The Dynamite Club: How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror (16 page)

Italian anarchists, of whom there were several hundred among the five thousand Italians living in London, led the way in activism. Many lived in Soho (a prime location for the down-and-out), Holborn, Whitechapel, or Clerkenwell (northeast of Bloomsbury), or around Fitzroy Square. Extremely poor, they were squeezed together in miserable housing. Many Italian anarchists worked, when they could, in the trades they had learned in Italy, particularly as shoemakers, tailors, or waiters; some taught Italian. One Italian priest noted that he feared the Italian secret societies and that, of the three thousand Italians living in his parish, only about twelve hundred went to church.

More interested in the philosophy of anarchism, the German anarchists seemed less dangerous because few were tempted by "propaganda by the deed." They were followed in number by the Russians, the Italians, the French, the Belgians, the Dutch, and the Spanish. Although drawn from a variety of countries, the anarchists tended to stay in the same neighborhoods, seeking the solidarity of like-minded souls, something to eat, and perhaps even the possibility of a job.

Great Britain had suffered terrorist attacks from the Fenians, the Irish nationalist organization, but there were few British anarchists, despite the publication of the anarchist newspaper
Commonweal
(which began in 1885) and Kropotkin's
Freedom
(which debuted the following year). They included David Nicoll, who wrote "The Anarchists are 'criminals,' 'vermin,' 'gallows carriers.' Well, shower hard names upon us! Hunt us down like mad dogs! Strangle us like you have done our comrades [in Spain], Shoot us down as you did the strikers at Fourmies, and then be surprised if your houses are shattered with dynamite." After eighteen months in prison, he continued to write and publish on behalf of anarchism. After one bombing in which innocent people were killed, he wrote that he could not "feel the least pity for those who, living in luxury and splendor, never give a thought to those on whose labors their blissful existence is built."

Immigration played a large role in this "first wave" of modern terrorism, as political refugees moved from one country to another during the closing decades of the nineteenth century—particularly to those places willing to provide sanctuary, notably Great Britain, Switzerland, and the free city of Tangier in North Africa, as well as Egypt. Immigrants provided recruits to the anarchist cause. Italian anarchism was carried to Argentina by immigrants and temporary migrants, including the "swallows"—seasonal workers who returned home each year to Italy. One song sung by Italian anarchists included the line "The entire world is my country." In Europe, only Russia required a passport for entry.

Indeed, the rapid improvement in transportation (of news and goods and people) was largely responsible for the internationalization of anarchism. Shipping lines stretched across oceans, making Barcelona, Marseille, and Buenos Aires important anarchist hubs. Anarchists also found havens in the United States, Argentina, Mexico, Cuba, Brazil, Persia, the Ottoman territories in the Balkans, China, Japan, India, the Philippines, Egypt, and Ethiopia. Russian anarchists operated in France, Belgium, Austria, Japan, and Hong Kong, as well as in Great Britain. Their French counterparts could be found in Spain, Argentina, and even Ethiopia; German anarchists showed up in Britain, the United States, and Australia. The burgeoning popular press of the 1880s carried word of attacks and the ensuing police repression across the world, drawing ever greater numbers to the cause.

In Great Britain, terrorism and the presence—permanent or temporary—of foreign nationals became linked in the popular imagination. During the 1870s, political refugee clubs in London grew in number, and by the time of the Congress of Socialist Revolutionaries and Anarchists in London in 1881, a secret "black international" (the color was derived from the anarchist flag) was rumored to be planning attacks throughout Europe. During the 1880s, immigration to London increased, particularly as Jews fled persecution in the Russian Empire. There were anarchists among them. The steady stream of immigrants generated xenophobia even in this World City, accentuated by a fear that the newly arrived might convert British workers to socialism or anarchism.

