The World That Never Was (66 page)

François Koenigstein, better known as Ravachol, had carried out his first known criminal act only a fortnight after the fateful May Day, and it had been a macabre affair. A spurious gesture against authority, the only rational explanation for the twenty-three-year-old’s exhumation of Countess de la Rochetaille’s rotting corpse was the hope of retrieving jewels buried with her. It was a chilling act that seeped into the public consciousness of a morbid and moribund society. The Café du Néant, opened in Montmartre a few months later, would allow its clientele to sample mortality, sipping absinthe while seated at a coffin lid in the Room of Intoxication, or watching a live human turned to dust in the Room of Disintegration by means of a Pepper’s ghost trick. By then, though, the real terror generated by Ravachol would be too immediate for easy sublimation.

Neither the desecration of the countess’ grave, nor his subsequent murder of Jacques Brunel, a ninety-five-year-old hermit in the tiny Loire town of
Chambles, had sated Ravachol’s appetite for spectacular revenge on a society that had, he believed, deeply wronged him. The spur to fulfilling his destiny seems to have been provided when an insurrection in the wine-producing Spanish city of Jerez on 8 January 1892 had seen around fifty peasants descend on the prison there to liberate friends who had been hideously tortured during interrogation over the bomb attacks of the previous year. The response ordered by Prime Minister Canovas was brutal and widespread, culminating on 10 February with the garrotting of four supposed ringleaders: strapped to seats, facing a crowd of soldiers and spectators, a rod was inserted into a cord looped around their neck and slowly rotated to strangulate them. Slower than hanging, far less clinical than the guillotine, it was a punishment that spoke of a governing elite who viewed the anarchists as little better than vermin, fit for extermination.

Outrage greeted the news in radical Paris, with one anarchist conclave agreeing that between two and five million deaths and ten to twenty years of warfare were necessary to bring about a revolution. With thoughts of the Clichy confrontation fresh in his mind too, Ravachol could wait only four days, until the feast of the early Christian martyr St Valentine, on 14 February. Then, together with his eighteen-year-old acolyte Charles Simon, known as ‘Biscuit’, along with the humpbacked anarchist Théodule Meunier and two or three others, Ravachol led an expedition to raid an arsenal at Soisy-sous-Etiolles to the south of Paris, from where the band succeeded in carrying off a sizeable haul of high explosives.

The motive had now found the means, and on a scale that made possible a campaign of terror to rock the French state and its neighbours and shock even the least alarmist prognosticators in the press. Far out into the suburbs, police raids scoured known anarchist hideouts, but without success. Ravachol, having gone to ground just outside the city, bided his time while fabricating the raw materials into timed or fused devices. Two weeks later, a half-cocked explosion, set by one of the Soisy band, blackened the front of Princess de Sagan’s town house: either her association by birth with Spain, or by marriage with the glittering world of French high society, had placed her in the firing line. For the start of the real campaign of terror, however, Paris had to wait another fortnight, while Ravachol and ‘Biscuit’ carried out planning and reconnaissance of targets deemed culpable in some manner for the fate of France’s May Day martyrs.

Ravachol’s first bomb exploded outside the apartment of Monsieur Benoît, the judge who had presided over the case brought against the Clichy demonstrators; the ground momentarily shook on boulevard Saint-Germain and a few windows shattered, but without causing injury. Then,
four days later on 15 March, a second device, planted by Meunier, struck the Lobau barracks near the Hôtel de Ville, home to the troops who had suppressed the Clichy demonstration. It was also the base from which Thiers’ troops had marched out to Versailles, almost exactly twenty-one years earlier, precipitating the creation of the Commune.

It would be another ten years before the painter Maximilien Luce could dredge up and place on canvas the image of Bloody Week that had haunted him since he had witnessed its horrors at first hand as an eight-year-old: the corpses piled in uncannily desolate streets. Already, though, his anarchist friends were retracing the old battle lines in stark new terms, justifying the persistent fear in Paris that, just beneath the surface of everyday life, the old insurrectionist spirit was threatening to rise again. Where a generation before the Communards had faced death together on the barricades, chemistry had now made the means of waging war against authority readily available, and martyrdom had become a matter of individual choice.

