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Title: Life of Malatesta Author: Luigi Fabbri Date: 1936 Language: en Topics: Errico Malatesta, biography Source: Retrieved on 2020-06-05 from https://libcom.org/library/life-malatesta-luigi-fabbri
The day I met Errico Malatesta is the most vivid memory of my distant
youth.
It was in April, 1897. The conservative and bourgeois monarchy who sat
in Savoy had suffocated the Italian people for nearly a year under a
harsh storm of reactionary measures which prefigured fascism, pausing to
appease them only once they threatened to disrupt the tranquil luxury of
the ruling classes.
Francesco Crispi, the old Jacobin-become-Minister who hid behind the
[banner of X] as he persecuted all new ideas, was forced to resign
thanks to the tide of popular indignation at Italyâs defeat in
Abyssinia. The imperial megalomania of the monarch Umberto I and his
Minister was laid to rest, and the peninsula once more breathed a small
sigh of liberty.
The revolutionary proletarian movement began to grow. Four months
earlier the first issues of Avanti! (Forward!), Italyâs first socialist
daily, had been published in Rome, and anarchists who had been
disarticulated and reduced to silence by the reaction of mid-1894, once
more had a pair of papers: Social Future (LâAvvenire Sociale) in Messina
and New Word (Il Nuovo VerboThe New Word) from Parma.
Many comrades, however, were still in jail or in domicilio
coatto,^(=> #sdfootnote1sym *
) the most famous of which were Galleani, Molinari, Gavilli, Binazzi and
Di Sciullo. Others, including Malatesta, Gori and Milano, lived under
the heavy burden of exile. Young supporters surged to fill the breach
left by their absence, and replaced those who under persecution had
disappeared from the movement or crossed over to the socialist camp.
Saverio Merlino, a well-known example of the latter, had gone so far as
to try to buy his way out of prison by publicly insisting that
anarchists accept the electoral and parliamentary system.
At the same time, some of those who were condemned and deported
recovered their freedom, and others, like Pietro Gori, returned from
their flight.
On March 14 of that year a new weekly, LâAgitazione, (Agitation) saw the
light of day in Ancona, the capital of Marcas province and a traditional
home to anarchists. The paperâs subtitle declared it a âsocialist
anarchist periodical.â At the time, I was a law student at the
university of the nearby city Macerata. I was 19 and full of enthusiasm
for the anarchist ideas which, since I had embraced them in 1893, had
already cost me some police persecution, a short trial, and a bit of
jail. From Ancona, my old friends Recchioni, Agostinelli and Smorti
encouraged me to write for their new paper, in which they had already
announced me as a contributor.
I decided to cement their invitation with a brief hesitation. Reading
the paperâs first issues had affected me intensely. It was a publication
unlike anything I had read before: flawlessly written, compiled and
printed, with more the tone of a magazine than a newspaper. Errico
Malatesta contributed from London.
The authors I read in it were brimming with thought and animated by a
spirit that was wonderful and new to me. I confusedly felt that I was
their intellectual inferior; all I knew was the anarchist press of the
past three or four years. I wrote and submitted a theoretical article on
âNatural harmony,â polishing it as well as I could manage. I explained
anarchy as an application of the laws of nature to human society through
the medium of science, which by negating God brings us to the negation
of all authority, political or economic. Its citations grounded it
mostly in the intellectual authority of Kropotkin and the Italian
philosopher Giovanni Bovio.
Frankly â and who hasnât been young and committed such sins of
presumption as to throw the first stone â I believed that I had written
a short masterpiece! Instead⊠my article wasnât published. I asked my
friends from Ancona what had gone wrong and they told me that they
disagreed with my article; they would publish it alongside with their
criticisms if I insisted, but I declined, to avoid giving readers the
impression of a family quarrel. They invited me to go to Ancona to
exchange ideas in person.
I fell from the clouds! Why did these comrades disagree with me? I wrote
them a few lines saying that I wouldnât bother to travel for something
so minor â but either way, finding Malatestaâs London address in the
paper, I wrote him for the first time, expressing my shock that the
paper he wrote for didnât share my conception of a complete and just
anarchy. Malatesta didnât respond, but a few days later Cesare
Agostinelli wrote for me to come to Ancona, saying that friends would
like to see me there, adding that it wasnât only about the article⊠They
sent me the money I was lacking to make the trip, but even without this
I was already determined to go.
I made up my mind one Saturday afternoon, relaxing my usual vigilance
against the police. I took the train to Ancona and arrived at dusk.
Agostinelli greeted me in his small store at the end of the Corso and
without delay, he took me down side streets to the distant suburb of
Piano San Lazzaro.
Arriving at a house, he opened the door with a key and we climbed a
wooden staircase at the end of the corridor, to find that it led to a
sort of attic.
As we climbed, I heard an unknown voice ask, âWho is this?â
âHeâs the âHarmonistâ,â responded Agostinelli, obviously referring to my
rejected article. Clambering to the top, I saw a small room with a
country bed at one side, an oil lamp burning on the table, and a pair of
chairs. On the chairs, on the table, on the bed and all about the floor
lay an indescribable number of papers, journals and books in apparent
disarray. A short stranger with thick, black hair met me with
outstretched arms and deep, laughing eyes. Agostinelli stepped from the
ladder and explained: âI present to you, Errico Malatesta.â
When Malatesta embraced me, my heart leaped about in my chest â I was
dazed and petrified. He was already a legend â demon of all the police
of Europe, an audacious revolutionary, banned in Italy and elsewhere,
and a refugee in London â but here he had been hiding all along. My
impression, that of an inexperienced youth full of an almost religious
faith, is easier to imagine than to describe.
âWhat?â he asked Agostinelli, âYou havenât said anything to him?â
We cleared the chairs and sat, Agostinelli leaving moments later.
