The Murderer of Warren Street: The True Story of a Nineteenth-Century Revolutionary

ON HIS RETURN to London, Barthélemy made the acquaintance of the Russian, Alexander Herzen. This must have been a welcome opportunity for him. England was a peculiarly hidebound society in many ways. The genteel classes were unfailingly polite, but the rules of etiquette were ‘so rigid and intolerant as to be inconceivable’¹. The French were surprised to see people meet and depart without even an affectionate hug. ‘I knew English men were averse to kissing,’² wrote Wey, ‘but I did not know it amounted to positive revulsion!’ A rather austere religion permeated all classes, and overt atheism could hardly be found. Visitors were depressed to see every attraction and retail outlet shut up on Sunday, though it did allow a welcome sight of blue sky in the industrial cities. Arriving in Leith on a Sunday in December 1850, the German émigré Carl Schurz had to ‘saunter around for seven continuous hours’³ before finding an inn that would agree to serve him. Britain could feel like rather a dour country, particularly for the French. When Barthélemy became friends with an elegant, rich, free-thinking and warm socialist in Herzen – aristocratic though he was – he was charmed.

For the biographer, and this book’s reader, it is a particularly fortunate happenstance that Herzen found him. Or rather, not such a stroke of unlikely good fortune. For Barthélemy was a magnetic personality and Herzen an acute observer with an unquenchable fascination for the revolutionary demi-monde on the fringes of society. So it was that Barthélemy found a place in Herzen’s memoirs, one of the literary masterpieces of the nineteenth century.

Herzen was a wealthy, sophisticated and observant man, possessed of considerable psychological acuity. After his expulsion from Russia in 1847 he found himself in France in time to witness the revolution. All his sympathies were with the socialists and worker movement. Herzen was no straightforward progressive, however. The experience of the French Second Republic disillusioned him with parliamentary democracy. Though critical of the tsarist regime in Russia, he thought he saw in the Russian village, organised collectively between its inhabitants, a superior basis for civilisation compared to anything to be found in the West. The foundation of Russia, he wrote, ‘is a communistic peasantry still slumbering⁴, with a surface scum of cultivated people’. For Herzen, only a more primitive society could provide a basis for an egalitarian society where everyone, without exception, had a place at the table.

Marx and Engels, who despised tsarism and disdained the peasantry, refused to have anything to do with Herzen. For these two Westerners, the road to socialism must go through capitalist development and the modern proletariat. Herzen, despite his own university education and subtle mind, saw in the primitive instincts of the untutored masses a simple goodness, so long as he did not have to live amongst them. When in London, he lived a life of elegance far above that of most émigrés. But into his company he was pleased to welcome Emmanuel Barthélemy – as an intriguing specimen, but also, it must be said, as a true friend.

Herzen arrived in London in 1852, and was immediately welcomed by the revolutionary emigration, not least because of his largesse. ‘Herzen kept open house⁵, and any exile down on his luck knew that he could come, any evening, to drink his wine, to smoke his tobacco, and to talk, gaily or gravely as the mood served, till any hour of the night.’ August Willich introduced Barthélemy at one of these soirées. Herzen was immediately impressed by the ‘great sympathy and confidence’⁶ Barthélemy showed him. Barthélemy, it seems, avoided the faux pas made by Wilhelm Weitling when he met the poet Heine, behaving amiably to this potential benefactor for the cause.

Herzen in his memoirs left a vivid description of Barthélemy as a physically impressive man, compact and lithe: ‘He was a young man, short, but of a muscularly powerful build; his pitch-back curly hair gave him a Southern look; his face, slightly marked with smallpox, was clear-cut and handsome.’ More striking, however, was the psychology of this true-born proletarian revolutionary:

Continual conflict had aroused in him an inflexible will⁷ and the power of directing it. Barthélemy was one of the most single-minded natures which it has been my lot to meet. Of bookish school education he had none except in his own line: he was an excellent mechanic …. The thought of his life, the passion of his whole existence was an unflagging thirst like that of Spartacus for the revolt of the working people against the middle classes. This idea was in him inseparable from a savage desire to massacre the bourgeois.