The Russian, French, Italian, Belgian, and Spanish governments, among others, viewed the anarchists in London with consternation and alarm, believing that London had become the center of a worldwide anarchist conspiracy. They resented how Britain tolerated the presence of dissidents and gave asylum to political refugees unless they stood accused of a specific crime. After the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881, French and Russian officials pressured the British police to adopt a more aggressive attitude and urged politicians to pass more restrictive laws, but the British government rejected these overtures, viewing them as an attempt to meddle in Britain's domestic affairs. Continental governments complained that British authorities refused to cooperate in the surveillance of anarchists. When in 1891 the Italian ambassador triumphantly showed Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, an admission ticket for a dance sponsored by the anarchist Autonomy Club to raise money for anarchist propaganda in Italy, the Italian hoped that the Briton would at last grasp the gravity of the threat. But Salisbury dismissed the man, telling him that dancing seemed an unlikely way to start a revolution.

But anarchists in London were in fact being watched. The Special Branch of Scotland Yard, created in 1883 to prevent Fenian bombings, had by the late 1880s turned its attention to foreign anarchists in that city. As it would after World War I, the Special Branch coordinated the policing of anti-colonialists in Britain, the lands that constituted its empire, and other countries. Agents referred to themselves as "Anarchist-hunter [s]" and infiltrated anarchist groups. The officers of Scotland Yard knew well that they had to watch the most prominent anarchists in London themselves and not merely rely on information provided by agents, many of whom were themselves foreigners trying to make ends meet. Knowing that they were the targets of surveillance strengthened the solidarity and determination of refugee anarchists living in London, though the city still remained generally more hospitable than any other in Europe.

As anarchism globalized, so did international cooperation to police its adherents. France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Belgium were the first to establish formal agreements to combat terrorism together. As part of this effort, police agents from France, Italy, Russia, and other countries were dispatched to Britain, where they infiltrated anarchist groups. The Russian police, the Okhrana, opened an office in Paris, with the consent of the French government, in order to monitor the activities and publications of Russian political exiles. Embassies and consulates directly organized such efforts, funneling monthly stipends to spies and informers, some quite well educated, others not at all. Recruits were not in short supply.

Soho, Tottenham Court Road, Fitzroy Square, and other neighborhoods in which anarchist exiles converged were crawling with police and secret agents in the pay of the anarchists' home countries, sometimes to the point of absurdity, as depicted in G. K. Chesterton's
The Man Who Was Thursday.
In this story Gabriel Syme, a detective with poetic pretensions, infiltrates a secret group of anarchists living in London, the European Dynamiters. Each of the seven leaders of the group is known by a day of the week. All turn out to be police spies, although at the beginning none know the real identity of any of the others.

In the London anarchist refugee communities of the early 1890s, suspicion of police spies became a veritable obsession. As in Joseph Conrad's
The Secret Agent,
a novel about the underbelly of anarchism in the back streets of London, it became difficult to tell real anarchists from undercover agents, informers, or even provocateurs. In the novel, Conrad's agent Verloc, whose shop attracts a variety of anarchists, is in the employ of a foreign embassy—obviously Russian. He is summoned to that embassy and told to organize, in the space of a month, a bomb attack that would be blamed on anarchists. So Verloc decides to blow up Greenwich, the point of Greenwich Mean Time: "Go for the first meridian. You don't know the middle classes as well as I do. Their sensibilities are jaded. The first meridian. Nothing better, and nothing easier, I should think." Such an outrageous attack would force the British police to put the squeeze on Russian anarchists in the capital.

Anarchists living in London developed their own counter-strategies. Malatesta eventually created a code, replacing letters with symbols, to communicate safely with colleagues. Because virtually every anarchist exile barely could scrape by, many looked suspiciously upon comrades who seemed to live well, despite having no obvious source of income. When an Italian infiltrater was discovered in 1889, Malatesta used the Italian newspaper in London to warn other anarchists. The Italian anarchist Rubino at one point tried to convince colleagues that he was not a police informer by asserting that he had tried to assassinate King Leopold of Belgium with a pistol bought using funds provided him by an undercover policeman serving as an agent provocateur.

While London police were not allowed to cooperate directly with foreign police, occasionally Scotland Yard or even the London metropolitan police worked informally with embassy-based authorities, who operated a wide network of police informers. However, police in London, as in Paris, Barcelona, Milan, Brussels, and other major European centers of anarchism, sometimes had to depend on reports that were misleading, exaggerated, or simply invented by paid informers—whose most intriguing stories often surfaced when they were pushing for pay raises. Yet the spies collected useful information as well, particularly concerning anarchist publications that were to be smuggled abroad.

