‘Unrest’ and Pyotr Kropotkin

Still from ‘Unrest’

Cyril Schäublin’s elegant film ‘Unrüh’ - ‘Unrest’ in English - opens with 19th century Russian women chatting about the eccentricity of Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, born into an aristocratic family and later a well-known anarchist; they gossip and pose outside, holding glasses of wine, preparing to be photographed. The scene is discreet, its pacing calm and unhurried. The next episode takes place in a small town in a Swiss valley, where a watch factory is at its heart. Saint-Imier is being photographed for a sales catalogue, and two local policemen politely remind everyone, including Kropotkin on his arrival, to move aside, out of the picture, and to give way to the needs of business. In keeping with this marginalisation, Schäublin frames his subjects unconventionally, often in a corner of the screen or partially obscuring them. Like clocks and watches, ‘Unrest’ is painstakingly and methodically constructed. The town’s orderliness, however, is not all; many of the workers in the factory are actively involved with socialist anarchism. We are also told that inside the factory’s watches there is a tiny spiral wheel - in German the ‘unrüh’ - which serves to balance the mechanism. The symbolism is significant.

Kropotkin has ostensibly come to Saint-Imier to carry out a survey for a more accurate map of the region, but he pays greater attention to the ways of the socialist workers. Predictably, their activism is not encouraged by the factory director, who decrees that any employees involved with the movement will be dismissed. Among them is the young Josephine, who befriends Kropotkin and whose task it is to fit ‘unrüh’ wheels into watches. Her work, like that of her fellows, is carefully timed as part of a drive for industrial efficiency. Saint-Imier, curiously, runs on different clocks, those of the factory, the municipality, the telegraph, and the railway. Time is relative, but somehow everything functions; ‘Unrest’, as well as being subtly anarchic, is not without humour, its dry tone having something in common with the stories of the Swiss writer, Robert Walser.

Meanwhile, money is raised for workers’ movements abroad; a photographer sells pictures of anarchists, adjusting his prices as he assesses the interest of buyers; the two courteous gendarmes keep the peace, somewhat superfluously, as the residents of Saint-Imier appear to be predominantly amicable. Political gatherings conclude with uplifting songs, and when a customer in the bar objects to a new ‘anarchist map’ that is being hung on the wall, the matter is settled by an immediate vote. Towards the end of the film, when Pyotr and Josephine take a leisurely stroll through the woods on the outskirts of the town, they are requested to measure the time it takes to do so. In the following scene, set at an unspecified point in the future, it is revealed that both Pyotr and Josephine disappeared during the walk and have since become modestly celebrated. The last shot is of a watch hanging on a branch in the woods where they were last seen - a literal suspension, or renunciation, of time.

When he left Saint-Imier, the real Kropotkin’s life took some interesting and unexpected turns. At Russia’s behest, Switzerland expelled him as a communist anarchist after the assassination of Alexander II, and in early 1881 he moved to Thonon-les-Bains in France, near Geneva, so his wife, a Russian Jewish student, could finish her Swiss education. When he learnt that the Holy League, a Tsarist group, intended to kill him for his supposed association with the assassination, Kropotkin moved to London, but he only lived there for a year before returning in 1882, whereupon the French authorities arrested him for agitation, once again partly to appease Russia, and he was sentenced to five years in Lyons. He was released in 1886 because of poor health, moving back to England, where he settled in Harrow; his intellectual circle in London included William Morris and W. B. Yeats as well as old Russian friends. Kropotkin founded an anarchist journal there, but gradually his revolutionary zeal subsided, and he increasingly focused on social, ethical, and scientific issues; in his later years an emphasis on social morality rather than on economics or politics, combined with his determination not to impose his personal principles on others, meant that he became more of a ‘revolutionary humanitarian’ than a radical revolutionist. Known for his integrity and moral character, as well as for his charm, sincerity, and determination to live an ethical life, Kropotkin was regarded by some as exceptionally kind. A contemporary remarked that his ‘scholarly and saintly ways’ almost brought respectability to the anarchist movement.

In his book Fields, Factories and Workshops, published in 1899, Kropotkin wrote about how local communities could become thriving and self-sufficient, with no coercive leaders or taxes, and with voluntary associations and mutual aid providing the bonds and connections of a functional society. One of the examples he gave was that of the French ‘culture maraîchère’, a form of market gardening that was common in and around Paris, which provided high yields during seasons that were difficult for conventional growers. Its techniques, popular in the 1840s, involved fermenting manure to warm the soil, building stone walls and using cloches to provide protection from the wind, and planting crops close together. The popularity of this intensive method of gardening peaked at the beginning of the next century, when it also spread across the English Channel.

At the time, the creation of agricultural settlements was thought to be a partial solution to problems of rural depopulation and unemployment in England; urban workers, offered plots of land on favourable terms, were taught to farm them effectively. These enterprises, associated with the Labour movement and drawing on Kropotkin’s ideas, were underwritten by private benefactors and local authorities. They included the Mayland colony in Essex, funded by the American philanthropist Joseph Fels and managed by Thomas Smith, one of my great-grandfathers. Smith organised the horticultural training, and in 1907 a two-acre ‘French garden’ was established as part of the much larger existing settlement, with a Frenchman, Paul Aquatias, supervising the work. Smith later wrote a successful book on the subject, prefaced by Kropotkin, who had visited Mayland.

For further exploration:

The trailer for ‘Unrest’: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ABVxQX4gGK0

An interview with Cyril Schäublin: https://www.rogerebert.com/interviews/Cyril-Sch%C3%A4ublin-unrest-interview-2022

An interesting article on Pyotr Kropotkin: https://www.plutobooks.com/blog/peter-kropotkin-and-the-anarchist-intellectual-tradition/

An essay on ‘culture marâichère’: http://hipcrime.blogspot.com/2011/12/french-market-gardens-la-culture.html

Pyotr Kropotkin