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1897: Michele Angiolillo, assassin of Canovas

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On this date in 1897,* anarchist Michele Angiolillo was garroted in Vergara prison for assassinating the Spanish Prime Minister.

Angiolillo (English Wikipedia entry | Spanish) was an Italian expatriate in England who was so incensed by the procesos de Montjuic — a spasm of indiscriminate arrests and torture that followed an anarchist bombing in Barcelona — that he resolved to avenge the crime against his brothers.

“He read of the great wave of human sympathy with the helpless victims at Montjuich,” Emma Goldman wrote of Angiolillo. “On Trafalgar Square he saw with his own eyes the results of those atrocities, when the few Spaniards, who escaped Castillo’s clutches, came to seek asylum in England. There, at the great meeting, these men opened their shirts and showed the horrible scars of burned flesh. Angiolillo saw, and the effect surpassed a thousand theories; the impetus was beyond words, beyond arguments, beyond himself even.”

That named “Castillo” whose clutches rent so much flesh was the Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas del Castillo, a statesman whose pioneering contribution to the art of manufactured consent was the turno system whereby two major Spanish political parties alternated turns in power/opposition and mutually connived to engineer ceremonial elections to that effect.

Upon his shoulders rested responsibility for the Barcelona torture regime.

And Angiolillo took it upon his shoulders to hold the executive to account.

Slipping into Spain with false papers, Angiolillo found Canovas taking a restorative visit to the Santa Agueda thermal baths and shot him dead on August 8.

As guards overcame the gunman — much too late — Canovas’s wife shrieked at him, “Murderer! Murderer!” The shooter gave her a bow and asked her pardon, for “I respect you, because you are an honorable lady, but I have done my duty and I am now easy in my mind, for I have avenged my friends and brothers of Montjuich.” (There are different versions of this bit of faux-politesse reported; suffice to say that in any form the remark was more pleasurable for Angiolillo to deliver than for the widow to receive.)

Official undesirables, by no means limited to anarchists who had survived Inquisition tactics in Montjuic, could scarcely contain their glee. New York anarchists avowed their support. Cuban and Puerto Rican separatists fretted only that the glory of the deed did not belong to one of their own. The Cubans specifically (and correctly) anticipated that the death of Canovas spelled the imminent recall of “Butcher” Weyler, the island’s strongman governor who had brutally crushed a rebellion there.**

His trial was undertaken within days, a mere formality considering that Angiolillo obviously shared the pride taken in his act by his overseas supporters. He justified the murder with reference not only to the torture and execution of anarchists at Montjuic, but of the execution of Philippines independence martyr Jose Rizal a few months prior.

* There are some sites proposing August 19 or 21. Period press reports are unambiguous that the correct execution date is August 20.

** William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal would publish a banner headline during the imminent Spanish-American War triumphantly asking readers, “How do you like the Journal’s war?” Its claim to ownership stemmed in part from Hearst’s relentless hyping of Weyler’s (very real) atrocities over the preceding years.

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1897: Five Barcelona anarchists

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THE BARCELONA ANARCHISTS.

(Through Reuter’s Agency.)

BARCELONA, May 4.

The five Anarchists sentenced to death for complicity in the dynamite outrages here during the Corpus Christi procession last year were shot at 5 o’clock this morning in the moat of Monjuich Castle. The troops intrusted with the carrying out of the sentence fired repeated volleys at the criminals, who all met their doom calmly, their eyes fixed on the public, who were kept at a distance by a large force of soldiers. The condemned men, who all had their hands tied behind them, bowed to the public as they arrived at the scene of execution. Mas asked the firing party to come nearer. Nogues, Molas, and Alsina exclaimed: — “We are innocent! This is murder!” Just before the first volley was fired all cried together: — “Long live Anarchy! Long live Revolution!” Molas then gave the word for the soldiers to fire. Four of the prisoners fell dead immediately, but Alsina remained on his knees not even wounded. At the second volley he fell, but was not killed outright, and it was not till a third volley had been fired that he was pronounced to be dead. (London Times, May 5, 1897)

The “outrage” that occasioned the executions this date in 1897 was the previous June’s bombing of a Catholic processional, attributed by police to an unidentified anarchist and by anarchists to a police agent provocateur.*

Whoever chucked that egalitarian explosive triggered an outrage of the law, els procesos de Montjuic — wherein the wholesale arrest of hundreds of accused “terrorists” under a general suspension of civil liberties resulted not only in this day’s five executions but in countless tortures courtesy of the Inquisitorial equipment still on hand in the venerable Montjuic dungeons.

It was not only anarchists but liberals and republicans who felt the effects of this right-wing crackdown; 87 people were tried in camera by drumhead military tribunals under emergency antiterrorist legislation. Notary Salvador Dali Cusi, father of the famous painter, appeared as a defense witness in one trial, successfully persuading the court that one of his lefty friends nevertheless sported impeccable patriotic credentials and required “merely” exile.

The upshot of it all was to smash up the militant Catalan working class.

Said smashing notably failed to settle the small matter of who actually threw the bomb. As per their dying proclamations, it almost certainly had nothing to do with Lluís Mas, Josep Molas, Antoni Nogués and Joan Alsina — men who were alleged by the state to have been party to an ambitious bombing campaign all over the city. This campaign never went off and the only evidence supplied for its existence came from men tortured to describe it.

Tomas Ascheri, a militant anarchist whose confession helped get the others shot, has long been suspected a police plant, a hypothesis at odds with Ascheri’s shared presence at the wrong end of the firing squad this date. Occam’s Razor — and somebody probably used an Occam’s Razor on Ascheri in between the thumbscrews and the strappado — suggests that the guy’s betrayal was likewise nothing but an inability to withstand “enhanced interrogation.” (Nogues and Mas also signed “confessions” under torture. This public-domain Spanish text by another post-Corpus Christi torture victim denounces that nation’s methods both in Montjuic and in the Philippines.)

Torture in Spain, torture in Russia … the danse macabre proceeds in the dungeons of Mont-juich and St. Petersburg.

-Kropotkin, April 1897

Ongoing state violence in turn invited reciprocation.

Over in England, the Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo was incensed by the executions, and the tortures suffered by Spanish refugees who had fled to England. “Angiolillo saw, and the effect surpassed a thousand theories,” wrote Emma Goldman. “The impetus was beyond words, beyond arguments, beyond himself even.”

Angiolillo made his way to Spain. On August 8, he joined the great tradition of anarchist avengers by assassinating the torture-happy Prime Minister, Antonio Canovas del Castillo.

* The argument for a false flag operation is a circumstantial one: the parade included a number of high muckity-mucks, like a right-wing general and the Bishop of Barcelona, detested by anarchists … and yet the bomber managed to let all the VIPs pass and attack only a knot of common people at the tail end of the train.

According to this book, a French journalist later reported that one of his countrymen by the name of Jean Girault, a genuine albeit “misguided” anarchist, did the deed. Girault fled to France and eventually to Argentina.

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