The World That Never Was (64 page)

Were Rochefort a candidate for the role, his supporters could comfort themselves that he had put his radical past behind him: an old Communard had recently leaned into Rochefort’s carriage on Regent Street and slapped him with a glove, challenging him to a duel for his betrayal of the cause. Anarchists and Boulangists, though, had joined together against the republic, and distasteful as it was, Novikoff may have hoped that the two extremes of French politics might once again be harnessed in the future. If Rochefort found himself in need of help to build bridges with his old friends on the left, the presence of Louise Michel in London would have been useful. She lived scarcely ten minutes’ walk away from his grand house in Clarence Terrace. But that short distance spanned the extremes of London society.

A stone’s throw further on from Charlotte Street, where Michel was staying, lay the sheer destitution of the slums of Seven Dials and the St Giles rookery, home to the ‘stink industries’ whose squalid labour underpinned the glamour of the nearby West End; in these slums ‘you burned the stair rails and banisters, the door jambs, the window frames for fuel’, and bobbies on the beat were few, being loath to venture in. The enclave north of Soho was one notch better, 400 French households crowding the terraced houses, the pavements walked by what the Baedeker guide charmingly described as ‘a motley crowd of labourers, to which dusky visages and foreign costumes impart a curious and picturesque air’.

It had been the May Day demonstrations of 1890, designated at the Paris Congress of 1889 as a date for mass protests demanding an eight-hour day, that had condemned Michel to a spell living in the streets where so many Communards had settled long before. While she was campaigning in the provinces, predicting her own martyrdom in incendiary speeches, the police had swooped to take her out of circulation for the day itself. When told she would be freed, the shameful anticlimax drove her to smash anything to hand in her cell. The doctor who ordered ‘her immediate removal to a special asylum for treatment’, recorded a diagnosis of ‘auditory hallucinations that provoke her to violence’. Michel had long claimed to hear the ‘voices from below’, but that had been a mere figure of speech. Perhaps the bullet still rattling around her skull had triggered something; more likely, the failure of the demonstrations, in a Paris heavily garrisoned for the occasion, was too much for a woman perpetually tormented by the bitter memory of past defeats to bear.

Michel fitted in easily in London, bringing with her Charlotte Vauvelle, her long-time companion from New Caledonia. A living legend to many, Michel would gossip in the grocery shop of the old Communard Victor Richard, an unofficial clearing house for newly arrived
compagnons
, or drink and curse the republic in the notorious Autonomie Club, which had recently moved to Windmill Street from its previous location only a few doors down from Michel’s own home. And when it came to the younger generation of immigrants – for whom the Commune was no longer a source of personal trauma but rather a mythic horror, known only from the sad eyes and gaunt features of those who refused to speak about the past – they adored her. Michel’s threat of ‘little engines’ to be used against the police in the speeches that had prompted her most recent arrest would have been a passport into their hearts.

Commanding the respect and affection of her countrymen was one thing; earning enough to supply even her modest needs, and fund her generosity to the anarchist community, quite another. Michel could, if necessary, rely on the kindness of wealthy friends, with Duchess d’Uzès an obliging patroness, but it was not enough. In her search for financial independence she found herself coming into the orbit of a very different set of Russians from those with whom Rochefort socialised, and indirectly into contact with a Russian government agent of a very different kind to Madame Novikoff.

Michel had met Kravchinsky in Paris during the congress of 1889, and kept his calling card, in the corner of which she had made a tiny sketch
in ink; whether of a fizzing bomb or a blossoming tree it is hard to tell. Kropotkin, though, she had known far longer, since the London Congress of 1881, their contentious release from prison on the same date in 1886 forming a further bond. It was to him that she now turned, requesting an introduction to the agency that arranged his lectures, under the impression that Kropotkin was considered almost a god by those around him, and his influence irresistible.

In reality, Kropotkin’s affiliation with his old Russian comrades was already becoming attenuated. ‘Is it even possible to write the history of our objectives, convulsions and errors, of the egotism of our comrades and their shortcomings?’ would be his acerbic reply when asked to contribute to a series of memoirs of leading figures in the nihilist movement. He despaired of Russia being ready for the onerous honour of leading the revolution, as Marx had predicted it would, in his dying years. And when the editors of the newly revived journal of the People’s Will approached him to participate in 1891, he would excuse himself on the grounds that he was committing all his strength and attention to the international anarchist cause, in the firm belief that ‘every step forward towards the coming revolution in western Europe also hastens the revolution in Russia’. Before long, though, in private he would be laying the same charge of egotism against the anarchists of the West.

Eventually, Kropotkin would secure Michel representation for her lectures, but only by undertaking to be present as her translator; for the moment her English was too accented to be readily intelligible. In the next scheme for which Michel solicited his help, however, his prestige and that of the other prominent names in English socialism that he brought on board could provide an immediate benefit.

The suggestion that Michel found a school to be run on anarchist principles came initially from Auguste Coulon, a half-French, half-Irish member of the Socialist League. It appealed to her immediately as a project that would allow her to reconcile the political engagement and nurturing sentimentality that formed the two poles of her identity; a year after the first progressive private school in England had been founded at Abbotsholme, the moment seemed propitious for the creation of a truly libertarian institution. It would serve those who wanted ‘to keep their children out of the hands of those professors of the modern school divinely inspired and licensed by the state, who teach, consciously or unconsciously, the doctrine of popular sacrifice to the power of the state and to the profit of the privileged class’. And who better to partner her than Coulon himself, who boasted scholarly
credentials as the co-author of
Hossfeld’s New and Successful Method for Learning the German Language?