My friendship with Malatesta formed almost immediately, like we were
merely renewing it and he had been an older brother or a comrade of many
years. I would have spoken to him like my father if he hadnât looked so
young â he was forty-four but looked even younger â such was his frank
and easygoing nature, his comfortable air that only develops in the
company of equals.
He promptly began a long and animated discussion, mostly about the
points in my article. It would be too long to repeat, but for the most
part is easy to imagine, knowing Malatestaâs ideas, and my article which
stated views common among anarchists of the day. At three in the morning
we were still debating. I slept there as I could, on a cushion that
Agostinelli (who had returned with food for us) had improvised for me in
the corner.
At seven in the morning I was awake again, expressly to continue our
discussion. We talked without rest, throughout the day, until night cut
the moment short and we parted emotionally before my train for Macerata.
I had to be back the next day to help with classes, but I also wanted to
avoid alerting the police to my absence.
It had been roughly a month since Malatesta had arrived in Ancona
incognito to put LâAgitazione together. He still lived beneath the
weight of a three- to four- year sentence pronounced against him in Rome
in 1884 for âassociation with neâer-do-wellsâ; the threat barely changed
him. He stayed hidden for about nine months before the police caught up
with him, but the verdict was already decided.
Two months later a lack of basic necessities provoked popular rebellions
in Ancona and elsewhere, and he was detained again. This time, the
arrest was followed by a longer imprisonment, trial, domicilio coatto,
and more. [check chronology]
After our first meeting, I often returned to Ancona to see Malatesta in
hiding and then later, during his prison term and the trial of April
â98. That first encounter determined the course of my life, spiritually
and intellectually, and I can say it changed the rest of my life as
well. In our long colloquium, more than twenty-four hours, I had the
sensation that my brain had taken flight in my skull. I remember it
still, like yesterday, when arguments I had been so certain about were
discussed over and over, but finally fell to pieces. I wouldnât be able
to repeat my points now, while Malatestaâs arguments affected me with
more than their logic: a logic so natural and coherent that it seemed
that any child would have known it, so obvious that it was impossible to
refute.
Through this encounter, anarchy, the most radiant faith of my early
youth, had grown from a simple faith to become a deep conviction. If it
had been possible before then to trade in my beliefs for others, I felt
that with that episode I had become an anarchist for life; that it was
already impossible to change through anything other than a flippant and
base treachery, or a dark and involuntary twist of my consciousness.
Ages have passed since that remote spring of 1897. The hazards of life
and battle have brought long separations between us more than once.
Since then, years have passed without a letter. But whenever I went to
see him â in London in 1906, in Amsterdam in 1907, in Ancona united
again by common work from 1913â14, and finally without interruption from
1920 through 1926 â he always seemed the same to me as he did that first
time. Physically, it appeared that the years failed to take their toll
on him. In Bologna in 1920, I saw him playing with my children and full
of passion, with the same spirit as in Ancona thirty years earlier when
he wanted to fool around and run in the streets, or encouraged me to
make some noise to scandalize the older comrades.
He lived a perennial youth, and his ever-young spirit tamed his physical
nature. They say that age and death are nothing but prejudices, and the
deep psychological (even physiological) truth in this paradox can be
seen in the story of his long life. His fragile health, however, had
threatened illness since the first signs of trouble twenty years
earlier. When they met in 1872, Bakunin didnât believe Malatesta would
last another six months and the doctors agreed; its fair to say that he
defeated sickness for sixty years with his will to live. He never
surrounded himself with doctors and nurses in agonized fear of death,
but instead had the air of one who doesnât believe in death, believing
in his own energies and skeptical of the medical arts. He had inner
strength that became a spring of physical energy for him. The greatest
portion of that inner strength certainly came from his undevourable
optimism, which was never hobbled or fatigued by disillusionment, the
bitter messes and disasters, nor the graves that were dug. Few have seen
such suffering in all their cursed existence. In the end, when he felt
near death, he saw signs of the imminent rebellion and liberation he had
hoped for with such indestructible faith. It is that optimism which â in
wild forms of language reaching to the bounds of a sweeping creativity
full of humanism â always reanimated him after defeat, like the legend
of Anteo, always falling back to mother Earth, only to say, âNo matter:
we will start again.â
When I went to Rome in July 1926 to greet him, before I fled Italy in
search of bread and the liberty that my âfascistizedâ homeland had
robbed me of, I couldnât have guessed that it would be our last meeting.
He looked the same as he did thirty years before, less some white hairs
and a slightly tired walk, but with his old smile, his eyes alive and
deep for friends, remote and pained by the cruel tricks of his enemies.
And always in his logic closed to reason, always firmly hopeful that
victory is near.
My part in his life sadly ends here, when he decided to stay in Italy.
Though he appreciated the serious reasons compelling me to leave, the
memory of his decision always reopens the lacerated wound of remorse. He
wrote several times to say that he has been well, that his decision was
based on expectations which never materialized, and so on. In spite of
everything, I am often overcome by the doubt that if it had been easier
to stay⊠Who knows! But either way, that last day, he said goodbye to me
not as a friend departing forever, who might never be seen again, but he
accompanied our farewell embrace with a single word whose unyielding
optimism came from the heart, as if the separation would be short, and
the day soon in which Italyâs doors would be thrown open and exiles
could walk the earth freely: âCiao!â
More than seven years have passed, and still neither of us has seen the
other!
Curse the tyrants who divided us forever and denied us even the bitter
consolation of throwing a flower on his tomb!
Future generations will understand Malatesta through what remains of
him: the vast complex of his ideas and the story of his life. These will
easily fill a generous page of history which can never be erased. His
living personality is what has vanished, and however eloquent the
testimony of his writings or the cold account of his accomplishments,
these will only be an incomplete reflection of what we saw â we who
lived a bit of his life and warmed ourselves by the passionate fires of
his heart.
