The World That Never Was (70 page)

After the fogs and harassment that ground the anarchist émigrés down in London, those who dared visit Paris in July 1893 must have relished the colourful uproar around the Bal des Quat’z Arts. Setting out from the Moulin Rouge, a fancy-dress cavalcade dreamed up by students from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and featuring debauched emperors, Cleopatras and courtesans had brought the subculture of the avant-garde to the streets as it progressed towards the Latin Quarter, where it arrived at dawn. Concerns about dancers in ‘immodest attire’ and charges of licentiousness prompted a heavy-handed police response, however, leading the students to barricade themselves into the old streets of the Left Bank where they stayed for several days. With a vote of confidence tabled in the Chamber of Deputies over the mishandling of the affair, it seemed artistic anarchy had come close to toppling the French government. But the time was surely coming for anarchism to express itself again in more serious ways.

‘If one could know the microbe behind each illness… its favourite places, habits, its methods of advance,’ Dr Trélat wrote, ‘it would be possible, with a
bonne police médicale
, to catch it at just the right moment, stop its progress and prevent its homicidal attack.’ While the application of the language of disease and its spread to human migration may have been scurrilous, the disciples of Pasteur were respectful in drawing an explicit comparison between their research and the inquiries conducted by the police and the judiciary. Nowhere was the analogy more apt, though, than in relation to the cryptographic work of Eugène Bazeries, known variously as the ‘Lynx of the Quai d’Orsay’, the ‘Napoleon of Ciphers’ and simply the ‘Magician’, whose success in breaking an alpha-numerical code used by the émigré anarchists may well have helped bring the spate of international robberies to an end.

Gradually, during the latter months of 1893, members of the gang containing Emile Henry, who had himself once been nicknamed ‘Microbe’, began to be picked off by the police. In September, Ortiz was arrested in Paris and charged with burglaries and associated acts of violence in Mannheim and Crespin earlier in the year, while November saw an extensive and carefully coordinated operation by the French and Belgian police to corner and capture Rémi Schouppe while in the act of exchanging
stolen goods in a suburb of Brussels. Anyone even faintly familiar with bacteriology would have known, though, that until the last microbe was eradicated, the risk of disease remained.

Retreating to London, Henry may have remembered the final words of Clément Duval, a member of the Panthers of Batignolles and a hero of anarchist expropriators, as he was led out of court seven years earlier to face a life sentence on Devil’s Island: ‘Ah, if ever I am freed, I will blow you all up!’

The autumn of 1893 brought a resumption of anarchist attacks on the Continent. First came a revenge attack in Spain for the execution of Ravachol, when two bombs thrown by Paulino Pallas at the captain general of Catalonia left him with barely a scratch but killed a handful of bystanders. Then, on 7 November, a terrible massacre took place in the Liceo opera house in Barcelona during a performance of
William Tell
, that old favourite of the People’s Will terrorists: nine women were among the twenty-nine killed by bombs dropped into the orchestra stalls in revenge for the suppression of the Jerez revolt. The consequences would be disastrous: a further ratcheting of the repression, with the Spanish anarchists left no other means to express their discontent than further acts of terrorism.

In France, an attack of a different nature took place on 12 November at the Bouillon Duval, a canteen set up by a butcher from the nearby market of Les Halles to serve good cheap food to the masses, but which had been quickly taken over by a bourgeoisie who enjoyed the frisson of slumming it. ‘The French working man, though he could eat at the Bouillon Duval as cheaply and much better than in his usual greasy spoon, was too proud to thrust himself upon the society of people better dressed than himself,’ the obituary of its founder would observe. With money no object, however, the young unemployed cobbler Léon Leauthier did not stint on his last meal as a free man, feasting on a menu that now stretched beyond the basic bouillon to offer fresh game, roast meats and fine wines. Then, before the bill arrived, he abruptly crossed the room and plunged his knife into the chest of another diner, apparently at random, with the single thought that ‘I shall not be striking an innocent if I strike the first bourgeois that I meet.’

