The World That Never Was (52 page)

Soft soap it may have been, but the sentiment endeared Boulanger to those for whom an army commander with the common touch, alive to the suffering of the hungry masses and to their deeper emotional need for a sense of national purpose, was a most appealing prospect. Moreover, he was handsome and dashing, with an elegantly styled beard, handlebar moustache and an impressive black steed, on which he regularly rode out in public; and what France truly craved in late 1886, with the most wanton part of her soul, was the immediate glory of the cavalry charge: the chance for revenge on Germany. At the Bastille Day celebrations at Longchamp in July 1886, President Grévy was left waiting in vain to receive the salutes of the column of soldiers who, rather than looking right, towards him, as they passed, instead turned left to Boulanger.

Rochefort had always had something of a soft spot for a man in uniform, especially one who could combine the smack of firm leadership with liberal tendencies: during the dying days of the Commune in 1871 he had, after all, pressed the young General Rossel to assert himself as a military dictator. In Boulanger the ideal was made incarnate: a tribune of the people who had not flinched when it fell to him to inform his old mentor, the duc d’Aumale, that as an Orléanist claimant to the throne he was to be discharged from the army, yet who would equally readily speak hard truths to the tired old professional politicians in the council of ministers. And during the winter of 1886, mounting military tension with Germany allowed Boulanger to establish a reputation as ‘General Revenge’, a national saviour who strengthened frontier fortifications and sought to even ban performances of Wagner’s operatic paean to Teutonic chivalry,
Lohengrin
.

With conflict in the air, the anarchists saw an opportunity for revolution. Elisée Reclus came under suspicion from the French police of planning ‘a seditious movement whose aim is to thwart the efforts of the
French armies’; so too did Kropotkin, who proposed that each French city should declare itself a revolutionary commune as a focus for resistance. Friedrich Engels, meanwhile, demonstrated his usual perspicacity in military matters by warning the German high command that, were hostilities to break out, the conflict would rapidly turn into a continent-wide conflagration, as deadly as the Thirty Years War and bringing in its wake ‘the collapse of countless European states and the disappearance of dozens of monarchies’.

Seventy thousand troops were mobilised across the border, in response to Boulanger’s bellicose statements, with the result that nearly every other continental power stepped up its military preparations. Rochefort weighed in to fuel war fever, revealing in
L’Intransigeant
that Bismarck had warned the Red Cross to prepare field hospitals, and had offered Provence, Nice and Savoy to Italy if it would join the attack: a Boulanger dictatorship, the newspaper proposed, was France’s only hope. That he was providing Bismarck with the pretext to rouse nationalistic support in the weeks before the German elections did nothing to dent the general’s rising popularity. Yet wiser heads, fearing what might happen if actions were allowed to match the rhetoric, held France back from mobilisation, and once the elections in Germany had passed, the situation began to cool. Clemenceau now realised, however, that in underestimating ‘Boulboul’ he had loosed on to the political stage a man of dangerous charisma.

For Rachkovsky, a brinksman and provocateur by instinct, the situation must have held a fascination that was far from disinterested. Although Boulanger’s belligerence made him an unnerving figure for the Russian government, which knew itself to be in a parlous state of military unreadiness, the Okhrana chief deployed his propagandists in the French press to publish spuriously alarmist assessments of German intentions. For whilst not in Russia’s national interest, by encouraging heightened tension in the Franco-German relationship Rachkovsky could promote his own importance as a conduit for key intelligence, and he doubtless drew on the contacts he had made among Boulanger’s associates to monitor and influence the general.

Keeping track of Boulanger’s alliances was a complex business, though, since the ‘man on the horse’ acted as a magnet for malcontents from across the political spectrum. The Blanquists, still in thrall to the myth of their own revolutionary chief who had died in 1881, eagerly gravitated to the general’s camp in the hope of causing the kind of social crisis from which they might profit. Ambitious men like Louis Andrieux, the ex-prefect
of police and bitter antagonist of Rochefort, were lured by the hope that working with Boulanger would propel them into power. And crucially, the funding for Boulanger’s political insurgency came from the likes of the fabulously wealthy Duchess d’Uzès, inheritor of the Cliquot family’s champagne fortune. An arch-monarchist, who under the pseudonym ‘Manuela’ pursued an artistic sideline sculpting statues of saints for the Sacré-Coeur, it seemed scarcely credible that d’Uzès should bankroll the atheist populist that Boulanger appeared to be. Everyone had their reasons, though, and agendas of their own to advance.

