The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Public hysteria mounted. When, at a theatrical performance, some scenery back stage fell with a clatter, half the audience rushed for the exits screaming, “Les Anarchistes! Une bombe!” Newspapers took to printing a daily bulletin under the heading, “La Dynamite.” When the trial of the bomber of the Café Terminus opened on April 27, the terrible capacity of the Anarchist idea to be transformed from love of mankind to hatred of men was revealed.

  The accused turned out to be the same Emile Henry who had been suspected of setting the earlier bomb in the office of the Mines de Carmaux which had ultimately killed the five policemen. Already charged for murder in the Café Terminus, he now claimed credit for the other deaths as well, although no proof could be found. He stated that he had bombed the Café Terminus to avenge Vaillant and with full intention to kill “as many as possible. I counted on fifteen dead and twenty wounded.” In fact, police had found in his room enough equipment to make twelve or fifteen bombs. In his cold passion, intellectual pride and contempt for the common man, Henry seemed the “St. Just of Anarchism.” A brilliant student who had been admitted to the arcane Ecole Polytechnique and had been expelled for insulting a professor, he had been left to occupy his mind as a draper’s clerk at 120 francs a month. At twenty-two he was, along with Berkman, the best educated and best acquainted with Anarchist theory of all the assassins, and of them all, the most explicit.

  In prison he wrote a long, closely reasoned account of his experience of the cynicism and injustice of bourgeois society, of his “too great respect for individual initiative” to permit him to join the herd-like Socialists, and of his approach to Anarchism. He showed himself thoroughly familiar with its doctrines and with the writings of Kropotkin, Reclus, Grave, Faure and others, although he affirmed that Anarchists were not “blind believers” who swallowed whole any or all the ideas of the theorists.

  But it was when he explained his choice of the Café Terminus that he suddenly set himself apart. There, he said, come “all those who are satisfied with the established order, all the accomplices and employees of Property and the State,… all that mass of good little bourgeois who make 300 to 500 francs a month, who are more reactionary than their masters, who hate the poor and range themselves on the side of the strong. These are the clientele of the Terminus and the big cafés of its kind. Now you know why I struck where I did.”

  In court, when reproached by the judge for endangering innocent lives, he replied with icy hauteur, in words that should have been blazoned on some Anarchist banner, “There are no innocent bourgeois.”

  As for the Anarchist leaders, he said, who “dissociate themselves from the propaganda of the deed,” like Kropotkin and Malatesta in the case of Ravachol, and “who try to make a subtle distinction between theorists and terrorists, they are cowards.… We who hand out death know how to take it.… Mine is not the last head you will cut off. You have hung in Chicago, beheaded in Germany, garroted at Jerez, shot in Barcelona, guillotined in Paris, but there is one thing you cannot destroy: Anarchism.… It is in violent revolt against the established order. It will finish by killing you.”

  Henry himself took death staunchly. Even the caustic Clemenceau, who witnessed the execution on May 21, 1894, was moved and disturbed. He saw Henry “with the face of a tormented Christ, terribly pale, implacable in expression, trying to impose his intellectual pride upon his child’s body.” The condemned man walked quickly, despite his shackles, up the steps of the scaffold, glanced around and called out in a raucous strangled cry, “Courage, Camarades! Vive l’anarchie!” Society’s answer to Henry seemed to Clemenceau at that moment “an act of savagery.”

  Almost without pause fell the next blow, the last in the French series and the most important in its victim, although the least in its assassin. In Lyons on June 24, 1894, during a visit to the Exposition in that city, President Sadi Carnot was stabbed to death by a young Italian workman with the cry, “Vive la révolution! Vive l’anarchie!” The President was driving in an open carriage through crowds that lined the streets, and had given orders to his escort to let people approach if they wanted to. When a young man holding a rolled-up newspaper thrust himself forward from the front row, the guards did not stop him, thinking the newspaper contained a bouquet of flowers for the President. Instead it contained a dagger and, with a terrible blow, the young man plunged it six inches into the President’s abdomen. Carnot died within three hours. His wife next day received a letter mailed before the attack and addressed to the “Widow Carnot” which enclosed a photograph of Ravachol inscribed, “He is avenged.”

