Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

assassination of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish,

and his Under-Secretary, Thomas Burke, at Phoenix Park in 1882,bya

secret society led by P. J. Tynan and known as the ‘Invincibles’. Most of

these were Dublin members of the Fenian Brotherhood or Land League

organisers. They thereafter disappeared, and this ended Parnell’s ﬂirtation

with the movement (Davitt 1904,p.363). (It has been claimed, however,

that this act was the result of Land League activity, and went against ofﬁcial

Fenian policy at the time. See O’Brion 1973,p.122,andHistory of the Irish

Invincibles 1883.) In turn, however, the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ by which Par-

nell was released in exchange for new laws promoting tenants’ rights, gave

an even greater ﬁllip to the ‘dynamite’ propaganda aiming to make ‘land-

lordism...impossibleinIreland’(Davitt1904,p.427). Plots were mounted

to assassinate Queen Victoria, to blow up the House of Commons and to

sink British shipping using a submarine (which was actually built in New

Jersey). It was consequently claimed that the Fenians ‘preached and put into

operation the same ferocious doctrines’ as the anarchists. ‘It is the duty of

every Irish citizen’, cried an Irish orator in 1883, ‘to kill the representa-

tives of England wherever found. The holiest incense to Heaven would be

the smoke of burning London’ (Adams 1903, ii,pp.563–4). But agents

provocateurs also inﬁltrated these schemes, and it was frequently denied

that such tactics ‘ever had the approval of the Fenian organisation in Amer-

ica or elsewhere’ (Sullivan 1905,p.170). An ‘Assassination Committee’

was supposedly established to deal with traitors within the movement, but

only one man, an agent provocateur and informer, Chief Constable Tal-

bot, met a violent end, and the very existence of such a committee was

denied by leaders like Davitt (Moody 1981,p.511). Between 1882 and 1885

some dozen explosions occurred in Glasgow, Birmingham and Dublin, but

chieﬂy in London, where Underground stations were a favoured target.

An especially powerful bomb caused g reat damage in the House of Com-

mons on 24 January 1885. And the strategy seemed to work; leading Fenians

quoted with approval the Westminster Review’s conclusion that ‘Dynamite has

brought Home Rule within the scope of Practical Politics’ (Denieffe 1906,

p. 289).

Sinn F

ein (‘Ourselves Alone’ – meaning self-reliance) was founded by

Arthur Grifﬁth after 1899 with the aim of promoting passive resistance to

British rule, a policy soon adopted by the IRB and Clan-na-Gael. Linked to

the Gaelic League (founded in 1893), which did much to support cultural

separatism, it also promoted Irish cultural nationalism, linguistic and cul-

tural de-Anglicisation, and economic self-sufﬁciency (Henry 1920,p.64;

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

O’Hegarty 1919,pp.14–15). Emerging as a deﬁnite political grouping in

1905, Sinn F

ein became a ‘strictly constitutionalist’ rather than a republican

movement (Henry 1920,p.51), seeking the restitution of the constitution

of 1782. Under Grifﬁth it advocated (in imitation of De

ak) a ‘Hungar-

ian policy’ of abstention from parliamentary activity as a substitute for

armed conﬂict, which was renamed the ‘Sinn F

ein policy’ (Grifﬁth 1918;

O’Hegarty 1919,p.18). Soon moribund, Sinn F

ein was revived when its

predecessor and Fenian remnant, the IRB, linked it to physical force meth-

ods and strengthened republican sentiment (Brady 1925,p.9; Henry 1920,

p. 88; O’Hegarty 1924,p.17). Thereafter it would play a central role in the

Easter Uprising of 1916, assisted by James Connolly’s Irish Socialist Repub-

lican Party (founded 1896). The physical force separatist wing of Sinn F

ein

then formed the nucleus of what became known as the Irish R epublican

Army, or IRA. It has been claimed, however, that prior to 1916 the idea of

physical force occupied in separatist philosophy only ‘a subordinate place.

It was a line of action, but it was not the only nor the main line of action;

it was, rather, a last reserve . . . The use of arms, and the right to insurrect,

were maintained as a matter of principle, but rather as a means of arousing

the nation’s soul than as a policy’ (O’Hegarty 1924,pp.164–5).

