Mirrors

“The Communards are a committee of murderers, a pack of scoundrels. At long last the government of crime and lunacy is rotting before the firing squads.”

  Émile Zola declared:

  “The people of Paris will recover from their fevers and grow in knowledge and splendor.”

  The winners erected the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur on Montmartre to give thanks to God for the victory He bestowed.

  Today that giant cream pie is a big tourist attraction.

  WOMEN OF THE COMMUNE

  All power to the neighborhoods. Each neighborhood became a public assembly.

  And women were everywhere: workers, seamstresses, bakers, cooks, flower girls, babysitters, cleaners, ironers, barmaids. The enemy called them pétroleuses, incendiaries, these fiery women who demanded rights denied by the very society that demanded so many obligations.

  Women’s suffrage was one of those rights. In the previous revolution of 1848, the government of the Commune rejected it in a close vote, eight hundred and ninety-nine to one.

  The second Commune remained deaf to the demands of women, but while it lasted, during that brief spell, women spoke up in all the debates, they raised barricades and treated wounds and took up the weapons of those who fell, and they fell fighting with red kerchiefs, the badge of their battalion, at their throats.

  Afterward, in defeat, when the moment arrived for the offended powers to take revenge, more than a thousand women were tried in military court.

  One of the many sentenced to deportation was Louise Michel. The anarchist teacher had joined the struggle with an old carbine and in battle had won a brand-new Remington rifle. In the confusion of the final days, she escaped death, but was sent far, far away to the island of New Caledonia.

  LOUISE

  “I want to know what they know,” she explained.

  Her companions in exile warned her that the savages knew nothing, save how to devour human flesh.

  “You won’t get out alive.”

  But Louise Michel learned the language of native New Caledonians, and she went into the jungle and came out alive.

  They told her their sorrows and asked her why she had been sent there:

  “Did you kill your husband?”

  And she told them the story of the Commune.

  “Ah,” they said. “You’re one of the vanquished. Like us.”

  VICTOR HUGO

  He was his epoch. He was his nation.

  He was a monarchist and he was a republican.

  He embodied the ideals of the French Revolution, and by the art of his pen he transformed himself into the poor soul who steals out of hunger, and into the hunchback of Notre Dame. But he also believed in the redemptive mission of French military might in the world.

  In 1871, he was nearly alone in condemning the repression of the Communards.

  Before that, he was among the many in applauding the conquest of colonies:

  “It is civilization marching against barbarism,” he wrote. “It is an enlightened people setting out to meet a people living in darkness. We are the Greeks of the world, we must enlighten the world.”

  LESSON IN COLONIAL CULTURE

  In 1856, the French government hired Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin, the country’s number-one master magician, to enlighten Algeria.

  Algeria’s sorcerers had to be taught a lesson. Tricksters who swallowed glass and cured wounds with a touch, they were sowing the seeds of rebellion against colonial rule.

  Robert-Houdin showed off his talent. The big sheiks and local shamans were astonished by his supernatural powers.

  At the climactic moment of the ceremony, the envoy from Europe placed a small chest on the ground and asked the strongest of Algeria’s strongmen to lift it. The muscleman could not. He tried again and again and again, and he could not. With his last heave he fell to the ground, trembling violently, and he fled, terrified.

  The humiliation over, Robert-Houdin was left alone in his tent. He disconnected the powerful electromagnet hidden under a floorboard, and picked up the chest as well as the little generator that triggered electric shocks.

  HERE LAY INDIA

  Pierre Loti, a writer who sold tales of an exotic Asia to the French public, visited India in 1899.

  He traveled by train.

  At each station, a chorus of hunger awaited him.

  More penetrating than the roar of the locomotive was the pleading of children, or rather skeletons of children, their lips purple and eyes out of orbit, peppered by flies, beseeching alms. Two or three years previous, a girl or boy cost a rupee, but now no one wanted them even for free.

  The train carried more than passengers. In the back several freight cars were filled with rice and millet for export. Guards watched over them, finger on the trigger. No one came near those cars. Only the pigeons that pecked at the sacks and flew off.

  CHINA DISHED UP AT EUROPE’S TABLE

  China produced never-ending famines, plagues, and droughts. The so-called Boxers, who began as a secret society, wanted to restore the country’s broken dignity by expelling foreigners and Christian churches.

  “If it does not rain,” they said, “there is a reason. The churches have bottled up the sky.”

  At the end of the century, they launched a rebellion from the north which set fire to China’s countryside and reached all the way to Beijing.

  Then eight nations, Great Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Japan, and the United States, sent shiploads of soldiers to reestablish order by decapitating all who had heads.

  Next, they sliced up China as if it were a pizza, and each took ports, lands, and cities that the phantasmal Chinese dynasty bestowed upon them as concessions for periods of up to ninety-nine years.

  AFRICA DISHED UP AT EUROPE’S TABLE

  Following in England’s footsteps, Europe one fine day decided that slavery was an abominable crime. Jurists discovered that the slave trade violated people’s rights and the Church revealed that it was offensive in God’s eyes.

