Black capes

Title: Black capes

To: Retort

HEROES FROM HELL
Mike Davis interviewed by Jon Wiener
Radical History Review 85 (2003) 227-237


Jon Wiener: I've heard through the grapevine that you are working on
a book about terrorism.

Mike Davis: My day job currently is a grassroots history of Los
Angeles in the sixties ["Setting the Night on Fire"]. But I have also
been busy on an extracurricular project entitled, after a poem in
Mother Earth, "Heroes of Hell." It aims to be a world history of
revolutionary terrorism from 1878 to 1932.

Why did you choose those specific dates as bookends?

Eighteen seventy-eight was the inception of the "classical" age of
terrorism: the half-century during which the bourgeois imaginary was
haunted by the infamous figure of the bomb-throwing nihilist or
anarchist. Beginning in 1878, in fact, Bakuninists of several
nationalities and their cousins, the Russian Narodniki, embraced
assassination as a potent, if last-ditch weapon in the struggle
against autocracy. The calendar of that year is extraordinary. In
January, Vera Zasulich wounds General Trepov, the sadistic jailer of
the Narodniki. In April, Alexander Solovev makes his attempt on the
czar, the beginning of the royal game hunt that will culminate in
Alexander II's assassination by Peoples' Will in 1881. In May and
June, there are the successive attacks on the aged kaiser in Berlin
by the anarchists Holding and Nobiling, which provide Bismarck with
his long-sought-after pretext for repressing the utterly innocent
German social democrats. In the fall, meanwhile, Moncasi tries to
kill Alfonso XII of Spain, and Giovanni Passanante, hiding a dagger
in a red flag, slashes at the king of Italy. The year ends with a
hysterical encyclical from Pope Leo XIII on the "deadly pestilence of
Communism."

The debut of modern terrorism, I should emphasize, followed in the
wake of defeated hopes for popular uprisings in Russia, Andalusia,
and the Mezzogiorno. [The Italian Bakuninists did briefly established
a Che-like guerrilla focoin the Matese mountains above Naples for a
few weeks in 1877.] Terrorism, in other words, was one response to
the double failure of old-style urban Blanquism and rural
Garibaldeanism. There is an obvious parallel with the contemporary

experience of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood: after the betrayal
and suppression of the great Fenian conspiracy, a secret cadre turned
from insurrection to individual assassination as well as the first
dynamite campaign against English cities.

And 1932 as a finale?

Nineteen thirty-two was the last in a series of desperate but
unsuccessful attempts by Italian anarchists, direct descendants of
Passanante, to assassinate Mussolini. Fascism and Stalinism
succeed-where previous regimes failed-in bringing anarchism, and in
Russia, the powerful social revolutionary movement, to the brink of
extinction. The classical attentat [assassination attempt] is
rendered powerless in face of the modern totalitarian state, although
members of the Spanish FAI (International of Anarchist Federations)
will persist through 1950s to help reignite "propaganda of the deed"
with a blaze in the 1960s. But that is the story for another volume.

What put you on the track of Malatesta, Ravachol, and Durruti? Is
this a political and intellectual response to 9/11?

Only after the fact. The real occasion of this project was reading
Pierre Broue's magnificent Histoire de l'internationale communiste
(1997). Like Victor Serge and Isaac Deutscher, Broue writes in the
almost extinct idiom of the left opposition. His history is a
passionate-at times almost unbearably poignant-engagement with the
Shakespearean tragedy of the revolutionary generation decimated by
Stalin and Hitler. He rescues the memory-the courage and moral
grandeur-of hundreds of extraordinary women and men.

Broue inspired me to look at an even more out-of-fashion and
politically incorrect group: the avenging angels who stalked kings
and robber barons with bomb or dagger in hand. They tend to be the
pariahs of the left, even to "respectable" anarchism, as well as
demons of the right. I want to understand the moral architecture of
their universe as well as the repercussions of their acts. In doing
so, of course, I am now unavoidably drawn into the periphery of
debates about that sinister catchall category: Terrorism. . . .

What is the specific historical site of "classical terrorism"?

