A History of Modern Europe - From the Renaissance to the Present

State Social Reform 795

People’s Will assassinated Tsar Alexander II. Other victims included King
Umberto I of Italy, who was killed in 1900 (not long after saying that assas­
sination was “a professional risk”), and President William McKinley of the
United States, gunned down the following year.
From 1892 to 1894, a wave of bombings terrified Paris. “One does not kill
an innocent person in striking the first bourgeois one sees,” an anarchist told
a shocked judge. Francois Claudius Ravachol, an impoverished worker,
threw one of the bombs. “See this hand,” Ravachol told the horrified judge
and jurors, “it has killed as many bourgeois as it has fingers!” More attacks
followed. In March 1893, an unemployed worker unable to feed his family
threw a small bomb into the Chamber of Deputies, slightly injuring several
members. He wanted to call attention to the plight of the poor. French Pres­
ident Sadi Carnot (1837-1894) turned down an appeal for mercy for the
perpetrator. Next, Emile Henry, a young intellectual, tossed a bomb into a
cafe near the Saint-Lazare railroad station, killing one man and injuring
about twenty other people. In June 1894, an Italian anarchist assassinated
Carnot. The wave of anarchist attacks subsided in France, but continued in
Spain, where the government tortured and executed militant anarchists. In
France, Italy, and Spain, harsh government repression itself brought a
reaction against such policies, and soon the state gave anarchists fewer mar­
tyrs to avenge. With the rise of mass socialist parties and unions, anarchism
faded further into the fringes of popular protest, except in Italy and, above
all, Spain.

Syndicalists

At the turn of the century, syndicalism emerged as an ideology that held
that union organization could provide a means for workers to seize control
of their industries. Reflecting some anarchist influence, free associations of
producers would eventually replace the state. Like revolutionary socialists
and anarchists, syndicalists rejected participation in political life. Syndical­
ism, which was centered in France, Spain, and Italy, was sometimes called
anarcho-syndicalism, because of its opposition to the existence of the state.
A retired engineer who proudly wore the prestigious legion of honor
awarded by the French state, Georges Sorel (1847-1922) seemed an unlikely
candidate to plan any revolution. But Sorel’s Reflections on Violence (1908)
encouraged direct syndicalist action against capitalism and the state, until a
“general strike” by workers would bring both to their knees. By the general
strike, Sorel meant a series of simultaneous walkouts that would shut down
factories and lead to revolution.
The period 1895-1907 is sometimes referred to as “the heroic age of syn­
dicalism” in France because so many strikes spread through so many indus­
tries there, as elsewhere in Europe. More than 1,000 strikes in France
occurred in 1904 alone. During the “revolt of the south” in 1907, vineyard
owners and vine-tenders aggressively protested the state tax on drink. In