The true Errico Malatesta continues alive and whole in our spirits and
memories â but wonât this impression he made and the influence he held
upon us eventually be dissolved by the corrosive efforts of time? Either
way, when those of us who knew him personally have vanished, some final,
living part of him will disappear with us. Not to dismiss this
inevitability, but to soften its effect a little, I will try to describe
that living part of him here, independently from his life-story and the
ideas he defended in his writings, which I will present and discuss
separately. I havenât the skill to revive him in his most beautiful
aspects, so my attempt will necessarily fall short of reality.
Maybe at some point in the future another author will do what is
necessary better than I have; but I know that my efforts will at least
complete a picture of him, when no painter or photographer will be able
to bring back the light which has gone out forever. I fear that my work
might be mistaken for one of the usual apologias of political parties.
It isnât. I have asked myself more than once, even while he was alive,
if I would have felt the same admiration and affection towards him if we
had held different political views. However difficult it was to separate
the person from his thought, I have always answered that my feelings
towards him, after knowing him so well, couldnât have been any
different. The proof that this isnât simply my own partiality is that
Malatestaâs moral qualities have also struck and won over anyone who has
had the chance to grow close to him in any real way, regardless of their
differences of ideas, political opinions, or their place in society. On
more than one occasion, his bloodiest enemies felt driven to respect
before him; including the thugs who were kinder â for however fleeting a
moment â after meeting him.
Malatestaâs thought and actions cannot be fully understood without
knowing what goodness was present in the propagandist and the militant.
Despite the theoretical and practical quarrels that could at times
separate him from others, he was truly the soul-brother of those who
could be called â as Pietro Gori called them â the âheroes of goodnessâ:
Elise Reclus, Peter Kropotkin, Louise Michel, and others less known,
including the entirely ignored majority of humankind, sometimes
uneducated and almost illiterate, as were many we had known in the
revolutionary world. They werenât exempt from ugliness and baseness
either, of course, and were still certainly too few, but already enough
to do honor to humanity and to inspire belief in the brightest of hopes
for our future. Kindness, not weakness or blindness, is the best raw
material for all constructive rebellions against tyrants and social
miseries.
Malatestaâs kindness was united with an inflexible and resolved
character, which didnât trail off in useless words, but which was felt
in each one of its spoken or written manifestations as one feels the
heat of the sun. When he spoke to crowds, what made his reasoning and
encouragement sink in among the people who rushed to hear him and raised
their enthusiasm, despite the literary nakedness of his speech was, on
top of the seriousness of what he said, the great feeling of love felt
beneath all of his words.
Similarly, when he strived to convince someone in order to attract them
to his ideas in private conversation, his interlocutor would be won over
above all else by a contagious feeling which awoke the best qualities of
the soul and produced a reassuring belief in himself and in all people.
Naturally, Malatestaâs writings didnât have the same effectiveness as
his spoken word, when his sharp eyes could illuminate and give warmth,
firm and sweet at once, his voice and gestures so expressive and
affectionate. His writings still had an extraordinary ability to
persuade, not only by their clarity, simplicity and conciseness, but
also because of the noble and untiring human love that formed his
spiritual medium, never needing to resort to that sentimental wordiness
which is nothing more than the artificial display of goodness. His
personal goodness is revealed there in a reasoned and reasonable
optimism that casts a feeling of both safety and comfort over the
reader, though always remaining grounded in the most real and painful
uncertainties.
I should emphasize the fighting nature and the energizing effects of
Malatestaâs kindness, so that he isnât mistaken for one of those who,
passive and resigned, guiltily indulge the tyrannical and wicked. He
hated the bad as much as he loved the good; hate, he used to say, is
often an expression of love, though love and not hate is the true factor
of human liberation.
His innate kindness was a weapon for fighting, an instrument of
revolution, the leaven of rebellion. Far from hiding this kindness when
faced with the harshest necessities of revolutionary action, he
brandished it with resolved animation and affirmed it with an
uncompromising inexorability. It always remained alert in him,
recovering from each bitter battle, thoughtful of the human objective of
every fight, confounding in the same higher pity the vanquished and
fallen of all places. This was so sincere and obvious in all of his acts
and words, particularly to those under the direct influence of his
presence, by disarming them of all the malevolent preventions and
partisan hostilities of people, other than the notorious digging
scoundrels or shameful people paid with the single object of attacking
and defaming him.
It would be possible to tell many stories, some curious and others
shocking, about the influence exerted by Malatesta in the most diverse
environments, about people of the highest social classes and furthest
removed from his ideas and propositions, who ran into him in the course
of busy everyday life. The papers once invented a stupid and
conspiratorial drama about the simple fact of the profound impression
Malatesta made on the ex-queen of Naples, Maria SofĂa, and the esteem
she held him in after their chance acquaintance.^([1]) The famous
English political writer and journalist William Steed testified his
highest regard for Malatesta, and openly spoke of him as one of the most
interesting Italians of his time. His humane influence was felt even by
the judges, jailers, and police agents charged with condemning him,
keeping him in custody, and watching over him.
In the course of narrating his life, below, I will have the chance to
elaborate some of the episodes I have already touched upon which best
characterize the influence of Malatestaâs personality. I remember once
seeing tears in the eyes of some magistrates and soldiers while he spoke
to the judges of love and family in the Ancona trial of 1898. Also in
1898, during my own interrogation in jail, I mentioned Malatestaâs name
to an investigator â the reactionary Catholic judge Alipio Alippi, later
presiding over the Supreme Court of Appeals until his death â who had
known him in Ancona some months previously for official reasons, and he
exclaimed that if all anarchists had been like Malatesta, anarchy would
have been a realization of the Word of Christ. A humble cop who arrested
me in Bologna in 1920 told me the same thing, confessing an enthusiasm
for Malatestaâhis big secret: âAh, if all you anarchists could have been
like him, thenâŠ!â And I know that in 1913â14 in Ancona the guards
charged with watching the door of his house day and night sometimes
asked each other in the evenings if he wouldnât escape the next day, and
later they calmly went to the house, saying to some neighbor: âA man as
good as that canât do anything wrong.â^([2])
I believe that even now, Bologna still remembers a meeting Malatesta
held in San Giovanni, Persiceto, in the spring or summer of 1920.
