Illegalism

Not to be confused with the concept of "popular illegalisms" created by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish.

Illegalism is an anarchist philosophy that developed primarily in France, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland during the early 1900s as an outgrowth of individual reclamation. The illegalists openly embraced criminality as a lifestyle.

Emergence

Illegalism first rose to prominence among a generation of Europeans inspired by the unrest of the 1890s, during which Ravachol, Émile Henry, Auguste Vaillant, and Caserio committed daring crimes in the name of socialist anarchism, in what is known as propaganda of the deed.

Some anarchists, such as Johann Most, advocated publicizing violent acts of retaliation against counter-revolutionaries because "we preach not only action in and for itself, but also action as propaganda." Most was an early influence on American anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. Berkman attempted propaganda by the deed when he tried in 1892 to kill industrialist Henry Clay Frick following the deaths by shooting of several striking workers. By the 1880s, the slogan "propaganda of the deed" had begun to be used both within and outside of the anarchist movement to refer to individual bombings, regicides and tyrannicides.

Influenced by theorist Max Stirner's egoism, the illegalists in France broke from anarchists like Clément Duval and Marius Jacob who justified theft with a theory of la reprise individuelle (Eng: individual reclamation). Instead, the illegalists argued that their actions required no moral basis - illegal acts were taken not in the name of a higher ideal, but in pursuit of one's own desires.

Luigi Galleani

After Peter Kropotkin along with others decided to enter labor unions after their initial reservations, there remained "the anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists, who in France were grouped around Sebastien Faure’s Le Libertaire. From 1905 onwards, the Russian counterparts of these anti-syndicalist anarchist-communists become partisans of economic terrorism and illegal ‘expropriations’." Illegalism as a practice emerged and within it "The acts of the anarchist bombers and assassins ("propaganda by the deed") and the anarchist burglars ("individual reappropriation") expressed their desperation and their personal, violent rejection of an intolerable society. Moreover, they were clearly meant to be exemplary , invitations to revolt."

Such acts of rebellion which could be individual were in the long run seen as act of rebellion which could ignite an mass insurrection leading to revolution. Proponents and activists of this tactics among others included Johann Most, Luigi Galleani, Victor Serge, and Severino Di Giovanni. "In Argentina, these tendencies flourished at the end of the 20s and during the 30s, years of acute repression and of flinching of the once powerful workers movement –this was a desperate, though heroic, of a decadent movement."

Caricature of the Bonnot gang

France's Bonnot Gang was the most famous group to embrace illegalism. The Bonnot Gang (La Bande à Bonnot) was a French criminal anarchist group that operated in France and Belgium during the Belle Époque, from 1911 to 1912. Composed of individuals who identified with the emerging illegalist milieu, the gang utilized cutting-edge technology (including automobiles and repeating rifles) not yet available to the French police.

Originally referred to by the press as simply "The Auto Bandits", the gang was dubbed "The Bonnot Gang" after Jules Bonnot gave an interview at the office of Petit Parisien, a popular daily paper. Bonnot's perceived prominence within the group was later reinforced by his high-profile death during a shootout with French police in Nogent.

Regicides and other assassinations

Propaganda of the deed thus included stealing (in particular bank robberies - named "expropriations" or "revolutionary expropriations" to finance the organization), rioting and general strikes which aimed at creating the conditions of an insurrection or even a revolution. These acts were justified as the necessary counterpart to state repression. As sociologist Max Weber had argued, the state has the "monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force", or, in Karl Marx's words, the state was only the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois class. Propaganda by the deed, including assassinations (sometimes involving bombs, named in French "machines infernales" - "hellish machines", usually made with bombs, sometimes only several guns assembled together), were thus legitimized by part of the anarchist movement and the First International as a valid means to be used in class struggle. The predictable state responses to these actions were supposed to display to the people the inherently repressive nature of the bourgeois state. This would in turn bolster the revolutionary spirit of the people, leading to the overthrow of the state. This is the basic formula of the cycle protests-repression-protests, which in specific conditions may lead to an effective state of insurrection.