While Juliette Adam handed over the editorship of
La Nouvelle Revue
to Elie de Cyon, in order that he might better coordinate with Katkov’s
Moskovskie vedomosti
over their campaign for a Franco-Russian alliance, others in her circle took a more purely esoteric approach to international affairs. The occultists’ first foray into geopolitics had been to court the maharajah Dalip Singh to stage an insurrection against British rule, offering the inducement of a Franco-Russian alliance that they were in no position to deliver. Their fanciful aim then may have been to facilitate access to the technologically and spiritually advanced Holy Land of Agartha, buried deep under the mountains of Asia, from whose Grand Pandit their own guru d’Alveydre claimed to have learned the secrets of synarchy. In 1887, however, they turned their attention to matters closer to home.

Gérard Encausse, the scientific hypnotist at the Salpêtrière who was now beginning to establish himself as a mystical visionary under the name ‘Papus’ had, together with Paul Adam, a bon viveur, Boulangist and literary acolyte of Fénéon’s decadent movement, been engaged for some time in the investigation of consciousness, and the possible interpenetration of times past, present and future. History as it was experienced, they had come to understand, was merely an echo of strife and turmoil in the spiritual realm, and France’s defeat at the Battle of Sedan was the clear consequence of the superior invocatory powers of Prussia’s scryers. At a personal level, Encausse fought duels over accusations that he had attacked his enemies with volatised poison, but was alert too to conflict on a larger scale. If Boulanger was going to wage war, they must have concluded, then it was the patriotic duty of France’s psychic brigade to be in peak condition and free of earthly distractions.

It was Encausse who remarked at around this time on the feline cunning that Rachkovsky concealed beneath his jovial exterior, but as ‘Papus’ he too knew how to bear a grudge, and whilst his revenge would be slow in coming and far from ethereal, the Okhrana chief ignored him at his peril. In the present circumstances, though, Rochefort must have seemed
to offer Rachkovsky a more reliable means to influence the international situation. After all, he had predicted with suspicious clairvoyance the next flashpoint in the stand-off with Germany: a border incident involving espionage, such as was triggered by the arrest in German Alsace of the French police superintendent, Schnaebele. Moreover, with the secret documents in question concerning Bismarck’s intrigues in the Balkans, the situation had a Russian angle that de Cyon and Katkov were quick to exploit. Russia and Germany squared up in a war of words, with the Russian government rejecting Bismarck’s offer of a free hand in the East in return for being allowed to act with impunity in the West, asserting that if Europe was to be the theatre of war, then it was ready.

After the new French foreign minister, the late Gustave’s younger brother, Emile Flourens, finally secured the release of the spy a week later, Boulanger recklessly taunted Bismarck with having run scared of the Russian press, while from the sidelines Rochefort lambasted the Jewish financiers of Germany for their supposed role in orchestrating the crisis. With forgery, intrigue, nihilists, anti-Semitism and geopolitical manipulation all involved in the debacle, if Rachkovsky did not have a hand in it, then he would surely have had sleepless nights calculating how he might claim this territory as his own.

Concerned by the rising tide of popular acclaim for Boulanger, the general’s colleagues in the cabinet finally realised that they must act to curb his power, but when ousted from his post, Boulanger immediately received 100,000 write-in votes at the next by-election, and had to be hurriedly ‘promoted’ to command the army division based in Clermont-Ferrand, deep in the Auvergne. Unfortunately, sending an idol into the wilderness wasn’t so easy. Tens of thousands of grief-stricken Boulangists turned out to block the path of his train in July, before at last letting it roll with plangent cries of ‘You’ll be back! You’ll be back!’ And return he did, sooner than the crowds might have expected. A corruption scandal involving the sale of state honours by Daniel Wilson, the son-in-law of President Grévy, led to the fall of Grévy’s government and a power vacuum just waiting for the general to fill. From November 1887, throughout the following year, France was a frenzy of Boulangism.