As if to allow time for the Parisians to confront their own darkest imaginings, Ravachol paused for nearly another two weeks before committing his next outrage. This time the target was the home of the public prosecutor in the Clichy case, the explosives were hidden in a suitcase, and the injuries and devastation caused by the larger bomb far more extensive. For a brief moment, as the evening newspapers appeared on the stands, Parisians must have felt that terror had become endemic: the new condition of their lives. Already, though, Ravachol’s campaign had been doomed by his own pride and boastfulness. Taking lunch in the Café Véry on boulevard Magenta, he had been overheard by a waiter bragging about his recent exploits; when the waiter next caught sight of him in the street, he tipped off the authorities. In the ensuing chase Ravachol injured one of his police pursuers with a shot from a revolver, before eventually being wrestled to the ground.

Yet even with Ravachol in custody, the fear did not abate. With some reports claiming that up to 1,000 pounds of dynamite were still unaccounted for, it was now the turn of the Parisian bourgeoisie to feel besieged in their own city, as the defenders of the Commune once had. ‘They dared not go to the theatre, to restaurants, to the fashionable shops in the rue de la Paix, to ride in the Bois where there were anarchists behind every tree. The most terrible rumours ran round every morning: the anarchists had undermined the churches and…were robbing and murdering rich American ladies in the Champs-Elysées,’ recalled one English visitor, while Goncourt commented that, so empty was the city,
it might ‘have been devastated by a plague’. Communards and anarchists, powerless and marginalised for so long, could not help but feel a secret pleasure at the effect Ravachol had created. As a personality cult began to develop around him, even Elisée Reclus would write admiringly of Ravachol’s ‘courage, his goodness, his greatness of soul, and the generosity with which he pardons his enemies, and indeed those who informed on him’.

The same could not be said for those of Ravachol’s friends still at liberty, whose silence since his capture had maintained the air of menace. Then, the day before the trial of Ravachol and ‘Biscuit’ began, Meunier unleashed the most deadly attack yet. His target was the Café Véry, crowded with diners; his purpose to punish the friends of the waiter, Lhérot, who had betrayed Ravachol to the police. Sauntering in for a drink at the bar, the fuse of a bomb already smouldering in a bag that he discreetly deposited, Meunier had only just paid and left when a huge explosion tore the establishment apart, killing both the patron and a customer, and seriously injuring many others. A self-generating cycle of official repression and anarchist retribution was now in motion.

The views of the veteran anarchists became markedly more muted. In conversation with Coulon about the merits or otherwise of nitroglycerine for ‘social therapy’, Louise Michel was persuaded to admit that ‘in principle, yes, it is possible to use force for good purposes. That’s how the revolution will come about.’ Judged by her usual standards, however, it amounted to disapproval. Kropotkin too was increasingly critical, insisting that ‘a structure built on centuries of history cannot be destroyed with a few kilos of explosives’. Previously he had deferred to the conscience of the perpetrators of terror, often victims of a corrupt society. Yet faced with an angry young Frenchman called Auguste Vaillant – who in order to escape from servitude in South America as an indentured
peon
had braved the muddy shallows and violent eddies of the River Salado on a raft of his own construction, chancing his luck against the paramilitaries posted along the banks to capture any fugitives – the mild old Russian was said to have spoken ‘with great emphasis against physical force and even against revolution brought about by violence’.

Ravachol himself, however, had grasped better than others that in the service of anarchist propaganda nothing carried a greater currency than his own image. A handsome, manly but slick-haired dandy, he was conscious of the effect upon his looks wrought by the inevitable rough treatment dealt out in the police cells to any would-be cop-killer. When Alphonse Bertillon appeared with a camera to snap a
‘portrait parlé’
for
his anthropometric collection, Ravachol resisted fiercely. ‘Why?’ asked Bertillon, with a disingenuous professionalism that made his later tractability to corruption all too plausible, ‘I have to do this. It is part of my duty.’ ‘Well, my face is not such a pretty sight, is it?’ replied Ravachol, and Bertillon relented, realising perhaps that the prisoner’s bruised features would not reflect well on the police who were holding him.