Numerous heads of state were assassinated between 1881 and 1914 by members of the libertarian socialist movement. Regicides were for obvious reasons celebrated as popular victory over counter-revolutionary forces, which remained strong a century after the 1789 French Revolution. The first assassinations were carried out by Russian anarchists, which would lead to the creation of the term of "nihilism". For example, U.S. President McKinley's assassin Leon Czolgosz claimed to have been influenced by anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman. This was in spite of Goldman's disavowal of any association with him, his registered membership in the Republican Party, and never having belonged to an anarchist organization. Bombings were associated in the media with anarchists because international terrorism arose during this time period with the widespread distribution of dynamite. This image remains to this day. This perception was enhanced by events such as the 1886 Haymarket Riot, where anarchists were blamed for throwing a bomb at police who came to break up a public meeting in Chicago, Illinois.

List of assassinated important figures and other propaganda by the deed acts

A sketch of Czolgosz shooting McKinley.

• May 11, 1878. Failed assassination attempt of Max Hödel against Kaiser Wilhelm I.
• August 1878. Sergey Kravchinsky stabs to death General Nikolai Mezentsov, head of the Tsar's secret police, in response to the execution of Ivan Kovalsky.
• February 1879. Grigori Goldenberg shoots to death the Governor of Kharkov, Prince Dmitri Kropotkin.
• April 1879. Alexander Soloviev shoots at Alexander II. This second attempt on the royal's life also fails.
• 1880. Stepan Khalturin’s successfully blows up part of the Winter Palace—8 soldiers killed, 45 wounded. Referring to the 1862 invention of dynamite, historian Benedict Anderson observes that "Nobel’s invention had now arrived politically."
• March 1 (Julian calendar) 1881. Tsar Alexander II is killed in a bomb-blast by Narodnaya Volya.
• July 23, 1892. Alexander Berkman tries to kill Henry Clay Frick in retaliation for the killing of workers by Pinkerton detectives during the Homestead Steel Strike.
• December 9, 1893. Auguste Vaillant throws a nail bomb in the French National Assembly, killing nobody and injuring one. He is then sentenced to death and executed by the guillotine on February 4, 1894, shouting "Death to bourgeois society and long live anarchy!" (A mort la société bourgeoise et vive l'anarchie!). During his trial, Auguste Vaillant declared that he had not intended to kill anybody, but only to injure several deputies in retaliation against the execution of Ravachol, who had engaged himself in four bombings.
• December 11 and 18, 1893. Vote of the French lois scélérates.
• February 12, 1894. Émile Henry set a bomb in Café Terminus, killing one and injuring twenty. During his trial, he declares: "There is no innocent bourgeois". This act is one of the rare exceptions to the rule that propaganda of the deed targets only specific powerful individuals.
• June 24, 1894. Italian anarchist Caserio stabs to death French president Sadi Carnot to avenge Auguste Vaillant and Emile Henry. Caserio is then executed by guillotine on August 15.
• 3 November 1896. In Patras, anarchist shoe-maker Dimitris Matsalis attacked with a knife two figures of the city. By his blows the banker Dionysios Fragkopoulos was killed on the spot and the merchant Andreas Kollas wounded seriously.
• August 8, 1897. Michele Angiolillo assassinates Spanish Prime minister Cánovas, who had been a key figure in the 1874 overthrow of the Republic, helping the Bourbon monarchy back to the throne.
• September 10, 1898. Luigi Lucheni stabs to death with a needle file Elisabeth of Bavaria, Empress consort of Austria and Queen consort of Hungary due to her marriage to Emperor Franz Joseph.
• July 29, 1900. Gaetano Bresci shoots dead Umberto I of Italy, avenging the Bava-Beccaris massacre in Milan.
• September 6, 1901. Leon Czolgosz shoots at point-blank range on U.S. president William McKinley, killing him. He is then killed by electrocution on October 29 (Czolgosz' anarchist status is a matter of debate. He attended anarchist meetings and read anarchist texts yet was a registered Republican).
• October 1902. Gennaro Rubino attempts to murder Leopold II of Belgium.
• 31 May 1906. Catalan Anarchist Mateu Morral tries to kill Alfonso XIII of Spain and Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg after their wedding.
• September 14, 1911. Dmitri Bogrov shoots to death Russian prime minister Pyotr Stolypin.
• November 12, 1912. Anarchist Manuel Pardiñas kills Spanish Prime Minister José Canalejas in Madrid.
• March 18, 1913. Aleksander Schinas assassinates king George I of Greece.
• June 28, 1914. Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip shoots Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Countess Sophie. This led to the start of the First World War.
• April to June 1919 - First Red Scare:
  • April 28 - Mayor of Seattle Washington receives a homemade bomb (defused)
  • April 29 - servant of Senator Thomas W. Hardwick loses hands and burned by a bomb
  • April 30 - 16 bombs discovered.
  • June 2 - Carlo Valdinoci tries to blow up Washington DC Attorney Mitchell Palmer's house and blows himself up
  • June 3 - New York City night watchman William Boehner killed by a bomb placed at a judge's house
• September 16, 1920. The Wall Street bombing kills 38 and wounds 400 in Manhattan's Financial District. Anarchists associated with Luigi Galleani are widely believed responsible although the crime remains officially unsolved.
• 8 March 1921. Three anarchists shoot Conservative politician Eduardo Dato Iradier dead from a motorcycle in Puerta de Alcalá, Madrid.
• 1922. Gustave Bouvet attempts to kill French president Alexandre Millerand.
• 1926. Sholom Schwartzbard assassinates Symon Petlura, head of the government-in-exile Ukrainian People's Republic, in Paris. After an eight-day trial, he is acquitted by the jury, who has been convinced of Schwartzbard's just cause: the core of his defence was that he was avenging the deaths of victims of pogroms organized by Symon Petlura.
• 1926-1928. Several bombings in Argentina organized by the Italian anarchist Severino Di Giovanni, in the frame of the international campaign supporting Sacco and Vanzetti and against Fascist Italy's interests in Argentina. Bombings of the US embassy, of the headquarters of the Citybank and Bank of Boston in Buenos Aires, and of the Italian consulate on 23 May, 1928.

