The World That Never Was (75 page)

The previous March, soon after the bombs at the Café Terminus and in Greenwich, Louise Michel had gone on record as saying that terrorism
was irrelevant to the general struggle. It was a view that Malatesta would echo in his critical essay on the subject, ‘Heroes and Martyrs’, observing that ‘with any number of bombs and any number of blows of the knife, bourgeois society cannot be overthrown, being built as it is on an enormous mass of private interests and prejudices and sustained, more than it is by force of arms, by the inertia of the masses and their habits of submission’. However, a reputation, once acquired, is hard to live down.

For many years, Malatesta’s commitment to the cause of social revolution had led him to plot and plan its advent wherever the prospect seemed most promising; it was no accident that his travels around Europe, since his return from South America, had frequently coincided with strikes and demonstrations. The confrontations that ensued often led to violence, initiated by one side or the other. An almost inevitable outcome was the recourse to terrorism by anarchists for purposes of revenge. The repeated linkage of Malatesta’s conspiratorial presence and the use of dynamite led many, in the police forces of Europe and even among his colleagues, to suppose a causal relationship where it did not necessarily exist. Even his denunciations of individualistic violence, including his tart exchange of views with Emile Henry in 1893, were consequently seen as a ruse to misdirect attention away from his supposed role in such plots.

The wave of ‘anarchist’ terror that had swept the Continent was a millstone for Malatesta. He had been a suspect in the case of the rue des Bons-Enfants bomb in 1892, which Henry had in fact planned himself, and was thought by many to be the guiding hand behind others in Spain and Italy. During the weeks before the Café Terminus bombing it was his presence rather than that of either Henry or ‘Bourdin’ which attracted the heaviest surveillance, while his movements and contacts in London were consistently reported with an assiduousness that applied to few other émigrés. Accused in one report of having been ‘involved with’ President Carnot’s assassin, Caserio, and in another of being ‘satisfied’ with the result of the attack, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, the image of him presented by French police agents was like that in the Englishman W. C. Harte’s memoir
Confessions of an Anarchist:
‘the most dangerous plotter of modern times – who however…when the death of kings and presidents is in the air – appears in the background’. When Malatesta reviled dynamite, the authorities swiftly claimed it was because he ‘prefers daggers that are sure to strike their predetermined target’, and would long continue to insist that ‘he wraps himself in mystery’.

Malatesta’s predicament exemplified that of the movement as a whole. The demonisation of the movements in the 1890s had provided the press
with a compelling shorthand for the anarchist as a malign figure in the shadows, a bomb beneath his coat and hell-bent on destruction, and it was a cliché that enemies on all sides found highly advantageous to exploit. Even Signac’s innocent painting found itself tarred with the same brush. Up on the slopes of Montmartre, Henri Zisly’s anarchist group Les Naturiens pursued a libertarian existence that echoed Signac’s bucolic idyll, perplexing the police with their defiant choice of a life of near savagery in such close proximity to the metropolis. But while they won converts with their neo-Gaulish festivals and vegetarian banquets in honour of Rousseau, it was an attempted dynamite attack on the Sacré-Coeur in July 1895, rising ever higher on the skyline, and fantastical sketches of the destruction such a blast might cause published by the anarchist lithographer Théophile Steinlen, that caught the public imagination. These seemed to the general public to be a more credible representation of what life would be like
In the Time of Anarchy
than Signac’s flower-strewn paradise.

In recognition of the adverse circumstances, Signac altered the title of his painting to
In the Time of Harmony
but not even this compromise could secure its place in Victor Horta’s revolutionary art nouveau House of the People in Brussels, for which it had originally been destined. In fact, the previous year the Belgian authorities had revealed their nervousness towards anarchism, even in its most peaceable form, with the Free University’s last-minute decision to cancel Elisée Reclus’ fellowship. The decision had proved counterproductive. Rather than leave Brussels, Reclus had found an alternative venue for his lectures in the Freemasonic Loge des Amis Philanthropes, where his willingness to debate ideas with his audience had so energised the pedagogic process that, such was the demand to attend, arrangements were made for a breakaway New University to open its doors the following September.