That his victim turned out to be Serge Georgevitch, the Serb ambassador to France who, like de Mohrenheim, had been implicated in the Panama bribery scandal, prompted some talk of conspiracy. It was generally accepted as perfectly plausible, though, that simple despair
and envy of the ostentatious profiteering of bankers and the bourgeoisie had impelled Leauthier’s action.

The reaction of the London colony to events abroad was predictably excitable. It was the opera attack in Barcelona that stirred them most, for the dramatic scale of the devastation. An outspoken Samuels took the lead in articulating the mood: ‘I claim the man who threw the bomb as a comrade,’ he told an audience at the South Place Meeting House. ‘We will fight the bloodsuckers by any means…We expect no mercy from these men and we must show them none.’ His rhetoric was consistent with that of the
Commonweal
, now under his editorship, whose series of meetings on the subject of ‘Dynamitism’ drew eager audiences; the production of the Incendiary Cigar, Lorraine Fire, Fenian Fire and Pholophore recommended by Most and the
Indicateur anarchiste
may well have been on the agenda. The newspaper
Liberty
, though, was clear in asserting that the more bloodthirsty pamphlets then circulating were ‘inspired by Melville with the object…of preparing public opinion for the expulsion of foreign émigrés’.

It had been a satisfactory year for Peter Rachkovsky, quite apart from developments involving the anarchists and the benefits for his own campaign against Russia’s émigré dissidents. On 12 October, the Russian fleet had anchored off the French naval port of Toulon, the Third Republic reciprocating its own ships’ visit to Kronstadt in 1891, which the public at large saw as initiating the new relationship. Rachkovsky knew differently, having worked and deployed his agents for several years to help bring about a secret alliance.

That autumn, Rachkovsky could sit down to a celebratory Okhrana dinner, served
à la russe
with one course following another in the manner now fashionable in Paris. Outside the city had gone wild for the sailors’ visit, the cries of
‘Vive la Russie!’
reverberating as the carriages carrying dignitaries made their way up the rue de Lyon. ‘There are two million French people who wait to attest with their acclaim the indissoluble friendship and union between our two nations: Russia and France,’ wrote Charles Dupuy, the president of the council. Perhaps the only shadow was cast by the implication of Rachkovsky’s mentor de Mohrenheim in the mess of the Panama bribes, but Dupuy had at least promised to see to it that the press would be prevented from publishing any further embarrassing revelations about the Russian ambassador.

On 9 December, a fortnight after Dupuy’s bill to curb press freedoms
had been defeated in a vote by France’s deputies, Auguste Vaillant, radicalised by his cruel experiences in Argentina, entered the Palais Bourbon where the parliament met. Ignoring Kropotkin’s personal warnings against the use of violence, he proceeded to hurl a bomb, rather clumsily, into the Chamber of Deputies. The shrapnel of nails did as much harm to his nose as to the one politician injured, though several female visitors were said to have fainted after being scratched by the projectiles. ‘Gentlemen, the session will continue,’ Dupuy coolly announced.

Pope Leo XII would commend Dupuy for his sangfroid, but others were dubious. ‘Oh! The bravery of Dupuy!’ scoffed one anarchist, within earshot of the French commissioner of police, ‘It didn’t cost him much! He knew better than anyone that the bomb was not dangerous!’ The explosive power of the bomb had indeed been minimal: a fact due, some said, to it having been manufactured and supplied by the Municipal Laboratory. Vaillant, however, would insist that he had patiently gathered the chemicals necessary before making the glass fuse for the device, which had been intended only as a protest rather than to cause death.

