On Sunday 10 September 1898, Elisabeth, Empress of Austria, was walking along the Quai Mont Blanc in Geneva when Luigi Lucheni decided she must die.
If you could have brought her back to life, she would have known as little about him as Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker and his fellow hostages knew of Malik Akram, who arrived from the north of England at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Dallas to hold them at gunpoint.
Like Akram, Lucheni was always moving. And as with Akram, the itinerant Italian workman did not try to escape. Lucheni was “delighted” by his killing of the beautiful and melancholy empress.
A contemporary photograph shows the police taking him away. Lucheni is in a three-piece suit with shoulders back, chest out, and the cocky smile on his face of a man who thinks he has won the lottery.
“Never in my life have I felt so contented as now,” he wrote from prison. “I have made known to the world that the hour is not so far distant when a new sun will shine upon all men alike.”
Lucheni wanted the recognition capture and punishment would bring. You could say he yearned for martyrdom.
The global anarchist terror wave is all but forgotten now. But between the 1880s and 1920s, its adherents murdered not only poor, sad Elisabeth who had never recovered from her son’s suicide, but Umberto I of Italy, the Spanish prime minister Antonio Canovas, and the US President William McKinley.
They threw bombs into an orchestra pit in Barcelona, a café at the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris, and the Royal Observatory at Greenwich. The “propaganda of the deed” drove them, as it drives Islamist violence today.
The deed would be the spark that ignited the masses and made real the dream of the stateless, bossless anarchist utopia; or, in our day, of the heaven-on-earth of a restored Caliphate.
Anarchism came to nothing. No anarchist revolution succeeded. No anarchist state (if that is not a contradiction in terms) was established.
By 1920, radical leftism meant communism and its fellow travellers, who did not want to abolish government but to create states with limitless power.
The anarchist movement died everywhere except in southern Europe, where anarchist troops fought Franco with great bravery in the Spanish civil war.
Elsewhere, the anarchist with his bomb and bushy black beard became a stock comic figure.
“When you have been just told that the girl you love is definitely betrothed to another, you begin to understand how anarchists must feel when the bomb goes off too soon,” PG Wodehouse wrote in 1929, with a comparison he would never have reached for if anarchism were a real threat.
Today, the most prominent figures to use the anarchist ideal of freedom from state control are tech billionaires, a million miles away from the shining world of Luigi Lucheni.
Elon Musk now describes himself as a “utopian anarchist,” largely, one suspects, because he doesn’t want to pay taxes.
Anarchism’s death was assisted by state persecution. The judicial execution of anarchists in Chicago in 1886 was a scandal as great in its day as Guantanamo Bay. The prosecution could not prove that any of the defendants had thrown a bomb that killed police officers, but the court convicted them nevertheless.
After 9/11, policymakers argued about whether Islamism was comparable to anarchism or communism. Were we in a clash of civilisations as great as the Cold War? Or were we not in a war at all, but up against a violent but ultimately manageable crime wave?
The anarchist comparison has won the argument decisively. The US would never have cut and run from Afghanistan if it had not.
The early 21st century ‘war on terror’ was justified by the credible belief, in the days after 9/11, that Islamist ideology legitimised the slaughter of millions, if the means were available. Yet nothing of the sort happened in the West.
In saying this, I do not want to underestimate the scale of fear terrorist violence raises, the extent of antisemitism in Muslim communities, the reality of Islamist armies in sub-Saharan Africa, or the need for continued arrests and intelligence gathering.
I am simply saying that in the West, what was once seen as a clash of civilisations is now a police procedural.
It’s cheering to imagine that one day, the wave of Islamist attacks will seem as obscure as the upsurge in anarchist violence; that historians will have to explain what happened to people who will shake their heads and wonder why no one told them about al-Qaeda or lone-wolf jihadis before. It’s too early, to be sure. Iran remains a sponsor of terrorism.
I can imagine Osama bin Laden’s dream of an Islamist revolution against the appalling Saudi regime coming about, and as I said, there are Islamist armies in the field in Africa.
But this much is certain. After Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker and his fellow hostages put their anti-terrorist training to good use by throwing a chair at Akram and escaping, he said: “We are resilient and we will recover.”
So we are. And so we will.