The cityâs little theater was already full, and the public didnât bother
to hide their indignation at the large patrol of soldiers commanded by a
lieutenant, arrived fresh from Bologna and armed to the teeth in the
service of public safety, who had lined up all the way down a side wall.
It looked like a set-up. Any trifling little thing could have
precipitated a tragedy! Malatesta arrived and someone asked him whether
they should seize the hall from this public force. âNo,â responded
Malatesta, âleave them in peace. I will speak for them as well.â
He began to speak of the miserable conditions of the peasant families in
Southern Italy, from which the majority of soldiers and police agent had
been recruited through the pressure of hunger. He evoked the sad figures
of distant mothers who wait for help, and for news of their sons, whose
danger they can vaguely sense. Later he came to speak of other working
mothers in the more developed cities, also trembling that they might not
see their own children return home after going to a meeting or a
demonstration⊠A shiver passed through the room, of the two agonies
which were rooted in the single and only note of discarded humanity. In
the silence the listeners paled, their hatred gone; the soldiers
appeared the palest of all, and in their eyes one could read what might
have been entirely new feelings for those souls. The lieutenant at once
made a curt gesture to his troop, and in file they turned their back on
the oratorâs balcony, marching out in a hurry rush. The impression that
Malatestaâs words had made on his men convinced the lieutenant that it
was more prudent to leave and allow the meeting to proceed without any
protection.
I wonât push further, only to add that, even if Malatesta happened to
attract sympathy from people whose circumstances were most distant from
his own without meaning to, his great love for humanity was focused
entirely on the humble, the disinherited, the poor, the weak, the
defenseless, on victims of all sortsâwithout distinctionâof the current
social system. I remember when he got angry with a comrade one day,
becoming red and silent because the comrade had been permitted to speak
disrespectfully about a poor prostitute. And he demonstrated, not just
in his words and writing, but in his acts as well, his feelings of
solidarity with the unhappy, anywhere and everywhere the occasion would
present itself. He was prodigal beyond measure and he gave without
counting, in the most simple and spontaneous way, as if it were the most
habitual thing. For example, everyone knows that in his last years,
under the fascist regime, he lived in strictness and only thanks to the
comrades abroad. But most people donât know that this help was given to
him partly to help the rest as well, and he would often send some sum
back across the border to aid a distant refugee whose misery he was
aware of. He felt the mishaps of others as if they were his ownâand
remember, not only those of comrades of faithâthose in trouble had his
immediate and instinctive solidarity beyond all sectarianism and party
spirit.
I want to relate an episode told by the old French anarchist L.
Guerineau, in some paper, I forget which*, of the period in which he
found himself a refugee in
London with Malatesta. Once, in a moment of crisis, his friends
consented that Malatesta try to earn something selling pastries in the
streets and plazas. He procured a hand cart, sweets at a low price from
a wholesaler, and more⊠But the first day, while he was in a city square
thick with people, pastries on display, a poorly dressed kid asked him
for one as a gift. He gave it to him immediately with an affectionate
hug. A bit later he saw himself encircled by an infinite sea of poor
children from the neighborhood, among whom news of the pastry vendorâs
generosity had spread in an instant, and he distributed so freely that
in the end all of the merchandise had been devoured. Naturally it was
the beginning and end of that type of business⊠Some days later
Kropotkin, who knew nothing of this undoing, asked Malatesta how his new
commerce was going. âIâm not lacking customers,â he responded, smiling,
âbut I canât afford to buy any merchandise.â
To be kind was what anarchy meant for him. In a short discussion we had
by letter,^([3]) he wrote about justice and anarchy: âThe anarchist
program, founded in solidarity and love, goes beyond justice per seâŠ
love gives all that it can, and wants to give more each time⊠To do to
others what you would want them to do (in other words, to do the maximum
good) is what Christians call charity and we call solidarity; in sum, it
is love.â
All of his comrades know especially well how he felt about this ideal of
love, since Malatestaâs affection for them was immense: a true
tenderness, as the most loving family couldnât have given. He had known
an infinitude of comrades from the enormous anarchist family, vast as
the world. He remembered everything and recognized everyone, even after
a separation of decades. He took part in their joys and in their
sorrows. In their houses he felt like he was in his own, and of course
comrades went to his house like it was their own,
until the continual fascist vigilance made him retreat to his suburb.
When he already had one foot in the grave, knowing full well that it was
over for him, he worried not about himself, but about a distant
comradeÂŽs illness, and in order to encourage him and not cause him pain,
he lied that he was recovering himself. Feeling near death, he trembled
at the thought of the pain experienced by his most loved comrades; he
gazed at photographs like a bereaved lover. And in reality, what were
the scattered comrades who spun about the world, if not his beloved
family, a representation of the future family of humanity he hoped for
with such faith over the course of his life?
