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

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  For his death there was a reason; for two of the three that followed within the next three years there was none whatever. They were the product partly of Anarchist propaganda, which supplied the suggestion, but even more of public excitement over Anarchist deeds, which gave assassins promise of heroic notoriety and acted as an intoxicant to unsound minds.

  The first death took place by dagger on September 10, 1898, alongside the lake steamer at the Quai Mont Blanc in Geneva. Here met, in mortal junction, as meaningless as when a stroke of lightning kills a child, two persons so unconnected, so far apart in the real world, that their lives could never have touched except in a demented moment. One was the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, wife of the Emperor Franz Joseph, the other Luigi Lucheni, a vagrant Italian workman.

  The most beautiful and the most melancholy royal personage in Europe, married and crowned at sixteen, Elizabeth was still, at sixty-one, forever moving restlessly from one place to another in endless escape from an unquiet soul. Renowned for her loveliness, her golden-brown hair a yard long, her slender elegance and floating walk, her sparkling moods when she was the “incarnation of charm,” she suffered also from “court-ball headaches,” and could not appear in public without holding a fan before her face. She was “a fairies’ child,” wrote Carmen Sylva, the Queen of Rumania, “with hidden wings, who flies away whenever she finds the world unbearable.” She wrote sad romantic poetry and had seen her son’s life end in the most melodramatic suicide of the century. Her first cousin, King Ludwig of Bavaria, had died insane by drowning; her husband’s brother, Maximilian, by firing squad in Mexico; her sister by fire at a charity bazaar in Paris. “I feel the burden of life so heavily,” she wrote her daughter, “that it is often like a physical pain and I would far rather be dead.” She would rush off to England or Ireland to spend weeks in the hunting field riding recklessly over the most breakneck fences. In Vienna she took lessons in the most dangerous tricks of circus riding. At times she adopted frenetic diets, reducing her nourishment to an orange or a glass of milk a day, and when her health could no longer sustain hunting, she indulged in orgies of walking for six or eight hours at a time at a forced pace no companion could keep up with. What she was seeking was plain: “I long for death,” she wrote her daughter four months before she reached Geneva.

  On September 9 she visited the lakeside villa of the Baroness Adolfe de Rothschild, a remote, enchanted world where tame miniature porcupines from Java and exotic colored birds decorated a private park planted with cedars of Lebanon. As she left her hotel next morning to take the lake steamer, the Italian, Lucheni, was waiting outside on the street.

  He had come from Lausanne, where he recently had been reported to the police as a suspicious character. The orderly of a hospital where he had been taken for an injury suffered during a building job had found among his belongings a notebook containing Anarchist songs and the drawing of a bludgeon labeled “Anarchia” and underneath, in Italian, “For Humbert I.” Accustomed to misfits, radicals and exiles of all kinds, the Swiss police had not considered this sufficient cause for arrest or surveillance.

  According to what he told the hospital orderly, Lucheni’s mother, pregnant at eighteen with an illegitimate child, had made her way to Paris to give birth among the anonymous millions of a great city. Later she was able to return to Italy, where she left her child in the poorhouse in Parma and disappeared to America.

  At nine the boy was a day laborer on an Italian railroad. Later when drafted into a cavalry regiment of the Italian Army, he made a good record and was promoted to corporal. Upon his discharge in 1897, having neither savings nor prospects, he became manservant to his former Captain, the Prince d’Aragona, but on being denied a raise, left in anger. Later he asked to come back, but the Prince, considering him too insubordinate for domestic service, refused. Resentful and jobless, Lucheni took to reading L’Agitatore, Il Socialista, Avanti and other revolutionary papers and pamphlets whose theme at the moment was the rottenness of bourgeois society as demonstrated by the Dreyfus case. A single Samson, they indicated, could bring down the State at a blow. Lucheni, now in Lausanne, sent clippings from these papers with his comments to comrades in his former cavalry regiment. Apropos of a workman killed in a quarrel, he remarked to a friend at this time, “Ah, how I’d like to kill somebody. But it must be someone important so it gets into the papers.” He attended meetings of Italian Anarchists who fiercely discussed plans to shake the world by a great deed, of which the favored victim was to be King Humbert of Italy.