Criticism

Advocacy of illegalism proved to be highly controversial and was contested within the anarchist milieu, particularly by those who favored anarcho-syndicalism over individual actions disconnected from the labor movement. Many socialists argued that illegalism replicated the mentality of capitalism and represented a turn towards nihilism.

Following his arrest for harbouring members of the Bonnot Gang, Victor Serge, once a forceful defender of illegalism became a sharp critic. In Memoirs of a Revolutionary, he describes illegalism as "a collective suicide". Similarly, Marius Jacob reflected in 1948, "I don't think that illegalism can free the individual in present-day society... Basically, illegalism, considered as an act of revolt, is more a matter of temperament than of doctrine."

Contemporary egoist individualist anarchists such as Fred Woodworth (editor and publisher of the journal The Match!), Joe Peacott and Larry Gambone are also highly critical of illegalism on grounds that it is unethical.

Influence

Illegalism has been updated by currents such as insurrectionary anarchism and post-left anarchy. In Spain and Latin america in recent years a campaign called Yomango has apperared which advocates shoplifting and so it updates individual reclamation.

See also

• Insurrectionary anarchism
• Post-left anarchy
• Propaganda of the deed

Further reading

• Parry, Richard (1986). The Bonnot Gang. Rebel Press. ISBN 0-946061-04-1.
• Cacucci, Pino (July 25, 2006). Without a Glimmer of Remorse. Christie Books. ISBN 1-873976-28-3.
• On Illegalism and Ultra-Leftism. Philippe Gavi, J-P Sartre, & Pierre Victor. Gallimard, Paris, 1974
• The Bonnot Gang: The Story of the French Illegalists