Such was the extremity of emotion around Boulanger that it had even begun to attract the attention of researchers at the Salpêtrière and elsewhere, for whom the psychology of the crowd rather than the individual posed interesting new challenges. Their studies diagnosed Boulanger’s fanatical supporters as suffering from hysteria, a symptom of which, as
Encausse knew very well, was the susceptibility to hypnosis. As Jules Liégeois, of the rival Nancy school of psychologists, would write, ‘Nihilists, anarchists, socialists, revolutionaries – all kinds of political and religious fanatics – don’t they become… criminals by the force of suggestion? On days of popular agitation, the crowd – composed of many good individuals – turns fierce and bloodthirsty…the beast is unleashed.’

From her magnificent town house on the Champs-Elysées, plumply louche in black gown and diamonds, the Duchess d’Uzès pumped out money to the general’s campaign in the vain hope of seeing the republic brought down, while the general himself seemed ready to horse-trade his principles for monarchist support. It was a vision of anarchy, in its most pejorative sense: of myriad factions each hell-bent on destruction and chaos in the search for power; and a Boulangist campaign without even the self-respecting consistency to decline contributions from rich Jews, despite its overt anti-Semitism. And within this broad church, there was even a place for the anarchists themselves, whose affections were bought with some part of the campaign’s three million francs of champagne money.

Louise Michel herself, who had previously disdained the general, discovered enough cynicism to see how Boulanger might serve her political purposes, and finally agreed to accept donations from Duchess d’Uzès on behalf of her various charitable interests. ‘She confirmed that the extreme left will ally itself with the right,’ wrote one police informant, seemingly well placed to know her mind. ‘She believes that the demonstrations being organised by Rochefort will be extremely effective, and will help spread anarchist ideas.’ Michel even allowed herself to be drawn into involvement with the Ligue des Femmes, established by d’Uzès, who had charmed her by requesting a copy of Kropotkin’s
Paroles d’un révolté
.

Then, at the end of the year, the Panama Canal Company went bankrupt. The tens of thousands of bourgeois who had staked their savings on an engineering project so strongly tied to national pride, were devastated. Little in French national life, it seemed, could any longer be believed in; everything was a fraud, an illusion, a sleight of hand. ‘One can no longer mistake that what is taking place today, what the coming year has in store, is the decisive crisis of the republic, coinciding, by a singular irony, with the ostentatious celebration of the French Revolution,’ wrote one veteran political commentator at the turn of the year. It seemed that the general’s time had truly come.

A fortnight later, Boulanger won a crushing victory in a Paris by-election. ‘A l’Elysée, à l’Elysée,’ tens of thousands of his supporters cried as they
massed outside the Café Durand where their idol was dining, sensing that the
coup d’état
they had so often called for was now inevitable. Fatally, though, Boulanger hesitated. He would, he told the gathering of his political intimates, rather win power legitimately at the next election; then he promptly disappeared into the night, to celebrate his success in the arms of his beloved mistress. Had Rochefort been right all along in lauding his fundamental modesty and honesty, or did the general merely suffer a loss of nerve?

The acerbic wit of the professional politicians who had stayed up late to gauge the threat to their careers left no doubt as to their disdain: ‘Five-past twelve, gentlemen,’ remarked one, consulting his watch, ‘five minutes ago Boulangism started to fall on the market.’ ‘He’s set us a good example,’ said the president, Sadi Carnot, ‘let’s all go to bed, too.’ But behind the relief and the jokes, those in government must have still felt disquiet: they had come to grips with Boulanger and Boulangism, but what of the deep currents of popular disenchantment on which his rise had depended? Remove the lightning rod, and who might then be struck down?