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Title: Sante Caserio Author: Anonymous Language: en Topics: propaganda of the deed, anarchist biography, biography, anarchist history, history Source: https://archive.elephanteditions.net/library/sante-caserio Notes: Translated by Barbara Stefanelli.
24th June 1894, the President of the French Republic Sadi Carnot reached
the end of his life in Lyon under the blows of a young Italian
anarchist, Sante Caserio.
The killing made a tremendous impact in France as well as in Italy and
all over Europe. Though Umberto I and Crispi showed their execration and
grief, people attacked a number of Italian shops in Lyons and in other
French towns, and in Paris they even demanded to go to war against
Italy. A ship of Italian emigrants on their way to America was compelled
to avoid all French ports, while many fugitives terrified of reprisals
started flocking into Turin.
But Caserio’s attack had no nationalistic intent whatsoever.
On the contrary, it was planned by its author as an act of solidarity
towards his French comrades Vaillant and Henry who had been struck down
by that State.
Caserio’s attack should be reconstructed meticulously as it is quite
significant, and reveals some interesting aspects of the anarchist
movement.
This is the story of Sante Caserio, a young Italian anarchist who
refused to join the army and kill other exploited like himself, and
emigrated to France so as not to be arrested as a deserter. There he
stabbed and killed Sadi Carnot, the French president of the Republic,
during a public celebration in honour of the latter in 1894.
Why are we remembering Caserio one hundred and sixteen years after his
death, which he faced on the scaffold after the killing of the
president? There is more than one reason.
First of all, we should never forget the acts of rebellion of the past,
especially as they are often neglected by official historians or
presented in the worst possible light. Secondly, the great importance of
Caserio’s action is still valid even if it belongs to a quite different
context than ours: Caserio, twenty-years old, the shy and diligent
worker coming from a little village in the north of Italy, struck the
very core of political power, the most prestigious symbol of French
bourgeois society. Thirdly, Caserio’s act represents an excellent
example to all anarchists who are fighting against the system in order
to destroy it. We are not saying that the killing of whatever president
of the republic is recommended (consider, in fact, that a new president
would be immediately elected), we are just saying that propaganda by the
deed is often more important than a million words. Discussion is
necessary and worthwhile, of course, but translating the latter into
actions is also necessary. This is true today as well as it was in
Caserio’s time.
At that time, working class living conditions were thoroughly miserable
throughout Europe, while the great political powers were wasting huge
amounts of money and lives in colonisation campaigns. A large number of
attacks against the capitalistic and imperialistic establishment broke
out all over the continent, but it was mainly in France that anarchists
made some bourgeois blood flow. French anarchism, devoid of the powerful
anti-monarchist incentive that had characterized Italian and Spanish
anarchism, included a series of attacks against bourgeois society and
the institutions of the French republic.
On December 9 1893 August Vaillant threw an explosive device into the
Chamber of Deputies. Although no one was killed he was sentenced to
death on January 10 1894 and guillotined on February 5. President Carnot
refused to show any mercy, in spite of a petition in favour of the
condemned and a plea from his daughter. Vaillant went to the scaffold
shouting an hurrah for anarchy and announcing that his death would be
avenged. Seven days later, Emile Henry, another anarchist, launched an
explosive device into the Café Terminus at Gare St Lazare, frequented by
the bourgeoisie. One of them died and several others were injured. On
May 21 1894 Henry also went to the scaffold. A number of explosions
occurred between these two episodes. The Parliament suggested the
introduction of special laws against anarchists, as had occurred in
other European countries, but the series of attacks did not stop. On
June 24 1894, one month after Henry’s death, the president of the French
republic Sadi Carnot was to reach the end of his life in Lyon under
Caserio’s blows.
It was the revenge of the oppressed against the ruling class of
exploiters, the desire to destroy the bourgeois system based on
injustice and corruption and replace it with a new society without
servants or bosses, poor or rich, armies or prisons.
Caserio, a poor young worker, was one of the many oppressed, but he was
also aware that the ruling class was made up of criminals whose hands
were covered with blood, the poor people’s blood. He decided not to
remain a passive spectator of the suffering inflicted on the
proletarians; as soon as he discovered anarchist ideas he dedicated the
remainder of his short life to spreading the ideal among people and
putting it into action himself. In this sense Caserio is still an
outstanding example to anyone who claims to be anarchist.
Barbara Stefanelli
1894 was a year of great social disorder in France. French anarchism was
actually deprived of the powerful anti-monarchist incentive which had on
the contrary characterised Italian and Spanish anarchism, but expressed
itself in a series of attacks against the system, bourgeois society and
the institutions.