Spartacus had been the legendary slave general who had led a heroic and doomed rebellion against the Roman Republic of Caesar’s time. He was a name to conjure with in revolutionary circles. Marx selected him as his favourite personality from antiquity. German revolutionaries, led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, son of Wilhelm, were to name their organisation after him during the First World War. No figure better represented the heroism and combativity of the risen oppressed.

Barthélemy also reminded Herzen of those sans-culottes radicals who had turned their fury against traitors to the revolution during the violent days of the 1790s. He saw in him a ferocious will born of the most rigid fortitude. Barthélemy had that hatred which drives ‘the parties nearest of kin’ to destroy one another. ‘In him I saw face-to-face⁸ how a man can combine a thirst for blood with humanity in other relations, even with tenderness, and how a man may be at peace with his own conscience while like Saint-Just sending dozens of men to the guillotine.’ Engels, of course, had made the same comparison.

Herzen was impressed with the clarity of Barthélemy’s spoken thought. ‘He talked in a masterly fashion, a talent that is growing more and more rare.’ Barthélemy was not an empty orator, he did not preach, but he could ‘talk for the benefit of a room’. He spoke with remorseless conviction. ‘Barthélemy’s one-sided logic⁹, continually turned in one direction, acted like the flame of a blowpipe. He spoke smoothly without raising his voice or gesticulating; his choice of words, his sentences were correct, pure, and completely free from the three curses of modern French: revolutionary jargon, legal expressions and the easy familiarity of shop boys.’ Herzen was astonished that a workman, ‘brought up in the stifling foundries¹⁰ where iron was forged and wrought for machines, in stifling Parisian alleys, between the pot house and the forge, in prison and in penal servitude’ had acquired a ‘true conception of beauty and proportion, of tact and grace’. For Herzen, Barthélemy was a kind of noble savage.

In their conversations together, Barthélemy spoke of how the revolution was to be protected against the weakness or treachery of its own partisans. ‘That the revolution may not be for the tenth time stolen out of our hands,’ Barthélemy would say, ‘we must crush our worst foe at home, in our own family. At the counter, in the office, we always find him – it’s in our own camp that we ought to destroy him!’ These ‘enemies within’ included nearly all the prominent refugees: Victor Hugo, Mazzini and Kossuth among them. He had a special animosity for Ledru-Rollin, ‘the peculiar object of his most genuine hatred’. Only Ledru-Rollin could make him lose his cool. ‘The keen, passionate but extremely composed face¹¹ of Barthélemy would twitch convulsively when he spoke of “the dictator of the bourgeoisie”.’ One of the very few excused from Barthélemy’s scorn was Louis Blanc.

Herzen introduced Barthélemy to the former governess of his children, Malwida von Meysenbug. Von Meysenbug, aged thirty-six, was a German of French Protestant descent. Two of her brothers made prominent political careers in the service of German and Austrian monarchy, but she split from her family due to her republican and social democratic beliefs. Later in life, despite poor health, she would become a close friend to avant-garde intellectuals, notably Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. When Herzen promised to introduce her to Barthélemy – ‘a very odd person’ – she was eager but nervous: he had a reputation as a stone-cold killer. Any anxiety was dissipated by his ‘deep, melodic and irresistibly soothing voice’. Barthélemy was ‘reserved, modest, even shy’ and reassuringly gentle with von Meysenbug. But ‘his dark eye, which glowed in a melancholic face under a thoughtful brow’ would sometimes ‘flash like the distant lightning flashes of a threatening storm’.

She agreed with Herzen’s conviction that Barthélemy was hypnotically direct and precise in his speech, a sharp contrast to the sentimental rhetoric of the middle-class French émigrés:

He never became animated in a discussion, never yelled like the other French, never recited like they, didn’t speak rhetorically, in fact, didn’t speak much at all. But when he spoke, all drew silent, one after the other. His deep, soothing voice sounded clear and determined above the echoing chaos and uttered opinions seemingly cut from stone, they seemed so unshakeable.

She was fascinated by those flashes of his daemon held under restraint: ‘Only seldom was a note of passion mixed in his voice, which revealed that not only could his opinion lead to a deed, but that it could be such a rash deed that he himself might later regret it.’