This sentiment of humanity wasnât just an instinctive force in
Malatesta, an indirect animator of thought and action, but constituted
the fundamental rationale of his doctrine; it was the anarchist doctrine
itself. We have seen this already. According to him, to be an anarchist
it isnât enough to believe with logic and theory that capitalist and
statist organization is unjust and harmful to humanity; it isnât enough
to simply display the conviction that a dispersed organization without
exploitation and without governments is possible and would be beneficent
to all people. These alone wouldnât add up, according to Malatesta, to
being a good anarchist, if the anarchist didnât feel above all else the
pain that social ills cause others more intensely than the pain they
cause oneself. Only that feeling of pain at the suffering of others, the
human solidarity that rouses and the necessity that provokes the remedy,
are able to push a man to action, to make a conscious rebel of a man, to
form the complete anarchist who wants to emancipate not only himself
from misery and oppression, but all the disinherited and oppressed of
the world.
When presented with a problem which was a question of humanity, he
wouldnât ask if a possible solution corresponded to this or that
platformâs strategic formula, but whether a real and lasting good would
arise from this solution: something good for only a few, or for many;
that wouldnât hurt anyone except the oppressors and exploiters. This
psychological and mental predisposition of his goes a long way towards
explaining certain apparent contradictions that dry formalists and
doctrinarians, especially his rivals, have believed they have discovered
with great mistakenness among the theories affirmed by Malatesta, and
certain expressions and shows of feeling in painful or tragic moments
during the social fight.
Once, to a certain cold sectarianism that seemed ready to follow
Torquemadaâs example and sacrifice half of humanity in order to save for
the other half the arid formula of principle, he said: âIâll give up
every principle to save one man!â Another time, confronted with a
terrorism that was thought to be revolutionary because mass executions
appeared necessary [to them] if the revolution were to succeed,
Malatesta exclaimed: âIf victory requires gallows to be erected in the
plaza, I would prefer to lose!â In July of 1921, at his trial in Milan,
he ended his statements to the jurors with some words of sorrow at the
fierce fighting brought about in their country by fascism, a fight âthat
is repugnant to all and doesnât benefit any class or party.â And on
these three occasions they didnât miss the chance to accuse Malatesta of
being a Tolstoyan or worse.
However, it was Malatesta who had reason. One can imagine that this or
that phrase, taken by itself and separated from the rest of his
reasoning, particularly if the moment didnât allow for a long
explanation, might be able to leave simple listeners with an unfair
interpretation. But those who knew Malatestaâs intimate feelings and the
complex of his ideas knew that the meaning behind his words was in no
way Tolstoyan, but perfectly coherent with his revolutionary sentiment
and anarchist thought, in which it is not humanity that should serve a
principle established before the fact, but principles which should serve
the salvation of humanity. He considered a principle to be just only
insofar as it served humanity. If its application would be harmful, that
would mean that the principle was in error and would have to be
abandoned. But he didnât abandon [it] precisely because he felt it just
and human at the same time; and his words couldnât be interpreted any
other way than as simultaneous premise and conclusion of the principle
of human liberation that he predicted [anticipated?] his entire life.
It is correct to say, [though] setting aside the possibly bad faith in
which his rivals could have misunderstood Malatestaâs personality, that
[at least] a poor understanding of his sentiments and ideas has greatly
contributed to the legends that were created around his name in the long
years which he was forced to live in hiding or in exile, away from
direct contact with the people. The contradiction that some believed to
discover in him when they saw him directly in their work and knew him,
was only between the false legends and the true reality of his being.
But some legends were already so well-rooted that nothing less than his
[presence] personal, categorical denials succeeded in fully undoing
them, and then by a not uncommon phenomenon, the legend would have been
given credit among more than a few of his fellow-thinkers who didnât
know him personally and were disposed to imagine him according to their
own particular beliefs, perhaps through their own mental errors.
One of the injustices that Malatesta was long a victim of, and which was
in 1919â20 aggravated by all of the malicious and ferocious things that
his hatred of social class inspired against him, was the legend that
described him as a promoter of disorders, a theorizer of homicide, a
violent man in propaganda and deed, a demon thirsting for blood. Hints
of this rumor were found in not only the conservative, reactionary and
police papers, but in some papers of progressive ideas. I remember,
among others, a violent and ignoble article against Malatesta in The
Republican [Initiative] (LâIniciativa Republicana) of Rome,^([4]) where
assurances were made that he had in his caprice provoked bloody tumults,
while it was plain enough that these had all been provoked by the
Italian police with the deliberate aim of halting the progress of the
revolutionary movement, or to create a favorable moment to rid
themselves of the fearsomeed agitator.
Since 1870 he had mixed himself up in a quantity of movements and
attempted European revolutions and insurrections, and at the same time
the fabricated reports of the various countriesâ police, who bourgeois
journalists and certain writers in the style of Lombroso, through a
professional sense of servility or by ignorance took for the gold of
law, had enabled the stupid legend to spread. This, especially in Italy
in 1919 and more though before 1913, Malatesta was unknown to the great
majority of comrades, especially those who had joined the movement in
the last thirty years. [Through] 1885 he had gone to Italy several
times, clandestinely it is true, but he saw only a few trusted friends;
most people had not heard him spoken of more than as a distant and
mysterious person. In 1897 he had been in Ancona for ten months, but in
hiding for almost nine of them; and in the little time remaining he
barely had the chance to spread activity beyond the Marches region
before he was taken to prison,
later in domicilio coatto, and later again in flight.
It was 1913 when he could once again (a right denied to him since 1885)
truly live a public life in Italy like a man of flesh and bone; but also
this time the public took time to follow his activity for several months
not exclusively through papers, when the âRed Weekâ and the persecutions
that followed drove him from Italy once again, where he would only be
able to return in late 1919. Therefore, when in this last period
Malatesta threw himself anew into the whirlwind of Italian agitation, to
the masses he was still the man of old legends, certainly not depriving
him of an attractive, novelistic prestige, but it was always a great
obstacle to the comprehension of his personality and to the [evolution]
that would have been more useful. Despite all of his efforts to the
contrary, an enormous number of people insisted on obstinately seeing
Malatesta not as the man he really was, but only that which some desired
and others feared and hated, welcomingâsave the few who had the chance
to know him better, outside the tumult of public meetingsâthe old and
false legend which depicted him as violent, a champion of the most
poorly [planned] disorders.
