The World That Never Was (39 page)

In the impoverished slums that Emile Zola had so shockingly evoked in his novel
L’Assommoir
, two years earlier, there were many ready to listen to such rabble-rousing. To oversee the Communards’ peaceful reintegration into French society and prevent them becoming a catalyst for popular discontent would require every inch of Andrieux’s skill as a schemer. Yet as the new prefect took stock of his job, familiarising himself with the workings of his domain, the case from the archives that particularly caught his attention was of an altogether more glamorous nature.

Dating from twenty or so years earlier, it involved his forerunner as prefect, Monsieur Lagrange, and the beautiful courtesan La Floriana, onetime mistress of the tsar. Having been deported from St Petersburg for some undisclosed offence, La Floriana had settled in London and fallen in with France’s most dangerous revolutionaries. Lagrange had intervened. Contriving to take a seat next to her at the opera, he had introduced himself as a rich provincial merchant, and seduced her over dinner into believing that he wished to finance a conspiracy to assassinate Napoleon III. It was agreed that a miniaturised bomb would be constructed, small enough to be concealed in a lorgnette case. The risks were worthwhile, Lagrange had thought, for the insights that might be gained, but having been tipped off about his subterfuge, La Floriana had provided only false information, before absconding with 40,000 francs of the prefecture’s money.

The case notes should have constituted a cautionary tale. The lesson that Andrieux chose to learn, however, was not that the dangers of provocation inevitably outweighed the potential benefits, but simply that Lagrange had been too easily duped. He, by contrast, was determined to be more cunning. By good fortune, the pragmatic deftness with which he responded to his first major challenge as prefect, involving a Russian émigré of a rather different kind, suggested that he might indeed have grounds for such self-assurance.

It was the gold watch, in exchange for which Lev Hartmann had finally
persuaded the Moscow electricians to part with the battery needed for the People’s Will attack on the tsar’s train, that proved the terrorist’s undoing. Within weeks of the failed bombing, the executive committee of the organisation had spirited Hartmann out of Russia on a steamship bound for Constantinople, insisting, as it had with Kravchinsky previously, that someone with so much to offer was of more use agitating among the émigrés abroad than rotting in Siberian exile. Even before Hartmann had time to establish himself among the Russian student doctors, scientists and engineers of the rue des Lyonnais, however, the detectives of the Third Section had caught up with him, having assiduously traced the battery back to its suppliers, then the watch to the woman who had bought it for Hartmann, and finally Hartmann himself to Paris.

The intense pressure brought to bear by Russia on the French government to allow Hartmann’s extradition placed Andrieux in the eye of the storm. The outcome, though, was not obvious. The two countries were by tradition ideological foes, the opposed principles of tsarist autocracy and republicanism affording scant common ground. Faced with increasingly undiplomatic demands from Prince Orlov, the Russian ambassador, Andrieux appears to have had little inclination to acquiesce, despite a barrage of penal-code citations and precedential arguments for Hartmann’s provisional arrest. Although seen as dashing by some in France, the black silk patch worn by Orlov over the eye he had lost while fighting the Turks made it only too easy to cast him as an avatar of a piratical despotism who should be resisted at all costs.

The soul of the Third Republic was already tarnished, however, and political pragmatism demanded that other considerations, both domestic and geopolitical, be weighed in the balance. Foremost of these was continued concern about the rising power of the united Germany. Whilst France had largely succeeded in putting the Commune out of mind for some years, the country was perennially torn between fear of Germany and resentment over its appropriation of Alsace and Lorraine: in 1875, cavalry horses were even bought in preparation for an imminent renewal of hostilities. France needed an ally, and Russia’s concern over their shared neighbour made her a promising, if unlikely candidate for the role. Secret meetings between generals Boisdeffre and Obruchov, contrived by Elie Cyon, had so far failed to produce concrete results. Andrieux’s domain of policing, however, appeared to offer a promising platform on which to build collaboration between the two countries, which would replace the strong links forged by Stieber between the political police forces in St Petersburg and Berlin.