In a word, the Mur des Federes. This is the infamous wall in Père
Lachaise cemetery against which the last Communards were executed. As
Eugène Pottier, the author of the Internationale, put it in a
contemporary poem: "Your history, bourgeoisie, is written on this
wall. It is not a difficult text to decipher." Thiers's slaughter of
30,000 working-class and bohemian Parisians, to the almost universal
approval of middle-class opinion, was the moral watershed in European
labor history. As Mayer emphasizes, it was essentially a colonial
massacre brought home to the metropolis. Together with other
subsequent atrocities-like the mass executions in Russia, the murder
of internationalists in Cádiz in 1873, the violent suppression of the
1877 strike wave, and the Haymarket hangings-it convinced many
revolutionaries that terror had to be fought with terror. If victory
seemed impossible, better then, vengeance.

If the escalation of class violence by republican as well as
absolutist rulers was the necessary condition for this new terrorism,
causal sufficiency, as I mentioned earlier, was provided by the
frustration of Bakuninist and Narodnik hopes for large-scale
uprisings in the Mediterranean and Russian countrysides. In the
generation from the death of the Commune to the first international
May Day in 1890, revolutionaries were vexed by the immaturity of
social conditions to sustain large-scale class struggle. The European
artisanate was in its final death agony from the Pale to Sicily, yet
the modern industrial proletariat, except in England, was not yet
fully born. Strikes were usually crushed or led to small violent
cataclysms like that depicted by Emile Zola in Germinal. Gains in
suffrage, meanwhile, were easily annulled by antisocialist laws or
confiscated by corruption as in Spain and the United States. In this
context, the social democratic strategy-Marx and Engels's counsel of
patient organizing and the slow accumulation of forces-seemed

maddeningly slow, especially for young artisans forced to choose
between starvation, emigration, or crime.

Terrorism, then, was a pathology of structural transition, of
delayed modernization?

It is tempting to simplify matters and say that the anarcho-terrorism
of the 1880-1900 period was the ghost dance of the European
artisanate, with Ravachol as Wovoka or the Mahdi. Certainly this has
been a traditional approach to understanding the popular,
episodically violent, anarchism of Andalusia, yet as Temma Kaplan
demonstrated in a major revisionist study, the millenarian
interpretation collapses under careful scrutiny or, at least, yields
to a more rational-actor model.

Similarly, traditional attempts to portray anarchists as criminal
madmen or publicity-hungry meglomaniacs-beginning with the Italian
criminologist Lombroso in the 1890s-are disproved by the sober,
exemplary characters of such figures as Bresci [the assassin of King
Umberto] or Durruti [whose Robin Hood-like feats defy credulity].
Even Czolgoscz, the killer of McKinley, who has always been portrayed
as a lunatic' by historians, was quite sane, as well as
extraordinarily modest and dignified in bearing. As James Clarke has
shown, Czolgoscz was seeking revenge for the massacre several years
earlier of nineteen [some accounts say twenty-one] Slavic miners in
Latimer, Pennsylvania. [When some of the wounded had asked for water,
deputies replied, "We'll give you hell, not water, hunkies!"]

If the criminological approach is bankrupt in the study of anarchism,
this doesn't mean that there weren't significant overlaps between
terrorism and the late Victorian underworlds. But the violent
anarchists of the 1880s and early 1890s represent less a
criminalization of the labor movement than an unprecedented
politicalization of the criminal strata of the urban proletariat.
[There are interesting similarities to the Black Panthers'
orientation to the street proletariat in the late 1960s.] In
post-1871 Montmartre and Belleville, as Maitron and others have
shown, there was a fascinating continuum between anarchism, bohemia,
proletarian subculture, and criminality. In the 1890s, one of the
most popular songs in the cabarets was "La Ravachol": "Lady Dynamite,
that dances so fast, let us dance and sing ... and dynamite!"

It was a very different articulation of class location and politics
than the Parisian lumpens whom Marx denounced as shock troops of
Bonapartism in 1848-50. The attentat-in the full sense that it was
used in Père Peinard and the underground press of the
period-encompassed both the act of revolutionary vengeance against
the class oppressor and routine expropriations that allowed Ravachol,
say, to wear new suits or purchase books. A common moral
economy-apparently embraced by a significant minority of the Parisian
working class-justified both assassination and theft on class grounds.

But can you generalize from this Parisian instance?