Most leading anarchists interviewed were prepared to laud Vaillant’s act. ‘You must balance it out. On the one side, a few voluntarily sacrificed lives of our own plus a few others’ lives; on the other side, the happiness of all humanity, and the end of war and want which together claim many more victims than do a few explosions,’ explained Louise Michel to a reporter from
Le Matin
who visited her new suburban home in East Dulwich. The acerbic cultural critic Laurent Tailhade considered it a ‘healthy warning’, but went on to offer a chilling reformulation of aesthetic theory for a dawning era of terrorism: ‘What do a few human lives matter if the gesture is beautiful?’ Others, though, looked again to provocation and conspiracy, asking why the police had made so little effort to apprehend the mysterious accomplice who Vaillant told them had bankrolled the bombing. And intriguingly, Edouard Drumont’s
La Libre parole
pointed the finger at Germany and England which, it claimed, were using the émigré anarchists ‘to kill every ideal in French souls, to destroy that faith in Christ which has rendered the French invincible’.

The government’s response was swift: so swift, in fact, that Vaillant’s attack seemed almost to offer a pretext for legislation to be implemented that had been under consideration for some time. A slew of draconian measures, the ‘Lois Scélérates’, or ‘Wicked Laws’ as they became generally known, were rushed through the chamber, starting with a bill to outlaw anarchism, voted in only three days after the chamber had been bombed: the bill decreed that henceforth it would be a criminal offence
to promote, publicise, encourage or exonerate the anarchist idea, punishable by up to two years in prison, while to be involved in any violent action, regardless of outcome, was liable to capital punishment. The resistrictions on the press did not yet amount to all that Ambassador de Mohrenheim had been promised by Dupuy, but the additional 80,000 francs of funding allocated to the police would surely have delighted Rachkovsky who, a few weeks later, would contact the French foreign ministry, behind his own government’s back, in an attempt to promote the idea of an anti-anarchist convention.

On Boxing Day, the novelist Huysmans, immersed in a spiritual crisis of his own, expressed the prevailing mood among those sickened by the revelations of the Panama scandal. ‘The infamous and fateful year 1893 is coming to an end’ he wrote to a colleague and friend, ‘In France, at least, it has been nothing but a heap of filth, so much so that it has made one sympathise with the anarchists throwing bombs in parliament, which is the rotting image of a country in the process of decomposition…in an old world that is cracking apart at the seams; Europe seems drastically undermined, as she heads into the sinister unknown.’

In London, Vaillant’s attack had seen the tempo of anarchist ‘chatter’ about terrorist plots continue to increase, with
La Cocarde
informing Paris early in the New Year that the émigrés had decided that their main targets should be stock exchanges, religious buildings and political institutions. A report to the French cabinet from the ‘special commissioner’ warned that nearly all émigré anarchists believed in the assassination of heads of state as the most effective means of propaganda. By then, Emile Henry had almost certainly returned to Paris having weighed the reality of Vaillant’s failure: the gesture might have been beautiful and bold, but the execution and consequences were dismal. A further demonstration of the anarchism’s potency was now required, Henry decided, to set the record straight, and to avenge the death sentences that awaited Vaillant and the Barcelona bombers.

Henry’s original objective in early Ferbuary 1894 was to assassinate the French president, Sadi Carnot, but tight security around the Elysée Palace thwarted him. Wandering the streets in search of an alternative target, the example of the Liceo opera house in Barcelona must have passed through his mind as he glanced into the cafés and restaurants of Paris, estimating the likely number of bourgeois fatalities he could cause; repeatedly he walked on when it seemed too low a price at which to rate his own life, faced with almost certain arrest and execution. For it was now
to be a whole social class who would feel the force of his attack: a class so reckless and irresponsible that, lost in their lives of leisure, they gave no thought to easing the poverty that surrounded them.

‘Are those children who die slowly of anaemia in the slums, for want of bread in their home, not innocent victims too; those women ground down by exhaustion in your workshops for forty centimes a day, whose only happiness is that they have not yet been driven into prostitution; those old men turned into machines so you can work them their whole lives and then cast them out on to the street as empty husks?’ As Henry settled into his seat at the Café Terminus and sipped his drink, he would have had plenty of time to ponder how he might justify the action he was about to take before a court of law.