Continental and extra-European developments

Amongst the other European terrorist writers active in this period, mention

should be made of Johann Most (1846–1906), who early in 1879 established

the Freiheit in London, with the motto: ‘All measures are legitimate against

tyrants.’ A German Social Democrat, Most was jailed in London for praising

the assassination of Alexander II, but succeeded in transferring his paper,

Freiheit, to the USA, where it became the most inﬂuential anarchist journal

of the day. Most rejected the parliamentary road to socialism, contending

that conspiracies led by an elite cadre aiming at the murder of the exploiters

(including policemen and spies) would arouse the latent resentment of the

masses.

One of the most important developments in the anarchist tradition on the

continent following the Commune emerged with the theory of ‘propaganda

by deed’. The phrase had been coined in 1877 by a French physician, Paul

Brousse (1844–1912) (Stafford 1971; Vizetelly 1911), and was linked from

the late 1870s with an Italian peasant tax rebellion led by Errico Malatesta

(see Richards 1965), Carlo Caﬁero and the Russian Peter Kropotkin, among

others, for whom its great aim was to spread ‘courage, devotion, the spirit of

sacriﬁce’ (Kropotkin 1970,p.38). The idea came to be seen as a substitute

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

for intellectual propaganda as such. Here, too, we see the target of violence

widening from a regime and its ofﬁcials to a class, and not a small hereditary

order, either, but potentially all property owners or bourgeois.Everyact

of violence against the established order, in this view, came to be seen as

progressive; for some, such as the French shoemaker L

eon-Jules L

eautheir,

any bourgeois was a ﬁt (i.e. morally guilty) target; when the anarchist Auguste

Vaillant was executed he shouted ‘Death to middle-class society, and long

live Anarchism!’ (Vizetelly 1911,p.153). Class could now potentially justify

blood-letting on a scale as wide as race, a point Pol Pot would so vengefully

exemplify in the later twentieth century.

This acceptance of a mass category of ‘legitimate’ targets was an extremely

important step in the transformation of tyrannicide into modern terrorism

(Fleming 1982,pp.8–28). In an anti-imperial context, this could be widened

to include all members of the occupying ethnic group or nation. Amongst

the most important anti-imperial struggles to develop a ‘terrorist’ compo-

nent in this period was India. There had been isolated cases of assassination

in India as far back as 1853, when Colonel Mackison, the Commissioner

at Peshawur, was stabbed by a ‘fanatic’ from Swat who intended to prevent

British invasion of his ancestral lands (Hodson 1859,p.139). In June 1897

two British ofﬁcers were murdered by members of a Hindu military society,

commencing a new campaign of violence (MacMann 1935,p.43; Steevens

1899,pp.269–78). By the end of this period political assassination became

increasingly common. Mainstream nationalists were much inﬂuenced by

Mazzini, and Bengali extremists received aid from Irish-American Fenians

(Argov 1967,p.3; Bakshi 1988). In 1908 a book was published entitled The

Indian War of Independence, 1857, wrapped in a dust jacket inscribed ‘Ran-

dom Papers of the Pickwick Club’, which justiﬁed the killing of women

and children. Bomb-parasts, or worshippers, now became more common.

On 30 April 1908, a young Bengalee, Khudiram Bose, killed a Mr and

Miss Kennedy at Muzafferpur with a bomb intended for the magistrate,

Mr Kingsford. The nationalist leader Bal Gangadhar Tilak, who cited the

authority of Krishna in the Bhagavadg

ıt

a respecting the legitimacy of assassi-

nation, was arrested for extolling the use of bombs as ‘a kind of witchcraft, a

charm, an amulet’, and convicted of sedition (Chirol 1910,p.55). (Indige-

nous religious traditions were beginning to be interwoven with violent

protest; see Macdonald 1910,p.189.) This battle was also taken to the

streets of London in 1909, when Lord Morley’s political secretar y, Sir W.

Curzon Wyllie, and Dr Lalcaca were murdered. A host of other acts occurred

in India shortly thereafter, and recruitment efforts overseas were renewed.