  Meanwhile the Swiss papers reported the coming visit of the Empress Elizabeth to Geneva. Lucheni tried to buy a stiletto but lacked the necessary 12 francs. In its place he fashioned a homemade dagger out of an old file, carefully sharpened and fitted to a handle made from a piece of firewood. As the Empress and her lady-in-waiting, Countess Sztaray, walked toward the Quai Mont Blanc, Lucheni stood in their path. He rushed upon them with hand upraised, stopped and peered beneath her parasol to make sure of the Empress’ identity, then stabbed her through the heart. She died four hours later. Lucheni, seized by two gendarmes, was caught in his great moment by an alert passer-by with a camera. The picture shows him walking jauntily between his captors with a satisfied smile, almost a smirk, on his face. At the police station he eagerly described all his proceedings and preparations and when later it was learned that the Empress had died, expressed himself as “delighted.” He declared himself an Anarchist and insisted on its being understood that he had acted on his own initiative and not as a member of any group or party. Asked why he had killed the Empress, he replied, “As part of the war on the rich and the great.… It will be Humbert’s turn next.”

  From prison he wrote letters to the President of Switzerland and to the newspapers proclaiming his creed and the coming downfall of the State, and signing himself, “Luigi Lucheni, Anarchist, and one of the most dangerous of them.” To the Princess d’Aragona he wrote, “My case is comparable to the Dreyfus case.” Yet behind the poor foolish megalomania, even in Lucheni, glowed the Idea, for he also wrote to the Princess that he had learned enough of the world during his twenty-five years in it to feel that “never in my life have I felt so contented as now.… I have made known to the world that the hour is not far distant when a new sun will shine upon all men alike.”

  There being no death penalty in Geneva, Lucheni was sentenced to life imprisonment. Twelve years later, after a quarrel with the warder which resulted in his being given a term of solitary confinement, he hanged himself by his belt.

  In the month following the Empress’ death, the Kaiser, Wilhelm II, in the course of a widely heralded royal progress to Jerusalem, was the most conspicuous ruler of the moment. Police rounded up all known Anarchists along the route and international excitement reached a peak when an Italian Anarchist was arrested in Alexandria in possession of two bombs, a ticket for Haifa and obviously murderous intent upon the Kaiser. That sovereign had little to fear, however, from the Anarchists of his own country, for the two who had attempted to kill his grandfather were the last and only activists. Otherwise, German Anarchists remained theorists, except for those who got away to America. Germans were not fit for Anarchism, as Bakunin had said with disdain, for with their passion for Authority, “they want to be at once both masters and slaves and Anarchism accepts neither.”

  The assassins of the President of France, the Premier of Spain, and the Empress of Austria, as well as the would-be assassins of the Kaiser, had all been Italians. Inside Italy itself, in 1897, an Anarchist blacksmith named Pietro Acciarito had attempted to kill King Humbert, leaping upon him in his carriage with a dagger in the identical manner of Caserio upon President Carnot. More alert than Carnot to these occupational hazards, the King jumped aside, escaped the blow, and remarking with a shrug to his escort, “Sono gli incerti del mestiere” (“These are the risks of the job”), ordered his coachman to drive on. Acciarito told the police that he would have preferred to have “stuck that old monkey” Pope Leo
XIII, but that as he could not get inside the Vatican, he chose to attack the monarchy as the next evil after the papacy.

  The hatred for constituted society that seethed in the lower classes and the helplessness of society to defend itself against these attacks was becoming more and more apparent. As usual, the police, in wishful hunt for a “plot,” arrested half a dozen alleged accomplices of Acciarito, none of whom in the end could be proved to have had any connection with him. Plots by groups or parties could be dealt with; there were always informers. But how could the sudden spring of these solitary tigers be prevented?

  So serious was the problem that the Italian Government convened an international conference of police and home ministry officials in Rome in November, 1898, to try to work out a solution. Secret sessions lasted for a month with no known result except the admirable if negative one that Belgium, Switzerland and Great Britain refused to give up the traditional right of asylum or agree to surrender suspected Anarchists upon demand of their native countries.

