Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- General Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 From the Socialist Revival to a Terrorist Epidemic: Anarchism in the 1880s
- 2 The Francophone Anarchist Circles in London: Between Isolation and Internationalisation
- 3 Exilic Militancy
- 4 Bombs in Britain? Realities and Rumours
- 5 The Road to the Aliens Act: The Anarchists Become a Political and Diplomatic Stake
- 6 The Pre-War Years: Cross-Channel Networks, Syndicalism, and the Demise of Internationalism
- Conclusion
- Select Bibliography
- Index
4 - Bombs in Britain? Realities and Rumours
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- General Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 From the Socialist Revival to a Terrorist Epidemic: Anarchism in the 1880s
- 2 The Francophone Anarchist Circles in London: Between Isolation and Internationalisation
- 3 Exilic Militancy
- 4 Bombs in Britain? Realities and Rumours
- 5 The Road to the Aliens Act: The Anarchists Become a Political and Diplomatic Stake
- 6 The Pre-War Years: Cross-Channel Networks, Syndicalism, and the Demise of Internationalism
- Conclusion
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It was from London that the sums of money which funded the latest anarchist outrages were sent. It is in London that the most militant comrades live, those at the head of the movement. It is from London, for example, that part of the money from burglaries is sent, in order to support those comrades risking their lives in attacks … what is certain is that support for the comrades comes from London, where the strength of the anarchist party is now.
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,
Four hundred desperadoes, robbers, counterfeiters and killers, whom their crimes have marginalised from any society … have fled continental polices and landed upon our shores. As soon as they arrive, being as ungrateful as they are unjust and unpatriotic, they start by plotting a large, horrific conspiracy (adjectives always sound good) against their hosts … These wretched men have decided to penetrate into the houses of all the wealthy people in London and the Kingdom with various excuses, in order to chloroform them … Etc., etc., etc.
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.
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- The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation, pp. 103 - 130Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013