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

Some political violence also occurred in Egypt, including the assassination

of the Prime Minister in 1910. Here nationalism and anti-British feelings,

inﬂamed by events like the 1864 Dinshiway incident, where four villagers

were executed after the accidental death of a British ofﬁcer, were linked to

an Islamic justiﬁcation for the killing of tyrants and ‘inﬁdels’ alike (Badrawi

2000).

In the late nineteenth century political violence escalated dramatically

throughout the world. The ‘golden age’ of political assassination began in

1870s with the killing of the liberal Spanish Prime Minister Juan Prim, by

right-wing opponents. By the time of the International Anarchist Congress

held in London in 1881 the justiﬁcation of acts of individual violence

had gained wide currency, and the fusion of the image of a card-carrying

anarchist and bomb-wielding dynamitard accomplished. This image, which

remains to this day, was especially associated with dynamite, which had

been invented in 1866 and had become the fashionable weapon of choice.

A multitude of attempts on leading European politicians followed; vic-

tims of the

ere des attentats at its peak included the president of Ecuador,

Gabriel Moreno (1875); the Japanese prime minister in 1878;theliberal

French president Sadi Carnot (1894), killed by an anarchist for whom he

was a symbol of political power, rather than individually guilty; the Shah

of Persia, Nasr-ed-Din (1896), killed by a Shi’ite mystic; the Spanish Prime

Minister Antonio Canovas (1897), another anarchist victim; the Empress

Elizabeth of Austria (1898); and the increasingly absolutist King Umberto

of Italy (1900), shot by an anarchist. The American president McKinley

followed in 1901, again at anarchist hands, with the King of Serbia falling

in 1903, the prime ministers of both Greece and Bulgaria in 1907, the King

of Portugal in 1908, the Egyptian prime minister in 1910, the Domini-

can prime minister in 1911, another Spanish prime minister in 1912,the

president of Mexico in 1913, and Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in

1914. This list could easily be doubled (see Hyams 1969). Individual acts

of violence also increasingly characterised labour disputes in France and

Spain. In the United States, Alexander Berkman, with the justiﬁcation,

‘The more radical the treatment ...the quicker the cure’ (Berkman 1912,

p. 7), attempted to assassinate the chairman of the Carnegie Steel Com-

pany in 1892 following a bitter strike. But there were also those, like

Emile

Henry, able to justify the random bombing of a caf

e, with no particular vic-

tims in mind, because society had collectively condoned injustice (Mered-

ith 1903,pp.189–90). Violent tactics also entered the Suffragette move-

ment in 1912–14, though only destruction of property (window-breaking,

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

postbox-burning) was generally sanctioned (stones thrown through win-

dows were wrapped in paper to minimise injury). But violence as such

was not gloriﬁed, and ideological inspiration seems to have been practically

non-existent (Harrison 1982; Pankhurst n.d.; Raeburn 1973). The classic

age of modern political assassination, whose motives thus included religion

and opposition to liberalism and democratic reform as well as radicalism,

ended in 1914.

There were, however, important exceptions to this trend. Many Amer-

ican anarchists, such as Benjamin Tucker, contended that violence could

only be legitimately justiﬁed by reformers ‘when they have succeeded in

hopelessly repressing all peaceful methods of agitation’ (Eltzbacher 1908,

p. 211). A number of other prominent anarchists, notably Tolstoy and

Gandhi, and including individualists like Josiah Warren and Lysander

Spooner (see Rocker 1949,p.161), also rejected violence entirely. By the

1890s Kropotkin in particular had come to deplore the loss of innocent

life, denying that revolutions were made by heroic acts, while refusing to

condemn their perpetrator s. But other anarchists, notably the geographer

Elis

ee Reclus (1830–1905), less hesitatingly insisted that the ends justiﬁed

the means, and that every act of violence against the existing order was good

and just (Fleming, 1979). (But it has been claimed that Reclus had ‘nothing

in common with the folly of the dynamitard’; Zenker 1898,p.161.) The

case can certainly be made that the blood-lust increasingly encouraged by

political violence – but equally imperial conquest – in this period heralded

and prepared the way for the vastly greater blood-baths of the twentieth

century, as both fascism and communism accepted, justiﬁed and promoted

violence as a means of ﬁrst obtaining and then maintaining state power,

thus wedding the philosophy of individual terror to attain power to that of

state terror to maintain it.