  In the following year, 1899, there were bread riots in Italy, caused by taxes and an import duty on grain, which the Anarchists saw as another aspect of the war on the poor by the State. The riots spread north and south despite repressive measures and bloody collision between troops and people. In Milan, streetcars were overturned to make barricades, people hurled stones at police armed with guns, women threw themselves in front of trains to prevent the arrival of troops, a state of siege was declared, and all Tuscany put under martial law. The cry that at last the revolution had come brought thousands of Italian workmen back from Spain, Switzerland and the south of France to take part. Control was only regained by the dispatch of half an army corps to Milan. All Socialist and revolutionary papers were suppressed, parliament was prorogued, and although the Government succeeded in re-establishing order, it was only on the surface.

  The inoffensive monarch who found himself presiding over this situation had a fierce white moustache, personal courage, a gallant soul and no more noticeable talent for kingship than any of the House of Savoy. Humbert was passionately fond of horses and hunting, totally impervious to the arts, which he left to the patronage of his Queen, and very regular in his habits. He rose at six every morning, attended to the management of his private estates (whose revenues were large and deposited in the Bank of England), visited his stables and drove out in his carriage every afternoon at the same hour over the same route through the Borghese Gardens. Every evening at the same hour he visited a lady to whom he had remained devotedly faithful since before his marriage thirty years earlier. On July 29, 1900, he was distributing prizes from his carriage to athletic competitors in Monza, the royal summer residence near Milan, when he was shot four times by a man who stepped up to the carriage and fired at hardly two yards’ distance. The King gazed at him reproachfully for a moment, then fell over against the shoulder of his aide-de-camp, murmured “Avanti!” to his coachman and expired.

  The assassin, “holding his smoking weapon exultantly aloft,” was immediately seized. He was identified as Gaetano Bresci, a thirty-year-old Anarchist and silk-weaver who had come from Paterson, New Jersey, to Italy with intent to assassinate the King. His act was the only instance of Anarchist propaganda of the deed for which there is some evidence, though unproven, of previous conspiracy.

  Paterson was a center of Italians and of Anarchism. Certainly the Anarchists of Paterson held many meetings and heatedly discussed a Deed which would be the signal for overthrow of the oppressor. Certainly the King of Italy figured as their preferred target, but whether, as charged in reports after the event, lots were actually chosen to select the person to do the deed, or whether the discussions simply inspired Bresci to act of his own accord, is not certain. The picture of a cabal of Anarchists in a cellar drawing lots to select an assassin was a favorite journalistic imagery of the time.

  One imaginative reporter pictured Bresci as having been “indoctrinated” by Malatesta, “the head and moving spirit of all the conspiracies which have recently startled the world by their awful success.” He claimed that Malatesta had been glimpsed quietly drinking at an Italian bar in Paterson, but the police found no evidence that Bresci had ever met Malatesta. He had, however, either obtained or been given a revolver in Paterson with which he practiced shooting in the woods while his wife and three-year-old daughter picked flowers nearby. Also, he was given by his comrades, or somehow obtained, money to buy a steerage ticket on the French Line with enough left over to make his way from Le Havre to Italy.

  “He was not insane enough to expect that the change of Government would follow his act,” explained Pedro Esteve, editor of the Paterson Anarchist journal, to a reporter. “But how else could he let the people of Italy know that there was any such force in the world as Anarchy?” An amiable and scholarly person whose bookshelves held the works of Emerson next to those of Jean Grave, Esteve accepted as quite reasonable that one of his own readers should go out and express the protest of the masses in a magnificent gesture.

  Bresci’s comrades sent him a congratulatory telegram in prison and wore his picture on buttons in their coat lapels. They also insisted at a mass meeting in Paterson, attended by over a thousand persons, that there had been no plot. “We don’t need to make plots or talk,” said Esteve, who was the principal speaker. “If you are an Anarchist you know what to do and you do it individually and of your own accord.”

  Bresci himself suffered the same fate as other instruments of the Idea. As Italy had abolished the death penalty, he was sentenced to life imprisonment, the first seven years to be spent in solitary confinement. After the first few months he killed himself in prison.

