The World That Never Was (87 page)

It would be three decades before the anarchist artist Maximilien Luce exorcised his traumatic childhood memories of the Bloody Week in his vast canvas of 1903/4,
A Paris Street in May 1871
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For those communards deported to New Caledonia, eight years would pass before an amnesty allowed them to return.

A surge in peaceful political activism by Russia’s radical youth in the 1870s prompted severe Tsarist repression; many hundreds were imprisoned for long periods without trial. (image credit
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Within weeks of the Tsar’s death, seemingly spontaneous pogroms against the Jews swept through Russia. (image credit
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In early 1881, less than two years after The People’s Will faction adopted a strategy of terrorist violence, Tsar Alexander II was finally killed by bomb-throwing assassins. (image credit
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When Rachkovsky arrived in Paris in 1884 fumigators had been installed to protect against the cholera epidemic then sweeping southern Europe. (image credit
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New conceptions of disease suggested irresistible metaphors for social malaise. Here a cartoon from the anarchist newspaper Père Peinard proposes that Capitalism should be seen as ‘The True Cholera’. (image credit
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The French artist who illustrated the murder of Colonel Sudeikin, Rachkovsky’s police mentor, exaggerated the number of assailants but not the brutality of the attack. (image credit
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Although a historical illustrator by trade, the most extraordinary work of Albert Robida offered visions of airborne commerce and technological warfare that recollect the work of Jules Verne. (image credit
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Spectators on the Eiffel Tower view the celebrations of the Franco-Russian alliance that Rachkovsky had helped orchestrate from behind the scenes. (image credit
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The only known photograph of Peter Rachkovsky

By the 1890s, after years of struggling to have his anthropometric system of criminal identification accepted, Alphonse Bertillon was the pride of the Paris Prefecture of Police. (image credit
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