Proud Tower - Barbara W. Tuchman [65]
Some time later, in August, 1897, Premier Canovas went for a summer holiday to Santa Agueda, a spa in the Basque mountains. During tranquil days there, he noticed a fair-haired well-mannered fellow guest at the hotel who spoke Spanish with an Italian accent and several times saluted him politely. Canovas was moved to ask his secretary if he knew who the strange young man was and found he was registered as correspondent from the Italian newspaper Il Popolo. One morning as the Premier was sitting with his wife on the terrace reading his newspaper, the young Italian suddenly appeared, pulled a revolver from his pocket, and at three yards’ distance fired three shots into Canovas’ body, killing him instantly, Mme Canovas, in a passion of rage and grief, flew at the man still holding the revolver and struck him in the face with her fan, crying, “Murderer! Assassin!”
“I am not an assassin,” replied the Italian sternly. “I am the Avenger of my Anarchist comrades. I have nothing to do with you, Madame.”
Upon arrest and examination, his real name proved to be Michel Angiollilo. When in the Italian Army, he had served three terms in the disciplinary battalion for insubordination. On release from the Army he became a printer, a trade with an affinity for Anarchism, either because the Anarchist seeks contact with the printed word or because contact with the printed word leads to Anarchism. In any case Angiollilo was shortly sentenced to eighteen months in prison for printing subversive literature. In 1895, following a futile attempt, along with some Italian Anarchist comrades, to set up a clandestine press in Marseilles, he went to Barcelona and left after the Corpus Christi explosion. He drifted to Belgium and then London, where he bought a revolver with the intention of killing the Spanish Premier for “ordering the mass torture and execution of Anarchists.” He returned to Spain, stalked Canovas in Madrid but failed to find his opportunity, followed him to Santa Agueda and found it there. Tried by court-martial a week later, he attempted to expound his Anarchist principles, and when silenced by the Court, shouted, “I must justify myself!” but was not allowed to speak. At his execution by the garrote he refused religious rites and maintained an unbroken sangfroid.
The European press erupted in agitated demand for a concerted effort to suppress the “mad dogs” of Anarchism. There was a sense that the loss of a man of Canovas’ stature could be grave for Spain if not, as the Nation of New York predicted, a “national disaster.” In fact, his death proved to be one of those accidents that give a decisive jerk to the course of events. With Canovas gone, the Liberals succeeded in taking office and soon retreated before the wild howls of Hearst-engendered indignation against “Butcher” Weyler then reverberating from the United States. General Weyler was relieved just when he was close to restoring order and the Cuban insurrection flared up again, providing the imperialists in the United States with the excuse for the most deliberately manufactured war of the century. Had Canovas lived, the excuse might not have been available.
For his death there was a reason; for two of the three that followed within the next three years there was none whatever. They were the product partly of Anarchist propaganda, which supplied the suggestion, but even more of public excitement over Anarchist deeds, which gave