On 9th December 1893, August Vaillant threw an explosive device full of
nails into the Chamber of Deputies, injuring many people but no one was
killed. The assailant, a very conscious rebel, but not a killer, was
sentenced to death on 10th January 1894 and guillotined on 5th February.
President Carnot refused to show any mercy, in spite of a petition in
favour of the condemned and a plea from his daughter. Vaillant went to
the scaffold shouting a hurrah for Anarchy and announcing that his death
would be avenged. Seven days later Emile Henry, another anarchist, threw
a deadly explosive device, which he had made alone, into Café Terminus
at Gare St. Lazare. One person died and several others were injured. On
21st May 1894 Henry also went to the scaffold.
A number of explosions occurred between these two episodes, not all were
of anarchist origin but all terrified the capital. The Parliament
suggested the introduction of special laws against anarchists, as had
occurred in other European countries, but the series of attacks didn’t
stop. On the contrary it was about to strike the peak of the political
pyramid: on 24th June 1894, one month after Henry’s death, the President
of the French Republic Sadi Carnot reached the end of his life in Lyon
under the blows of a young Italian anarchist, Sante Caserio.
The killing made a tremendous impact in France as well as in Italy and
all over Europe. Though Umberto I and Crispi [1] showed their execration
and grief, people attacked a number of Italian shops in Lyons and in
other French towns, and in Paris they even demanded to go to war against
Italy. A ship of Italian emigrants on their way to America was compelled
to avoid all French ports, while many fugitives terrified of reprisals
started flocking into Turin.
But Caserio’s attack had no nationalistic intent whatsoever. On the
contrary, it was planned by its author as an act of solidarity towards
his French comrades Vaillant and Henry who had been struck down by that
State.
Caserio’s attack should be reconstructed meticulously as it is quite
significant, and reveals some interesting customs and psychological
aspects of the anarchist movement [2].
Sante Caserio, a young man from Lombardy, was born on 8th December 1873
in the little village of Motta Visconti, near Milan, on the left bank of
river Ticino. In that village the poetess Ada Negri [3] was a teacher in
her first experience in a primary school in the late Eighties, but
Caserio was not among her pupils [4]. His family was very poor: his
father, who died young, was used to working as a boatman in the summer
and as a woodsman in the winter. When he was ten, the boy left his
family and moved to Milan in order to look for work. He became a worker
at ‘Tre Marie’ Bakery, where he was remembered as a gentle boy and a
hard worker. Though semiliterate he was very bright and when he ran into
the anarchist world and understood the basis of anarchism, he became
anarchist himself. He made friends with lawyer Pietro Gori, director of
the Milan newspaper ‘L’amico del Popolo’ (Friend of the People), which
was often seized by the authorities. Gori remembers his young comrade
from Motta Visconti in this way:
One morning in winter I saw him near the Chamber of Labour in Milan, he
was handing out propaganda pamphlets and bread to the unemployed
workers. He had bought the pamphlets as well as the bread with his own
savings. I never saw him even a bit drunk, which was quite usual among
poor people, and he also smoked very little. As concerns juvenile vices,
he was a puritan. One night he scolded a few friends of his who were
coming out from a brothel: ‘How can you abuse these poor women buying
their flesh and love?’. And as one of those guys, an opportunist, said:
‘At least we relieved a little of their misery with our money’, Caserio
went in, gave one lira to one of the women, who looked at him in wonder,
and went away without speaking. One day I asked him: ‘You’re a nice
young boy, why don’t you make love?’. ‘I used to’, he answered, ‘but
since I married the anarchist idea I’ve stopped going around with women,
and now I’d like to find a partner for life, as I would like her to be’.
He rented a flat where he used to give hospitality at night to all the
homeless comrades in Milan. It was a real camp site, whereas he was at
work in the bakery all the night.[5]
Gori’s interesting report is strengthened by a testimony which is above
suspicion: that of Filippo Turati [6]. Soon after the attack against
Carnot, Turati wrote a courageous article in ‘Critica Sociale’ where,
among other things, he dissociated himself from the general and
conventional feeling of grief and made it clear that Carnot was ‘the man
whose name is strictly associated with the greatest bourgeois and
militarist republic, the alliance between France, the Pope and the Tsar,
the massacres of Fourmies and Pas de Calais, etc’. Turati also talks
about the young assailant:
We knew Caserio in Milan, when he used to take part in our meetings and
contrast our views along with some other anarchists. But he was not as
insolent and arrogant as some of his comrades. On the contrary he was
gentle, thoughtful and quiet, he was known as an affectionate boy and a
very hard worker. His nature was deeply rooted in feelings of duty and
sacrifice. The fact that he had been a very religious teenager confirms
our opinion: he was not religious any more, but was still devout.[7]
The main feature of Caserio’s personality was his devotion to the
anarchist ideal. He had been constantly worried about doing his duty
properly and acting coherently with his ideas. On the one hand, as a
little boy, he had found a response to his need of faith in the
Christian doctrine, spirituality and maybe even poetry; on the other, as
an adult, he found in the anarchist movement that family he missed so
soon and in his comrades the people to whom he could give his great
love.
