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- Author: James Crossland x
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In the dying light of the nineteenth century, the world came to know and fear terrorism. This was a time of progress and dread, in which breakthroughs in communications and weapons were made, political reforms were implemented and waves of immigration bolstered the populations of ever-expanding cities. This era also simmered with political rage and social inequalities, which drove nationalists, nihilists, anarchists and republicans to dynamite cities and discharge pistols into the bodies of presidents, police chiefs and emperors. This wave of terrorism was seized upon by an outrage-hungry press that peddled hysteria, conspiracy theories and fake news in response, convincing many readers that they were living through the end of days. Against the backdrop of this world of fear and disorder, The Rise of Devils chronicles the journeys of the people who evoked this panic and created modern terrorism – revolutionary philosophers, cult leaders, criminals and charlatans, as well as the paranoid police chiefs and unscrupulous spies who tried to thwart them. In doing so, this book explains how radicals once thought just in their causes became, as Pope Pius IX denounced them, little more than ‘devils risen up from hell’.
As this chapter explains, the real ‘international brotherhood’ of the 1860s was not spearheaded by nihilists but by Fenians – Irish-American radicals who sought Ireland’s emancipation from the British Empire. The New York-based chief of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), James Stephens, forged relationships with Marx’s International Workingmen’s Association in London, the Franco-American mercenary Gustave Cluseret and the Swiss republican Octave Fariola. With the help of these collaborators, the IRB launched a series of ambitious attacks in 1866 and 1867 in Canada, Ireland and England. The attacks failed but in the process a policeman was shot and a prison in London was bombed by Fenians, prompting public outrage and accusations in the press that the IRB had turned to terrorism, with one newspaper claiming that the Irish republican movement now ‘reeks of the dreaded violence and depravity of the Russian nihilists’. The lesson that targeted violence could alert the British public to Ireland’s plight was learned, prompting a new generation of Fenians to consider terrorism as the way forward in their struggle.
Opening with the act that started the age of modern terrorism – the bombing of Emperor Napoleon III’s carriage in 1858 by the Italian nationalist Felice Orsini – this chapter explores how Stieber’s theories informed repressive police responses across France to the threat of terrorism. Orsini did not succeed in killing Napoleon, but having deployed a new form of shrapnel bomb that killed eight people and wounded 156 others , he and his accomplices did grip Paris with fear. This influenced Napoleon’s decision to go to war in Italy in 1859, with the aim of ensuring that Italian terrorists would no longer threaten him or his realm. Martyred via guillotine before the guns started firing, Orsini was lauded by radicals the world over, who noted how his single act of targeted violence had brought an emperor to heel and marched thousands of men to war.
This chapter explores the short history of Hell’s successor organisation, Narodnaya Rasprava (People’s Revenge), and the partnership formed between its leader, Sergei Nechaev, and the foremost anarchist of the 1860s, Mikhail Bakunin. A psychopathic narcissist who inveigled university students into his schemes, Nechaev was doted on by Bakunin, who saw the younger man as key to the success of his ‘International Brotherhood’ – a semi-mythical alliance of radicals from across Europe. Together, the two unleashed a propaganda campaign in Russia designed to bring recruits into People’s Revenge. This was complemented by Nechaev publishing the Catechism of a Revolutionary, a terrorist manual that went on to influence violent radicals from Russia’s Socialist Revolutionaries to Al Qaeda. Central to the Catechism was the idea that revolutionaries should be unfeeling, merciless and ‘doomed’ to death in the name of their cause. This idea disturbed one of Nechaev’s followers, whom the People’s Revenge leader murdered, souring his relations with Bakunin and undoing their plot to assault tsardom. Still, the fear of the Bakunin–Nechaev alliance and the so-called International Brotherhood continued to plague police thoughts across Europe.
As the American Civil War drew to a close, in distant Russia a group of nihilists – ascetic extremists – sent one of their number to Geneva to acquire allies and plans for the Orsini bomb. Operating under the menacing name Hell, this terrorist group’s purpose was to unleash what some journalists were now calling ‘Orsini warfare’ on Russia, with the aim to murder the tsar and topple his regime. Grand as this goal was, Hell’s leader, Nikolai Ishutin, was a fantasist who filled the heads of his young followers with dreams of murdering tsarist officials and blowing up palaces. None of this was attempted, as Ishutin spent more time urging Hell’s members to deprive themselves of food and commit to self-mutilation . From the depths of this bleak cult arose Dmitry Karakozov, a disillusioned university student who tried to shoot Tsar Alexander in 1866. Karakozov’s attempt failed and the other members of Hell were swept up in a brutal police dragnet, the approach to which was informed by the tsar’s secret police – the Third Section – believing Ishutin’s lie that Hell was ‘an international gang of usurpers and criminals ’ with ties to radicals in Europe. Absurd as this claim was, it inspired another nihilist to rise up in St Petersburg and finish what Ishutin started.
