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settled into agreeable domesticity after the initial difficulties of exile, for in October 1850 Heinzen and his family returned to New York. He reverted to editing and lecturing, settling in Louisville, Cincinnati, and finally back in New York, where the family’s chronic money troubles were partially alleviated by Mrs Heinzen’s millinery and needlework trade. In early 1860 they moved to Boston, where they lodged for the next twenty years in the home of a fellow radical, a Polish woman doctor who founded the New England Hospital for Women and Children. There Heinzen enjoyed something like peace of mind, tending his garden and growing vines to remind him of his native Rhineland. Having enjoyed robust health all his life, in late 1879 he suffered an apoplectic stroke and slowly died.2

Heinzen’s younger German contemporary Johann Most was more a man of action than a theoretician. For anarchists of his persuasion, violence was attractive because it was unencumbered with theories that seemed designed to frustrate action. It hardly needs to be said that many anarchists - notably the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy - were opposed to violence, thinking there were other routes to the federalism and mutualism their creed desired.

Born in 1846 in Bavaria, Most experienced terrible facial disfigurement at a young age when a disease resulting from parental neglect was treated by incompetent surgeons. He became a bookbinder as well as a committed Social Democrat, being sentenced in Austria in 1870 to five years’ imprisonment for high treason. He had played a leading role in a rowdy demonstration before Vienna’s parliament building. This was the first of many spells in jail that Most underwent on two continents; like Kropotkin, he became something of an authority on comparative penology. After his early release, he caused further provocation by going about with a group of ‘Jacobins’ threatening the extermination of ‘mankind’s’ enemies.

Deported to Germany, Most quickly became one of the leading figures in the Social Democratic Party. In 1874 he was elected a member of the Reichstag, which he attended by day, while editing socialist newspapers at night. His rhetorical intemperance meant that the sergeant at arms frequently had to eject him from the chamber where even his own comrades dreaded his interjections. In 1874 he was sentenced to eighteen months in Plötzensee prison for inciting violence during a speech commemorating the Paris Commune. In 1878, Bismarck’s introduction of anti-socialist laws, following two failed attempts on the life of the Kaiser, meant that Most had to flee abroad. He chose England; as the Berlin Political Police claimed, ‘The whole of European revolutionary agitation is directed from London,’ in ominous anticipation of the delusional laxities of contemporary ‘Londonistan’. Most founded a paper, called Freiheit, whose revolutionary stridency embarrassed German Social Democrats trying to negotiate the twilight of legality and illegality that Bismarck had consigned them to by allowing them a presence in the Reichstag while suppressing their larger organisation and its propaganda organs. The German Social Democrat leadership began to mock Most as ‘General Boom Boom’, slinking about London with his red scarf and wide-brimmed black hat, a dagger in one hand and a pistol in the other. The Party leadership duly expelled their erstwhile comrade, who reacted by moving from being a socialist revolutionary to an anarchist-Communist under the influence of people he met in London, though his grasp of anarchist theory was shaky as he did not have French. He became a convinced advocate of ‘propaganda by the deed’ or as he vividly put it: ‘Shoot, burn, stab, poison and bomb’. In England, his intemperance was ignored - much to the annoyance of foreign authorities - until he responded to the assassination of Alexander II (‘Triumph, Triumph’) by calling for the death of ‘a monarch a month’.

At the instigation of a German teacher shocked by his paper, Most was arrested and charged with seditious libel. Convicted by an English jury,