Von Meysenbug was clearly quite besotted with Barthélemy. She found in him an exceptional product of the heroic yet terrifying proletariat:

I was so taken by my acquaintance with this man¹² that Herzen laughed about my enthusiasm, even though he himself found him very important and magnetic. In Germany, I had been accustomed to dealing with educated workers who discussed social issues earnestly and thoughtfully; but I had never encountered such a harmonious and thoroughly educated man as Barthélemy or such a complete deviation from social class manifested through his decency and behaviour. He gave me new-found respect for the French working-class which justified me in assuming that the salvation and future of that country lies in this class alone.

Barthélemy, it seemed to these observers, both transcended his own class and represented its best potential.

It was around this time that Carl Schurz met Barthélemy in the drawing room of the Baroness von Brüning, a Russian of Germanic background from the Baltic. Her St John’s Wood salon was a regular gathering place for refugees. Schurz had dramatically escaped from the prison fortress of Rastatt in 1849. Like August Willich, he would go on to fight with high rank and distinction in the Union army during the American Civil War. Unlike him, he would subsequently rise to high political rank. The description Schurz gives of Barthélemy matches that of Alexander Herzen and Malwida von Meysenbug, but he found in him a far more chilling character.

Schurz described Barthélemy as ‘a man of a little more than thirty years, of sturdy figure, a face of dusky paleness with black moustache and goatee, the dark eyes glowing with piercing fire’. He was struck, once more, by Barthélemy’s diction and unsentimental focus: ‘He spoke in a deep, sonorous voice, slowly and measuredly with dogmatic assurance, waving off contrary opinions with a word of compassionate disdain.’

For Barthélemy, nothing could be allowed to get in the way of the revolution. He was a man who had killed, and without compunction would kill again:

With the greatest coolness he explained to us his own theory of the revolution, which simply provided that the contrary minded without much ado be exterminated. The man expressed himself with great clearness, like one who had thought much and deliberately upon his subject and had drawn his conclusions by means of the severest logic.

We saw before us, therefore, one of those fanatics¹³ that are not seldom produced in revolutionary times — men perhaps of considerable ability, whose understanding of the moral order of the universe has been thoroughly confused by his constant staring at one point; who has lost every conception of abstract right; to whom any crime appears permissible, nay, as a virtuous act, if it serves as a means to his end; who regards everybody standing in the way as outside of the protection of the law; who consequently is ever ready to kill anybody and to sacrifice also his own life for his nebulous objects. Such fanatics are capable of becoming as cruel as wild beasts and also of dying like heroes. It was quite natural that several of those who listened to Barthélemi in the Brüning salon felt uneasy in his company. Never was Barthélemi seen there again.

This was a hostile pen portrait, and Barthélemy would certainly have had little time for Schurz’s non-socialist and moderate republicanism. But one can hardly deny that Schurz had accurately identified a chilling ruthlessness in Barthélemy’s devotion to revolution.

There is much romanticism, both positive and negative, in these accounts of Barthélemy, but they also give us unsurpassed psychological insight, if only through the eyes of others. Barthélemy saw himself as a professional revolutionary. Just as his employment in fine metalworking and engineering called for organisation, a steady hand, a clear head and a firm strike, so the job of revolution required preparation, planning, measure and resolution. Personal sentiment could not be allowed to intrude, and individuals were as of nothing compared to the great cause. Enemies and inconstant friends must be swept away. The workbench of revolution was an ordered place, kept clean of waste and with tools regularly sharpened.

Barthélemy was not a creature of instinct, however, but a man who had educated himself and was possessed of a tremendous sense of personal dignity. He was no ruffian. Willich, the braggadocio soldier¹⁴, would find himself turned out of Brüning’s salon because he could not keep his hands to himself: his reputation ruined by sexually assaulting the hostess. Barthélemy never behaved in such an uncouth fashion. He was aware of himself as a representative of his class, and in preserving his honour he preserved the honour of all those who had to work for wages. Barthélemy would not allow himself to be intimidated by the rich and the educated. Privilege, he knew, did not affix itself to intrinsic merit. Nor, however, would he throw snippy proletarian contempt in their face. As he wrote in his last letter to Malwida von Meysenbug, it was because she was ‘above all the petty considerations¹⁵ which motivate the people who take social prejudice for virtue’ that he called her his friend. Barthélemy judged men and women by their usefulness to the cause, no doubt, but also by their respect for themselves, for him, for those dear to him, and for the much maligned class he represented. Barthélemy lacked spite, but he would not stand for humiliation. Those who would betray the movement for working-class liberation could expect his professional enmity. Those who would seek to abase him could expect his fury.