A further factor in Andrieux’s calculations was the impact that the terroristic methods being pioneered in the east might have closer to home, if they inspired France’s own revolutionaries to similar feats. For most people in France the horrors of 1871 had bred not moral indignation at the crude strategies of power, but a kind of quiescence: an unquestioning contentment with the easy pleasures of bourgeois life, for as long as they lasted. That this complacency might be disturbed and the ball of history set rolling again was a source of dread to those in authority. In the aftermath of the Winter Palace bombing, French press reports of 6,000 troops being drafted into St Petersburg to reinforce the garrison stirred uncomfortable memories.

On 25 February 1880, Andrieux succumbed to pressure from above and abroad to take action. Whilst promenading with friends along the Champs-Elysées, the man purporting to be ‘Edward Mayer of Berlin’ was identified as Hartmann by means of photographs that the Russian Embassy had provided, and arrested. The Russian agent in his group was not required to break his cover. Victor Hugo and Georges Clemenceau, among others, complained vocally about the arrest, while Kropotkin, in Switzerland, organised a campaign against Hartmann’s extradition. Recognising the hypocrisy of which he had been guilty, Andrieux is likely to have been stung most, however, by Hartmann’s appeal to France’s conscience. ‘The Republic government has amnestied 1,000 Communards,’ the renegade argued. ‘Can they then deliver to Russia a political émigré who has come to France to seek asylum?’

The humiliating predicament prompted some French commentators to wish that Hartmann was England’s problem rather than theirs, at a time when the British Empire was already entangled with Russia in the Second Afghan War, and therefore had little to lose. Deciding to act as an agent of destiny, Andrieux deftly made the switch, before anyone could argue, and personally escorted his prisoner to the port of Dieppe, where he handed him a ticket for the boat train to London. ‘I had hoped to find protection and security of the kind that was always to be found in France, as in all free states for political émigrés, but I was badly deceived in my hope,’ Hartmann would reflect, but the prefect’s pragmatism had almost certainly saved him from execution, had he been sent back to Russia.

The tsar withdrew Prince Orlov from Paris in protest at the subterfuge, but only for a few weeks. Despite marking a setback in the slowly developing trust between France and Russia it was an acceptable outcome for what had become a seemingly intractable problem. By the time the
ambassador returned to his duties, it was once again the Communards who were Andrieux’s main preoccupation.

An early warning of the problems that lay ahead came on 24 May 1880, the ninth anniversary of the massacres of Bloody Week, after the prefect had sanctioned a demonstration at the Mur des Fédérés in Père Lachaise cemetery. It was the wrong decision. Violence erupted on the streets, the police were required to use brutal tactics in its suppression; Andrieux became a scapegoat for the council of ministers, yet hung on to his position. Of equal concern to the prefect, however, may have been the challenge to a duel that he received from Henri Rochefort, who was enraged by the sabre wounds that his son had suffered during the melee. Although still an exile in Switzerland, Rochefort’s imminent return seemed probable as part of the phased amnesty of the Communards, and he was notorious for his duplicitous swordplay, having once skewered an opponent’s knee, supposedly by accident,
after
the fight’s conclusion. Andrieux was probably even more alarmed, however, by the resurgent political irrationalism and volatility that Rochefort represented and his utter lack of compunction in manipulating circumstances to his own ends.

The crowd of 200,000 that gathered outside the Gare de Lyon to greet Rochefort on his glorious return to Paris that July, standing on one another’s shoulders and breaking the windows of the station to get a better view, appeared to testify to his immense popularity. That a promoter hired by Rochefort had persuaded them to attend would have been scant reassurance to the prefect, and the marquis’ ingratiatingly demotic interviews are likely to have sent a shiver down Andrieux’s spine. ‘One is bourgeois out of sentiment, not by birth,’ Rochefort told one newspaper interviewer. ‘When one sincerely marches under the same flag against the enemy, social classifications disappear.’ At least Andrieux’s suspicion of Rochefort’s morals and motives was shared by many of the marquis’ erstwhile Communard colleagues, and a similar sentiment also found its way into the two dramatic paintings of
The Escape of Rochefort
that Edouard Manet executed at the time.

Manet’s intention had been to exhibit the final painting in the Salon of 1881, but prolonged exposure to his sitter may have caused the artist, who had witnessed the aftermath of Bloody Week, to revise his ideas. In Manet’s first attempt at the painting, Rochefort sits erect in elegant attire at the helm of a small boat in wide and rough seas off New Caledonia, neither seasick nor staggering to keep his balance, and there is the unmistakable hint of mockery of a man who cannot or should not be taken
seriously at his own heroic estimation. In a second version, the image represented is further cropped to remove the horizon, creating a vision of terrible, turbulent alienation: of a figure adrift from all the certainties of dry land, of religion and social hierarchy, just as Rochefort argued that life should be. What violent and egotistical extremes might not such a man embrace, the painting seemed to demand.