No, although it has fascinating counterparts in Berlin, Barcelona,
and Buenos Aires, especially in the 1920s. My research is structured
around a provisional typology and periodization. In my reading,
revolutionary terrorism is largely retributive, although sometimes
messianic. It is useful to distinguish four distinctive types of
elitist revolutionary violence. Moral-symbolic terrorism was
typically carried out by lone wolves [solitarios], like Ravachol or
Bresci, with the support of a few friends; or by autonomous cells
[groupuscules or grupitos] with never more than a score of members.
On this scale there was no capacity to sustain long campaigns, so the
terrorist sequence typically involved an act of revenge, the
execution of the avenger, then further revenge for his death.
Sometimes this cycle was repeated.

Thus in Paris in 1892, Ravachol avenges massacred workers in Fourmies
with a series of bombings of prosecutors and judges. After he is
executed, Meunier blows up the Restaurant Very, Leautheir stabs the
first bourgeois he meets on the street-it turns out to be the Serbian
minister-and Valliant bombs the chamber of deputies. When Valliant is

guillotined, he is avenged by Henry who blows up the Café Terminus
and a police station. Henry's arrest enrages the art critic Feneon,
who plants a bomb in the chic Café Foyot, which ironically only
wounds the anarchist Tailhade, who nonetheless approves of the
attack. Finally Caserio, claiming justice for Vaillant and Henry,
stabs to death the president of France, Sadi Carnot.

A similar cycle of vengeance-originally in response to the repression
of the Jerez uprising in 1892-took place simultaneously in Barcelona.
Both led to mass trials of anarchist sympathizers, including writers
and editors, and repressive legislation. In Barcelona, the defendants
were imprisoned in the infamous Montjuich fortress and hideously
tortured. This, of course, only supplied more fuel for an almost
infinite vicious circle of violence in Spain that, in some remote but
real sense, is continued today by ETA [Euskadi ta Askatasuna]. It is
key to remember, however, that state atrocities, which most recently
include a "death squad" campaign against Basque militants conducted
by the former Gonzales regime in Madrid, provide the oxygen without
which terrorism cannot combust for very long. . . .

What were the other two types of classical terrorism?

Expropriatory terrorism consisted of two subspecies. On one hand,
there were the celebrated bands of anarcho-outlaws like Jacob's
"Workers of the Night" and the Bonnot Gang, which included the young
Victor Serge, in Paris, and Severino Di Giovanni's desperados in
Buenos Aires. They thrived as much from notoriety as from loot and
self-consciously "performed" in the gaze of the popular press. The
Bonnot Gang added to their fame by pioneering the use of the
newfangled automobile in their heists. They preferred to die young in
a heroic blaze of gunfire than end up in Cayenne [Devil's Island],
the green hell that devoured generations of French anarchists.
Likewise the handsome Severino-the original "man in black" who was
sometimes compared to dead silent-screen idol Valentino-thrilled
Argentinians with his insouciance before a firing squad in 1931. [The
famous actor José Gomez, according to Bayer, had won admission to
Severino's last scene by pounding on the prison gates and demanding:
"Open up in the name of Art!"]

More anonymous, although no less legendary, were the groups who
robbed banks on behalf of their left-wing parties or unions. The most
famous example was the mixed cell of Lettish SRs, anarchists, and
Bolsheviks-under the leadership of the mysterious "Peter the
Painter"-who perpetrated the Tottenham Outrage in 1909, the
Houndsditch Murders' in 1910, and then blasted away with their
Mausers at Winston Churchill and the Scots Guards during the Sidney
Street Siege in 1911. But there were other notable instances: Russian
SRs and anarchists did bank jobs all over Europe, and Durruti and
Ascaso were Spanish anarchism's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as
they blazed a trail across Cuba, Mexico, and Argentina in the early
1920s.