A very different man from Barthélemy was Frédéric Cournet¹⁶, the rumbustious, tempestuous and larger-than-life figure described by Victor Hugo in his account of the building of the Faubourg Saint-Antoine barricade. Where Barthélemy was focused and sharp, Cournet was expansive and wild. That the two men would collide seemed fated.

Frédéric Cournet, eight years older than Barthélemy, came from an old Brittany family. After leaving college he joined the French navy where he earned a reputation for courage and intrepidity. In 1826, when aged only eighteen years, Cournet and six other men in a small boat captured a Spanish frigate under English command in an action on the Tagus river, on Spain’s frontier with Portugal. For this he was awarded the prestigious Légion d’honneur. Before he had attained his twenty-first year he was made a lieutenant in the navy. Cournet was held in high favour and he was included as part of the French naval deputation at Queen Victoria’s coronation in June 1838. He looked well set for a splendid military career.

Cournet developed republican convictions, however, and they put paid to any hope of further naval promotion. When the February revolution broke out in 1848, he resigned his commission and threw himself into politics. Cournet was nominated commissaire of the Provisional Government in the Department of Morbihan as one of Ledru-Rollin’s trusted agents. He identified himself with the démoc-soc wing of the revolution. On 11 March 1848, Cournet was tried by the Tribunal of Correctional Police, with twenty other persons, on the charge of having formed part of an unauthorised political association called the Comité central des républicains socialistes. Ledru-Rollin managed to have the case thrown out. Cournet brought into his politics the rough-housing characteristic of military life. He was involved in a political disturbance at a banquet that May and given ten days’ imprisonment. This did not prevent him from continuing to advance politically, and it was while serving as president of the Parisian Comité démocrate socialiste, that Cournet was elected to the National Assembly for the Saône-et-Loire department in 1850.

On 21 March 1850 he was condemned to a year’s imprisonment for having facilitated the escape from prison of two men: Monsieur Emery and Eugène Pottier. (Pottier, condemned to ten years’ imprisonment for his participation in the June days, would later write the Internationale, the famous anthem of international socialism.) After release from prison, Cournet, along with the republican journalist Félix Pyat, in May 1851 sent a challenge to Monsieur Lapierre, one of the editors of the royalist pro-Bourbon periodical, Mode. They had been offended by an insulting editorial article making fun of a letter addressed by Pyat to the Count de Chambord – the putative Bourbon heir to the throne. As a consequence, Cournet and Lapierre fought a duel, in which Lapierre received two sword thrusts and Cournet a small wound near the eye. The two combatants were tried by the Tribunal of Correctional Police on 20 May 1851, for ‘inflicting voluntary wounds’¹⁷. Lapierre was sentenced to six days and Cournet to a month’s imprisonment.

In the autumn of 1851, Cournet visited England to see the Great Exhibition, a magnificent showcase of commercial and industrial technology, splendidly housed in the Crystal Palace at Hyde Park, which attracted visitors from across Europe. It was opened publicly by Queen Victoria despite concerns that the refugees crowding London might include anti-royalist fanatics with assassination on their minds. Prince Albert, the Queen’s German consort and a moving force behind the exhibition, had been mildly concerned. ‘The strangers, they say, are certain to begin a revolution¹⁸ here and to murder Victoria and myself.’ As it turned out, most refugees were content to gape at the industrial wonders on display. ‘I was struck by the number of foreigners in the streets,’ the historian Lord Macaulay wrote in his diary on the first day of the exhibition. ‘All, however, were respectable and decent people¹⁹. I saw none of the men of action with whom the Socialists were threatening us.’

While in London, Cournet planned to make contact with his republican friends forced into exile. Before leaving Paris, he had been entrusted with a parcel, containing letters and engravings – perhaps plans of Blanqui’s prison island – which was to be delivered to Emmanuel Barthélemy. Cournet, who did not personally know the addressee, asked one of his friends in London about him. This friend, unfortunately, was a political adversary of Barthélemy and he told Cournet that ‘Barthélemy was a disreputable character²⁰, and that he ought to avoid him’. Specifically, he accused him of pimping his lover²¹. Believing the stories, Cournet decided to post the parcel through the mail rather than hand-deliver. He sent with the package a cold letter.

