The World That Never Was (69 page)

For Kropotkin, a regular speaker at the Jewish anarchist clubs of the East End, the social solidarity of the eastern European immigrants represented the idea of ‘Mutual Aid’ in action: evidence to support his alternative theories for the factors shaping evolution. Infuriated by the publication in 1888 of Thomas Huxley’s essay ‘The Struggle for Existence’, he had immediately set about giving systematic expression to his belief that ‘fitness for survival’ was best determined not by competition but by
cooperation. By working together, rather than striving for dominance, a particular group or species might win an advantage in the search for resources and, thereby, in the perpetuation of their genes. The culmination of a lifetime of study and observation, the series of long essays in the
Nineteenth Century
magazine in which he articulated these ideas during the first half of the 1890s predicted much that the science of genetics would prove about the mechanism of evolution a century later. Nor were the political implications of his research lost on him.

Despite taking on a heavy workload of reviewing and lecturing to meet his family’s bills, concurrent with his work on ‘Mutual Aid’, Kropotkin was developing a practical blueprint for the creation of a society similar to that which Morris had evoked in
News from Nowhere
. Except that whereas Morris the craftsman had shown aesthetic discretion by keeping the electrical cables out of sight, Kropotkin’s
Fields, Factories and Workshops
explained how technology could provide for the basic needs of human existence, freeing men and women to lead a just and fulfilled life.

Any such anarchistic paradise was premised on an optimistic view of human nature that appeared increasingly fanciful in the face of the brute, competitive realities of a capitalistic, industrialised world. And yet Kropotkin could now adduce scientific support for a notion that the political realities of the world appeared to belie. For according to the theory of ‘Mutual Aid’, evolution offered clear, natural validation for the principle of social solidarity both as the means to achieve the ideal communistic future, and as the proof of mankind’s inherent perfectibility.

The cause of the East End immigrants was unsurprisingly, then, close to his heart. Whilst on holiday on the Isle of Wight in the summer of 1891 he had written a long letter of reproach to the usually sympathetic French sociologist and author Auguste Hamon, for the indifference Hamon and others on the political left showed to the growing anti-Semitism around them. Putting himself in the position of the hundreds of Jews who supported the Berners Street anarchist club with their subscriptions, he imagined how they must hate those who ‘cannot admit that the exploited Jew is a revolutionary just as often (more often, I’d say) than the Russian, the Frenchman, etc., and that the Jewish exploiter is no more nor less than the German exploiter’.

Kropotkin himself, however, would suffer from more than his fair share of prejudice as anarchism became ever more demonised in the popular imagination, the subtleties of his thinking lost on the mass of his contemporaries who failed to differentiate between the political ideals he espoused
and the simpler impulse to destruction which so many younger colleagues in the movement were eager to indulge. ‘There must be no destruction,’ he confided to Ford Madox Ford, in the softest of voices, as they sat in an alcove off the grand Grill Room of the Holborn Restaurant, the dishes clattering around them. ‘We must build, we must build in the hearts of men. We must establish a kingdom of God.’

This was the Kropotkin whose soul Oscar Wilde described as being that of a ‘beautiful white Christ’. Even the budget fifteen-shilling dinners that the Holborn Restaurant offered to feed a father, mother, governess and four children were so far beyond the vast majority of anarchism’s adherents, though, as to evince prejudices of another kind against him too. Seen from outside the movement as being tarred with the brush of violent anarchism, from within it Kropotkin’s voice increasingly appeared anachronistic in its moderation. His attitude towards Britain might be premised on a clear understanding that it shared the fundamental authoritarian shortcomings of all nation states, but he could enthuse to Jean Grave that ‘Parliament has voted (on the 2nd reading) the 8 hour law for the miners. The Old Gladstone was superb… the young want it: I am with them!’ It is unlikely that Parmeggiani, for example, would have felt the same.