However, all of Malatestaâs past life, the real one and not the novels
invented by the police and journalists, was all a refutation of the
legend that had grown around him. In his acts, words and writing he had
always shownâand continued to do so until the endâthat he was guided
above all by that high and pure human love that I have tried to
illuminate above, by the criterion of the best possible coordination of
forces, wishing to avoid the sufferings and pains of his fellow-men, by
the intention of saving as much as possible of not only the blood and
lives of friends, but of enemies as well.
Malatesta was truly a revolutionary in the most complete wayâand as
such, a proponent of that type of âdisorderâ so feared by the
reactionaries, which is the initial disorder of every revolution, not
unwitting, but conscious preparation for a higher orderâas have been so
many people known universally across the centuries for their goodness,
but who accompany the goodness with a clear vision of reality, for who
the insurrectional violence appears to be an unavoidable necessity, a
sacrifice that must be faced to free men from greater sacrifices and
from incomparably greater ills and suffering, blood and death.
Once he had arrived at the conclusion of the necessity of revolt and
revolution, Malatesta didnât dissimulate the consequences. He disdained
the subtle distinctions and hypocrisies of politicians, speaking his
thoughts in their entirety; but this thought, if taken whole and not as
some insignificant and isolated sentence speculated on in bad faith, is
the true negation of all systems of violence.
Additionally, his propaganda, even in the exposition of the most radical
ideas and to in the defense of the most energetic acts of rebellion and
insurrection, was in its form and mode of expression something totally
different than violence or vehemence. I still remember the impression it
made on me as a youth to experience one of his conferences for the first
time â in Porto San Giorgio (in Marcas), 1897, while he was hidden in
Ancona and presenting himself under another name. I barely knew him, and
the terrifying legends about him still held sway over me. What an proof
I had of the contrary! His ideas and their exposition, the reasoning,
flowed from the lips of the orator; the sentiment that animated him was
communicated to his listeners through his words, his steady gesture, and
above all the expression in his lively eyes. The auditorium sat riveted
by that calm word, spontaneous, like the conversation of friends, with
neither pseudoscientific pretensions, empty paradoxes, verbal attacks,
invectives, nor barks of hate, and distant from all political rhetoric.
In the years of distance between that day and his end, I have always
felt the same. He spoke in the languages of feeling and of reason at the
same time; never in that of resentment or vengeance. He spoke to the
mind and the heart, making them think and tremble; he didnât touch the
nerves with the sole aim of exciting them. That isnât to say that he
wasnât known to take the opportunity to echo tones of rage against the
assassins and traitors of the people, and these tones were much more
effective when less habitual, though his words sometimes climbed to the
highest peaks of apostleâs inspiration. At times some subtle irony
produced a smile in the lips of the listeners, or instead, words of
suffering and pity wrung tears out. In debates, he appeared invincible;
interruptions wouldnât distract him, but would fuel further elaborations
and confound the opponent, who would look as if torn to pieces by his
persuasive and convincing dialect, accessible to everyone. The older
people of Romagna still recall his debate with Andrea Costa (in Ravenna,
1884), when after a long session they had to pause until the next day,
and the next⊠Costa had already left the city.
Malatestaâs oratory was the most effective in anarchist propaganda. In
my opinion it was best in expository or theoretical conferences on
method, revolutionary teaching, critique, history, and above all
controversies; but less apt in the committees of the plaza where the
crowd demands more exciting words and less idea-substance. And if in
these plazas he was warmly received, maybe it was more often due to his
name, the fact that he said different things than the others, and the
moment in which he said them, rather than because of the truthfulness
and the success in itself of his type of oratory. Vulgar people and
those same comrades who most love the words and rhetoric at the base of
the fountains of artifice, sometimes didnât hide a certain feeling of
disillusion after an event that Malatesta had intervened in. When they
felt dissatisfied by the lack of verbal massacres and too-few
invectives, but instead heard reasoned and realistic affirmations; when
they compared it with those who came before and after him, evoking all
of the reincarnations of the apocalypse, they believed that he was their
inferior. Some said: âWe expected much more!â Oh, they didnât expect
more than vain words, substituted for the thoughts that they fled from!
I believe that one of the grave errors of so many Italian anarchists in
1920 has been â and Malatesta himself agreed more than once â that of
not having cut short the series of meetings in incessant repetition,
useful at first, but dangerously draining energy later, and Malatesta
had been obliged to shuttle from one to the other, forcing a type of
activity upon him for which he was less apt, and in which he appeared
less effective than the many sentence-makers; and not having given more
than a few of his admirable expository and didactic conferences, in
which he would have been able to much more methodically and completely
teach that which should be done for the revolution, and in the
revolution, and to imprint with these conferences a more effective
direction on the movement, a more anarchist drive, more serious,
longer-lasting.
Certainly, in those committees Malatesta should have conceded something
to his environment, blended a little with the type in vogue; however his
oratory was always in the least violent language of any of the
revolutionary speakers spawning at the time. This memory wouldnât be
useless either: that of the last big committee I heard him at, in
Bologna, in defense of the political victims in October of 1920. Then
too he had spoken as was his custom, full of passion and reason at the
same time, but calm, with an exact perception of the critical moment,
without useless shouting or high-sounding and incendiary phrases; that
which the other anarchist orators made of the gathering. But what
incredible violence of language the other orators hurled about,
especially the socialists, and more than all a young professor who, only
two months later, would be drawn in the most humiliating way to the
rising orb of fascism! However, of all the orators in that meeting,
Malatesta was the only one arrested, a few days later, and in the
subsequent trial of Milan his discourse in Bologna figured among the
principal charges against him.