Arthur Reeves²², an Irishman with a degree from Trinity College Dublin, who had lived for twenty-two years in France, knew the French émigré community in London well. He dined almost every day at their regular meeting place, 26 Grafton Street in Soho. Reeves had an insight on the affair. Cournet, he reported, had ‘unfortunately listened to what the French call cancans, i.e. backbitings, in the School for Scandal style’ and ‘yielded to their malevolent influence’. To make matters worse, Cournet wrote back to friends in Paris, spreading the slanderous rumours concerning Barthélemy. Barthélemy had not received Cournet’s parcel and letter, as he was in France, but Cournet’s slanders spread from one gossiping revolutionary to another until they reached his ears. When Barthélemy heard, he was gripped by hatred and a ‘rancune grudge’²³. ‘And hence,’ as Reeves summed it up, ‘what the French call a brouille²⁴, which in plain English signifies a “blow up”.’

Upon his return to Paris, Cournet continued to speak ill of Barthélemy²⁵ and he received a letter from the man himself demanding explanations. Cournet consented to give them, but in his reply haughtily responded that he was unaware of Barthélemy’s political significance. In a cold fury, Barthélemy issued a challenge²⁶, which was accepted. The affair was interrupted by Napoleon’s coup d’état, however: Cournet achieved his place in history and Barthélemy went on the run.

Cournet was arrested on 5 December 1851, three days after Napoleon’s coup, and faced possible summary execution. His mode of escape, as described by Charles Hugo, was testament to his great strength – Cournet stood nearly six foot tall, weighing between thirteen and fourteen stone – and steely ferociousness. As an important prisoner he was placed in a cab under the guard of a government agent tasked with transporting him to the Police Prefecture. What happened next, according to repute, was rather extraordinary and chilling.

As the cab went into a small deserted street Cournet, hitherto motionless, sprang like a tiger, and two giant hands descended upon the officer and took him by the throat. The man could not scream. No noise betrayed the fearsome drama of silent struggle. The great vice of steel muscles that gripped the agent slowly closed on his neck. He went livid, his arms and legs twitched convulsively, and when Cournet let go, he was dead.

Cournet jumped out and fled from the cab, the other passengers understandably frozen with shock. The next day Cournet was in Brussels and two days after that he arrived back in England²⁷, leaving behind his wife and one son in Paris. Now an exile, he found a place to live at number 41 Lisle Street, off Leicester Square.

At first Cournet was still in receipt of £80 per annum in naval pension from the French government, but otherwise he had no employment. When his pension was cut off, Cournet fell on hard times. A government propaganda sheet reported after his death that Cournet ‘was in an estate nearly approaching indigence, and had scarcely a friend on account of his violent and quarrelsome disposition’²⁸.

In London Cournet was close to Ledru-Rollin, and a friend of his party. Otherwise, he was not particularly active in the politics of the emigration. He did, however, join the ‘Fraternal Society’, the mutual support organisation for exiles which tried to stay above the political quarrels of the community. Before long, however, he had deeply divided its membership. As Gustave Lefrançais remembered, Cournet was a ‘quarrelsome character’²⁹ with ‘brutal manners’. A close friend, Edmond Allain, called him ‘a killer, tall, strong, solid³⁰, defying everybody, and ultimately inspiring real terror’. Rumours spread that he was a Bonapartist spy³¹. Barthélemy, who was still in Switzerland, took no part in this malignant gossip, but later on he was to repeat the allegation.

A secret letter itemising the case against Cournet was circulated among the exile community by one Monsieur H. Perrie. Cournet tried to have a ‘Tribunal of Honour’ convened by the Fraternal Society, but as he had stormed out of the organisation, he was refused. As was his character, he turned to violent threats against his rivals. Arthur Reeves remarked that Cournet habitually ‘acted savagely with almost everyone’³², relying upon his reputation as a duellist to intimidate. Gustave Naquet, Cournet’s friend, admitted the truth of this. ‘He called out two or three of his defamers³³, who all refused his challenge. He then threatened them to “pull their ears”, and actually did so on several occasions, without knowing whether any of them had previously had his arm broken or not.’ This last was an oblique reference to an egregious assault that caused particular upset. The physically powerful Cournet had struck a blow at another émigré, Couturat, who was unable to defend himself³⁴ because he carried an injured arm.