  Then Europe began its colonial conquest deep inside Africa. Before, the men from cold lands went no farther than the ports where they bought slaves. Now the way to the hot lands was opened by explorers, behind whom came warriors mounted on cannons, and behind them missionaries armed with crucifixes, and behind them merchants. The highest waterfall and the largest lake in Africa were named Victoria in honor of a not-very-African queen, and the invaders baptized rivers and mountains, somehow believing the story that they were discovering everything they saw. And the blacks performing slave labor in mines and on plantations were no longer called slaves.

  In 1885, in Berlin, after a year of much scuffling, the European conquistadors managed to agree on how to divvy up the loot.

  Three decades later, Germany lost the First World War and with it the African colonies it had gained, thus enlarging the dominions of the British, the French, and the Belgians.

  A long while had passed since Friedrich Hegel explained that Africa had no history and that it would only be of interest “for the study of barbarism and savagery,” and another thinker, Herbert Spencer, judged that civilization would wipe inferior races off the map, “because every obstacle, human or brute, must be eliminated.”

  The three decades leading up to war in 1914 were called “an era of world peace.” During those sweet years, a quarter of the planet went down the throats of a handful of countries.

  CAPTAIN OF DARKNESS

  When Africa was carved up at the Berlin conference, King Leopold of Belgium got the Congo as his private playground.

  By shooting elephants, the king turned his colony into the world’s greatest source of ivory, and by whipping and mutilating blacks, he supplied abundant cheap rubber for the wheels of the automobiles that had begun to roll down the world’s streets.

  He never set foot in the Congo because of the bugs. Writer Joseph Conrad, however, did. And in Heart of Darkness, his best-known novel, Kurtz was the name he gave to Captain Léon Rom, a distinguished officer of the co
lonial force. The natives received his orders on all fours, and he called them “stupid beasts.” At the entrance to his house, among the garden flowers, were twenty stakes that completed the decor. Each held up the head of a rebellious black. And at the entrance to his office, amid more garden flowers, hung a noose swaying in the breeze.

  In his free time, when not hunting Africans or elephants, the captain painted pastoral scenes, wrote poetry, and collected butterflies.

  TWO QUEENS

  Shortly before dying, Queen Victoria had the great pleasure of acquiring another pearl for her well-laden crown. The Ashanti kingdom, one vast gold mine, became a British colony.

  The conquest had taken several wars over the course of an entire century.

  The final battle began when the English demanded the Ashantis hand over the sacred throne, home of the nation’s soul.

  Ashanti men were ferocious, better avoided than confronted, but in the final battle a woman took the lead. The queen mother, Yaa Asantewaa, pushed the male chiefs aside:

  “Where does the bravery lie? Not in you.”

  The fight was arduous. At the end of three months, the logic of British cannons won out.

  Victoria, the triumphant queen, died in London.

  Yaa Asantewaa, the vanquished queen, died far from her own land.

  The victors never found the sacred throne.

  Years later, the Ashanti kingdom, called Ghana, was the first colony in black Africa to win independence.

  WILDE

  The lord chamberlain of the kingdom of Great Britain was much more than a valet. Among other things, he was in charge of censoring the theater. With help from experts, he decided which plays ought to be cut or closed in order to protect the public from the dangers of immorality.

  In 1892, Sarah Bernhardt announced that Oscar Wilde’s new play, Salome, would open in London. Two weeks before opening night, the play was shut down.

  No one protested, save the playwright. Wilde reminded one and all that he was an Irishman living in a nation of Tartuffes, but the English just congratulated him on the joke. This chubby genius, who wore a white flower in his lapel and a knife blade on his tongue, was the most venerated celebrity in the theaters and salons of London.

  Wilde made fun of everyone, including himself:

  “I can resist everything except temptation,” he said.

  And one night he shared his bed with the son of the Marquis of Queensberry, tempted by his languid beauty, mysteriously youthful and jaded at once. That was the first of many nights. The marquis found out and he declared war. And he won.

  After three humiliating trials, which offered daily banquets for the press and unleashed the indignation of the citizenry against this corruptor of youth, the jury found him guilty of gross indecency committed against the young men who had the pleasure of accusing him.

  He spent two years in jail working with pick and shovel. His creditors auctioned off everything he owned. When he got out, his books had disappeared from the stores, his plays from the stage. No one applauded him, no one invited him.

  He lived alone, and alone he drank, pronouncing his brilliant sayings for no one.

  Death was kind. It came quickly.

  FRIGID RIGID MORALS

  Dr. Watson said nothing, but Sherlock Holmes answered anyway. He answered his silences, guessing all his thoughts one after another.

  This brilliant feast of deduction was repeated word for word at the beginning of two separate adventures of the English detective. And not by mistake.

  The original, The Cardboard Box, told of a sailor who killed his wife and her lover. But when gathering his stories into a book, Arthur Conan Doyle chose to suppress this risqué tale.