Defensive terrorism arose in conditions of semi-civil war, when
employers and the state engaged in the systematic murder of union or
radical leaders while maintaining a facade of electoral democracy.
This was the situation in Barcelona from 1917 to 1921 and in parts of
Germany during 1919-23. Thus the pistoleros of the Catalan employers
were countered by Durruti, the Ascaso brothers, and other fearless
CNT [Confederacion Nacional de Trabajos, National Confederation of
Workers] justicieros; while in Saxony, Max Hoelz led a famous band of
anarcho-communist fighters-the Red Army of Vogtland-which robbed
banks, sacked noble estates, drove the paramilitary police out of
factories, kidnapped bosses, liberated political prisoners and,
finally, fought the Reichswehr from barricades during the
insurrectionary March Action. Similarly, there were instances, both
during the 1905 revolution and the civil war, when Jewish
revolutionaries-bundists, anarchists, and so on-used assassination or
a well-placed bomb to deter pogromists. [A sympathetic French jury,
incidentally, acquitted the Jewish anarchist Sholom Schwartzbard

after he shot Petlura, the ataman of the Ukranian Whites, outside a
Latin Quarter bistro in 1926.]

This sounds very romantic, but surely the balance sheet of each of
these types of terrorism must be negative. Didn't every bomb and
bullet ultimately ricochet against the mass workers movements?

As Debray pointed out years ago, "The revolution revolutionizes the
counterrevolution." Terrorism, by analogy, revolutionizes state
repression, and, indeed, in some cases was instigated by the secret
police for the express purpose of legitimizing a state of emergency.
The mass left, indeed the working class as a whole, was repeatedly
victimized for the "heroic" deeds of a few. And despite the
traditional disclaimers of its theoreticians, terror substitutes the
messianic role of the self- sacrificial individual-or the magical
totemism of the attentat-for the conscious movement of the masses.
This is why Lenin called the terrorism of the SRs the "opium of
intellectuals." Likewise, Trotsky-perhaps the first true sociologist
of the phenomenon-warned that terrorism was too "absolutist," too
messianic a form of struggle to coexist with the democratic workers'
movement.

Yet the classical socialist critique of anarchist and populist
terrorism was never simplistic or completely consistent. Marx, for
example, excoriated the Bakuninists, yet deeply admired Narodnaya
Volya [as did many European liberals] and believed that the
assassination of the czar might actually speed history in the right
direction. Lenin, despite the ferocity of his attacks on the SRs
[whom Kautsky, by the way, supported], was relentless in urging
social democrats to adopt terrorist methods to resist the pogroms and
cossack terror that followed the defeat of the Moscow insurrection in
December 1905. And Trotsky, while scornful of the "minister after
minister, monarch after monarch, Ivan after Ivan" agenda of the SRs,
argued that revenge was a powerful and positive revolutionary
emotion. "Whatever moral eunuchs and Pharisees may say," he wrote,
"the feeling of revenge has its right. The working class has greater
moral probity because it does not look with dull indifference at what
is happening in this, the best of all worlds."

Moreover, if one attempts to draw up a coolly objective balance
sheet, not all terrorist acts in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century end up in the debit column. Some historians of the first
Chinese revolution, for example, credit the anarchist Eastern
Assassination Corps, built on the model of the SR's combat
organization, with accelerating the decomposition of Qing power. In
the same period, the killing of the Portuguese king and crown prince
in Lisbon in 1908 by anarcho-republican Carbonari undoubtedly cleared
the path for the October Revolution of 1910. And the assassination of
notorious warmongers and murderers of the poor sometimes resonated
fully with popular demands for revolutionary justice: as in the
celebrated deeds of Zasulich, Bresci, Spiridonova, Radowitzy, Adler,
Durruti, and Schwartzbard. One might also regret that the Italian
anarchists did not succeed in killing Mussolini or that the KPD after
1933 was so dogmatically opposed to assassination.

The problem, of course, is that such methods are-forgive me-literally
"hit and miss" and most likely to boomerang against the revolutionary
groups that authorize their use. Consider the most "successful"
single terrorist action in European history: the bombing of the
Sveta-Nedeia Cathedral in Sophia in 1925. A joint team of communists
and left-wing agrarians managed to plant a bomb during the funeral
service for a general killed a few days before in an anarchist
ambush. Although King Boris did not attend, most of the Bulgarian
ruling class gathered in the cathedral. The huge explosion killed 11
generals as well as the mayor of Sophia, the chief of police, and 140
other eminent people. It was the only example of classical terrorism
I can think of that was carried out by a member party of the
Comintern. And its aftermath was debacle: a renewed reign of terror
that decimated the Bulgarian left. . . .