Reclus had demonstrated how anarchists could turn marginalisation to their advantage, using their exclusion from the mainstream to shape new opportunities and a new identity that might in time deliver the objective of social revolution. While resident in Belgium, the geographer even took up the composition of songs to carry anarchist propaganda to the francophone peasantry. The project that was dearest to him, though, was the revival of his plans for a Great Globe, for he believed that ‘in the solemn contemplation of reliefs you participate so to speak with eternity… Globes must be temples which will make people grave and respectful.’ Conceived now on a scale of 1:100,000, at over a quarter of a mile in diameter, a third as high again as the Eiffel Tower and nearly twice the height
of the Sacré-Coeur, Reclus hoped that it would be commissioned for the 1900 Paris Expo, where it would reassert the values of the Enlightenment which commerce and religion threatened to obscure.

It is amusing to imagine what Special Branch and French police agents in London must have made of the diagrams that Reclus sent to his nephew Paul, one of those charged
in absentia
in the Trial of the Thirty and who had remained in partial exile for some time after the amnesty of 1895. Complete with its proposed superstructure housing the external observation platforms, in profile the pointed egg-shape of the globe bore a strong resemblance to that of the most advanced terrorist grenades, whose eye-opening function it was meant to supersede. The allusion was surely unintentional, though, and the path to acceptance would not be easy for either Reclus’ proposals or the anarchism they projected.

In 1891, Oscar Wilde had proposed a geographical metaphor of his own for the development of socialism. ‘A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at,’ he wrote in his essay, ‘The Soul of Man Under Socialism’, ‘for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing.’ Since then, anarchists had ventured into treacherous territory in search of their ideal. Even now, though, as veterans of the recent rough seas charted a course to new and diverse destinations, the shores that awaited them held unforeseen hazards of their own.

‘There is a growing sense of harmony and reconciliation,’ Louise Michel had written, ‘the reactionaries are less harsh than they used to be, and the bombs are past history.’ But while the bombs may have fallen silent, her statement was otherwise wishful thinking, as would be shown in the onslaught of criticism to which the anarchist elements at the congress of the Second International would be subjected when it convened in London in July 1896. A determination that anarchism should remain recognised as a legitimate socialist creed, socialism in its ultimate and purest form indeed, had led Malatesta to help organise the event, but any hopes he may have had of shaping the agenda from the inside were soon revealed as futile.

‘The only resemblance between the individual anarchists and us is that of a name,’ Reclus had recently protested, but not even the campaign of denigration waged by Parmeggiani’s L’Anonymat group against Kropotkin, Malato and Pouget could persuade the Marxists and social democrats to acknowledge the reality, when there was so much for them to gain by not doing so. ‘What we advocate is free association and union, the absence of authority, minds free from fetters, independence and well-being of all. Before all others it is we who preach
tolerance
for all – whether we think their opinions right or wrong – we do not wish to crush them
by force or otherwise,’ Gustav Landauer reminded the delegates, but failed to shame Liebknecht, Lafargue and the other Marxists into matching those ideals. Minds were made up, even before his assertion that ‘What we fight is
state socialism
, levelling from above, bureaucracy’, setting the stage for a coup even more decisive than that staged by Marx and Engels against Bakunin a quarter-century earlier.

Having delayed her planned move to America to be present at the congress, Louise Michel attended for its second day and the showdown. The dice were heavily loaded against the anarchists, who were poorly represented: offers by Special Branch to subsidise the cost of a one-way Channel crossing at the time of the amnesty the previous year had left the once thriving London colonies sadly depleted. The followers of Marx, by contrast, had succeeded in packing the congress with delegates shipped in from Germany and Belgium as well as many local supporters. Malatesta’s oratory failed to break down their disciplined obstructionism, despite the attempts of the British trade unionist Tom Mann and others to win him a hearing. ‘Were I not an anarchist already, that congress would have made me one,’ wrote Michel, after witnessing the expulsion of her colleagues; an excommunication, in effect, by a new ‘state religion’ of Marx with its own ‘infallible hierarchy’.