Much of what I said about the orator Malatesta I would have to repeat
about the writer. I have already spoken of the psychological substratum
of kindness beneath his writings, and incidentally of his clarity,
simplicity, and conciseness. These have the great merit of making one
read him with appetite, though when they treat the less actual and
impassioned questions, because Malatesta took from them the most human
aspect and most in relation with the general interests, and at the same
time with the specific interests of those in his audience, touching the
most intimate strings of the soul and simultaneously conquering their
minds with an coherently reasoned logic. He quickly came into a unison
with the reader, speaking to him in a sensible, understandable language,
easy and convincing, without a shadow of that type of intellectual
bullying of the doctrinaire writers who pronounce from on high. Those
who read him almost always have the feeling of seeing their own thought
expressed, or good ideas very different from their own but not outside
the common human reality, since these ideas are said naturally, from
equal to equal, as if they were self-evident truths and acceptable to
everyone.
How the halls and plazas filled themselves at the announcement that he
would speak; almost every paper or magazine he began promptly reached
the widest circulation and had the merit of soon leaving the circle of
those already convinced, in which most regular propaganda and party
papers have the defect of being confined to.
Almost every printing of his well-known pamphlets was swallowed up in
the briefest time and reprinted hundreds of times in every language. Not
only his personal influence and the efficacy of his oral propaganda, but
also the way he developed the propaganda with his writings, explains how
just after publishing one of his papers in a given place, little by
little the environment was raised and heated up, anarchists multiplied,
the revolutionary spirit grew and was agitated like a tide, and not
uncommonly, like by the action of a hidden yeast, important collective
movements arose, better than what Malatesta hoped for.
A professional or pedantic attitude is never be found in Malatestaâs
prose; no studied literary effects, no doctrinaire abstruseness, nor
learned ostentations; no âdifficultâ words in scientific or
philosophical jargon, nor citations of authors. Maybe this prejudiced it
a bit among that special category of readers who might understand what
they read quickly and well â and conclude that the author must have no
depth or originality, and who discover originality and depth only in
what they canât understand, or only understand laboriously, when within
there is no more substance than a few common banalities or the most
utter vacuity masked by the most grandiloquent phraseology. But
Malatestaâs intention was also to react against this trend towards an
obscurity of language in propaganda; and on the other hand his success
in penetrating into new environments and in making converts among
workers of the simplest tastes and the least rotted by an
intellectualism that is as false as it is cheap, compensated him with
interest for the failure to please a few lovers of beautiful,
incomprehensible writing.
He liked most of all to make himself understandable, and to be
understood by the greatest number of readers; and he succeeded
admirably, confronting the toughest problems and explaining the highest
concepts in the most precise and clear way, with a plainness that had
nothing to do with simplification.
Like in spoken arguments, in written controversies he found himself in
his element. The long discussion, lasting almost a year in the columns
of LâAgitazione of Ancona (1897), with his old friend Merlino who by
then had converted to parliamentary tactics, is a model of the type. His
numerous arguments with the socialists, the republicans, masons,
syndicalists, and with the diverse anarchist currents that didnât share
his point of view, were an example of how it is possible to discuss with
all, defend oneâs own ideas and critique those of others, with all
serenity, with dignified courtesy, respecting oneâs adversaries and
without the need to suspect them at all costs of bad faith â but
energetically putting in their place those who exceed the limits of
fairness or show too obvious insincerity or some dishonest ulterior
goal. He constantly had to argue with Andrea Costa, Bissolati,
Prampolini, Zibordi, Cirpriani, James Guillaume, with an infinite number
of comrades and, except for early in his arguments with Costa, the
discussion never became violent. I remember that, after a brief debate
between La Giustizia of Reggio Emilia and UmanitĂ Nova in the summer of
1920, the editor of the former had to close the discussion with a very
short private letter which ended by sending âdear Malatestaâ his best
wishes: âGiustizia and UmanitĂ Nova!â
Malatesta conducted his discussions and reasoning with the method that
the pedagogues call âSocratic,â to a degree of refinement that doesnât
appear to me to have been reached by others, at least among modern
writers on political and social matters. His dialectic â I use this word
in the normal sense of the art of reasoning and not in the extravagant
and variable one that the ancient and modern sophists have given it â
rose up beneath his pen and became so forceful that it held the
adversary like in a vice, and the indifferent or doubtful listener or
reader, absorbed (so to speak) the ideas almost without realizing it.
This is what his propaganda writings in dialogue form the most
successful at proselytizing, of which the most celebrated is the
pamphlet Fra Contadini (Among Farmers).
The literature of dialogue certainly isnât the easiest, especially when
the dialogue is developed around general and more or less theoretical
questions. However, that has been the classic literary form of all those
â from Socrates and Plato to Bruno and Galileo â who throughout the ages
have been stirred by ideological, scientific, or political passions to
diffuse among neighbors and the distant, and to hand down with the pen,
that which they believed to be the truth and in which they had faith.
Malatesta has also adopted the same weapon of propaganda, reaching the
maximum of efficacy, not deprived of literary beauty. I am sure that in
the future, when the ire and passions of discord blind us less,
Malatestaâs dialogues will be highly appreciated by those that are and
remain contrary to the ideas propagated in them.
I should add a few things to help clarify Malatestaâs position regarding
the issue of violence.
Later I will try to explain Malatestaâs ideas, including those on
violence, in a more organized way. Here I will limit myself to the heart
of his thoughts on the matter: the idea that nobody has the right to use
to violence or the threat of violence to impose their own ideas, their
way of living and organizing themselves, their systems, laws, or
anything else upon others, under any pretext (even that of doing them
well). The logical conclusion is the right of individuals and peoples to
rebel against governments and masters. He called this a âright of
legitimate defenseâ against the coercive impositions of these rulers,
who oppress and exploit the people by means of violence and the threat
of violence, or its equivalent, the blackmail of hunger. The necessity
of revolutionary violence against the conservative violence of the
present political and economic organization of society stems from this.