When the official photograph was eventually produced, its subject did indeed appear more presentable: dangerously so, to those looking for an anarchist icon. Artistic impressions published in the anarchist press and elsewhere, alongside extraordinary encomiums from the literary world and transcriptions of the prisoner’s own eloquent invective, fixed his public image as the self-sacrificing hero of a society that had lost its way. ‘Judge me, members of the jury,’ Ravachol told the court, ‘but if you have understood me, in judging me, judge all the unfortunates that destitution, allied with natural pride, has made criminals and whom wealth, even just ease, would have made honest people.’

His sentence was surprisingly lenient: hard labour for himself and an absent ‘Biscuit’ and acquittal for the other three defendants. The novelist Octave Mirbeau, already an eager contributor to the anarchist press, wondered whether the jurors had been afraid ‘to kill a man whose mysterious vengeance will not wholly die with him’. The assizes court of provincial Montbrison, however, promptly rectified the error, providing the French anarchists with the martyr denied them by the Paris judiciary. That Ravachol ultimately went to the guillotine for the murder of an ancient hermit did nothing to hinder his lionisation, and the anarchism that he preached until the very moment the blade fell was immediately taken up by myriad other voices. ‘After three quarters of a century of dreams, should the last word be left to Deibler [the executioner]?’ demanded Charles Malato, the son of a New Caledonian exile who was well acquainted with Ravachol’s co-conspirators.

Reclus derived hope from Ravachol’s death. ‘I am one of those who see in Ravachol a hero with a rare grandeur of spirit,’ he wrote to Félix Nadar, the photographer and balloonist, telling his old friend that ‘We live from day to day, happy and confident, listening to the great blast of the revolution which is advancing.’ A striking feature of many opinions expressed about Ravachol, though, was the appropriation of religious language and symbolism, echoing that applied to the terrorists in Russia a decade earlier, but coming carelessly close to blasphemy. ‘In this time of cynicism and irony, a saint has been born to us,’ wrote Paul Adam,
the Symbolist novelist and amateur mystic, expressing a common sentiment, while others eulogised Ravachol as a ‘violent Christ’.

The defining image of the moment was provided by an iconic ink sketch by Félix Vallotton for the
Revue Blanche
, which depicted Ravachol in a muscular refusal to submit to his tormenters, his hair wild and eyes staring, white shirt stripped from his shoulders as the prison guards force his straining neck down towards the board of the guillotine: the anarchists’ answer to a meek Jesus stumbling under the weight of his cross, on the way to Calvary.

‘The old world is collapsing under the weight of its own crimes, and is itself lighting the fuse on the bomb that will destroy everything,’ Mirbeau wrote in the anarchist literary and artistic newspaper
L’Endehors
on the day of Ravachol’s execution, warning that ‘There are certain corpses that walk again.’ The phrase was an exact echo, whether unconscious or not, of that written by Henri Rochefort about Boulanger the previous September, after the putative dictator had shot himself dead on the grave of his recently deceased mistress. But while the terrible ‘bomb’ to which Mirbeau referred would ‘contain neither gunpowder nor dynamite …[but] comprised compassion and an idea; two forces that nothing can withstand’, Rochefort longed to see a more cataclysmic fate befall a French Establishment that he held responsible for his persecution and exile.

‘He dreams of the death of Constans,’ his hireling editor on
L’Intransigeant
had written in 1891, ‘and all his letters say that he wants to kill the minister [of the interior], no matter how, or by what means.’ Stewing in paranoia, with an infinite capacity for delusional self-righteousness, Rochefort was convinced that his enemy Constans would arrange his murder if ever he set foot again in his homeland, and considered his own murderousness a just and reasonable response. But the shame and humiliation produced by a journalistic exposé was Rochefort’s favoured means of attack, and his hand can surely be detected in the revelations about the scandalous sale by Constans, for personal profit, of Indo-Chinese antiquities that had been purloined during France’s recent colonial adventures in the Far East.