That Kropotkin’s anarchism was sincere and resolute was never in doubt, but increasingly the radical left was tempted into a closer relationship with the political mainstream. In 1893, the tide of strikes that had been building for several years across Europe would reach its high-water mark, and the general election in France saw a huge swing in favour of the socialists with their vote rising to 600,000, twelve times its level a decade earlier. At the same time, a socialist congress in Brussels voted to work within a constitutional framework to achieve representation for labour. With socialism’s leaders once again acquiescing to the status quo, just when the prospect of worker-led revolution seemed in sight, anarchism, as embodied by a new generation – many of whom were little more than adolescents – reacted by becoming increasingly egotistical and shrill. The People’s Will of the 1870s had been similarly preoccupied by violence, but at least it had possessed a genuine, practical sense of its political goals.

Emile Henry had first visited the Autonomie Club soon after his arrival in London in late 1892, high on his recent murderous exploits. No one outside his immediate circle took seriously his boasts of responsibility
for the rue des Bons-Enfants bomb. Nevertheless, the devil-may-care attitude that Henry cultivated led one French informant to speculate that he was destined for the guillotine, and appears to have made him a focal point around which the most restive and impetuous of the international émigrés now coalesced, in their unscrupulous quest for profit and excitement. There was talk that he might set sail for a new life in North America, as Meunier had now done, but after tasting the fruits of straightforward criminality with an ambitious extortion scam in January 1893, Henry set aside such plans. From idealist to extortionist was a giant step for Henry to take, but the five lives he had claimed, albeit inadvertently, had hardened his attitude, and London provided a convenient base from which to launch lucrative forays across the Channel.

Among the most seasoned expropriators in the émigré underworld from whom Henry could learn the trade were many anarchists he would have known from Paris: the old Communard Constant Martin, Henry’s original mentor in the ways of anarchism; Louis Matha, a hairdresser and vehement militant, who first helped Henry find his bearings in London; Placide and Rémi Schouppe, who had been on the longlist of suspects for the Bons-Enfants attack; the Mexican burglar and propagandist Philippe Leon Ortiz, known to his colleagues as ‘Trognon’ (his wife was ‘Trognette’); and Alexandre Marocco, a thick-set fifty-one-year-old Egyptian and veteran of Pini’s and Parmeggiani’s gang, who as ‘Mademoiselle Olga’ acted as a fence for stolen goods, while running an umbrella shop in an unlikely gesture to British respectability. Henry, with his baby-faced charm, new-found confidence, and a knack for disguise, soon defined a role for himself within the gang, acting as a trustworthy lure for its bourgeois French marks, or distracting them while their goods were liberated. For the best part of a year, the gang plundered the Continent from the Channel coast to Montpellier in the south, from Paris to Brussels and over the border into Germany. Or so, at least, seems likely. For such was the skill of the robbers that even the weight of police resources committed to placing the anarchist demi-monde under surveillance could not confidently keep track of them or their crimes, as they crossed and recrossed the Channel, and followed smugglers’ rat runs across borders.

The job of gathering evidence against them was far from easy. Whether experience had taught them discipline and patience, or their claims to be motivated by ideology rather than greed were genuine, few of the stolen goods came on to the open market to be traced. Whilst the occasional bag of gemstones might be offered quietly to the jewellers of Hatton
Garden, or an
objet d’art
discreetly sold, perhaps to Rochefort or through the antiquities shop opposite the British Museum in which Parmeggiani had invested his own ill-gotten gains after returning from his prison term in France, not enough of the loot turned up to give the police the clues they needed, allowing Henry and his companions to lead them a dance across France.

In England, though, the anarchists now faced a Special Branch under the direction of William Melville himself, with only Anderson as his superior to keep him in check. There is pathos to the formality of his predecessor’s last entry in the accounts ledger: ‘Ch. Insp. Littlechild left office on 18 March 1893 on three weeks’ leave, having his resignation in so as to expire with his leave viz 9 April.’ In all his previous entries to the ledger, Littlechild had referred simply to ‘self’. Poor health was the explanation given for the forty-five-year-old’s departure, though he was well enough to establish himself promptly in a private detective practice. Perhaps he had simply seen which way the wind was blowing. Although debate continued to rumble on concerning the treatment of the Walsall men, with Irish Members of Parliament tabling further questions in the House of Commons, the choice of Melville as Littlechild’s successor suggests that those appointing to the post approved of his methods, even if they could not openly condone them.

