Very early on, the London anarchist milieu and the French and Italian proscriptions in particular were regarded as the nodal point of the international anarchist conspiracy. In the words of Malato, parodying the rants of the British conservative press,

It was a commonly held belief, in Britain and beyond, that during the critical years 1890–4, the French exiles were actively conspiring against their host country and other targets from their London headquarters. By the early 1890s, the stereotype of the French ‘dynamiter’ or ‘dynamitard’ – a French term tellingly imported into English – was deeply entrenched. Throughout the 1890s, spies’ reports and newspapers abounded with rumoured conspiracies of terrorist attacks in Britain or on the Continent, sometimes very inventive or chillingly prophetic. This obsession with terrorism betrayed a profound misunderstanding of the political views of most anarchists, the functioning of the movement, and the resources actually available to them. It also reflected how unfathomable this new type of terrorism was for its contemporaries. The French and British police forces and the popular press played a pivotal role, both directly and indirectly, in fanning those fears and shaping a negative, non-political understanding of anarchism.