  The assassin was a baker’s apprentice, not yet twenty-one, named Santo Caserio. Born in Italy, he had become acquainted with Anarchist groups in Milan, the home of political turbulence. At eighteen he was sentenced for distributing Anarchist tracts to soldiers. Following the drift of other restless and troublesome characters, he went to Switzerland and then to Cette in the south of France, where he found work and a local group of Anarchists which went by the name “Les Coeurs de Chêne” (“Hearts of Oak”). He was brooding over Vaillant’s case and the refusal of the President to give a reprieve when he read in the newspapers of the President’s forthcoming visit to Lyons. Caserio decided at once to do a “great deed.” He asked for a holiday from his job and for twenty francs that were due him, and with the money, bought a dagger and took the train for Lyons. There he followed the crowds until he met his opportunity.

  Afterwards, in the hands of his captors and in court he was docile, smiling and calm. His wan and rather common but gentle face looked to one journalist like “the white mask of a floured Pierrot illuminated by two bright little blue eyes, obstinately fixed. His Up was ornamented by a poor little shadow of a moustache which seemed to have sprouted almost apologetically.” During his interrogation and trial he remained altogether placid and talked quite rationally about Anarchist principles, by which he appeared obsessed. He described his act as a deliberate “propaganda of the deed.” His only show of emotion was at mention of his mother, to whom he was greatly attached and to whom he had been writing letters regularly when away from home. When the gaoler came to wake him on August 15, the day of execution, he wept for a moment and then made no further sound on the way to the guillotine. Just as his neck was placed on the block he murmured a few words which were interpreted by some as the traditional “Vive l’anarchie!” and by others as “A voeni nen,” meaning, in the Lombard dialect, “I don’t want to.”

  When Anarchism slew the very chief of State, it reached a climax in France after which, suddenly, face to face with political realities and the facts of life in the labour movement, it retreated. At first, however, it looked as if the Anarchists would be handed a magnificent opportunity for either propaganda or martyrdom. Charging to the offensive, the Government on August 6 staged a mass trial of thirty of the best known Anarchists in an effort to prove conspiracy between theorists and terrorists. As the known terrorists had already been executed, the only examples the Government could produce were three minor characters of the “burglar” type, none of them Ravachols. Of the leaders, Elisée Reclus had left the country, but his nephew Paul Reclus, Jean Grave, Sebastien Faure and others were in the dock. In the absence of a party or corporate body as defendant, the prosecution was in a difficulty similar to having no corpus delicti. Nevertheless it accused what it called the “sect” of aiming at the destruction of the State through propaganda that encouraged theft, pillage, arson and murder “in which each member of the sect cooperates according to his temperament and facilities.” In dread perhaps of the irresistible oratory of Faure, the prosecution did all the talking, hardly allowing the defendants to open their mouths and regretting it when they did. Addressing Felix Fenéon, the art critic and first champion of the Impressionists, who was one of the defendants, the presiding judge said, “You were seen talking with an Anarchist behind a lamppost.”

  “Can you tell me, Your Honor,” replied Fenéon, “where is ‘behind a lamppost’?”


  In the absence of evidence connecting the accused with the deeds, the jury was not impressed and acquitted everyone except the three burglars, who were given prison terms. Once again French common sense had reasserted itself.

  The jury’s sensible verdict deprived Anarchism of a cause célèbre, but a greater reason for the decline that followed was that the French working class was too realistic to be drawn into a movement suffering from self-inflicted impotence. The sterility of deeds of terror was already beginning to be recognized by leaders like Kropotkin, Malatesta, Reclus and even Johann Most. Searching for other means of bringing down the State, they were always tripped up by the inherent paradox: Revolution demands organization, discipline and Authority; Anarchism disallows them. The futility of their position was beginning to make itself felt.

  Banished from the meeting of the Socialist Second International in London in 1896, because of their refusal to subscribe to the necessity of political action, Anarchist groups called a Congress of their own in Paris in 1900. They made efforts to arrive at a formula of union which the comrades could accept, but every proposal foundered against the stubborn devotion to singleness of Jean Grave. A second attempt in a Congress at Amsterdam in 1907 produced a short-lived International Bureau which, for lack of support, soon withered and ceased to function.

