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1893: Paulino Pallas, Spanish anarchist

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Spanish anarchist Paulino Pallas was shot on this date in 1893 for attempting to assassinate the military chief of Catalonia.

A bricklayer’s son who had known starvation days, the politically radicalized Pallas returned from years abroad to his native Catalonia to discover a restive district nearing the brink of outright rebellion.

An 1892 uprising among the Jerez peasantry, a disturbance that ended with four anarchists publicly garroted, stirred Spanish anarchists to a wave of violent revenge. Pallas’s strike came on the September 24, 1893, when he hurled two bombs at a military parade on the Gran Via in Barcelona in an attempt to assassinate Gen. Arsenio Martinez-Campos.

The bombing killed a nearby policeman, but Gen. Martinez-Campos was only slightly injured.

Pallas was arrested on the spot and his lair yielded for the horror of the pro-Bourbon press “many anarchists proclamations, a photo of the anarchists who were executed in Chicago, and several letters from France containing instructions on making a revolution.” Within days, a court-martial condemned him.

The assassin justified his action in a letter published two days after his execution:

I have maintained throughout my life a titanic struggle for existence. I have felt in my own skin the effects of this society, constituted poorly and governed even worse. I observe that it is a gangrenous body, to which you can not place one finger without touching a festering sore. I thought it was necessary to destroy it and I wanted to offer my contribution that demolishing work in the form of another bomb. General Martinez Campos, as a soldier and a gentleman, I respect. But I wanted to hurt him to undo one of the many pillars on which rests the current state of affairs in Spain. […] I state the record that, in undertaking this act, I have not been compelled by any consideration other than to sacrifice my life for the benefit of my brothers in misfortune.

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1894: Six anarchists in Barcelona

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On this date in 1894, on the very day that anarchist terrorist par excellence Emile Henry was guillotined in Paris, six more anarchists were executed by firing squad outside Barcelona’s Montjuich Fortress.

Mariano Cerezuela, Bernat Siveval, Jaime Sogas, Jose Codina, Villarubbia, and Manuel Archs were condemned just weeks prior by a military court for complicity in the attempted assassination earlier that year of Spanish Marshal Arsenio Martinez Campos. Some had originally been rounded up in the general anti-anarchist crackdown after the bombing of the Liceu theater … although another man would be put to death for authoring that crime later in 1894.

Only one of their number, Sogas, died penitent.

In the report of the London Times (May 22, 1894),

[t]he condemned men were conveyed from the chapel, where they had spent the night, to the place of execution by an underground passage, the first two to appear being Sogas and Cerezuela. The former, who confessed last night, joined in the prayers offered by the priest, and he and Cerezuela walked quietly to their doom. The other prisoners, however, shouted all kinds of revolutionary cries. The convicts were placed in line, and at the first shot they all fell to the ground. It was found, however, that in the case of Sogas and Codina the bullets had not taken effect, and a second shot was necessary.

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