The concept of propaganda by the deed, or the notion that the actions of terrorists can serve a pedagogical purpose, originates with Carlo Pisacane. Pisacane is a legendary figure in Italy. A patriot, he participated in the revolution of 1848 and would later try to overthrow the Kingdom of Naples, an effort that resulted in his death after he embarked on an expedition to Calabria in 1857. Outside of Italy, though, he is best known for popularizing the idea that violence had an important propagandistic purpose that should be exploited. He wrote that ideas did not suffice in inspiring change; people lacked either the wisdom to understand or the very awareness that there was a problem until they could see it for themselves. The only way to get people to understand what needed to be done was through action. Pisacane was not unique in having these thoughts. That Pisacane’s ideas were put into practice made them unique. Errico Malatesta and Carlo Cafiero, two Italian anarchists, were the first to make this happen, proclaiming “the insurrectional fact destined to affirm socialist principles by deeds is the most effective means of propaganda and the only one which, without tricking and corrupting the masses, can penetrate the deepest social layers and draw the living forces of humanity into the struggle sustained by the International.” While the idea has its origin in Pisacane’s writing, the phrase propaganda by the deed was coined by Paul Brousse, a French physician whose writing appeared in the same journal in which Malatesta and Cafiero first published their doctrine. Brousse thought that traditional propaganda could only be consumed by the middle classes, who had the luxury to read and understand the likes of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and not the laborers, whom the socialists wished to mobilize. Given this reality, forceful action was the key to mobilizing the public.
Interestingly enough, Brousse did not advocate assassination, doubting its efficacy. For that, the anarchists have Peter Kropotkin to thank, as he exposed Brousse to the idea of permanent incitement through words, knives, rifles, dynamite, and anything that was not legal. Although the media back then was not what it is today, with social media and other forms of communication transmitting global events in an instant, Kropotkin was aware that violent actions attracted attention in a more widespread fashion than mere words, even in the primitive days of global media. For Kropotkin, the action built on itself: governments overreacted, which served to spread the propaganda further and incited others to react and mobilize against it. This, of course, is the hallmark terrorist goal, and it is still copied today. Al-Qaeda staged 9/11 with the hope of forcing the United States to overreact, invade Afghanistan, and thus inspire the Muslim community to rise up against all apostate governments.
Kropotkin is a notable figure in the history of terrorism. He came from an established military family, but, after coming of age, quickly evolved into a conspirator actively participating in the various anarchist movements engulfing Russia. Despite being arrested in 1874, he escaped a few years later and continued propagating his ideas. Yet in contrast to the likes of contemporary terrorists belonging to al-Qaeda or IS, Kropotkin eventually came to shirk “mindless terror.” This made him different from Nechaev and those who seemed primarily to lust for blood. Before taking this approach, though, he was the key advocate of the individual terror characterized as regicide or tyrannicide. He thought such assassinations would help inspire the revolutionary fervor most anarchists and socialists found wanting among the masses. Kropotkin later provided moral justification to the assassination of Alexander II and other political figures killed at the end of the nineteenth century, blaming society for making the assassins desperate enough to take such actions to remedy their unbearable social conditions. Society had filled these people with contempt for life. This idea still finds purchase in contemporary terrorism.
Consumers of anarchist and socialist literature found much inspiration in the ideas postulated by Pisacane, Brousse, and Kropotkin. Propaganda by the deed was a major point of discussion in the July 1881 International Anarchist Congress held in London, leading many in attendance to advocate the study of chemistry to disseminate bomb-making techniques. Kropotkin participated in that meeting. He supported these ideas to an extent, but he qualified his support from a sociological perspective. In his mind, what was more important was knowing the impetus to radicalize and mobilize people rather than making bombs. Bombs and other forms of pyrotechnics were of no use if they served no tactical or strategic function. Moreover, these were rigorous sciences that necessitated an elite cadre that could quickly learn and manufacture these items; it was a waste of time to have everyone try to study chemistry. Again, Kropotkin provided the blueprint for the likes of Osama bin Laden, generating a cohort that specialized in making bombs rather than tasking everyone to do so. Regardless, the congress passed a resolution that those in attendance should study chemistry and other related disciplines, for it already had provided a revolutionary service and its need would only increase as the fervor for change increased. The resolution stated “that a general conflagration was not far distant; ‘propaganda by deed’ had to reinforce oral and written propaganda and arouse the spirit of the masses insofar as illusions still existed about the effectiveness of legal methods.” This resolution had little effect. It was another ten years before anarchists throughout Western Europe would attempt propaganda by the deed.