  Yet in the end there was a kind of tragic sense in the Anarchist rejection of Authority. For, as the Jesuit-educated Sebastien Faure said in a moment of cold realism, “Every revolution ends in the reappearance of a new ruling class.”

  Realists of another kind during these years began to come to terms with the labour movement. It was the eight-hour day that the French working class wanted, not bombs in parliament or murdered presidents. But it was the Anarchist propaganda of the Deed that woke them to recognition of what they wanted and the necessity of fighting for it. That was why Ravachol, whom they understood, became a popular hero and songs were sung about him in the streets. Ever since the massacres of the Commune, the French proletariat had been prostrate; it was the Anarchist assaults that brought them to their feet. They sensed that their strength lay in collective action, and in 1895, only a year after the last of the attentats, there was formed the Confédération Générale de Travail (CGT), France’s federation of labour.

  Upon the Anarchists, frustrated by their own inherent paradox, it exerted a strong pull. One by one they drifted into the trade unions, bringing with them as much of their doctrine as could be applied. This merger of Anarchist theory and trade-union practice took the form known as Syndicalism, derived from syndicat, the French word for trade union. In this altered form, though extremists of the “pure” kind like Jean Grave shunned it, French Anarchism developed during the years 1895–1914.

  Its dogma was direct action through the general strike and its new prophet was Georges Sorel. Under his banner the general strike was to replace propaganda of the deed. The overthrow of capitalism, Sorel argued, could only be accomplished when the working class developed a will to power. The use of violence was to be the means of fostering and training the revolutionary will. The Syndicalists continued to abhor the State or anyone willing, like the Socialists, to cooperate with it, and they had no more use than their Anarchist predecessors for half-way reformist measures. The strike was all, the general strike and nothing but the strike. They retained the sinews of the old movement; but something of its soul, its mad marvelous independence, was gone.

  In Spain the cycle had far from run its course. On June 7, 1896, during the festival of Corpus Christi in Barcelona, a bomb was thrown into the midst of a religious procession as it was entering the church door led by the Bishop and the Commanding General of Barcelona. The two representatives of the Church and the Army at whom the bombs were aimed escaped injury, but eleven others were killed and forty wounded amid scenes of blood and terror comparable to the slaughter in the Opera House three years before. The Anarchists succeeded in thoroughly frightening the country, if not its Premier, Antonio Canovas del Castillo, who was not a man to tremble.

  Recalled in 1895 for his fifth term as Prime Minister, Canovas was a man of “humble origin,” as the phrase then was, who had risen—through engineering, journalism, diplomacy and election to the Cortes—to the top post of the Conservative Party. He had been the political arm of the restoration of the crown in 1874. In addition to practicing politics, he wrote poetry, literary criticism, a life of Calderón, a ten-volume history of Spain, and was President of the Royal Academy of History. He collected paintings, rare china, old coins and walking sticks, lived in a sumptuous palace in Madrid, dressed always in black and, like Frick, never allowed jewels “to obtrude their vulgarity” upon his person. Whether considered a man of reaction by the republicans or the ablest statesman of his time by others, he was acknowledged to be the only man who could hold the Conservative Party together and hold Cuba for Spain. Although he had formulated a plan for Cuban autonomy, he had also sent out General Weyler to quell the insurrectos, and already a firm hand and stern measures, in contrast to that of his Liberal predecessors, were taking effect. Against the Anarchists Canovas had no compunctions about proceeding ruthlessly.

