Assassins against the Old Order: Italian Anarchist Violence in Fin de Siècle Europe by Nunzio Pernicone and Fraser Ottanelli (review)

In this excellent volume, Nunzio Pernicone and Fraser Ottanelli track the historical, economic, and political factors that gave rise to the spate of violent attentats conducted by Italian anarchists in the late nineteenth century. Pernicone and Ottanelli forcefully make the case that—contra traditional historiographies that lay the responsibility for Italian anarchist violence firmly at the door of Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and other anarchist thinkers—the violence of the Italian anarchist tradition was an inheritor of a different intellectual tradition entirely. Italian anarchists "had nothing to learn about violence from their Russian mentor" Bakunin, Pernicone and Ottanelli argue. Instead, they were inheritors of a violent legacy "imbedded in the revolutionary traditions of the Risorgimento" (19)—that is, the tactics employed by republican figures such as Giuseppe Mazzini during Italian unification. Rather than fanning the flames of revolutionary fervor, the ideological clout of Russian anarchists in fact had little to do with the development of Italian anarchist violence in the fin de siècle.

In defense of that thesis, Pernicone and Ottanelli argue that anarchist political violence in nineteenth-century Italy experienced three distinct, if overlapping, phases, each with different methods and motivations. The first phase constitutes "propaganda of the deed" as Carlo Pisacane described it in Saggio sulla rivoluzione: instances of small-scale guerilla warfare intended to galvanize the populace into wider insurrectionary activity. This was the preferred method of Errico Malatesta (a close friend of Bakunin) and other Mazzinians that had converted to anarchism. However, by the 1880s, an important shift had taken place. Many Italian anarchists, pessimistic in the wake of the failed insurrections of the first phase, began to valorize individual acts of revolutionary violence. These "antiorganisationists," as they became known, no longer sought to encourage agrarian and industrial workers into revolution; instead, their attentats were for the most part directed towards destroying public infrastructure that possessed symbolic significance.

In this manner, attentats of the second phase operated "principally as a means of retaliation," in the words of Pernicone and Ottanelli. Instead of trying to help galvanize the population into revolutionary activity, these acts of violence had less complex motivations—they were "extreme measures of protest and resistance against authoritarian and repressive government" (56). Pernicone and Ottanelli claim that it is this retaliatory character that most clearly differentiates Italian anarchist violence in the fin de siècle from the anarchism of Bakunin and Kropotkin. Unlike the ideologically motivated violence endorsed by Bakunin and Kropotkin, the violence of Italian anarchists was motivated by social and economic pressures: retributive acts of defiance against a repressive and hostile regime. This retaliatory character becomes particularly obvious when Pernicone and Ottanelli move to the third phase of Italian anarchist violence—beginning in the 1890s and continuing into the early twentieth century, the target of anarchist violence moved from buildings to people.

These political assassinations provide much of the structure for the book. Each attentat—beginning with the failed assassination of Italian Prime Minister Francesco Crispi in 1894, and moving through the successful assassinations of President Sadi Carnot of France in 1894, Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo of Spain in 1897, Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, and King Umberto of Italy in 1900—is provided with a biographical study of both the assassin and the person assassinated, providing a compelling picture of the ways in which political repression, economic inequality, and anarchist violence were deeply and densely intertwined. Indeed, in pointing out how little anarchist ideology served to motivate most of these assassinations (the exception being Luigi Lucheni, the assassin of Empress Elizabeth), Pernicone and Ottanelli make clear how little of the violence was motivated by the ideological stances offered by Bakunin and Kropotkin. Instead, it was the Risorgimento tradition of tyrannicide that directly informed the retributive actions of Italian anarchists in...