Terrorism and its justiﬁcation: theory and problems

It is worth brieﬂy considering what light these developments cast on the-

ories of terrorism, particularly in so far as the dissection of key moral

issues facilitates the framing of a usable deﬁnition of the term itself. The

relationship of the classical doctrine of tyrannicide to modern ‘terrorism’ is

complex, and beset by deﬁnitional ambiguities. The propensity to condemn

any armed struggle as ‘terrorist’ in which war has not been declared formally

undermines any more precise deﬁnitions, and hinders further clariﬁcation

of the subject. But according to classical deﬁnitions neither assassination

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

as such nor the effort to overthrow by force a despotic regime, or a force

of foreign occupiers in one’s own country (or another’s) would necessarily

qualify as ‘terrorist’.

Nonetheless the subject is fraught with paradox, contradiction and moral

ambiguity. Much late nineteenth-century Russian political violence was

aimed at the tsar, for example, who was widely recognised as an autocrat,

‘the real upholder of despotism’, as Victor Hugo put it, rather than a mere

‘mask’ like Louis Bonaparte (Hugo 1854,p.4). Such resistance could be

and was often construed by liberals as both ‘legitimate’ and justiﬁable; even

John Stuart Mill would exclaim of the attempt on Napoleon III’s life in

1858 that ‘What a pity the bombs of Orsini missed their mark, and left the

crime-stained usurper alive!’ (quoted in Morley 1917, i,p.55). Similarly

when Count V. Plehve, the Russian minister of the interior, was killed in

1904, many liberals applauded the act (Seth 1966,p.216). But the reign of

Louis Napoleon, sometimes described as the ‘ﬁrst modern dictator, basing

his authority directly upon a carefully controlled expression of the people’s

will’ (Packe 1957,p.253), rested of course on a plebiscite. To his assassin,

John Wilkes Booth, who famously shouted ‘sic semper tyrannis’ as he ﬁred

his pistol, the emancipator of American slaves, Abraham Lincoln, was also

a ‘tyrant’. (Southern landowners had published an offer of $100,000 to kill

him two years earlier.) But the Duke of Wellington refused to admit that

he possessed any right to have Napoleon Bonaparte assassinated (Browne

1888,p.135). Nor are ‘war s of liberation’ aiming to free nations or peoples

deﬁnable as nations ‘terrorist’ as such; such struggles lie more properly

within the literature of the tradition known as the ‘just war’ (Dugard 1989,

pp. 77–98). It has been pointed out, too, that most guerrillas adhere to

the chief canons of war in conﬁning their targets to the armed forces and

adjuncts thereof of their enemies.

The chief theoretical issues which arose from the emergence of the tactic

of individual violence as part of nineteenth-century revolutionary strategies,

which would be adapted and modiﬁed in the twentieth century, include:

(1) The question of the scope of permitted or legitimate assassination vis-

vis ‘tyrants’: here the problem of ‘innocence’, when ‘killing’ is not ‘murder’,

requires a coherent deﬁnition of tyranny or despotism. If a tsar (or a Hitler

or Stalin) might be legitimately killed (but both also enjoyed widespread

popular support), what justiﬁcations permit this? And when? We should

recall that temporary elective dictatorships, notably in wartime, have been

permitted in most societies; hence ‘dictators’ cannot constitute a legitimate

category for tyrannicide as such, though genocidal murder by a dictator

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Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

probably would trigger such a distinction. (But as we have seen, many

European nations engaged in genocidal policies during this period. The

assassination of Queen Victoria by a black Tasmanian would certainly have

been legitimate according to this logic.) Additional questions include: Does

‘terrorism’ include the killing of ‘innocent’ civilians who might be family

members of government ofﬁcials in a despotic reg ime? Does it include

killing such family members in an occupied colony by natives of that land?