  In the United States the newspaper account of King Humbert’s assassination was read over and over again by a Polish-American named Leon Czolgosz. The clipping became a precious possession which he took to bed with him every night. Twenty-eight at this time, he was small and slight, with a peculiar fixed gaze in his light-blue eyes. Born in the United States shortly after his parents came to America, he was one of six brothers and two sisters, and lived with his family on a small farm in Ohio. According to his father, he had “the appearance of thinking more than most children,” and because of his fondness for reading, was considered the intellectual of the family. In 1893, when he was twenty years old, he had been laid off during a strike in the wire factory where he worked, and afterward, according to his brother, “he got quiet and not so happy.” Prayer and the local priest having proved ineffective, he broke away from the Catholic Church, took to reading pamphlets issued by “Free Thinkers” and through these became interested in political radicalism. He joined a Polish workers’ circle where Socialism and Anarchism were among the topics discussed, and also, as he said later, “we discussed Presidents and that they were no good.”

  In 1898 he suffered some undefined illness which left him moody and dull. He gave up work, stayed home, took his meals upstairs to his bedroom, kept to himself, read the Chicago Anarchist paper Free Society and Bellamy’s utopia, Looking Backward, and brooded. He made trips to Chicago and Cleveland, where he attended Anarchist meetings, heard speeches by Emma Goldman and had talks with an Anarchist named Emil Schilling to whom he expressed himself as troubled by the conduct of the American Army, which, after liberating the Philippines from Spain, was now engaged in war upon the Filipinos. “It does not harmonize with the teaching in our public schools about our flag,” said Czolgosz worriedly.

  As flags were a matter of no respect to Anarchists, Schilling became suspicious of him and published a warning in Free Society that the oddly behaved Polish visitor might be an agent provocateur. This was on September 1, 1901, and was wide of the mark. Five days later Czolgosz turned up in Buffalo, where, in a receiving line at the Pan-American Exposition, he shot President McKinley. The President died eight days later and was succeeded by Theodore Roosevelt. Thus Czolgosz, on the lowest level of understanding among Anarchist assassins, performed of them all the act with the greatest consequen
ces.

  “I killed President McKinley,” Czolgosz wrote in his confession, “because I done my duty,” and later added, “because he was an enemy of the good working people.” He told reporters that he had heard Emma Goldman lecture and her doctrine “that all rulers should be exterminated … set me to thinking so that my head nearly split with pain.” He said, “McKinley was going around the country shouting prosperity when there was no prosperity for the poor man.” And further, “I don’t believe we should have any rulers. It is right to kill them.… I know other men who believe what I do that it would be a good thing to kill the President and to have no rulers.… I don’t believe in voting; it is against my principles. I am an Anarchist. I don’t believe in marriage. I believe in free love.”

  The Idea of Anarchism, its vision of a better society, had not come within Czolgosz’s ken. Like Caserio, the simple assassin of President Carnot, he was of the type of regicide who becomes obsessed by the delusion that it is his mission to kill the sovereign. This was brought out, shortly after Czolgosz’s hurried trial and electrocution on October 29, by Dr. Walter Channing, Professor of Mental Diseases at Tufts, and son of the poet William Ellery Channing. Dissatisfied with the official alienists’ report, Channing made his own study and concluded that Czolgosz had been “drifting in the direction of dementia praecox” and was a victim of a delusion already isolated and described by a French alienist, Dr. Emanuel Regis, in 1890. According to Dr. Regis, the regicide type is much given to cogitations and solitude and “whatever sane reason he may have possessed gives way to a sickly fixation that he is called on to deal a great blow, sacrifice his life to a just cause and kill a monarch or a dignitary in the name of God, Country, Liberty, Anarchy or some analogous principle.” He is characterized by premeditation and obsession. He does not act suddenly or blindly, but on the contrary, prepares carefully and alone. He is a solitaire. Proud of his mission and his role, he acts always in daylight and in public, and never uses a secret weapon like poison but one that demands personal violence. Afterwards, he does not seek to escape but exhibits pride in his deed and desire for glory and for death, either by suicide or “indirect suicide” as an executed martyr.