In that sense, Dostoyevsky’s literary recognition of active nihilism in Russia anticipated later acts of destructive violence. Beginning in the late 1870s, these kept erupting on the orderly surface of modern, rational civilization across Europe until it was consumed by the great conflagration of the First World War.
The radical intelligentsia did not give up in Russia itself, despite severe repression. A movement called the People’s Will launched a campaign of terror, and in 1881 it managed to assassinate the Tsar, Alexander II. The deed, planned by a twenty-six-year-old female revolutionary, Sofia Perovskaya, was comparable in its boldness and implications to the execution of Louis XVI in 1793. And such was its infectious quality that a wave of assassinations washed over Europe and America in the next three decades.
King Umberto I of Italy, who survived an attempt on his life made by an anarchist in 1878, considered assassination to be a ‘professional risk’. He was murdered twenty-two years later by an Italian silk worker, a member of an anarchist group from New Jersey. Attacks were also directed at institutions that seemed to represent the deceitful values of bourgeois society. An attack on a disreputable music hall in Lyons in 1882 seemed to have been provoked by the anarchist newspaper that said ‘You can see there, especially after midnight, the fine flowers of the bourgeoisie and of commerce … The first act of the social revolution must be to destroy this den.’
An anarchist attacked the Paris Stock exchange in 1886; another hurled a bomb at the Chamber of Deputies in Paris in 1893. An Italian anarchist then stabbed to death the president of France, Carnot, for refusing to pardon the murderer. The European states responded with brutal police repression: torture became common again, along with summary trials and executions and crackdowns. Governments started to cynically use the threat of terrorism to shore up domestic support and ensure compliance: Bismarck blamed assassinations and bombings on the Social Democratic Party, and eventually banned it.
The anarchist terrorists came to be depicted gaudily by a sensationalistic press as a powerful conspiratorial force spanning the globe. The radicals also began to make their way into literary fiction outside Russia. Oscar Wilde wrote a play about a bomb-throwing Russian, depicting her, in a Baudelairean touch, as an expression of satanic beauty. In The Princess Casamassima (1886), Henry James ventured into London slums with an unusual cast of anarchist conspirators. In émile Zola’s novel Germinal (1885), a Russian anarchist called Souvarine blows up a mine. The French novelist warned:
the masters of society to take heed … Take care, look beneath the earth, see these wretches who work and suffer. There is perhaps still time to avoid the ultimate catastrophe … [Yet] here is the peril: the earth will open up and nations will be engulfed in one of the most appalling cataclysms in history.
Literature, in turn, incited acts of terror. One of the readers of Germinal, and greatly inspired by its Russian anarchist, was émile Henry. Henry bombed a mining company and a much-frequented café near the Gare Saint-Lazare. He defiantly spoke in court of ‘a deep hate, each day revived by the revolting spectacle of this society … where everything prevents the fulfilment of human passions and the generous tendencies of the heart, and the unimpeded growth of the human spirit’. Henry claimed to have acted so that the ‘insolent triumphs’ of the bourgeoisie were shattered, and ‘its golden calf would shake violently on its pedestal, until the final blow knocks it into the gutter and pools of blood’.
In monarchical Spain, Mateo Morral Roca, the son of a Catalonian industrialist, directed his murderous rage at King Alfonso XIII in 1906. A student of Nietzsche and chemistry, he fabricated a bomb in his Madrid hotel room and threw it from his fifth-floor balcony at a royal procession, killing dozens of soldiers and bystanders and injuring nearly one hundred people. It was the Spanish king’s third escape from assassination during his reign. Barcelona, where a series of bombs exploded from 1903 to 1909, causing widespread terror and panic, became known as the ‘city of bombs’. The random attacks caused a precipitate decline in the tourist trade and provoked the city’s affluent class to flee to safer locations.
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Anarchists were not always responsible for this unprecedented carnage across Europe prior to the First World War, even if it was inspired by anarchist techniques. The violence was aimed at different political ends. But it was inspired by the belief – fundamental to much modern terrorism – that assaults on symbols of political and social order, and the self-sacrifice of individuals, had a propaganda value that far exceeded any immediate political ends.
Revolts against the dehumanization imposed by industrial society gave to anarchist movements in the 1880s and 1890s an international dimension. In one estimate, there were some ten thousand anarchists residing in Buenos Aires by the early years of the twentieth century. A German follower of Bakunin, Johann Most, found harshly industrializing America a fertile soil for his mentor’s ideas. He discovered adherents among the large number of German and Bohemian workers in Chicago. ‘Let us rely,’ he wrote, ‘upon the unquenchable spirit of destruction and annihilation which is the perpetual spring of new life.’
Most published The Science of Revolutionary Warfare – A Manual of Instruction in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun Cotton, Fulminating Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc., etc. Printed in Chicago and Cleveland in 1885 and 1886, it sang the glories of the then newly discovered dynamite. The explosive could:
be carried in the pocket without danger … a formidable weapon against any force of militia, police, or detectives that may want to stifle the cry for justice that goes forth from the plundered slaves … It is a genuine boon for the disinherited, while it brings terror and fear to the robbers … Our lawmakers might as well try to sit down on the crater of a volcano or on the point of a bayonet as to endeavor to stop the manufacture and use of dynamite.