Despite the inaction, general panic spread along with calls for greater scrutiny of their activities by security forces. Strangely enough, in seeking to penetrate these groups, police actually enabled their activity. Evidence suggests they may have provided money for some of their propaganda pieces and even funded some plots. It is at least certain that the police sponsored the publication of an anarchist piece written in a French-language periodical based in London that advocated violence against all sectors of society, noting that if arson and theft were legitimate, explosions were as well. Again, predating the likes of Inspire and Dabiq, in the 1880s, La Révolution Sociale, a French newspaper, gave bomb-making instructions. Unlike its more contemporary examples, the editor was Serreaux, a police spy working in cooperation with the Paris police prefect. Similar instructions appeared in legitimate anarchist papers across Europe. Alongside instructions for manufacturing incendiary devices, they also gave guidance on where to place these weapons, usually around places that were highly flammable, but ultimately what mattered was: “L’action ne se conseille, ni ne se parle, ni ne s’ecrit—elle se fait.”1 Propaganda by the deed even made it into revolutionary songs, with Marie Constant ending one of her songs by saying: Maintenant la danse tragique vent une plus forte musique: Dynamitons, dynamitons.2
These anarchists were opportunists. They were happy to use any weapon. After the conviction and execution of Ravachol for a series of bombing in the 1890s, ravacholiser became a verb and “La Ravachole” became a popular tune based off “La Carmagnole”: “Vive le son d’l’explosion.”3 Propaganda of the deed became fashionable, as Ravachol evolved into a cult. The latter in turn advocated all sorts of devious plots. Servants should poison their masters. Anarchists should douse rats with gasoline and light them on fire to raze the houses of the enemy. The goal of the anarchist in the 1890s was to co-opt science for revolutionary aims in order to destroy society. The strategy of revolutionaries across the world no longer revolved around confrontation, but rather “une guerre des partisans menés de façon occulte.”4
Even with this literature in the public sphere, there was not much to show for it. As noted before, the French were the first to put propaganda by the deed into action in the 1890s, but this wave seemed to end around 1894. In Italy, by the time propaganda by the deed became central to all anarchist enterprises, the revolutionary fervor had receded in the peninsula. Some attempted to reignite the passions of their coconspirators. Between 1882 and 1884, anarchists killed a shoemaker, a police inspector, a police agent, and a moneylender, but with little to show for it. Dampening the spirit of these attacks was a tragedy: the anarchists had killed a small child in order to hide evidence, which proved repugnant for Italian society. North of Italy, others killed a pharmacist and a banker, in Strasburg and Mannheim respectively, but both seemed to be botched robberies onto which the police imputed political motives after the fact. In 1894, Italians assassinated several political figures, but these were likely acts by individuals and not planned by an organization. The only instance of a strategic assassination conducted by a group was that of King Umberto in 1900. There is evidence to suggest that Gaetano Bresci, the man who killed him, received support from an Italian anarchist group based in New Jersey.
This is to say that despite these limited outbursts of violence, there was no grand anarchist conspiracy. More than anything, the “revolution” was a product of the political imagination of various police chiefs across Europe, and while the movement provided valuable referential material to the great writers of that time (James, Conrad, Zola, and others), it did not change the established order of things. What did happen resembled the contemporary lone-wolf problem—individuals who were influenced by the literature but lacked any material or organizational support from a larger entity. In this respect, Émile Henry’s words at his trial for bombing Café Terminus seem quaintly hollow: “We ask no pity in this pitiless war which we have declared on the bourgeoisie.” It was around this time that the last true anarchist publications renounced propaganda by the deed as ineffective. It was too idealistic to hope that such activity could inspire mass uprising without any concomitant organizing by anarchists across the world. Kropotkin himself agreed to this sentiment. The Russian example again proved wanting. Explosions could destroy buildings but not institutions. Yet despite these appeals by the leading anarchist intellectuals of the 1890s, individuals still bought into the rhetoric of the 1880s and acted on it. Regardless of the nonexistence of some constituted global conspiracy to destroy the state, explosions were speech for individuals who wanted the world to hear and know their minds.