Cournet was intimidating not only for his size, military training and bellicosity, but because he was notorious for his readiness to challenge. He had fought and survived no fewer than fifteen duels, sustaining a serious injury only once. But it is clear that his reputation was in freefall. Aware that he was quick to anger, particularly when drunk, he was said to have abandoned the use of wine and come to live abstemiously. Still, he cut a rather bombastic figure which Herzen wrote up in his memoirs as an unflattering pen-portrait of the ‘duellist, rake and scapegrace’:

Cournet was one of that special class³⁵ … like a fish in water, but a fish with polished, varnished scales. These men are brave, reckless to the point of insolence and senselessness, and very dull-witted. They live all their lives on the memory of two or three incidents in which they have passed through fire and water, have sliced off somebody’s ears, have stood under a shower of bullets …. They are dimly conscious that their recklessness is their strength … and they have a mortal passion for boasting.

For Herzen, Cournet’s type was quite common in France, but barely to be found in England at all. That he had fought so many duels at all was proof enough that ‘he could not be considered a rational man’³⁶. While Barthélemy was politically committed, Herzen suggested, Cournet was a braggart whose politics were rather accidental. This seems unfair to a man who had given up a career and a family for the republican cause. But there is no doubt that Cournet was a bully, with all that bullying belligerence masking an inner uncertainty.

The French émigrés were in the habit of visiting a restaurant and coffee house at number 53 Old Compton Street in Soho, run from his home by a Frenchman called Guisland Patrice Denis. He certainly had a market in the refugees. Alexis Soyer, a French chef heroically attempting to educate English tastes in this period, wrote despairingly that ‘it is a very remarkable fact that but few persons in England know how to make good coffee’³⁷. Food was also an issue. In England the well-off ate gargantuan meals: a simple breakfast might consist of tea, coffee, chocolate, cold meats, game, broiled fish, sausages, eggs, kidneys, bacon, toast, muffins, butter, marmalade and, mostly for decoration, fruit on the table and sideboard. When the rich dined out, it was in the exclusive clubs of London: Boodle’s, Brooks’s or the Athenaeum, for example. Common folk would dine on bread, butter, cheese, potatoes, fish and – by no means standard on the Continent – butcher’s meat. Very many would buy quick meals from street sellers: oysters, whelks, shrimps and watercress – fresh because still alive when sold. Taverns would provide a good meat pie, and supper was most popularly eaten by working people about midnight.

Restaurants and even cafés, in the French style, were virtually unknown, and French cuisine generally mocked. The French loved potatoes – generally looked down upon as a food of the poor in England – bread, milk products, meats and, of course, garlic, escargot and cuisses de grenouille – frogs’ legs. More than this, the restaurant had become part of French national culture since the Revolution. It was a social experience, where food mixed with drink, smoking and talk. The English cult of domesticity, and a wave of anti-smoking sentiment in the 1850s, meant that French exiles preferred their own eating houses. In time, of course, the restaurant would be absorbed into Britain’s native culture. In 1890, Guisland Denis’s establishment would be remodelled into the Swiss hotel. It retained a whiff of the counter-culture, and in the 1940s it was cautioned by the police for ‘harbouring sodomites’³⁸. In the 1980s it became Compton’s, a jewel in the crown of London’s gay nightlife.

In 1854, Cournet was in the habit of taking meals at Denis’s establishment in the company of Etienne Barronet, Charles Delescluze and Monsieur Recherolles. It was from Denis that Barthélemy learnt, on 4 October 1852, that Cournet was now also living in London. Barthélemy asked for pen and paper and immediately began writing a further letter to Cournet⁴⁰, once more demanding a retraction and apology for the slanders he had spread. Denis knew well Cournet’s reputation for duelling, and warned Barthélemy that Cournet ‘was a very fine man, and a strong man – a strong and robust man’. In response, Barthélemy held up his hand, ‘as if in the act of firing off a pistol, towards a looking glass, and said, “At this, I don’t fear the first comer.”’³⁹

The letter was delivered to Cournet by two of Barthélemy’s friends, a Frenchman and his Prussian comrade, August Willich. At first, all seemed well. Cournet at once stated to his visitors that he had forgotten the name of his original informant – perhaps he did not wish to acknowledge a disreputable colleague – and was therefore happy to retract the expressions he had used. This was considered satisfactory. But when he read Barthélemy’s note again, Cournet decided that he detected a ‘menace’ in its tone, and he immediately wrote to Barthélemy refusing an apology. ‘This in the eyes of French men rendered a hostile meeting inevitable.’

