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CHAPTER 3  NINETEENTHCENTURY INTELLIGENCE

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“PROPAGANDA OF THE DEED”:

ANARCHIST BOMBERS

A spectacular series of terrorist attacks swept through

Europe and the United States during the late nineteenth

and early twentieth centuries. They were carried out

by radical anarchists, who described their actions as

“propaganda of the deed.”

The philosophy of anarchism at its simplest argued for the dissolution

of the capitalist state. Most anarchists adopted peaceful means in their

attempts to achieve their goals but a few adopted the more aggressive

methods pioneered by the Italian anarchist Carlo Pisacane. In 1857,

Pisacane wrote: “Ideas spring from deeds and not the other way round,”

insisting that the “deeds” must be violent in order to draw popular

attention to the cause and to rally the masses behind revolutionary activity.

These acts of violence were to be focused against the chief representatives

of the state—such as monarchs and presidents—although a few anarchists

went even further to include all members of the middle-class bourgeoisie.

ATTEMPTS AGAINST THE TSAR

In 1866, Russian revolutionary Dmitry Karakozov attempted to gun down

Tsar Alexander II, and although the attempt failed, it set a pattern for

further anarchist and revolutionary activity. In 1880, Stepan Khalturin used

the new explosive dynamite in a further attempt to kill Alexander. The tsar

escaped unharmed but a section of the Winter Palace was destroyed, with

eleven killed and forty-five seriously wounded. Two years later, a bomb was

thrown into the café of the Bellacoeur Theater in the French city of Lyons—

the first in several other similar indiscriminate attacks against general

targets that caused fear and revulsion.

“I REGARD ALL

GOVERNMENTS AS

INSTITUTIONS FOR

COMMITTING THE

MOST REVOLTING

CRIMES.”

Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist

and anarchist supporter

Above: Carlo Pisacane

Above: Dmitry Karakozov