  With his sanction the mass arrests began again. Over four hundred persons were imprisoned, the Government as usual seizing the pretext to proceed against any or all enemies of the regime, whether Anarchists, anti-Clericals, or Catalan Republicans. The cries of agony from Montjuich were heard again, followed by the fearsome report that the Attorney-General would ask the death penalty for no less than twenty-eight out of eighty-four accused persons who were to be tried by court-martial. This was under a law passed by the Cortes after the Opera House explosion, making all crimes committed with explosives subject to court-martial and providing the death penalty for the guilty. Life imprisonment was decreed for those guilty of advocating violence through speeches, articles or pictures. The trial took place behind the stone curtain of Montjuich with only military personnel permitted to be present. Only the sentences were announced: eight condemned to die, of whom four were reprieved and four executed. Seventy-six were sentenced to prison terms ranging from eight to nineteen years, of whom sixty-one were sent to the penal colony of Rio de Oro, the Spanish Devil’s Island.

  At the same time the outside world learned from a firsthand report of the tortures inflicted at Montjuich upon the prisoners of 1893. Tarrida del Marmol, member of a leading Catalan family and director of the Polytechnic Academy of Barcelona, had, because of his liberal opinions, been caught up in the arrests, and his account, published in Paris in 1897 under the title Les Inquisiteurs de l’Espagne, aroused horrified protests. It included a posthumous cry for help in the form of a letter from a fellow prisoner, written before his execution and addressed to “All good men on earth.” It told how he had been taken at night from his cell to a cliff over the sea where the guards loaded their guns and threatened to shoot him unless he said everything the lieutenant told him to say. When he refused, his genital organs were twisted and later, back in prison, this torture was repeated while he was hung from the door of his cell for ten hours. He was also subjected to the enforced walking for a period of five days. “Finally I declared everything they wanted and in my weakness and cowardice signed my declaration.”

  Some time later, in August, 1897, Premier Canovas went for a summer holiday to Santa Agueda, a spa in the Basque mountains. During tranquil days there, he noticed a fair-haired well-mannered fellow guest at the hotel who spoke Spanish with an Italian accent and several times saluted him politely. Canovas was moved to ask his secretary if he knew who the strange young man was and found he was registered as correspondent from the Italian newspaper Il Popolo. One morning as the Premier was sitting with his wife on the terrace reading his newspaper, the young Italian suddenly appeared, pulled a revolver from his pocket, and at three yards’ distance fired three shots into Canovas’ body, killing him instantly, Mme Canovas, in a passion of rage and grief, flew at the man still holding the revolver and struck him in the face w
ith her fan, crying, “Murderer! Assassin!”

  “I am not an assassin,” replied the Italian sternly. “I am the Avenger of my Anarchist comrades. I have nothing to do with you, Madame.”

  Upon arrest and examination, his real name proved to be Michel Angiollilo. When in the Italian Army, he had served three terms in the disciplinary battalion for insubordination. On release from the Army he became a printer, a trade with an affinity for Anarchism, either because the Anarchist seeks contact with the printed word or because contact with the printed word leads to Anarchism. In any case Angiollilo was shortly sentenced to eighteen months in prison for printing subversive literature. In 1895, following a futile attempt, along with some Italian Anarchist comrades, to set up a clandestine press in Marseilles, he went to Barcelona and left after the Corpus Christi explosion. He drifted to Belgium and then London, where he bought a revolver with the intention of killing the Spanish Premier for “ordering the mass torture and execution of Anarchists.” He returned to Spain, stalked Canovas in Madrid but failed to find his opportunity, followed him to Santa Agueda and found it there. Tried by court-martial a week later, he attempted to expound his Anarchist principles, and when silenced by the Court, shouted, “I must justify myself!” but was not allowed to speak. At his execution by the garrote he refused religious rites and maintained an unbroken sangfroid.

  The European press erupted in agitated demand for a concerted effort to suppress the “mad dogs” of Anarchism. There was a sense that the loss of a man of Canovas’ stature could be grave for Spain if not, as the Nation of New York predicted, a “national disaster.” In fact, his death proved to be one of those accidents that give a decisive jerk to the course of events. With Canovas gone, the Liberals succeeded in taking office and soon retreated before the wild howls of Hearst-engendered indignation against “Butcher” Weyler then reverberating from the United States. General Weyler was relieved just when he was close to restoring order and the Cuban insurrection flared up again, providing the imperialists in the United States with the excuse for the most deliberately manufactured war of the century. Had Canovas lived, the excuse might not have been available.