Journal for the Study of Radicalism

"No matter where one hears of the life of some ruler or royal personage being attempted, one may always be certain to find that the assassin bears an Italian name."¹ So commented the New York Evening Journal after Gaetano Bresci's assassination of Italy's King Umberto I on 29 July 1900. There is no denying that a handful of Italian anarchists carried out several of the most sensational assassinations perpetrated in late nineteenth-century Europe: Sadi Carnot, the president of France, by Santo Caserio in 1894; Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, the prime minister of Spain, by Michele Angiolillo in 1897; Empress Elizabeth of Austria by Luigi Lucheni in 1898; and King Umberto of Italy by Gaetano Bresci in 1900. Often ignored but no less important were the unsuccessful attentati perpetrated by Italian anarchists during the same decade: Paolo Lega's attempt against Prime Minister Francesco Crispi in 1894, and Pietro Acciarito's attempt against King Umberto in 1897.²

Historians of anarchism and terrorism generally subsume these assassinations under the rubric of "propaganda by the deed," a definition that places too much emphasis on ideological factors at the expense of other considerations, such as personal grievances derived from poverty and desperation, the desire to avenge perceived injustices and crimes committed by the state in Italy, France, and Spain, and—in one case (Lucheni)—a quest for notoriety and lasting fame.³ Even though three of the attentati were committed by Italians [End Page 67] in exile abroad, the forces driving the assassins must be understood within the historical context of fin-de-siècle Italy. More than any other period between the Risorgimento and World War One, the decade of the 1890s was characterized by dire economic conditions, numerous popular upheavals, and unprecedented political repression by successive Italian governments. Each of the attentati committed by Lega, Caserio, Acciarito, Angiolillo, and Bresci were causally related to one or more of these factors.⁴

By the 1890s, the so-called liberal state in Italy had long ceased to regard or treat the anarchists as bona fide revolutionaries motivated by a genuine political and social philosophy, no matter how objectionable by bourgeois standards. The anarchists were now considered outlaws, a species apart from and outside of traditional politics and civil society, who, as Interior Minister Giovanni Nicotera declared in Parliament in 1891, "do not fight for a principle or for an idea, but for the delight of destroying society."⁵ This distorted characterization of the anarchists dated from the end of the 1870s, when the Italian government finally crushed the Italian Federation of the First International first organized in 1872, not only by utilizing traditional means of suppressing political subversives, but also by obtaining from the High Court of Cassation a legal ruling in 1880, specifying that any group of five or more anarchists constituted an "association of malefactors" (i.e., criminals) under the penal code.⁶ Socially stereotyped and legally classified as malfattori, the anarchists were subjected to frequent attacks by successive governments throughout the 1890s, especially by means of administrative (as opposed to judicial) measures, such as ammonizione (admonishment) and domicilio coatto (confinement). These repressive measures were particularly effective in paralyzing the anarchist movement, because they could be imposed almost arbitrarily and sometimes en masse. More commonly utilized methods of persecution were surveillance by police and paid informers, invasion of private domiciles, periodic arrests, preventive detention without charges, confiscation of personal property, and suppression of the anarchist press—the movement's only institutional nexus.⁷

Despite the movement's decline after the 1870s, Italian authorities always considered the anarchists a revolutionary threat, a militant and dangerous minority capable of rousing the discontented masses to rebellious action. This perception was primarily a function of the Italian bourgeoisie's exaggerated fear of social revolution. It had little basis in reality. Attempts by Errico [End Page 68] Malatesta, Francesco Saverio Merlino, and Amilcare Cipriani to foment rebellion in Rome in 1891, and again by Malatesta, Merlino, and Charles Malato in Sicily and Piedmont in 1893-1894, never got off the ground. The only anarchist insurrection of the...