The last third of the nineteenth century saw the world in flux.
Science vied with religion to represent the soul of man, and
technological advances opened the possibility of new ways of
living. Yet as the world sank into a long depression, untrammelled
capitalism continued to stretch the gulf between rich and poor.
From Russia to America, across Western Europe and beyond,
governments already unsettled by major shifts in geopolitical power
were threatened by growing social unrest and the rise of socialism.
And looming over them was the spectre of the Anarchist and the
shadow of international terrorism.
A Tsar and an Empress, Presidents and plutocrats were all
vulnerable to the assassin's bombs and bullets, but so too was
bourgeois society in its cafes and opera houses. It was a new kind
of Terror that could strike anywhere and that permeated deep into
the imagination of the times. Its true weapon, though, was not
dynamite but fear itself: a fact quickly grasped by those whose job
it was to protect the powerful. Yet in a credulous age, when
hoaxers and forgers thrived, the fictions spun by police chiefs and
their agent provocateurs were often no less beguiling. And out of
the short-term actions of these forgotten individuals grew the
noxious delusions of worldwide conspiracy that would poison the
century to come.
A masterly exploration of the strange twists and turns of history,
The World That Never Was follows the interweaving lives of several
key anarchists, and of the secret police who tracked them. Framed
by the Paris Commune of 1871 and the 1905 revolution in St
Petersburg, and spread across five continents, theirs is the story
of a generation that saw the dream of Utopia crumble, to be
replaced by a dangerous desperation. Here is a revelatory portrait
of an era with uncanny echoes of our own.
"From the Hardcover edition."
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