofia in Zurich and use his time in Switzerland to take stock.

Until only a few years earlier, the final stage of the journey would have been arduous, travelling by coach along the military roads that Napoleon had laid across the Alpine passes, before concluding his journey with a rapid descent on the far side of the mountain range by sledge: ‘like being precipitated downstairs in a portmanteau’ according to one English traveller of the time. A Fell railway had offered a questionable improvement in 1868, its locomotive heaving soot-blackened carriages over the Saint-Cenis route by means of a cogged ratchet on a notched rail; by the time Kropotkin set off in February 1872, Alfred Nobel’s dynamite had blasted a route clear through the mountains to the promised land beyond. A man used to challenging travel, he would nevertheless have appreciated what it meant to live in an era of remarkable technological progress.

A decade earlier, Kropotkin had graduated from the Academy of the Corps of Pages with the highest distinction and a choice of the most prestigious military commissions. To the shock of the imperial court and his family, he had enrolled instead in a regiment of Cossacks stationed in the depths of Siberia, deliberately cutting himself adrift from his privileged background. His hectoring father was apoplectic: all the military discipline he had imparted to his son, all the gifts of rifles and sentry boxes, had failed to inspire Peter to better his own rather undistinguished army career. It did not help that his late wife, whose memory Peter’s stepmother had done everything she could to erase, had herself been a Cossack, with all that fiery tradition of independence. Peter’s rectitudinous cousin, Dmitri, then serving as Tsar Alexander II’s aide-de-camp, had tried to intervene, urging him to stay and pursue the glittering opportunities that awaited him in St Petersburg. Even the tsar himself had taken an interest, insisting that his erstwhile page de chambre explain his eccentric decision in person. On being told by Kropotkin that he hoped travel might afford him insights into how society could be improved, Alexander II had appeared overwhelmed with world-weariness. Kropotkin would later conclude that the tsar was already predicting defeat in the great programme of reforms that he had set in motion only months before. Fortunately, however, the young Peter was owed a favour. When mysterious fires had swept through the adminstrative district of St Petersburg, the initiative Kropotkin had shown in raising the alarm had saved much of the old wooden city from devastation. He chose the Siberian posting as his reward.

The twenty-year-old Kropotkin took with him to Siberia a smouldering disdain for all arbitrary authority. As children on the family’s feudal estate in Nikolskoe, deprived of their dead mother’s tender attentions, Peter and his brother Alexander had considered themselves fortunate to enjoy ‘among the servants, that atmosphere of love which children must have around them’. But it was the kindness and fellow feeling of the oppressed. Little had changed for the serfs since the days of Ivan the Terrible, and to Kropotkin’s father and his ilk, they remained mere property: ‘souls’ to be traded without regard to ties of blood or affection and ruthlessly exploited. Not even death could free them from their bondage, as the teenaged Kropotkin would have learned when helping his tutor translate Gogol’s
Dead Souls:
in the vicious world it satirised, beatings were liberally administered, and those serfs punished by being sent into the army as cannon fodder, where the floggings were still crueller, and those who expired under the whip would have the remaining quota of lashes administered on their corpse. ‘Leave me alone,’ one of his father’s serfs had snapped when Kropotkin tried to comfort him after a whipping at the local barracks, ‘When you grow up, you think that you won’t be exactly the same?’ The rebuke stung the young prince and, as a cadet, a display of intolerance for unjust authority, of the kind that permeated society from top to bottom, had landed him in solitary confinement for six weeks on a diet of bread and water: a foretaste of what was to come.