This chapter tracks Orsini’s influence in the United States in the years prior to the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. The radical émigré and promoter of terrorism Karl Heinzen applauded the spread of the ‘Orsini disease’ into America, seeing terrorist violence as an element of the bitter national debate over slavery. He was not alone. In the late 1850s, agitators on both sides of the debate drew inspiration from Orsini. Some, like the abolitionists John Brown and George Lawrence Jnr, saw connections between Orsini’s efforts to free Italians and the struggle to break the chains of America’s slaves. Pro-slavers like John Wilkes Booth and Cipriani Ferrandini also admired Orsini, seeing his struggle for Italian independence as synonymous with the South’s opposition to Abraham Lincoln’s emancipatory policies. In 1859, Brown led an armed assault on the federal arsenal at Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, prompting press coverage that linked the raid to the ‘instructions of radicals from abroad’. Ferrandini supposedly hatched a plot to kill Lincoln in 1861, citing Orsini as his inspiration. This plan was thwarted by the private detective Allan Pinkerton, but still the tension in America remained, and with it clear evidence that the ‘Orsini disease’ had spread terrorism to the United States.
The Prussian spymaster Wilhelm Stieber spent the 1850s warning anyone who would listen that a wave of revolutionary violence was about to flood over Europe. Obsessed with the idea that the failed revolutions of 1848 would be reprised, Stieber waged a one-man war on radicalism, which included the use of fake news, agents provocateurs and his accusation that Karl Marx was organising a violent, continent-wide uprising. He was eventually discredited for corruption and spreading falsehoods, and was put on trial in 1860. However, Stieber’s paranoid belief that a revolutionary conspiracy was active in Europe and that it would use terrorist tactics to challenge the authority of emperors and kings remained, influencing police perceptions of radical threats for decades to come.
As anarchism turned away from ‘hot-head’ violence towards collective political action, terrorism continued to flourish across the world. In Russia, the nihilist tactics of old were studied by the Socialist Revolutionaries, who unleashed a bloody campaign in the early 1900s. They were joined by anarchists, far-right anti-Semites and practitioners of ‘motiveless terrorism’, who adhered to no ideology or political goal, but simply wanted to inflict death and chaos on Russia. As this wave of terrorism reached its apogee in the land of the tsars, insurgents in India and China took instruction from French anarchists and Russian nihilists, from whom they acquired knowledge in explosives manufacture and conspiratorial planning. This diffusion of terrorist knowledge led to bombing campaigns by Anushilan Samiti in India, and the attempted assassination of the Qing regent by Wang Jingwei in Beijing. These and other acts of terrorism perpetrated across the world were not the products of a global conspiracy nor a transnationally shared belief in anarchist ideals. Rather, these attacks were the products of the decades of terrorist knowledge, myths and histories that had developed since Orsini’s bombing of 1858, the sum of which was a terrorist milieu from which any violent radical could borrow for whatever purpose – personal, political or otherwise. By the early 1900s, therefore, terrorism was normalised across the globe.
Faced with a threat that seemed global and invisible, police chiefs like the notorious Okhrana head Peter Rachkovsky and the Scotland Yard detective William Melville pursued counter-terrorism policies that were as outlandish as they were often illegal. This, combined with the panic across Europe created by anarchist terrorism, led to a series of terrorist scare works of fiction, such as Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent and Edward Douglas Fawcett’s Hartmann the Anarchist. The anxiety over terrorism reflected in these and other works only heightened when, in 1898, Elizabeth of Austria was murdered in Switzerland. This prompted the first International Anti-anarchist Congress later that year, at which representatives from police forces across Europe sketched out a plan to attack terrorism by eliminating the ideology that fed it – anarchism. By the dawn of the twentieth century, however, terrorism had evolved beyond anarchism, nihilism or Fenianism and had become an ideology of its own.
This chapter shows the folly of the police pursuing the IWMA–Communard conspiracy theory, by chronicling the spate of assassination attempts carried out across Europe in 1878. Attempts to link the shootings and stabbings to the supposed conspiracy denied the reality that Europe’s radicals were fragmenting rather than coming together in the 1870s, their allegiances split over whether to follow Marx’s vision of a communist revolution or Bakunin’s talk of an anarchist utopia. Beneath this schism, individual assassins and the world’s first terrorist organisation, Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), emerged to practise a new form of terrorist violence. This trend reached its crescendo in Russia in 1881, when People’s Will carried out the era’s most spectacular terrorist attack – the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by a suicide bomber. This promoted an overhaul of Russia’s secret police and clumsy efforts to create a reactionary conspiracy against terrorism, in the form of the nationalist sect, the Holy Brotherhood. Neither this group nor the efforts of the tsar’s new secret police – the Okhrana – could stop the spread of terrorism in the 1880s, as People’s Will provided inspiration similar to that which Orsini had given radicals in the 1860s. The key to this inspiration was the tool by which People’s Will had taken the Holy Tsar’s life – dynamite.