It was a different kind of egotism, ostensibly self-denying though just as dangerous, that Louise Michel presented on arriving in France four months later. That she should be the last of the Communards to accept the amnesty, having refused offers of special treatment for years until the last of every one of her comrades was freed, told its own story. Where Rochefort had tried to milk the moment by being the first home, the turnout then had matched neither the size nor sincerity of the crowds that now greeted the Red Virgin, their exuberance at the station surpassing that for Rochefort’s return, and threatening chaos around the barriers that Andrieux had thrown up. And while Michel’s address showed magnanimity – ‘We want no more bloody vengeance; the shame of these men will suffice’ – there was also evidence of an undiminished zeal that must have further unnerved the prefect: ‘Long live the social revolution!’ she declared, then concluded, more ominously, ‘Long live the nihilists!’

Her words sounded like a declaration of intent, and a letter she had written to Karl Marx shortly before leaving New Caledonia, chastising him for his armchair generalship, seemed to indicate the uncompromising activism she had in mind. Andrieux, it was clear, would need all the operational expertise he could muster to keep the threat of sedition under control, yet he failed to grasp the potential of the tools of physiological profiling being innovated under his nose by the young obsessive, Alphonse Bertillon. ‘You have no scientific qualifications, and you produce an incomprehensible report which you cannot explain,’ he told Bertillon, and withdrew support for his new-fangled ideas. Instead, he fell back on the kinds of methods that had cost his predecessor so dear in the La Floriana case, and used the prefecture’s money to fund a new anarchist newspaper,
La Révolution sociale
.

Fortunately for Andrieux, whatever instinct Louise Michel may once have had for sniffing out police chicanery had been blunted by seven years on a desert island. Before making any important decisions, Michel would have been wise to reacclimatise to a country much changed in her absence, not least for women. For since the heady days of female emancipation during the Commune, every inch of political ground ceded had been clawed back; one interior minister of the 1870s had even banned meetings
on the ‘Female Question’ out of simple distaste for the kind of women they would attract. Instead, impatient to assert her presence, Michel swallowed whole the account of the supposed anarchist sympathiser, Egide Serreaux, that he wished to invest a part of the fortune he had made in the pharmaceuticals business in the new publication, and readily agreed to become its star columnist.

It was like laying a telephone line direct to the heart of every anarchist conspiracy, Andrieux would delight in recollecting. When Michel’s close associate, Sénéchal, expressed the opinion that ‘There are a certain number of heads whose disappearance in France would singularly facilitate the solution of the social question’, the cabinet was immediately informed. But whilst Michel had the greater popular support, before long a more insidious challenge emanated from Rochefort to threaten some of Andrieux’s closest political friends. What was more, Rochefort’s other activities seemed to make concrete the threats of international solidarity among the enemies of the state to which Michel had merely alluded.

Despite Gambetta’s frequent kindnesses to him, not least his assistance when the military tribunal held Rochefort’s life in the balance, Rochefort had come to loathe his old friend. Perhaps he didn’t like feeling a sense of obligation. Certainly when Gambetta’s brilliant political and journalistic protégé, Joseph Reinarch, took it upon himself to accuse Rochefort of ingratitude, the polemicist went on the attack. Using his newspaper
L’Intransigeant
, he inveighed against Gambetta for his willingness to reconcile himself to the spurious Third Republic, and poured scorn on the lawyer, Alfred Joly, hired by Gambetta on Rochefort’s behalf in 1872, for the ineptitude with which he had defended him against transportation. The war of words escalated, Joly and Reinarch making public a letter written by Rochefort from prison. Its pathetic pleading for leniency undermined all his past claims of steadfastness in the face of persecution. His pride dented, and his journalistic armoury empty, Rochefort reached for the crude but potent weapon of anti-Semitism, publicly addressing Gambetta through Reinarch, both of them being Jewish, in vicious terms: ‘I send you sufficient expectorations in the face to admit of your honourable master receiving some of them.’