The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

As a precaution, the carriage was returning to the palace by an unaccustomed route. Suddenly, there was a tremendous explosion. The carriage rocked, and its door was blown in, but the tsar was unharmed. Shakily, he looked out, and saw a man and a boy lying in the road, both bleeding. Alexander was a kindly man; he got out of the carriage to see whether they were badly injured. As he did so, there was another tremendous explosion – so great that it smashed the windows many streets away. The tsar was hurled on to his face, both his legs shattered. The bomb had been made of nitro-glycerine enclosed in a glass ball, and it had killed the assassin and twenty bystanders. Fragments of bloody flesh hung from trees and lampposts. The tsar was rushed back to his palace; an hour later, he died.

The assassin belonged to a group who called themselves Narodniki, or the Party of the People’s Will. They were followers of the revolutionary Michael Bakunin – who had been Marx’s chief rival for leadership of the First International and had been out-manoeuvred by Marx. Bakunin, in turn, was a follower of Pierre Joseph Proudhon – Marx’s pet detestation and the man who invented the phrase ‘property is theft’. It was Proudhon, in fact, who had coined the word ‘anarchy’, meaning the opposite of hierarchy: no government. But as this came to be used as a synonym for chaos, its devotees preferred to use the form ‘anarchism’. Bakunin had died in 1876, a disillusioned and disappointed man – ‘a Columbus who had never seen his America’ as his friend Alexander Herzen put it.

The Marxists believed that socialism would come about of its own accord, as the rotten structure of capitalism collapsed. The anarchists were less optimistic. They were firmly convinced of the basic goodness of human nature, of man’s ability to live in peace with his fellows in an ideal world. But in the meantime, power was in the hands of kings and police chiefs. And, since they were determined to hold on to it, the only way to bring about the Revolution was to ‘remove’ these enemies of the people. Even the gentle Prince Peter Kropotkin, who had been converted to anarchism out of the goodness of his heart, had begun to preach bombs and bullets in the late 1870s: ‘A single deed is better propaganda than a thousand pamphlets.’ And in the 1870s, the anarchists had made four unsuccessful attempts on crowned heads: two on Wilhelm I of Germany, one on the king of Spain and one on the king of Italy. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II was their first major success. It was also a signal for a period of total repression in Russia. The police swooped; revolutionaries were arrested by the dozen, and either hanged or thrown into the Peter and Paul fortress. Censorship was reintroduced. The new tsar, Alexander III, detested the very word reform, and made a determined attempt to put back the clock to the days of Peter the Great. But it meant that he became virtually a prisoner in his own palace. He died prematurely in 1894, and was succeeded by his son Nicholas II, who was to be the last of the tsars.

Anarchism arrived in America in the late 1870s, and the city where it found most response was Chicago, a minor trading post that had turned into a major city overnight with the wealth from blast furnaces and cattle stockyards. It was full of immigrants, and the new entrepreneurs, true to the methods of their British counterparts, paid starvation wages. (Even three decades later, conditions were still so bad that an accurate description of the Chicago stockyards in Upton Sinclair’s novel The Jungle (1906) shocked the whole nation.) The result was that the workers tried to form trade unions, the bosses tried to break their strikes with blacklegs, and Chicago was in continual industrial ferment. A German immigrant, August Spies, founded a German-language anarchist newspaper called the Arbeiter-Zeitung – Workers Times – and urged the workers to stand up for their rights. He became particularly embittered when his brother was shot dead by a policeman for ‘creating a disturbance’ at a picnic, and cried in his newspaper: ‘Revenge! Revenge! Workingmen to arms!’ There was mob violence on 3 May 1886, when police and strikers clashed in front of the McCormick Harvester Company, and the following morning, the Arbeiter-Zeitung announced that there would be a mass meeting in the Haymarket that evening at 7.30. By 8 o’clock, three thousand people had assembled, and were listening to an inflammatory speech by Spies, urging them to arm themselves to meet the aggression of government hirelings. When another anarchist began to shout: ‘Kill the law, exterminate the capitalists, and do it tonight,’ the police decided it was time to intervene. The police chief ordered the mob to disperse. At that moment, a large black bomb went whizzing through the air, hissing like a skyrocket, and there was an explosion that could be heard far away. The police began to shoot. So did the crowd. When the mob finally dispersed, the anarchists carrying away their dead and wounded, it was found that seven policemen had been killed by the explosion. The police swooped on the office of the Arbeiter-Zeitung and five men were arrested, including Spies. Two days later, the police located a bomb factory; one of the men they arrested claimed that the anarchists had planned to bomb all the Chicago police stations simultaneously. The bomb maker, Louis Lingg, was also arrested. In August, eight anarchists were tried; seven were sentenced to death, the other to fifteen years in prison.

The verdict was obviously a miscarriage of justice in the sense that no one knew who had thrown the bomb. Splinters removed from dead policemen suggest that it was of the same type as those manufactured by Lingg. But there was no proof that any of the eight had been in any way responsible for the deaths of the seven policemen. However, the jury was in no mood for this kind of legal hairsplitting; as far as they were concerned, the American way of life was being threatened by homicidal maniacs who were taking advantage of American freedom of speech. Lingg succeeded in committing suicide in his cell with a capsule of fulminate – the explosive that detonates a bullet – and four others, including Spies, were hanged the next day. Lingg had written with his own blood ‘Long live anarchy!’ in his cell. The two other condemned men had their sentences commuted to prison terms.

Now that anarchism had martyrs, the movement became more powerful. Their basic mythology – that rulers and ‘bosses’ were criminals who had robbed the working man – was pure ‘magical’ thinking, a thin rationalisation of the ‘xenophobia’ of primitive tribes. Their basic philosophy – that when the rulers had been murdered, men would live together in perfect harmony – was completely untenable. We have seen how the Fielding brothers halted the crime wave in eighteenth-century London with a few Bow Street runners and horse patrols, and how it instantly started up again when the patrols were withdrawn. But the anarchists insisted that police were only necessary because of poverty, and that as soon as the Revolution had destroyed all authority, there would be more than enough of everything for everybody; people would only have to go and help themselves from the goods taken from the rich. As to work, five hours a day would be enough to support everybody in comfort… No one even suggested that if everybody was allowed to help themselves, the warehouses containing the goods of the rich would soon be empty; that would have been regarded as a libel on the nature of the poor. But Bernard Shaw sounded a note of realism in a Fabian pamphlet when he asked how, if human nature was so perfect, the oppression and corruption had arisen in the first place.

Anarchist disturbances came to France in the early 1890s. On May Day 1891, three anarchists were arrested for taking part in a demonstration and badly beaten up by the police. At their trial, the prosecuting attorney demanded the death sentence – an absurd demand, since the men were only accused of incitement to violence. The judge was more reasonable; he acquitted one, and sentenced the others to three and five years respectively. In the following year, there was an explosion at the home of the judge, which demolished a stairway but fortunately injured no one. Two weeks later, the home of the prosecuting lawyer was blown up. A left-wing professor who was arrested after the first explosion – and no doubt subjected to the vigorous interrogation methods of the French police – admitted that he had planned the attack, but said that it had been carried out by a man named Ravachol. This Ravachol, it seemed, was already known to the police – not as a political revolutionary, but as a burglar and suspected murderer. His real name was Konigstein, and he was believed to have killed four people – an old man and three old women – in the course of robberies.