Does the necessity of defending a revolution justify expanding the scope of

the legitimate use of violence, such that, as Bronterre O’Brien contended,

‘a large proportion of the victims’ of French revolutionary terror ‘deserved

their fate; for they would have murdered every democrat in France, had

they not been destroyed, themselves’ (O’Brien 1859,p.9).

(2) The political context in which terrorism is utilised where ‘tyranny’ is

absent: Can ‘terrorism’ ever be justiﬁed against a democratically elected

government? ‘Tyranny of the majority’ can assume many different and

very oppressive forms (ethnic, religious). Such distinctions were drawn at

this time. When President Garﬁeld was assassinated in 1881 by an oppo-

nent of liberal treatment of the defeated South, the Executive Commit-

tee of the Narodnaya Volya condemned the act, arguing that because the

will of the people made law in the United States, the use of such force

was not justiﬁable (Jaszi and Lewis 1957,p.138). But the assassination of

President McKinley in 1901 was inspired by anarchists (Vizetelly 1911,

p. 251).

8 It is worth noting that what a ‘despot’ was also underwent change in this period; as G. J. Holyoake

stated, ‘Formerly a man was regarded as a lawful ruler who reigned by what he called “divine right”.

Since representative government began, a king is regarded as a despot unless he reigns by Parliamentary

right. A ruler may be good or bad, but he is still a despot if he rules by his own authority, or prevents

any one else ruling by public appointment.’ Thus ‘tyrant killing, undertaken for public ends, with a

view to temper or suppress despotism, is not regarded by moralists as murder. It is apparently a necessity

of progress there and at that stage only, and is only defensible when done under such circumstances that

armed resistance cannot be reasonably attempted. Where the justiﬁcation of irremediable oppression

does not exist, tyrant-killing is a mistake.’ But he also added that ‘Nevertheless the good despot who

rules justly cannot be usefully killed, since one cannot be sure that an untried government, introduced

by force; could rule better than he.’ He then drew up four principles by which tyrannicide could be

justiﬁable (none of which he regarded as applicable in a free country): ‘1. That the tyrannicide must

have intelligence sufﬁcient to understand the responsibility of setting himself up as the redresser of a

nation . . . 2. He who proposes to take a life for the good of the people must at least be prepared to

give his own if necessary – both as atonement for taking upon himself the ofﬁce of public avenger

and to secure that his example shall not generate other than equally disinterested imitators . . . 3.

The adversar y of the despot must not be weak, vacillating, or likely to lose his head in unforeseen

circumstances, nor be deﬁcient in the knowledge and skill needful for his purpose . . . 4. He should

have good knowledge that the result intended is likely to come to pass afterwards’ (Holyoake 1893,

ii,pp.59–61).

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

(3) The issue of the nature of the method adopted: here the key question

is the justiﬁcation of violence where there is a signiﬁcant risk of ‘innocents’

being injured; over 150 were injured, for instance, in Orsini’s 1858 bombing.

Many attempts involved several methods at once; the successful plot against

Alexander II of 1 March 1881 proposed to assail the Tsar with explosives,

grenades and ﬁnally daggers. Here, as elsewhere, the key question is whether

the end to be achieved, if it can itself be justiﬁed, justiﬁes the means adopted.

(4) The justiﬁcation of suicide bombing: Holyoake said of Orsini that ‘Those

who engage in political assassination should have no hesitation in sacriﬁcing

themselves’ (Holyoake 1893, ii,p.27).