The chronicles describe him as a blonde, slim boy of average height,
with blue eyes and quite an intelligent face: ‘his upper lip was shaded
by some blond teenage hair, his eyes looked clever, his mouth was pink
and fresh’. He first went around with the anarchist group of Porta
Romana, then he himself created a group at Porta Genova, where they had
a cubbyhole as a meeting place and even a red and black flag on which
was written: ‘Anarchist-communist group a pee’, which means ‘broke’[8].
On 26th April 1892 he was arrested for the first time for handing out
the pamphlet Giorgio e Silvio, an antimilitarist dialogue, to the
soldiers of Santa Prassede barracks in Milan. He was sentenced but soon
let free again. At the age of nineteen he was called up to join the
army. He fled to Switzerland to avoid being enlisted and was condemned
as a deserter. He stayed in Lugano, where he found a job for a few weeks
and also took part in a strike (August 1893). Later he moved to
Lausanne, then to Geneva and finally to Lyons. In that town a strong
anarchist tradition was still alive, so Caserio met some other comrades,
but kept in touch with the Italian groups and received various anarchist
papers from there. From Lyons he moved to Vienna and from Vienna to
Cette (today called Sète), a sea-town south of Montpellier where many
Italian workers lived.
On Saturday 23rd June 1894 Sante Caserio worked as usual at the Viala
Bakery in Cette till 10am. Following a stupid quarrel, deliberately
aroused, with his boss, Caserio suddenly gave in his resignation and
picked up twenty francs. One hour and a half later he bought a dagger
for five francs from a local gun dealer who, lying, told him it was an
authentic piece from Toledo. At 1pm he went into Café du Garde, took a
look at the newspaper Intransigeant, and told everybody that he was
going to Lyon. The day before he had known that the President of
Republic would be in Lyon to inaugurate the Exposition, and he had
decided to kill him. Lyon was far from Cette, so the customers of the
Cafè not only didn’t suspect the young Italian’s intentions, they didn’t
even believe he was moving to Lyon. At 3pm Caserio was at the station,
took the train to Montbasin then, at 4pm, he caught the train to
Montpellier where he arrived at 4.43. Waiting for the 11.23pm train to
Avignon, he went and visited a friend of his, Laborie. He then caught
the train to Avignon but he stopped at Tarascone. From there he changed
class in order to take the only train to Avignon which was supposed to
arrive at 2.04am. In the first-class coach the passengers looked with
deep mistrust at that badly dressed and awkward stranger.
In Avignon, Caserio, who had been working all the previous night, fell
asleep for an hour on a bench inside the station. Then he asked for
information about the time and money needed to arrive at Lyon. The time
was enough, little more than four hours, but the price of the ticket,
eleven francs and thirty cents, was beyond his means: he had only twelve
francs. Had he bought the ticket to Lyon he wouldn’t have been able to
buy any food. He then resolved to go to Vienne, nine francs and eighty
cents, so that he could buy a piece of bread and calm his hunger. At
4.12am he left Avignon and at 9.45am he reached Vienne. Here he bought
Le Lyon Républicain, cut the page containing the President’s day
programme and wrapped it around his dagger. In Vienne he met a few
people he had known when he had been in that town in 1893, among whom
was a hairdresser who cut his hair for free and also gave him a glass of
wine. At 1.30pm Caserio left Vienne and walked towards Lyon, a journey
of 27km on foot. It was Sunday, a cloudy, rainy day. Caserio met some
beggars, gendarmes, and farm workers. On his way he also bought a packet
of tobacco and asked someone for two glasses of cold water. When he was
near Lyon, he came across a bus adorned with tricolour flags full of
people going to greet the President. Caserio only knew one spot in
Lyons, Place de la Guillotière, and went there in order to orientate
himself. The streets were all well-lit as the President was at the
Chamber of Commerce for a banquet. Such a scene, made up of
illuminations, parties, processions and music, gave rise to the most
hostile feelings in the lonely assailant’s mind. At a certain point,
Caserio, walking through the crowd, ran into a blocked road: the
Presidential procession would go right there to get to the Theatre for
the gala show. Caserio was on the wrong side though, as he had read that
the President would go by carriage sitting on the right side, whereas
Caserio was on the left side of the road. He found it difficult but in
the end he slipped behind a wagon and got to the other side, where he
gained a second row place among the throng. At 9.15pm the crowd started
tossing around. First two horsemen of the Republican Guard passed, then
it was the turn of some other regiments. The Marseillaise suddenly began
to play, the President was approaching. Behind the last regiment the
President’s coach came forward with two further horsemen on each side.