  In those days, good manners demanded courtesy and silence. Adultery need not be mentioned, because adultery did not exist. Not to wound the sensibilities of his readers or to displease the queen, the author censored himself. However, he rescued the opening monologue by sticking it into another adventure of the most famous detective in the world.

  On boring days, when London offered only mediocre cadavers and no enigma worthy of his superior intelligence, Sherlock Holmes used to inject cocaine. Conan Doyle never felt the least compunction in mentioning his character’s habit in story after story.

  Drugs posed no dilemma. Victorian morals did not address the question. The queen was not about to spit in her own plate. The epoch that bears her name forbade passion, but sold consolation.

  FATHER OF THE BOY SCOUTS

  Arthur Conan Doyle was knighted, and not for the merits of Sherlock Holmes. The writer was invited to join the ranks of the nobility as thanks for the propaganda he wrote for the imperial cause.

  One of his heroes was Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts. They met while fighting savages in Africa:

  “There was always something of the sportsman in his keen appreciation of war,” Sir Arthur said.

  Gifted in the art of following the tracks of others and erasing his own, Baden-Powell was a great success at the sport of hunting lions, boars, deer, Zulus, Ashantis, and Ndebeles.

  Against the Ndebeles, he fought a rough battle in southern Africa.

  Two hundred and nine blacks and one Englishman died.

  The colonel took as a souvenir the horn the enemy blew to sound the alarm. And that spiral-shaped horn from a kudu antelope was incorporated into Boy Scout ritual as the symbol of boys who love nature.

  FATHER OF THE RED CROSS

  The Red Cross was born in Geneva. It grew out of an initiative by several Swiss bankers to help the wounded abandoned on the battlefields.

  Gustave Moynier led the International Committee of the Red Cross for more than forty years. He explained that the institution, inspired by evangelical values, was welcomed in civilized countries, but repudiated by the colonized.

  “Compassion,” he wrote, “is unknown among those savage tribes that practice cannibalism. Compassion is so foreign to them that their languages have no word to express the concept.”

  CHURCHILL

  The descendants of Lord Marlborough, perhaps best known in song as “Malbrook who went to war,” had clout. And thanks to that family connection, young Winston Churchill managed to join a battalion of lancers heading off to fight in Sudan.

  He was a soldier and chronicler at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898, near Khartoum on the banks of the Nile.

  The British Crown was building a colonial corridor the length of Africa from Cairo in the north to Capetown in the south. The conquest of Sudan was a crucial step in the plan to expand the empire, which London explained by saying:

  “We are civilizing Africa by means of trade,”

  instead of confessing:

  “We are trading away Africa by means of civilization.”

  The redemptive mission advanced by blood and by fire. Since Africans were too feeble-minded to understand, no one bothered to ask their opinion.

  In the bombardment of the city of Omdurman, Churchill acknowledged that “a large number of unfortunate non-combatants were killed or wounded,” victims of what a century later would come to be called “collateral damage.” But in the end, the empire’s weaponry achieved, in his words, “the most signal triumph ever gained by the arms of science over barbarians. Within the space of five hours the strongest and best-armed savage army yet arrayed against a modern European Power had been destroyed and dispersed.”

  According to the official statistics of the victors, this was the outcome of the Battle of Omdurman:

  among the civilized troops, 2 percent killed or wounded,

  among the savage troops, 90 percent killed or wounded.

  COLOSSUS OF RHODES

  His objective in life was humble:

  “If I could, I would annex other planets.”

  Boundless energy was his birthright:

  “We are the first race in the world. The more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race.”

  Cecil Rhodes, the richest man in Afric
a, king of diamonds and owner of the only railroad with access to the gold mines, spoke clearly:

  “We must obtain new lands,” he explained, “where to settle the excess of population, where to find new markets for the production of our factories and mines. Empire, I have always said, is a matter of the stomach.”

  On Sundays, Rhodes entertained himself by tossing coins into a pool of water and having his black vassals pick them up with their teeth. But during the week he spent his time amassing land. This patriotic tycoon expanded the map of England five times over, stealing from blacks by natural right, and uprooting other whites, the Boers, from the field of colonial competition. To accomplish this he invented a rudimentary version of the concentration camp, which the Germans later perfected in Namibia before bringing it to Europe.

  In homage to the feats of the English conquistador, two African countries were named Rhodesia.

  Rudyard Kipling, lyre ever ready at the foot of the cannon, wrote his epitaph.

  THRONE OF GOLD

  A number of years before Rhodes, King Midas of Phrygia wanted to turn the world into gold at the touch of his hand.

  He asked the god Dionysus to give him that power. Dionysus, who believed in wine not gold, granted it to him.

  Midas broke off the branch of an ash tree and it turned into a rod of gold. He touched a brick and it became an ingot. He washed his hands and a rain of gold poured from the fountain. And when he sat down to eat, his food broke his teeth and no drink could flow down his throat. He hugged his daughter and she turned into a statue of gold.