Herzen was told of the encounter by Willich. According to him, Cournet admitted that he had merely repeated a rumour, and that he regretted it.

‘That,’ said Willich, ‘is quite enough. Write what you have said on paper, give it to me, and I shall go home truly delighted.’

At this point, one of Cournet’s friends, who had just entered the room, interrupted.

‘For the act of an honest man,’ interrupted Willich, ‘who having repeated a slander regrets it.’

‘No, no, pardon me, but I cannot. Tell Barthélemy that “I said that because I chose to say it.”’

‘On you, monsieur, rests the responsibility for the misfortunes that will follow.’

The French refugees, Arthur Reeves reported, were ‘most sensitive upon the point of honour, but so guarded are they against the boiling nature of their blood, that they have instituted here, in London, a “Tribunal of Honour”⁴², which decides upon every case of discussion, disagreement, or quarrel’. Cournet claimed to have informal evidence of Barthélemy’s perfidious behaviour, but he refused to cooperate with the Tribunal of the Fraternal Society given his previous dealings with the group. It seems clear that most saw Cournet as the unreasonable party, in neither withdrawing nor substantiating his allegations. The challenge must certainly have come from Barthélemy, however. It was no doubt delivered with icy politeness – ‘avoiding all strong language’⁴³ – as this was the correct form and it suited Barthélemy’s austere ideal. But all those who saw him in the days following recognised a dangerous anger in his manner. Turning a grim face against fear and a sense of proportion, he muttered through gritted teeth that he would burst Cournet’s⁴⁴ belly. The emigration was disturbed. The fact that Barthélemy had to find new seconds – or witnesses, for Willich would not act for him – suggests that even his close friends thought that he was being irreconcilable.

There was a fixed procedure in French duelling⁴⁵ tradition, which was always committed to writing. The principals always had two ‘seconds’ each. Among gentlemen the privileged weapons were pistols and swords, though seldom both in the same fight, and – when both parties agreed – it was a duel to the death. Normally, however, the principals would fire no more than twice and if swords were used the duel would end when first blood was drawn. It was quite rare for a duel to end in loss of life. An authority calculated that of two hundred duels in Britain, only one in fourteen ended in fatality. The offended party had the choice of arms, but this often led to disputes over who had first provoked. If agreement could not be reached a coin was tossed to determine weapons and who should fire first. If pistols were the weapons of choice, they were brought to the scene of the duel, examined, and then the duellists drew lots to determine their weapon before they were loaded. Gallery pistols were the most dangerous as they required no wadding between the ball and the powder. The seconds displayed the gunpowder and held up the ball to the seconds on the other side. Each second then loaded the pistol of his principal. When one of the parties was considered to be a better shot than the other the distance between the duellists was increased in order to place them on an equal footing. Usually the distance chosen was forty yards. Each duellist walked up to a certain point, turned and, upon signal, opened fire.

There was an initial arrangement for Cournet and Barthélemy to fight the duel on Thursday, 14 October, at Richmond Park in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, where a quiet spot might be found away from prying eyes. They met, but disagreed about the choice of weapons. Barthélemy preferred swords while Cournet insisted upon pistols. Being unable to agree, the two parties separated. Cournet complained ‘in an exasperated tone’ that Barthélemy had kept him waiting for an hour and a half, had raised objections over weapons, and finally refused to fight. Barthélemy said angrily, ‘The coward would not accept me⁴⁶ today.’ The duel was rearranged.

A specific protocol⁴⁷ was now agreed. The two men would be placed at forty paces’ distance, each duellist to have the option of advancing ten paces before discharging his pistol. Each party was to have two shots: once the signal was given, either could shoot at any time, but after their first shot they must wait to receive return fire. In the event of none of the four shots taking effect, the duel was then to be continued with swords. If any of the pistols misfired that was not to be considered a shot.

