Anarchism

“Propaganda by Deed”

Anarchism was a product of the miserable social, economic, and political conditions of working people in the 19th century. Industrial development and significantly greater mobility brought rapid urban growth and the expansion of the gap in wealth and geography between social classes. Where working and living conditions were intolerable and hunger claimed many lives, anarchist ideas found adherents.

Anarchism was the first revolutionary movement in history that not only criticized authority but also agitated for immediate and radical social change. Anarchists, however, are stymied by their very concept of social relations—organizing is anathema. Thus, with a theoretical prohibition against large group action, Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (1814–1876) made the proposal for “propaganda by deed,” the most extreme method of struggle. He thought that individuals or small groups of people should kill those who represented an existing social order, causing such dread and horror that the masses would spontaneously revolt and overthrow the state itself. Similarly, German radical thinker Karl Heinzen theorized in an 1848 essay called “Der Mord” (“Murder”) that all forms of violence (including not only murder but suicide) are both justified and necessary in revolutionary struggles.

Bakunin's ideas found many followers. During the last quarter of the 19th century and before the outbreak of World War I, an epidemic of terrorist attacks spread from Europe all over the world; the attacks included the attempted assassination of German emperor Wilhelm I in 1878; the attempt on the life of the German princess in 1883; the assassinations of General Martinez Campos in Barcelona, Spain, in 1892, of President Sari Carnot of France in 1894, of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary in 1898, of King Humbert I of Italy in 1900, of U.S. president [Page 29]William McKinley in 1901, and of Prime Minister Canalejas y Mendez of Spain in 1912.

Anarchists demonstrate in Chicago on May Day, 1887.

Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division (LC-USZ62-69545).

To fulfill their wish to have the state wither away, some devoted anarchists began to attack institutions and organizations that represented the “false” values of bourgeois society. In 1882, a bomb exploded in a popular music hall in Lyons, France; in 1886 Charles Gallo threw a bottle of vitriol and fired a revolver into the crowd of brokers in the Paris stock exchange. Auguste Vaillante detonated a bomb in the Chamber of Deputies in Paris in 1893 (no one was killed); Vaillante was sentenced to death and executed. A year later, Emile Henry, in an act of retaliation for the execution of Vaillante, deposited a bomb in the Café Terminus, where shopkeepers, clerks, and even some workers were drinking and listening to a band. Twenty people were wounded, one of whom later died. The majority of anarchists condemned terrorist actions that would cause damage and death to so many people, but such uncompromising individuals as Henry would explain their position by their total disdain of the lives of the bourgeoisie.

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