(5) The problem of the relation of terrorism to insurrection and internation-

alism. This raises the question of the scope of those legitimately permitted to

exercise such violence; in particular, sympathisers with a struggle as opposed

to the actual victims of an oppressive regime. The willingness to ﬁght in the

cause of others, from the French in Ireland to Byron in Greece onwards,

also stemmed from a sense of internationalist loyalty and devotion to prin-

ciple which transcended local and national boundaries, divided loyalties and

produced a sense of fragmented and contradictory political identity. Many

Irish fought on both sides of the American Civil War. Escaped convicts

assisted Australian Aborigines in their resistance to white violence. Some

Europeans evidently took the side of mutinous sepoys in India in 1857–8

(Forbes-Mitchell 1893,pp.278–85). Two Irish brigades as well as an Irish-

American corps (plus Italians, Scandinavians, Russians, Germans, Greeks,

Austrians, Bulgarians, French and Dutch volunteers) fought alongside Boers

in the South African war (Conan-Doyle 1900,p.82;Davitt1902,pp.300–

36). (Irish taken prisoner were protected from treason charges by having

previously been granted citizenship by the Volksraad.) It was easy for an

Irish nationalist like Michael Davitt to condemn England’s ‘cowardly and

unchristian’ warfare in South Africa from the Boer point of view (Davitt

1902,pp.579–90). To those who regard all forms of imperialism as prima

facie illegitimate, such cosmopolitanism was often applauded rather than

condemned (see Claeys 2010).

(6) The issue of the gloriﬁcation of violence for its own sake, for exam-

ple as ‘creative’, or for some psychological end which beneﬁts the perpe-

trator. We need here to consider what, if any, links really exist between

the destructive and the creative, and whether that ‘creative hatred’ which

Sorel dismissed, against Jaur

es (Sorel 1969,p.275), is not an oxymoron. A

related and underlying issue is the danger of moral egoism, or of a reli-

gious or quasi-theolog ical suspension of moral norms (e.g. an anomic or

251

Gregory Claeys and Christine Lattek

antinomian state of grace). Anarchists sometimes claimed that an individ-

ual could ‘be a law unto himself ’ (Vizetelly 1911,p.3) in the manner of

the sixteenth-century Adamites and Anabaptists. There were precedents

for this stance earlier in the modern period too; a black ﬂag carried in

We x f o r d in 1798 by Irish rebels carried the letters ‘M.W. S.’, which some

have interpreted as ‘Murder Without Sin’, signifying that it was no sin to

kill a Protestant (Holt 1838, i,p.89). But this has been denied, too. The

gloriﬁcation of violence for its psychologically liberating effects would be

taken up in the twentieth century, most notably, in the context of the

Algerian wars, by the French psychiatrist Franz Fanon (Fanon 1969;Per-

inbam 1982). The danger here that legitimate justiﬁcations for opposing

tyranny disintegrate into open-ended and self-perpetuating blood-lust is

evident.

5 Conclusion

Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the secular revolu-

tionary ideal identiﬁed with the ‘principles of ’89’, seemed to have run its

course, only to gather momentum again this century, with new challenges

to authoritarian regimes everwhere. Nonetheless the idea of revolution

remains tainted by the failed promise of historical necessity, and the accu-

sation of implicit totalitarianism, the fulﬁlment of Proudhon’s warning that

those who were ‘fascinated by the schism of Robespierre’ would ‘tomorrow

be the orthodox of the Revolution’ (Proudhon 1923a, p. 127). Throughout

much of the world nationalist movements emerged directly from anti-

colonial and anti-imperial resistance. But malformed, corrupt and failed

nation states too commonly resulted, and national identities did not always

succeed in transcending and mitigating ethnic, religious and tribal enmities.

Even in otherwise successful and relatively mature democracies, disfran-

chisement of women and exploited minorities has continued even to the

present. ‘Radicalism’ is today associated chieﬂy with right-wing extremist

movements, rather than the extension of the franchise. Though the issue

now excites little public emotion, republicanism has proven more success-

ful in the long term, with many leading monarchies being extinguished

completely in the early- to- mid-twentieth century, and others shorn of

any real political or constitutional power. By contrast, debates about ‘ter-

rorism’ are as heated today as in the late nineteenth century, and have

subsumed much of the controversy once associated with revolutionism. By

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Radicalism, republicanism and revolutionism

the late nineteenth century anti-imperialist and anti-colonial movements,

partly inspired by the democratic ideals of European revolutions, had begun

to gather momentum, and would become the focus of global politics in the

coming century. After 1918, and even more after 1945, thus, the analytic

thrust of the ideas and movements outlined here shifts markedly, though

not completely, away from Europe to the less developed world. Here the

idea of revolution has evidently far from run its course.

253