A prospectus was printed, and premises were taken at the heart of the French enclave, in Fitzroy Square, whose grand houses, which had been prime addresses for the aristocracy a century earlier, were now subdivided into a maze of cramped rental rooms and workshops or else occupied by affluent British bohemians. Walter Crane provided the woodcut for the school’s letterhead, and a quotation from Bakunin was prominently displayed: ‘The whole education of children and their instruction must be founded on the scientific development of reason, not on that of faith; on the development of personal dignity and independence … and above all on respect for humanity.’ Morris served on the five-man steering committee along with Malatesta, Kropotkin’s involvement assuaging any unease Morris felt at the involvement of Coulon, who was becoming known as one of the more inflammatory contributors to the
Commonweal
for his ‘International Notes’.

Michel would teach the piano, Coulon classes in French and German, while among other members of staff was listed a young Margaret McMillan, who in years to come would become the great pioneer of progressive schooling in England. There appeared to be good cause for optimism. Yet on the very day that Michel wrote out the order for the new school’s stationery – ‘6 boxes of pens; 4 bottles of ordinary ink; 6 dozen pen cases’ – the British steamer SS
Utopia
sank off Gibraltar with catastrophic loss of life, after hitting submerged rocks. She should perhaps have taken the ship’s fate as an omen, and looked for the unseen hazards in her own project, for Coulon had been on the British Special Branch payroll for three months under the code name ‘Pyatt’, a curious approximation of the name of Rochefort’s great journalistic rival of twenty years earlier, Félix Pyat, who had died in 1889. As to his possible relationship with foreign forces, there would later be much speculation. One thing is certain: during Coulon’s breaks from teaching, when he stepped out into Fitzroy Square to chat with the neighbours such as the Battolas or perhaps greet Constance Garnett, his actions were rarely disinterested.

The Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police had been founded specifically as a corrective to the kind of provocative intrigues and manipulation in which Edward Jenkinson had engaged as head of Section D during the mid-1880s, with near-catastrophic consequences. Since then it had become a victim of its own success, the threat from Fenianism greatly diminished
by its efforts in that area, with home-grown socialism hardly a compelling enough replacement to justify the cost of the Branch’s work to protect against subversion.

Already, in the previous four years, Special Branch had lost a fifth of its staff, its numbers falling from thirty-one to twenty-five at a time when Britain’s foreign spy networks were also being scaled back. Investment in the apparatus of state security was falling across Europe, with the ‘secret funds’ assigned by the French police cut by half in 1890, and only a belated sleight of hand by the Belgian interior minister preventing a three-quarters reduction in the budget of its Sûreté. Further cuts in Special Branch funding were imminent, unless a pressing danger could be identified. In the Britain of the early 1890s, the greatest risk of sedition appeared to lie in the gathering tide of strikes, but unless labour activism could be shown to entail some element of violent conspiracy, a force such as Special Branch had little legitimate role in its supervision.

The Continent provided clear examples of how the need for their involvement might be made apparent. In 1887, just as a series of general strikes in Belgium was about to force concessions from a strongly Catholic and deeply corrupt government, the high moral ground occupied by the socialist leader Alfred Defuisseaux crumbled beneath him when an associate called Léonard Pourbaix persuaded him to write an ultimatum to the government. The document was manipulated for publication so as to appear to threaten civil war and, following a series of bomb attacks, the socialist party was utterly discredited. Pourbaix himself, it would transpire, had supplied the dynamite, after a secret midnight consultation with the chief of the cabinet. Similarly in France, an escalation of violence around strikes and demonstrations on May Day 1891, provoked by police heavy-handedness, helped create a general sense of emergency, while Landesen’s contrivance of the bomb plot in 1890 had stiffened the case for French police action against foreign émigrés.

That the British government should be inhibited about such an approach was unsurprising, in light of its past experience with Jenkinson and the Fenians, but concern for public opinion and its patriotic belief in the virtues of liberalism in matters of policing was a more decisive factor. Lord Salisbury’s administration felt obliged to proceed cautiously, while the prime minister himself appeared sceptical about the true extent of the danger laid out in the Russian Memorandum and the reliability of information of conspiracies forwarded from the Okhrana. There were those in Special Branch, however, who felt a visceral antipathy towards anyone or anything that challenged the status quo in Britain, or even the
authority of despotic foreign states, and found their own government’s timidity deeply frustrating. The most capable and determined among them was William Melville, the rising star of the Branch, whose knowledge of the French language and postings to Paris and the Channel ports over the previous few years would have made him amply aware of the machinations of Rachkovsky and others.

Calculating, perhaps, that his actions if successful, would receive the tacit approval of his superiors, in April 1891 Melville took matters into his own hands. Eschewing the usual diplomatic channels, and apparently keeping both Chief Inspector Littlechild and Assistant Commissioner Anderson in the dark, he wrote to warn the Italian police that Malatesta had left with a companion for Rome, to involve himself in the disturbances planned there for May Day. Then, only a few weeks later, he went much further in conniving with a foreign force. ‘I have made the acquaintance of Inspector Melville of the political police,’ wrote the Okhrana go-between, an expatriate French journalist named Jolivard to his contact ‘Richter’. ‘He has offered me his services complaining that his superiors at Scotland Yard act too feebly with regard to the nihilists.
Do not pass up on this chance
, my friend, it will not come your way again.’ It was, indeed, a proposition that ‘Richter’, in reality none other than Rachkovsky himself, could not afford to decline.