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Title: Angiolillo’s Vengeance Author: Solidaridad Obrera Date: August 1998 Language: en Topics: Michele Angiolillo, vengeance, colonialism, political repression, Spain, assassination, propaganda of the deed, history Source: Retrieved on 24th September 2020 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/kkwj4b Notes: From El Solidario, August ’98, organ of the Solidaridad Obrera group in Spain. Translated by Paul Sharkey.
On 20 August 1897, the Italian anarchist Michele Angiolillo Lombardio
was garrotted to death in Vergara, Spain. He was 36 years old and just a
few days earlier he had killed the Spanish prime minister Antonio
Canovas del Castillo in the spa town of Santa Agueda, capitalising upon
an oversight on the part of the police escort.
We have few details about Angiolillo. We know that he was from Naples
and entered Spain from France, coming from Marseilles in 1897.
Previously he had been living in England and it was probably there that
he met the Spanish anarchist refugees who would have filled him in on
the situation of the anarchist movement in their homeland, especially as
regards the most active elements at the time, the Catalans.
The engineer Tarrida del Marmol’s book, Inquisitors of Spain, had just
been published. The author, having fled to England, offered a first hand
account of the so-called Montjuich trial which had followed the bombing
of the Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona in 1896. A bomb had been
thrown at the procession — not, oddly enough at the dignitaries leading
it but at the body of the procession — and five workers and a policeman
had been killed. This curious circumstance, plus the fact that the
actual perpetrator was never identified led to suspicions of a set-up or
connivance on the part of the police themselves, a much more likely
story than most might be inclined to believe.
In any event, hundreds of arrests ensued and the matter was used as an
excuse to put the anarchists on the rack. The aim was to indict some of
the leading ideologues still at liberty, Tarrida del Marmol among them.
Later, in his book, he would tell of the awful tortures to which the
accused were subjected in the Montjuich fortress to extract phoney
confessions. The upshot of the trial was that lengthy prison sentences
were handed down and five anarchist militants were executed by firing
squad. In only one case was there a hint of possible involvement in the
preparations for the bombing. The other four were completely innocent.
The First Republic having foundered due to military intervention, the
Bourbon restoration established by Canovas del Castillo (endorsed by
Isabella II, Maria Cristina and Alfonso XII, one after another) put paid
to a pre-revolutionary situation and ushered in unprecedented stability,
thanks to rotation in power of the conservatives (led by Canovas) and
the liberals (led by Sagasta), both of them recognising the authority of
the monarchy. That stability which favoured big business and shady deals
served the interests of the landowning oligarchy and superior officers
in the military. Their chief enemy (given, as well, the dithering and
limp character of incipient marxist socialism) was anarchism: Not just
on account of sporadic and controversial outrages, which many anarchists
condemned, but because of the certain fact that the anarchist movement
was growing in influence every day and that at all costs situations such
as has occurred before where the anarchists fomented and led strikes,
revolts and popular disturbances (as in Alcoy, Jerez, Cadiz, Barcelona,
etc.) had to be averted. The position in Andalusia where hunger was an
endemic problem might turn explosive again and any disturbances were put
down at gunpoint and with mass arrests, not to mention recourse to the
ley de fugas [shot ‘trying to escape’]. During this time, paradoxically,
as Gerald Brenan puts it ‘every Civil Guard turned into a recruiting-
sergeant for anarchism.’ In 1896 a new law was promulgated: it was
designed specifically to crack down on anarchism.
As if that were not enough, the response to the pro-independence
agitation in the Spanish colonies took the form of carte blanche being
given to the most reactionary among the military. In the Philippines, a
revolt had been ruthlessly quashed and among those mown down was the
most popular leader, the Tagalog José Rizal. General Martinez Campos was
dispatched to Cuba to defend the short-term interests of the Spanish
landowners: he was soon replaced by General Weyler who displayed greater
zeal in his efforts to de-populate the island. His greatest problem was
ensuring regular supplies to his huge army which was doomed to hunger
and decimating disease by the corruption of the army bureaucrats.
This policy of bloody terror was to furnish an ideal pretext for the US
government to persuade the voters that war should be declared on foot of
some obscure manoeuvre. The war with the Americans, under-rated by the
‘brilliant’ Spanish strategists, was to culminate in the disaster of
1898 and the traumatic loss of Spain’s colonies and the complete
disgracing of her army which, in spite of swallowing up the bulk of the
national budget, stood exposed in its archaic and corrupt structures,
especially the extremely pricy navy which was wiped out by armoured US
ships. Canovas (someone the present rightwing government would have us
look up to again) and his regime had one pronounced feature in the shape
of a superciliousness that placed them beyond good and evil and
inaccessible to any sort of influence by popular feeling. His lapidary
pronouncements are famous: ‘He is Spanish who cannot be anything else’
and ‘Poverty is the badge of stupidity…’ This in a society prey to
chronic starvation, with a 75% overall illiteracy rate and a State
groaning under a massive debt run up by exorbitant military expenditure.
By the time that Angiolillo arrived in Barcelona, anarchists had been
driven completely underground: their public meetings, newspapers were
strictly banned. He may well have been involved in an operation to raise
funds and was arrested but the complete lack of evidence against him and
good references resulted in his being released.
He then set about laying the preparations for the assassination bid that
had brought him to Spain. He travelled to Madrid and assumed a false
identity as one Emilio Rinaldini, reporter for the Il Popolo newspaper.
He journeyed by train to Zumarraga and made his way to the spa town of
Santa Agueda where he claimed to have come in search of a cure for his
chronic pharyngitis. He had with him a small suitcase in which he had
two revolvers and a few sticks of dynamite. He dumped the dynamite in
order to avert injury to the innocent. Although he spoke with no one,
his educated manner and great height did not go unnoticed; because of
them several witnesses claimed to have seen him strolling around the
environs of the Buena Esperanza hermitage just as the worshippers were
leaving on the morning of 7 August. Once again, Angiolillo decided
against accosting Canovas because of the large number of people in the
vicinity.
His chance came the next day when the prime minister was fleetingly left
alone with his wife on a bench in the spa. Rushing over, he fired at
Canovas killing him virtually outright. He was detained and offered no
resistance and taken to Vergara to appear before a summary court martial
as the law required, even though he was, of course, no serviceman. Under
questioning he implicated no one, stating that he had acted alone at all
times; he declared that he was a dedicated anarchist and that the
assassination was by way of a reprisal for the torture and killing of
his comrades in the Montjuich fortress and for the execution of the
Filipino rebel leader José Rizal. He was sentenced to die by the
garrotte, a sentence carried out forthwith on 20 August 1897. He
appeared calm at all times and showed no signs of remorse.