On 16 October, Cournet met with a friend, Louis Joseph Soulli, another inveterate duellist who had fought nine encounters, during one of which he had received a sword wound to his leg, leading to an amputation. The crippled Soulli was now a corpulent man with a wooden prosthetic, but no less enthusiastic for the honourable pursuit of duelling. Cournet told Soulli that he had a desire to avoid the duel, but such was the nature of the offence that he could not. He felt that he could neither withdraw nor offer any explanation, and the insult from Barthélemy was in the nature of a menace. Cournet then met with an old comrade, Gustave Naquet, on the next day – a Sunday – and they dined late into the evening. Cournet told his friend that the duel was to take place in three days’ time.

At this point, the mysterious Mademoiselle⁴⁸ Goldsmith, who had betrayed the insurgents of December 1851 into the hands of the police, once more appeared on the scene. She turned up at the door of Giuseppe Mazzini, demanding an audience and bearing shocking allegations. They talked.

‘You are the friend of Ledru-Rollin. You know that Cournet, who is also Ledru-Rollin’s friend, is going to fight with Barthélemy.’

‘Well,’ said Mlle Goldsmith, ‘this Barthélemy is attached to the police.’

‘The proof,’ said Mlle Goldsmith, ‘is first of all that I myself am with the police, and then that my close friend Besançon is also a police officer, and he is the intimate of Barthélemy, who is himself also with the police.’

‘Come,’ said Mazzini, ‘there must be other proofs than that to prevent the duel from taking place.’

‘It will take three days to produce certain proof,’ Mlle Goldsmith admitted.

‘We do not have those three days,’ Mazzini replied. ‘All the same, we shall go to Ledru-Rollin’s house at 3 p.m on Monday and notify him.’

When they met with him, however, Ledru-Rollin thought that there was nothing to be done; they could not wait for any evidence. ‘Cournet would look as if he were putting off the duel,’ said Ledru-Rollin, ‘and Cournet cannot look like a coward.’

It is difficult to know what to make of this episode. Its source was Edmond Allain, a close friend to Cournet and his second in the duel. It was on Allain’s evidence that Charles Hugo wrote his published account of the duel. Nonetheless, despite his clear hostility to Barthélemy, Hugo declined to mention the Goldsmith affair. And whilst he referred to the rumours that Barthélemy was a police informant, he gave them no credence. Barthélemy was ‘sinister, but a man of conviction’⁴⁹.

We enter here the murky world of police informers. Their use was already a commonplace in French crime detection, though in England it was a despised practice thought only appropriate when it came to the Irish. A hundred years later, Jean Belin, commissioner of the French security police, explained the difference in attitudes:

In France we first look for material clues⁵⁰, and afterwards check up on their significance through contacts with our informers, whom we use freely to obtain corroborative evidence or even straight tips. Scotland Yard [the metropolitan police headquarters in England] does not encourage the employment of informers, and is reluctant to do so, I believe, on ethical grounds …. The science of British detection is based on deduction, the close following up of small clues, and the full exertion of the reasoning faculties. It suits the English temperament, but, to my mind, this method takes up too much valuable time. Whether I am right or wrong in this contention, one thing is certain – the British method is invaluable to writers of crime novels, for it is founded on the assumption that a case is a puzzle which has to be solved. If a link is missing in a chain of evidence that has to be built up you must come to a full stop.

Informers, however, can very easily turn into agents provocateurs used to poison the well of political opposition. Émigré politics, under the gaze of governmental agents from abroad, was rife with such skulduggery. Following the clues, and avoiding any full stop, we may come to a reasonable conclusion. Mlle Goldsmith had appeared once in Paris in a sting operation to trap insurgents during Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, casting suspicions on Barthélemy’s role (particularly given his escape from police custody), and then almost a year later in London, to dramatically reveal herself and Barthélemy as informers. It seems rather too convenient. Mazzini was avoided by many leftists because he was ‘so completely surrounded by spies, who completely befooled him’⁵¹, as one put it. Was this episode an example of the French secret police stirring the troubled waters of émigré republican politics? This is the most likely conclusion.

12

BARTHÈLEMY AND COURNET