ARMS AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE: SPAIN AND THE UNITED STATES
In Europe, the nation that felt the outburst of anarchist violence for the longest period of time was undoubtedly Spain. In the 1880s, there were reports of a peasant uprising organized by an anarchist group called La Mano Negra, or the Black Hand. Whether this group was real or invented by the police to justify a crackdown in Andalusia is debatable. Nonetheless, there were anarchist revolts throughout Catalonia, afflicting Barcelona particularly badly from 1904 to 1909 and again from 1917 to 1922. These plots had a noticeable labor flavor to them. Violence seemed to follow labor disputes, either with the owners of factories or intra-syndicalist rivalries. They also included common thieves who would participate in the violence in an opportunistic fashion. These efforts were remarkably better organized than those in other parts of Europe. In 1905, there was a plot to kill King Alfonso in order to inspire a true revolutionary movement on the Iberian Peninsula. Whatever noble quality this anarchist violence had managed to create, degenerated completely during the First World War. Ángel Pestaña characterized the prewar violence as “mystical and apocalyptic idealism,” but after the war, anarchism became an excuse for score settling, avenging disputes, or fee collection among rival syndicalist groups. Anarchism seemed more of an organizing principle than the main motivator of violence in the country. Spain of course had a unique history of political violence, being the country of origin for the term guerrilla. In the early twentieth century, Spain was home to unique social conditions that made it amenable to this type of violence. This is to say that ideology mattered little for many of these disputes.
Conditions were similar in the United States. As it industrialized, there were major labor disputes. The Homestead Massacre is only one of multiple examples of the bloody fights that occurred. Organized fights began with the Molly Maguires and continued with various labor unions such as the Western Federation of Miners and the IWW. With German and Eastern European immigrants commingling with these already radicalized laborers, ideology helped inspire others to become anarchists who promoted propaganda by the deed. There were some differences, however. In 1883, the International Working People’s Association was established in Pittsburgh, and it did not advocate terrorism. The IWPA thought mass strikes and sabotage were more productive. Nonetheless, propaganda by the deed did find purchase among the laborers in Chicago.
In that midwestern city, emblematic of America’s industrialization, industrial conflicts arose continuously. Blue-collar workers railed against the owners of factories, asking for more equitable pay and for the eight-hour workday, but as the factory owners became more and more reluctant to concede, newspapers like The Alarm and the Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung were published, both of which advocated the use of terrorism. They borrowed the words of their counterparts in Europe, noting that in the same way the guillotine a century earlier had equalized capital punishment for both rich and poor, dynamite could advance their cause. They wrote pamphlets with instructions on how to use these new industrialized tools of revolution: “The Weapons of the Social Revolutionist Placed within the Reach of All.” One reader wrote to them arguing that “[dynamite] of all good stuff, this is the stuff.… It is something not very ornamental but exceedingly useful. It can be used against persons and things, it is better to use it against the former than against bricks and masonry.”
There were important ideological agitators in these circles. C. S. Griffin argued that a government required a head to function, and “by assassinating the head just as fast as a government head appeared, the government could be destroyed, and, generally speaking all governments be kept out of existence. Those least offensive to the people should be destroyed last.” These advocates of terrorism also believed it to have an important democratizing effect. Albert Parsons, the editor of The Alarm who was accused of participating in the Haymarket affair, defended the use of dynamite. “It was democratic,” he said. “It made everybody equal. It was a peacemaker, man’s best friend. As force was the law of the universe, dynamite made all men equal and therefore free.” Parsons claimed innocence in that particular incident. Apparently, the ones who did participate had been followers of Johann Most, the high priest of terrorism in America.
European immigrants continued plotting throughout the 1890s. Alexander Berkman arrived from Lithuania in 1887, when he was sixteen years old, and came to idolize Yevgeny Bazarov, G. W. F. Hegel, the idea of “liberty,” and Nikolay Chernyshevsky in that order. Inspired by these individuals and ideas, he came to view the proletariat as the only ones that mattered in society, and inverting the logic of another Eastern European émigré (Ayn Rand), he thought the owners of capital were the true parasites. Because of the latter’s control of the means of production, he believed all actions were morally justified and advisable if the goal was to change the system. Berkman compared the system to an infirm individual that required immediate surgery. As such, any capitalist who acted like a tyrant had to be removed. For Berkman, assassination attempts against these targets had to be weighed differently from blatant murder. To kill a capitalist was a noble activity. He put his words into action in July 1892 when he tried shooting Henry C. Frick of the Carnegie Steel Company, making him responsible for the denouement of the Homestead Strike. The United States was not ready for this type of conceptual tyrannicide, with most of society rejecting it outright. He was denounced in Freiheit but defended by Emma Goldman. Surprising many of their contemporaries, Johann Most actually attacked Berkman for the plot.