The President, who was with the major and two generals, greeted the
crowd. At that very moment Caserio sprang out, broke through the first
row, jumped on to the footboard and stabbed Sadi Carnot. Many people
thought that a man was making a plea, as they only saw the paper
wrapping around the dagger and didn’t realize that the President had
fallen down into his coach and was wounded to death. Caserio still had
time to find a way out through the crowd, but instead he ran in front of
the coach shouting: ‘Long live Anarchy! Long live the Revolution!’.
Quickly the horsemen seized him and pulled him away from the anger of
the crowd, while the President’s coach ran towards the Palace of
Prefecture, where the President died not long after midnight.
This sequence of events, which has been reconstructed here following the
detailed and truthful version given by Caserio himself during the
investigation and trial, proves three facts: 1) the assailant acted by
himself, in the simplest and most elementary way, without any help from
anyone and without talking to anyone about his plan; 2) not more than
four hours had elapsed from the moment the assailant had decided to act
and the moment in which he actually acted; these two facts and Caserio’s
deep long-lasting determination and remarkable physique and psychic
strength, made it possible for him to put his plan into action quite
easily, as no preventive measure of supervision could have stopped the
action under those conditions. Caserio’s attack was simply an individual
action made by one single man aiming to strike one single victim. During
the trial the prosecutor tried to use a not very reliable witness in
order to support the hypothesis of a conspiracy. But Caserio’s long walk
from Vienne to Lyons due to his lack of money, undertaken with the risk
of missing that tragic meeting, is the proof that no project had been
planned in advance by the accused, nor, as a logical consequence, by his
supposed accomplices. What Caserio had planned before was the acceptance
of his death: that was his great strength, he had therefore fulfilled
himself with his act. During the inquiry he was calm and talked quietly
with the investigating judge. One day he said to him: ‘How is it that
such an intelligent man as you doesn’t understand that the present
society needs to be changed by the means of anarchy? Me, a poor baker,
understood that, why don’t you?’
During the trial he was calm, dignified and even witty. Here are a few
of his remarks:
Judge: Accused, considering your childhood, nobody could have foreseen
your horrible murder. You were a diligent and honest worker. But you
were also impetuous, gloomy and too reserved.
Caserio: Sir, I’m not responsible for being like this.
Judge: You were once an altar boy, weren’t you? And you also used to
appear in religious processions as young Saint John the Baptist, weren’t
you?
Caserio: Little boys don’t know what they are doing, they often do silly
things.
Judge: Isn’t it true that in 1892 you were arrested for making some
anarchist propaganda among the soldiers?
Caserio: Yes Sir.
Judge: In 1892 you deserted and repudiated your homeland as well as your
family.
Caserio: The whole world is my homeland.
Judge: Have you met with some well-known anarchists in Milan?
Caserio: Should I have done I wouldn’t say.
Judge: The police know that, even though you don’t say it.
Caserio: The police do their work, I do mine.
Judge: The prosecutor states you saw an anarchist hairdresser.
Caserio: I couldn’t go to a baker’s to have my hair cut.
Judge: You’re Italian, the attack was on 24th June, didn’t that day mean
anything to you?
Caserio: It’s Saint John the Baptist day, a holiday in my village.
Judge: It is the day of the battle of Solferino, when Italian and French
blood flowed together for the freedom of Italy.
Caserio: I don’t accept civil war.
Judge: You had no right to kill the President, there’s a natural law
which prevents from killing!
Caserio: But heads of government are used to killing....
Judge: You said that had you been in Italy you’d have hit the King and
the Pope, didn’t you?
Caserio: Oh no, they never go out together.