Even this decisive schism in the socialist movement was not without its benefits, however, with many of the heretics from the congress impelled towards a consensus on the vexed question of how the future society to which anarchism aspired should be organised. For too long, the rival claims of communism and collectivism – ownership in common, or on a cooperative basis, with some degree of private property – had clouded anarchism’s clarity of purpose. Now, the young Fernand Pelloutier joined with Emile Pouget to clarify the issue. Inspired by the dynamic example set by the British unions, and his own recent work in France in bringing together the representation of different industries with the city-specific work of the
bourses du travail
, Pelloutier advocated ‘a hybrid of anarchist and trade unionism known as anarcho-syndicalism or revolutionary socialism’. The project breathed new life into the vision of autonomous but associated units of economic activity that Proudhon, Bakunin and Kropotkin had all held up as a viable basis for social transformation, but also provided a robust base from which eventually to launch a general strike, as the mechanism for effecting peaceful revolutionary change.

The London Congress of 1896 was notable too, however, for those who were absent: Kropotkin, Kravchinsky and Morris. Kropotkin, weary of the predictable and unproductive debate that characterised past
meetings, and perhaps reading the runes, had decided in advance not to attend. It was not only the final marginalisation of the anarchists, though, that caused the congress to mark the end of an era. The recent death of Kravchinsky and failing health of Morris would have left Kropotkin, had he attended, without two of those contemporaries closest to him.

The valedictory tone of
News from Nowhere
in 1890 had marked William Morris’ turn away from socialism and back to his artistic activities, in particular the exquisite printing of the Kelmscott Press, but since 1893 he had once again begun to appear at public meetings of the Social Democratic Federation. Its brand of bureaucratic socialism was scarcely more to his taste, though, than the anarchism that had driven him from his own Socialist League, and he had wearily bemoaned to a leading Fabian that ‘The world is going your way, Webb, but it is not the right way in the end.’ The last lecture he delivered before his death that autumn was to the newly formed Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising, denouncing the plague of billboard advertising that had begun to disfigure the landscapes he so loved and from which he had drawn such inspiration. As a sideways attack on the capitalist culture of consumption, it chimed perfectly with the oblique approach to revolution increasingly being adopted by his lasting friends in the anarchist movement.

It had been almost a year earlier, however, standing on the steps of Waterloo station on 28 December 1895, that Morris had delivered his final outdoor address to the mourners at Kravchinsky’s funeral, 200 of whom then boarded the train run by the London Necropolis Company to accompany his coffin on the twenty-mile journey to Brookwood Cemetery. ‘It was a significant and striking spectacle, this assemblage of socialists, nihilists, anarchists, and outlaws of every European country, gathered together in the heart of London to pay respect to the memory of their dead leader,’
The Times
told its readers. The sadness of those present was all the greater that his death was so premature and unnecessary, while its cause seemed scarcely credible, in the case of a man who had always lived by his wits.

Recent years had undoubtedly imposed great strains on Kravchinsky, as he risked the safety of even those closest to him in the cause of Russian freedom, only to find himself repeatedly thwarted in his task by the ruthless efficiency of his enemies, and the unscrupulous tactics that they were prepared to employ. When, on the eve of 1894, he had sent Constance Garnett into the depths of icy Russia on a risky mission to distribute money and collect information, she had returned deeply unnerved by the police surveillance to which she had been subjected, and which had caused her to burn all her entire precious cargo of letters and documents back to
London before she reached the border. Almost as bad, it had been while she was away, leaving her six-month-old baby in the care of her husband, that Rachkovsky had placed the article in the British press that exposed her beloved Kravchinsky as Mezentsev’s murderer and made pointed reference to his ‘shallow theories of free love’. The personal awkwardness was as nothing to Kravchinsky, however, compared to the damage being done by the Okhrana to the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom.