The World That Never Was (23 page)

The period since Rochefort’s capture in the dying days of the Commune had held horrors and humiliations far worse than he had experienced during previous spells in prison in the Second Empire. Arraigned before the military tribunal, the charges had threatened his dignity as much as his freedom: not grand accusations of treason or conspiracy that he might have batted aside with a rhetorical flourish, but demeaning insinuations that he had stolen artworks from the Louvre and bronzes from Thiers’ ransacked home. And when it came to his inflammatory journalism, the fact that Rochefort had cunningly continued to propose hypothetical violence to his readership whilst dismissing the awful notion at the same time cut little ice. ‘You turned this government to ridicule in your articles,’ inveighed the president of the tribunal, enthroned beneath a vast painted crucifixion scene, ‘and you know that in France ridicule kills.’

Brutal and exemplary sentences were being handed down unstintingly: twenty-five of the Commune’s leaders and fiercest proponents, including
Ferré and General Rossel, were shot at Satory military camp in short order. Influential friends were concerned that Rochefort might suffer a similar fate, or that his name might at least slip on to the lengthening lists of lesser miscreants due for deportation to France’s distant penal colonies in South America or the Pacific. The price of clemency, they ascertained, would be Rochefort’s acceptance of humiliation. When Edmond Adam, hero of the 1870 stand-off at the Hôtel de Ville, testified that his ex-colleague was merely a ‘fantasist who lacked prudence’, Rochefort had sat in chastened silence; when summoned to the dock, he bore himself with a meekness that few would have recognised. His lawyer, Albert Joly, even persuaded him to compose a compromisingly abject letter pleading with Gambetta to secure his release. The strategy of self-abasement appeared to work and the threat of transportation lifted, though Rochefort is unlikely to have felt much gratitude as he sat shackled atop a stinking mattress, as a Black Maria juddered its way to the prison fortress of La Rochelle.

Imagining himself the romantic heir of the Calvinist rebels three centuries earlier, who had held out there against an interminable Catholic siege, Rochefort enjoyed sufficient freedom in prison to start work on a novel, buying off the antagonism of inmates with abundant gifts of contraband tobacco. Even after his transfer a year later to the slightly less congenial conditions of Fort Boyard between Île d’Aix and Île d’Oléron, he had watched unperturbed as the frigates
Danae
and then
Guerrière
steamed away over the horizon, carrying his old comrades to the penal colonies. The worst that fate might have in store, solicitous friends assured him, was a brief spell in an apartment on the prison island of Sainte-Marguerite followed by early release. But then, on 23 May 1873, the hard-line General MacMahon, ex-commander of a French army whose officers found it easier to blame the Communards for the country’s defeat than their own shortcomings, became president of the republic.

Rochefort, it was announced, would join the final consignment of Communards to be shipped to New Caledonia. His friends were horrified. What of the compassionate considerations that had weighed upon the original judges: his weak health, and the children he would be leaving as virtual orphans, following the death of their mother, a servant whom Rochefort had finally married while in prison? Victor Hugo took up the cudgels, arguing that transportation exceeded the court’s terms: ‘By it, the punishment is commuted into a sentence of death!’

No one who had seen the pitiful hulk of the
Virginie
, languishing on mudflats off the Atlantic coast, could have doubted the legitimacy of
Hugo’s concern. The long line of sea-salts who declined to captain the ship may well have suspected that President MacMahon considered a deep-water grave to be the most convenient end for her undesirable cargo. Destined to be sold as firewood at the end of the journey, the ship’s minimal refit allowed only just enough time for the Communards’ last appeals to prove futile. Finally accepting his hazardous fate, Rochefort signed the papers appointing Juliette Adam – outspoken feminist, wife to Edmond Adam, and Rochefort’s own ex-lover – as guardian to his children, and instructing the sale of his property for their benefit. The anxiety he felt at his predicament as he clambered on board was enough to have turned even a strong stomach queasy.

The first Rochefort knew of Louise Michel’s presence on the
Virginie
were the jokes she cracked across the narrow corridor that divided their cages. ‘Look at the pretty wedding trousseau MacMahon has sent me,’ she had offered by way of introduction, posing her gangly, angular body in the regulation navy-issue clothes with which the prisoners had been supplied. Rochefort, of course, knew of the Red Virgin by repute. He could hardly have avoided the tall tales of her courage during the dying days of the Commune and had read, in prison, Victor Hugo’s poem in celebration of her metamorphosis into the ‘terrible and superhuman’ figure of Virgo Major. He was glad of her company.

On the face of it, Rochefort and Lousie Michel had little in common. Rochefort was a philandering aristocrat, a potentially bitter reminder to Michel of her own father, with whom he shared a predatory taste for servant girls. Moreover, in contrast to the marquis’ supplicatory contrition before the tribunal’s authority, Michel had been unflinching in her resolve. ‘Since it appears that any heart which beats for liberty has only one right, and that is to a piece of lead, I ask you for my share,’ she had declared, calling the judges’ bluff, while threatening that ‘if you permit me to live, I shall never cease to cry for vengeance.’ From Rochefort’s perspective, in turn, Michel might have seemed the revolutionary counterpart of those deluded Joans of Arc whose appearance across France as putative saviours in the face of the Prussian invasion had attracted his scorn. Nevertheless, in the close confines of the
Virginie
, they discovered a complicity that went beyond the terrible oath of loyalty and vengeance that the imprisoned Communards had sworn. When Rochefort was moved to a private cabin for the sake of his health, and served seven-course dinners from the officers’ table, Michel did not join
in the sniping of those who suspected favouritism due to his Freemasonic connections. And when Michel gave up her own warm clothes and shoes to other prisoners, Rochefort passed on a pair of felt boots supplied by the captain, claiming that they had been given to him by his daughter, but were too small.

Without steam engines to assist the
Virginie
when she was becalmed, the journey was long enough for a firm friendship to form, even before unforeseen revisions to the planned route. The ship had only just left port when the French admiralty issued the captain with orders to steer clear of the waters around Dakar, lest she be intercepted by a revolutionary fleet from the Spanish port of Cartagena, where insurrectionists had declared a republic. The ship’s lookouts scoured the horizon for sight of the old red and yellow pennant of Spain with the royal crest ripped out, and a lengthy detour was charted by way of the Canary Islands. In reality, however, whilst Elisée Reclus, in Switzerland, might dream that a revolutionary Mediterranean federation had risen to assume the mantle of the Commune, by the time the
Virginie
had set sail Cartagena was already under intense siege by monarchist forces, and about to fall.

The hysterical propaganda that had enveloped the Commune had left nervous officials susceptible to even the most improbable scares. Just a few weeks earlier, the military governor of Marseilles had assembled a hundred-strong posse of mariners to hunt down a school of killer sharks that proved to be wholly imaginary. The source of the misleading intelligence was letters purporting to be from local fishermen but in reality forged by a disgruntled cub journalist on the local paper. It was a first coup in the career of Gabriel Jogand-Pages, as he was then known, on his way to becoming the greatest hoaxer of his era. For decades to come he would expose with mounting ruthlessness the true depths of prejudice and credulity that was rotting French society from the core.

As the
Virginie
charted her slow and creaking course south through the Atlantic, other monsters preyed on the minds of the passengers. In 1857, a ship called the
Castilian
had spotted a terrifying creature in those very waters, while four years later the French naval frigate
Alection
had barely escaped the clutches of a giant squid. Then, in 1866, there were repeated sightings, of a pulsing, phosphorescent object beneath the waves, far longer than any whale. By 1873, such accounts had become entrenched in the popular mind through the fictional filter of Jules Verne’s
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
, which had first been published in the
run-up to the Franco-Prussian War: the phosphorescent tube was explained as the submarine
Nautilus
, with the squid cast as its mortal enemy.