Only rarely did Caserio get upset, namely when the defence tried to show
that Caserio’s family was mentally deranged. He was very sensitive about
that. He also wrote a resentful letter to Podreider, his Milan lawyer,
against such a line of defence that aimed to play down the political
importance of his act. Podreider gave up Caserio’s defence as a result
of that letter [9]. Another reason for Caserio’s resentment arose when
Mr Dubreil, his assigned lawyer, mentioned the ‘bad influence’ that Gori
had on Caserio in order to mitigate the accused’s punishment. On that
occasion Caserio suddenly interrupted his lawyer and shouted: ‘I don’t
want you to insult my ideas!’. Caserio’s anger also aroused when they
put forward the hypothesis of a draw: ‘We’re not soldiers, no need to
pick a number! Anarchists are not subordinate to anyone!’. Caserio was
then moved to tears when Mr Dubreil talked about his mother and his poor
family. During the inquiry he had said: ‘I love my mother but can’t help
moving away from the prejudice of family. A greater and more important
family is humanity itself’. But Caserio’s feelings towards his mother,
brothers and nephews were full of affection and his last thought was for
them, as is proved by the letters he wrote from the prison [10].
During the trial, Caserio answered various questions using his memorial
that was read at the end of the trial. The memorial contains the
essential reasons for his act: it is evidence of his beliefs, just as
Vaillant and Henry’s declarations were to become anarchist propaganda
texts after their death. Caserio cared a lot about his memoir which he
wrote in his Italian Lomellina [11] while he was in prison. When father
Alessandro Grassi, the priest of Motta Visconti and only person of that
village who went to Lyon for Caserio’s trial, visited him in prison,
Caserio read his memoir to him [12]. The poor priest tore his hair out,
perhaps because of the style of Caserio’s text, perhaps for its content,
and said to him: ‘Tear up these pages of yours, I’m writing down a few
lines for you which will make a good impression on the jury’. But
Caserio was absolutely adamant, and refused.
During the trial an interpreter read his declaration whose publication
was forbidden by the Court following a bill passed in France a few days
before. In Italy, on the contrary, Caserio’s declaration was published
as one of the journalists at the trial, the correspondent of the Milan
newspaper ‘La Sera’, was able to write it down in shorthand. Caserio’s
text can’t be compared with Vaillant and Henry’s revolutionary
eloquence, but it reveals his mature judgement and his ability to
express it in a simple and clear way. First of all he talks about his
own experience and the suffering he shared with other proletarians:
hunger, unemployment, forced emigration, pellagra, low salaries, meagre
and bad food, long working hours. On the other hand he saw ‘big shops
full of clothes and woollen fabric as well as storehouses full of wheat
and corn’ and then ‘plenty of people who didn’t need to work and produce
because they lived thanks to the hard work of poor people while they had
huge luxury houses with many rooms, twenty or thirty horses, many
servants and any of the pleasures of life.....’. The comparison between
the two categories made Caserio aware that society was not fair at all,
that’s why he got rid of all the idols and beliefs he had grown up with.
‘I used to believe in God, but when I saw such inequality among human
beings, I realised that it was not God who created men, on the contrary
men have created God in order to keep people ignorant and make them
respect private property’. As concerns the homeland Caserio, who was
compelled to leave first Motta Visconti in order to find a job and then
Italy in order to escape conscription, came to believe that ‘there’s no
homeland for us poor workers. Our homeland is the whole world.’ In his
final years what struck him most was Vaillant and Henry’s condemnation,
what disgusted him most were the France-Russia alliance great
celebrations in Paris, Marseilles and Tolone. Caserio didn’t save anyone
among the ruling class, neither kings, presidents of the republic,
generals, ministers, deputies or trade union leaders. And he ended:
‘Members of the jury, you are representatives of bourgeois society; you
want my head? Well, take it, but don’t think you can stop the anarchist
idea’.
The trial lasted just one day, 3rd August 1894, and Caserio was
indifferent to the death sentence. He was ready for that and refused to
sign an appeal to the Court, even although he could have done as at the
beginning of the trial the judge had pronounced an inadmissible speech
aimed at influencing the jury’s final decision. He also refused to sign
any petition for mercy and finally he refused any religious consolation
to such an extent that he claimed he was a Jew in order to avoid the
priest’s insistence.
Here are the first lines of the popular song which made that day famous:
On 16th August
At daybreak
The executioner prepared
The horrible guillotine
The execution was carried out by Deibler, the executioner, who had come
to Lyons for that purpose, exactly at 4.35am, just before dawn. About
three thousand people witnessed it: workers going to or coming from
work, lovers of night life, drunk men, curious persons. Caserio faced
the scaffold with great dignity but when he was next to the guillotine
he jumped with fear, took a step backwards and cried in his dialect: ‘A
voeri no’ (I don’t want), at least so they said. But he soon recovered
and accepted death.
As soon as the execution was over, a little applause came from the crowd
which had been silent until then.
France showed
Her joy
Shouting hurrah for the executioner
Who cut off his head.
At that very moment a prisoner in St Paul Prison shouted: ‘Hurrah for
Anarchy, damn Deibler’.
The prisoner, a poor thief, was soon identified and put in chains.