In the end, British police did succeed somewhat in monitoring the activities of foreign anarchists living in London. Nicoll, the British anarchist, called Inspector Melville, the chief police inspector, "a really remarkable and astute man." He admitted that Melville was "on terms of perfect intimacy with the police agents of foreign governments ... he and his gang [had] dogged the steps of the foreign refugees for years." In January 1892, six anarchists were arrested in London and Walsall, a town in the West Midlands near Birmingham, after a small bomb factory was discovered, its products perhaps intended for use in Russia. One of the men was a French Breton, picked up outside the Autonomy Club on Windmill Street in London and found to be carrying a paper bag containing chloroform; another of the apprehended was an Italian shoemaker. Although four of those arrested were convicted and sentenced to long prison terms, two men were acquitted when it became clear that a French agent provocateur named Auguste Coulon had encouraged the operation and then denounced it. The Italian shoemaker also belonged to the Autonomy Club. Another was in possession of a tract called "An Anarchist Feast at the Opera," in which several anarchists bring a bomb to the opera and then leave after the first act, enjoying the anguished screams of their victims. Émile, who was in London during this period, almost certainly read this pamphlet, which was reprinted in 1892.

Many French anarchists, like Louise Michel, lived in Soho (dubbed "La Petite France") or to the north around Fitzroy Square. During this time, Fitzroy Square was far from the exclusive address that it would become (though at the time, George Bernard Shaw lived at number 29, an address subsequently occupied by Virginia Woolf). Still, it was somewhat less shabby than the more proletarian Soho neighborhoods nearby. Small firms of cabinetmakers and upholsterers were located in and around its stucco façades. The London Skin Hospital stood on one corner of the square. People of means had abandoned Fitzroy Square for more chic addresses, leaving behind properties that were divided and then subdivided. Rents were relatively low and the neighborhood attracted political and artistic outsiders. Fitzroy Square and its surroundings thus earned a reputation as a small oasis of left-wing politics and bohemian lifestyles.

Louise Michel, the anarchist known as "the Red Virgin" who had been a leader in the Paris Commune, fell in love with London, "where my banished friends are always welcome." Kropotkin wanted to organize a lecture for her, but she did not speak English. After arriving in the British capital in 1890, she started an anarchist school on Fitzroy Square for the children of political refugees (it lasted until 1892, when police discovered explosives in the building, stored there by a
compagnon).
Michel always wore black in honor of the Communards who had been slaughtered in 1871.

A Parisian journalist described the French anarchists in London as "a collection of poor devils more needy than ferocious."
Compagnons
helped each other, and like immigrants in any city, relied on their fellows as they learned to navigate a foreign place. Zo d'Axa described his time living near Fitzroy Square in London as simply "vegetating," completely cut off from Londoners. For him "isolation compounded the dense sadness of the fog." The lucky ones found work in their trades—tailoring, cabinetmaking, shoemaking. When he was in London, Émile's friend Constant Martin worked for a tailor. Several French anarchists sold flowers to survive, and it was rumored that several were working for a company that manufactured torpedoes for the Royal Navy. A few were burglars. At least two French anarchists worked at swindling people in the wine trade.

The small grocery shop Le Bel Épicier, operated by Victor Richard, a fifty-year-old philanthropic political militant and refugee from the Commune, became a port of entry and gathering place for French anarchist refugees. Richard was something of a local celebrity and well known to the police. He proudly sold only "red" beans, not the "reactionary" white ones, on Charlotte Street, near Fitzroy Square. Some French anarchists and store patrons lived on that street, which parallels Tottenham Court Road and is now so elegant. (Richard almost certainly was the inspiration for Conrad's character Verloc—Conrad also lived near Tottenham Court Road.) On at least one occasion Richard provided funds so that an anarchist sought by the police could get out of England. Nearby, the anarchist bookstore on Goodge Street provided a gathering place for
compagnons
lacking the money to frequent the pubs.