Seated at his new desk, his broad moustache bristling, Chief Inspector Melville must have felt himself master of his world. Like the telephone apparatus that the mysterious anti-Masonic campaigner Leo Taxil, actually the hoaxer Jogand-Pages, had described Satan using to communicate with his minions from beneath the Rock of Gibraltar, speaking tubes sprouted from the walls of Melville’s office, connecting him to every point of the compass. The latest warning of threats could be received and orders issued, insights communicated and intrigues planned. Since 1891 a cable laid beneath the Channel had provided a direct line to Paris, and unlike awkward written records, telephone conversations left no incriminating paper trail. There were other conduits too that he could use to pass information to his foreign colleagues: among the most reliable and productive of the French police informers was ‘Jarvis’ and it is clear that he and Melville frequently met to exchange information; Lev Beitner, embedded in the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, may have performed a similar role for Rachkovsky. And should the need arise, on Duck Island in the lake of St James’s Park, only a stone’s throw from the royal palaces, stood the bombproof bunker of the Home Office’s
explosives expert, Colonel John Majendie, on whose services Melville might call.

With everything in a state of readiness, a week before he officially took up his new role Melville celebrated by donning a mask and outfit to attend a fund-raising programme of revels staged at Grafton Hall in Fitzroy Square by Emile Henry’s dangerous friend, Louis Matha. After the mockery that had accompanied Inspector Houllier’s visit to London, the event would have allowed Melville an inward chuckle in revenge. First the foreigners’ unpunctuality delayed the curtain rising on ‘Marriage by Dynamite’, a crude vaudeville scripted by Malato. Then their demonstrations of the cancan left the native English shocked, their mood already soured perhaps by having to sit through Louise Michel’s lecture on contemporary art, with its unfavourable comparisons of Hampstead to Montmartre. At the time, Degas’
The Absinthe Drinkers
was on show in the city, depicting a disreputable couple huddled over a cloudy glass of the intoxicating liquor: the press reaction, reviling it as ‘a dirty French picture’, articulated the growing unease felt in London towards such foreigners. Whether Melville was a follower of the fine arts is not known, but squeezed in among such characters in the fug of the Grafton revels he would undoubtedly have concurred with the critics.

The population of the anarchist enclaves had further swelled in the course of the year, to such an extent that the sudden and unexpected arrival of thirty Spaniards from Buenos Aires was reported to have merely ‘caused a stir among anarchists here’. Having docked at Liverpool and then travelled by train to Euston station, they marched down the Tottenham Court Road to the Autonomie Club, where billets were arranged for them in hostels or on the floors of already overcrowded homes. A further half-dozen from Italy – whose anarchists comprised the most noxious ‘pests to society’ and scroungers, according to Special Branch officer Sweeney – were lodged in the offices of the
Torch
newspaper, where the children of William Michael Rossetti, Her Majesty’s secretary to the Inland Revenue, were thrilled to host them.

‘Poor children,’ Olive Garnett had remarked not long before, ‘they want so much to know some desperate characters and no one will introduce them’: tea with Kropotkin in the refreshment room of the British Museum had been as close as they got. Now she was appalled at the hypocritical blitheness with which the eldest sibling, Helen, was prepared to print articles calling on readers of the
Torch
to commit bombings of the kind that she would never contemplate undertaking herself. The
unsurprising result of their folly, according to Madox Ford, another family friend, was that their home was subsequently ‘so beset with English detectives, French police spies and Russian agents provocateurs that to go along the sidewalk of that respectable terrace was to feel that one ran the gauntlet of innumerable gimlets’.