There is a contemporary belief that for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, terrorism was associated with the left wing and only recently has it become associated with the right. The truth is different. While certainly the left has discussed terrorism more extensively and the theoretical implications of it, the right has always used it. Terrorism in India, prior to the HSRA and others, inculcated it with religiosity through the worship of the gods Kali and Durga. It manifested clearly with the Thuggee cult, but also in the anti-cow-killing campaigns, both activities that usually included high-caste Brahmins. The Irish, while definitely having a religious element, also had a nationalist flair when it came to their terrorism campaigns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For much of this period, Irish radicals used the United States as a foreign base of operations against the British Crown and established Clan na Gael. This group did not wish to target individuals but rather symbolic objects, like buildings and other public places of power. In contrast, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, another leading Irish nationalist from the era, had no remorse about killing civilians. Likewise, the Invincibles carried out violent plots like the Phoenix Park murders in the 1880s. The Irish tried every sort of weapon, shirking doctrine or the idolatry of dynamite, like the Russians. They built submarines, Rossa plotted to gas the House of Commons, and groups tried to acquire lucifer matches and poisoned stiletto-blade knives.
The Irish adopted similar arguments to those used by Indians to justify their plots: the British had done far worse. This was the era of pronounced British colonialism throughout Africa and Asia. In 1893, during the Battle of the Shangani, the British regulars killed sixteen hundred men while only suffering four casualties through the industrial use of the Maxim gun. Given these atrocities, among others, the Irish felt they were justified in their campaign. In the 1880s, the Irish inaugurated the dynamite campaign throughout the United Kingdom. They attacked the London Underground, symbolic barracks around the country, the Liverpool town hall, and other targets. Their goal was to disrupt the daily lives of Britons, their tourist industry, and to generate panic. The Invincibles, learning from the Russians, had similar expectations that such bloody campaigns would lead to an overreaction by the Crown, which would lead to the radicalization and mobilization of the Irish. The Irish terrorists, although they lacked an ideology like the anarchists or the socialists, were quite educated and provided some very telling quotes about terrorism: “Despotism violates the moral frontier as invasion violates the geographical frontier,” one of them wrote. “To drive out the tyrant or to drive out the English is in either case to retake your territory. There comes an hour when protest no longer suffices. After philosophy there must be action. The strong hand finishes what the idea has planned. Prometheus Bound begins, Aristogeiton completes; the Encyclopaedics enlighten souls, the 6th of May electrifies them.” Or on mass psychology, they quoted Victor Hugo: “The multitude has a tendency to accept a master. Their mass deposits apathy. A mob easily ‘totalizes’ itself into obedience. Men must be aroused, pushed, shocked by the very benefits of their deliverance, their eyes wounded with the truth, light thrown in terrible handfuls.”5
With this type of wisdom, intense dialogue and discussion were inevitable among the Irish nationalist leaders. It was generally agreed among them that their cause was just. The only matter that needed to be settled were tactics. John Devoy criticized Rossa and his dynamite campaign as a foolish enterprise that depicted the Irish as ignorant individuals incapable of comprehending the consequences of their actions. Yet, despite these criticisms, he maintained an eye-for-an-eye mentality toward violence committed against the Irish by the British Crown. In 1881, he made a direct threat against the British government, saying he would kill a minister for each Irish person killed by the Crown. This sentiment was shared widely by others, including Rossa. In 1886, Devoy personally threatened British ministers, telling them one would die for every skirmisher executed, and later started fires in the cities where each execution occurred. It is likely that Devoy’s attempt to avoid reprisals was motivated by his concern about the weakness of the Irish cause in the face of concerted British oppression. He most likely thought it impossible to win given their current situation. This was the position taken by Charles Stewart Parnell, who publicly rebuked terrorism, but in private, he held a different opinion. Constitutional reforms were most likely the best way to achieve Irish independence, and this could certainly be buttressed by clandestine murders.