Verne’s glorious anti-hero, Captain Nemo, held an obvious attraction for the Communards. A brooding champion of freedom and science, he salvaged the treasure of sunken wrecks to fund national liberation movements, and crowned his scientific engagement by recognising the imperative of social revolution. ‘The earth does not want new continents,’ he opined, ‘but new men.’ And quite apart from the inclusion in the book’s second edition of line drawings by newspaper artists who so recently had illustrated the tragedy of the war and the Commune, Verne’s novel contained veiled references to contemporary radical politics. Components of the
Nautilus
had been fabricated at the Le Creusot steelworks and Cails & Co. in Paris, the two main centres of recent socialist unrest, while only the delicate diplomatic situation between France and Russia at the time of the book’s composition had prevented Verne from making explicit Nemo’s background as a Polish patriot whose young family had died under Russian occupation. The fictional captain may have brought to mind comrades from the Commune like Dombrowski or Wroblewski, his fellow Polish commander in the doomed defence of Paris against the Versaillais. It was his sheer force of will, however, as a traceless ‘Nobody’ hell-bent on vengeance – ‘monstrous or sublime, which time could never weaken’ – that would have resonated most powerfully with the book’s Communard readers. That, together with the fate of the
Nautilus
, sent tumbling to the seabed by the giant squid in the book’s final scene, another sunken dream.

So potent and uncannily predictive did the symbolism of
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
seem to those left reeling by the Commune’s fall and its pitiless aftermath that later, as the dates and details of the book’s publication faded from memory, rumours even began to circulate that the work’s true creator was none other than Louise Michel herself, paid 200 francs by Verne for a first draft inspired by the
Virginie
’s crossing to New Caledonia. In reality, Michel’s only personal connection to the underwater tale was the membrane between her toes that she had inherited from her father and which she displayed to Rochefort on board the
Virginie;
perhaps to reassure him that in her web-footed company he could not drown, or else to illustrate the Darwinism she had learned at night school.

In later years Rochefort would talk of the kindnesses of ‘his lady neighbour of the starboard side’ but Michel herself was not easy to help, constantly accepting charity, only to give it away. So it was that the felt boots that Rochefort had hoped would protect her from the frost-coated
deck were soon warming feet that Michel considered to be needier than her own. According to Michel’s autobiography, however, she treasured far more the intellectual insights with which Rochefort furnished her on the journey: an introduction to ‘anarchism’ that would inform the remaining thirty-five years of her political life.

Which ideas, though, did Michel mean to encompass, in her somewhat anachronistic application of a term yet to be properly defined in 1873? Doubtless, she would already have encountered the theories of the leading French exponents of the anti-authoritarian, communistic tradition among friends in the Montmartre clubs. But if not Proudhon or Fourier, perhaps it was the federalist principles of Bakunin that were so thrillingly novel to her when expounded by Rochefort, or else the older example of Gracchus Babeuf, a progenitor of anarchism from the days of the first French Revolution. It might even have been the ancient tradition – that reached from before Jesus Christ, through the Gnostics and Anabaptist sects – which Rochefort used to hook in to Michel’s mystical inclinations, though there is little to suggest that he was a man who took the long view.

One old, Enlightenment theme, at least, that seems certain to have arisen in their discussions was that of the ‘noble savage’. Charges of ‘savagery’, sometimes ‘cannibalistic’, had flown in all directions during France’s recent upheavals: against those who had waged war on Prussia, only then to cry foul; against the murderous mob in Montmartre; and the troops who perpetrated the massacres of the Bloody Week. But for the deportees to New Caledonia, home to the aboriginal Kanaks, the question assumed a stark, new relevance. In purging French society of its regressive strain by a policy of transportation, the pseudo-republic of the early 1870s believed that it had definitively reclaimed the high ground of civilised behaviour, on which national moral regeneration might be founded. For those romantic souls who persisted in cherishing both the ideals of social revolution and a faith in noble savagery, the message of their punishment was clear: taste the brute laws of nature in the Antipodes, and then decide whether you were right to reject the solaces of paternalistic government. And once converted, if they chose to act as unofficial agents of French colonialism during their exile among the native Kanaks, then so much the better.