794 Ch. 20 • Responses to a Changing World

(Left) The assassination of French President Sadi Carnot by an Italian anarchist,

1894. (Right) Peter Kropotkins s publication The Spirit of Revolt.

southern Spanish province of Andalusia, anarchism took on a millenarian

character stripped of most of the trappings of religion. Andalusian anar­

chists told the story of one of their own who, as he lay dying, whispered to

one of his religious relatives to summon a priest and a lawyer. Relieved that

the anarchist seemed at the last moment to be accepting the conventions

of religion by accepting the last rites of the Church and drawing up a will,

relatives sent for both. When they arrived, the anarchist beckoned them to

stand on either side of his deathbed. As they leaned forward, one to hear

his confession, the other to write down his will, the anarchist proclaimed,

“Now, like Christ, I can die between two thieves.”

In the 1880s and 1890s, a wave of anarchist assassinations and bomb­

ings shook Europe. To violent anarchists, the goal of “propaganda by the

deed” was to spark a revolution. Bakunin's Italian disciple Enrico Maletesta

(1853-1932), who had a following in Italy, Spain, and Argentina, expressed

the bitter frustration of anarchists who had virtually nothing: “Do you not

know that every bit of bread they [the wealthy] eat is taken from your chil­

dren, every fine present they give to their wives means the poverty, hunger,

cold and even perhaps the prostitution of yours?” Bakunin had believed

that a single violent act might shock people into a chain-reaction revolu­

tion. “A single deed,” Kropotkin once said, “is better propaganda than a thou­

sand pamphlets.” Barcelona became the “capital of bombs” in the 1890s.

Anarchists killed six heads of states beginning in 1881, when members of