The Murderer of Warren Street by Marc Mulholland Francis Wheen
FRANCIS WHEEN
The Murderer of Warren Street: The True Story of a NineteenthCentury Revolutionary There are glimpses of Emmanuel Barthélemy in many 19th-century books. In Alexander Herzen’s memoirs he appears as a latterday Spartacus; in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables he is a ‘sort of tragic outcast’. But until now he has not taken centre stage – which seems astonishing. Marc Mulholland must have hugged himself with glee when he had the idea. He has done it full justice, with a succession of set pieces – street battles, duels, jailbreaks – that read like scenes from a lost novel by Alexandre Dumas.
Born in 1823, Barthélemy was already a dedicated revolutionary by the age of fifteen, growing his hair to shoulder length and vowing to ‘exterminate the monarchy and all aristocrats’. Aged sixteen, he shot a Parisian policeman. ‘I have nothing for which to reproach myself,’ he told the judge, who condemned him to hard labour for life. Nine years later, after the revolution of February 1848, the new provisional government released him, and he set up a club to teach workers the art and science of street fighting.
The workers hadn’t much time to learn. In June 1848, thousands took to the streets to challenge the crackdown by a new right-wing regime on ‘centres of sedition in Paris’. After three days of dauntless defiance, Barthélemy was captured and given another life sentence – whereupon he broke out of jail and slipped across the border to Belgium, disguised as a priest.
Still only in his twenties, he was an international proletarian pin-up. As the German socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht sighed, perhaps with a touch of sexual envy, ‘A wreath of legends surrounded his proudly erect head.’ Barthélemy’s lawyer received many letters from ‘beautiful ladies, young and wealthy, who declared themselves eagerly enamoured of his intrepid client, and willing to share with him their life and fortunes’.
It was probably one such groupie who in 1849 paid his passage from Brussels to London. There he befriended Karl Marx, sparring with him at a fencing salon near Oxford Street in preparation for ‘an imminent renewal of revolutionary warfare’. What actually broke out was the Left’s traditional internecine warfare: Marx was soon denouncing the Frenchman’s ‘reckless adventurism’; Barthélemy called Marx a traitor, adding that ‘traitors must be killed’.
Whatever his other qualities, Barthélemy didn’t lack courage. Having smuggled himself into France, where he was still a wanted man, he fought at the barricades again during the Bonapartist coup of December 1851. He was, of course, taken prisoner – and then escaped.
Back in London, he discovered that the republican refugee Frédéric Cournet was spreading a rumour that Barthélemy pimped out his lover as a prostitute. The outcome was inevitable, given that both men were world-class score-settlers. Cournet had already fought and survived fifteen duels. At the sixteenth, in a field near Windsor Great Park on 19th October 1852, Barthélemy shot and killed him. It was the last fatal duel in Britain.
Mulholland gives a gripping account of the preparations, the contest and the subsequent trial – which aroused such public interest that even Queen Victoria went to inspect the site where Cournet fell. The jury’s verdict was manslaughter, not murder: to Barthélemy’s astonishment, he was sentenced to only two months more than he had already served on remand. When jubilant supporters began singing La Marseillaise, Herzen pointed out they had English justice to thank. A chorus of Rule, Britannia! was duly added.
After many pages of swashbuckling adventure and political thriller, the final chapter of Barthélemy’s career is a Victorian whodunnit. One evening in December 1854, at a house in Warren Street, he shot dead George Moore, a fizzy-drink maker who had once employed him. Why? Although Mulholland never quite achieves a definite answer, he sheds much new light on this strange crime – and on Barthélemy’s mysterious female accomplice, who was never caught.
Despite thick fog and snow, thousands of gawpers braved the elements to witness his public hanging at Newgate, on 22nd January 1855. According to the Daily News, the execution was ‘one of the most remarkable in modern times; and the circumstances connected with it possess features of interest rarely exceeded’. I’d say the same, fortissimo, for this magnificent book.