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By Root 834 0

were anarchist supporters. The poet Laurent Tailharde shocked a literary supper when he exclaimed: ‘What do the victims matter, as long as the gesture is beautiful?’ - a view he probably revised when a random anarchist bomb took out one of his eyes in a restaurant. The execution of Vaillant allegedly provoked the young anarchist Emile Henry to detonate a bomb in the Cafe Terminus in the Gare Saint-Lazare, killing one person and wounding twenty. He chose this target after failing to get in to a theatre that was sold out, and after inspecting a restaurant with only a scattering of diners. The station cafe was full of commuting workers, a fact that did not disturb the workers’ advocate unduly. Henry was a cold-blooded killer whose avowed intent was to murder as many people as possible. At his trial he confessed to a murderous moralism with his infamous remark ‘there are no innocent bourgeois’: ‘I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that henceforth their pleasures would not be untouched, that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would rock violently on its pedestal until the final shock that would cast it down among filth and blood.’

That resentful desire to inflict chaos on ordinary people going about unremarkable lives would become a recurrent terrorist motive; what the victims of terrorists usually have in common is often overlooked. Henry warned the jury that ‘It [anarchism] is everywhere, which makes it impossible to contain. It will end by killing you.’ He was guillotined early on the morning of 21 May 1894. In retaliation for his refusal to grant Henry and Vaillant pardons, president Marie François Sadi Carnot was stabbed in the heart by an Italian anarchist Santo Jeronimo Caserio as he rode through Lyons in his carriage.

This was the first in a spate of assassinations of heads of state that made the years 1894-1901 more lethal for rulers than any other in modern history, forcing them to use bodyguards for the first time. Following the killing of Carnot, the prime minister of Spain was assassinated by Italian anarchists in 1897, in retaliation for confirming the death sentences passed on anarchists who had been rounded up and tortured after a bomb flew into a Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona. He was followed by Elizabeth empress of Austria, stabbed by an Italian anarchist drifter in 1898; king Umberto of Italy, shot dead in Monza by an Italian-American anarchist Gaetano Bresci in 1900; and president McKinley, assassinated in 1901. McKinley’s assassin was an Ohio farmboy turned factory worker called Leon Czolgosz, although he sometimes used the aliases John Doe and Fred Nobody. He was inspired by Emma Goldman’s passionate espousal of anarchism, although the direct inspiration to shoot McKinley at the Pan-American Expositon in Buffalo came from his reading of a newspaper report of Bresci’s shooting of king Umberto that July. Czolgosz approached McKinley outside the Temple of Music, where he shot him at close range; one bullet was deflected by the president’s breast bone, but the second went so deep into his abdomen that surgeons could not recover it. The president slowly bled to death. A search revealed that Czolgosz not only had a folded newspaper clipping in his pocket of Umberto’s murder, but that he had used the same .32-calibre Iver Johnson revolver as Bresci. Narrowly surviving the beating he received from McKinley’s security officers as they pummelled him to the floor, Czolgosz went to the electric chair after a trial that lasted eight-and-a-half hours from jury selection to verdict.

In 1892 Alexander Berkman had been inspired by Emma Goldman to stab Henry Clay Frick, the managing director of Carnegie Steel, in Frick’s Pittsburgh offices. Henry’s attack on commuters nursing a beer or glass of wine had already been preceded by the bombing of Barcelona’s Liceo Opera House during a performance of Rossini’s William Tell that killed more than thirty people, one of several bomb attacks in major European cities. The assassin chose the opera house as a target because it seemed to epitomise