Malatesta was opposed to any form of coercive violence, and the needed
revolutionary violence was no exception â to the contrary of how all the
Jacobin, Bolshevik, and in general authoritarian revolutionaries think.
He didnât believe it was useful, considering it the worst evil, to
violate anotherâs liberty to bend that person to oneself, to oneâs own
methods, to oneâs own particular beliefs. The revolution should free the
people from all of the impositions of their governments and masters, not
create new impositions. And he demanded this liberty for all people,
starting today, whether they be in the orbit of the revolutionary
movement, or in the relations with the external environment. Revolution
is made âwith forceâ â it couldnât be any other way â but it canât be
made âby force.â
However, these ideas were so poorly outlined in the legend of Malatesta
as the âbossâ of conspiracies and riots, which I have partially alluded
to above, that upon his arrival in Italy in 1919 there were more than a
few in the country who rushed to see him as â the reactionaries fearing
it and the revolutionaries hoping for it â the âLenin of Italy.â As
flattering as the name might seem, especially at the time, it
immediately put Malatesta in the worst predicament and, since a few of
his comrades had let the phrase escape from their lips or from their
pens, he feared a dangerous shift in ideas among them. Aldo Aguzzi, an
Italian anarchist in refuge in South America, told the story of his
first encounter with Malatesta during a conference he held in Montevideo
immediately after Malatestaâs death. It ties directly into what I am
saying, so allow me the pain to refer to it as literally as I can:
âI was a boy then, having left the Socialist Party a short time earlier
along with my associates from the juvenile circle of Voghera, and we
founded a âsubversive youth groupâ outside the Party. We werenât
anarchists, but something akin to what many communists are today, that
is to say, opposed to the reformists and enthusiastic about Russia. At
the time I believed that I was âalmost anarchist,â but in reality I knew
very little about anarchy, to the degree that one could say that the
only difference I saw between an anarchist and a socialist was that the
former loved violence and the other didnât. I need this background to
explain what happened to me.
âI came to Voghera early in 1920, called by the local anarchist group,
Errico Malatesta, and other comrades of his including Borghi and
DâAndrea. Malatesta was going to speak in an elementary school hall. I
was asked to introduce him, and I presented him as the Lenin of Italy
who, outdoing the socialists, would lead us to a revolution like in
Russia. After my chatter he rose to the platform, thanking the crowd who
wouldnât stop cheering him⊠with the title that I had burdened him with,
and after addressing many other things, at a certain point he began to
speak of the definition I had given of him. In truth he didnât mistreat
me, even paying me some compliments; but he explained that he couldnât
be, didnât want to be, and shouldnât be a Lenin. To summarize, however
well I am able to summarize at twelve yearsâ distance, and taking into
account my confusion at the moment, this is what he said:
â âThe young man who introduced me might be sincere and enthusiastic,
and might have believed that he would please me by saying that I am your
Lenin. I think that he isnât an anarchist, and those of you who took up
his cry must not be either. He and you are revolutionaries, you already
understand that the old, reformist methods are worthless, maybe you have
lost faith in your socialist leaders, so now you look for a man who
inspires confidence and who brings you to revolution. I thank you very
much for your confidence, but you are mistaken. I have all the desire to
do well by you, and myself as well, but I am a man like all the others,
and if I became your leader I would be no better than those you
repudiate today. All leaders are equal, and if they donât do what you
desire, it isnât always because they donât want to, but also because
they canât. Speaking furthermore of the revolution, this is not a man
who can make one: we have to make it together. I am an anarchist, I
donât want to obey, but above all, I cannot command. If I become your
Lenin as that âyoung manâ wishes, I will lead you to sacrifice, I will
become your master, your tyrant; I will betray my faith, because I would
not bring anarchy about, and I would betray yours, because with a
dictator you will tire of me, and I, turned ambitious and maybe
convinced that I was doing my duty, would surround myself with police,
bureaucrats, parasites, and would give life to a new caste of oppressors
and privileged people by which you would be exploited and vexed as you
are today by the Government and the bourgeoisie.â
âI remember that Malatesta also said, âIf you really love me, donât hope
that I become your tyrant.â But many details and phrases escape me now.
Later he explained how the revolution should be
âmade.â^(=> #sdfootnote6sym *
) I remember that among other things he spoke of âoccupying the
factories,â of arming the people, of the formation of armed groups,
expressing himself calmly, calmer than the reformists of the day⊠To
tell the truth, the public remained somewhat disillusioned (and I too,
at first) because Malatesta didnât live up to the âtypeâ that had been
imagined. But the fact is, after that conference I understood what
anarchy was and what anarchists wanted, and I became one of themâŠâ
This episode, similar to so many others â I repeat that for an instant
the âLenin of Italyâ legend ran its course even among those who had been
and believed themselves to be anarchists â demonstrates well the mistake
originating in a misunderstanding of his personality and ideas by those
who were outside his immediate environment.
That mistake, by its forceful contrast with reality, caused many to pass
from one misunderstanding to an opposite misunderstanding. When
Malatesta finally managed to make understood the difference that existed
between what so many believed, on one side the reactionaries and enemies
who with bad faith saw in the real Malatesta a fiction and attacked it
with unprecedented violence like a wolf dressed in lambâs wool;^([5]) on
the other side, the revolutionaries most taken by authoritarianism and
the lovers of violence for its own sake, the Bolsheviks and the
Bolshevizers, believed he had changed and saw in him, as we have already
said, a Tolstoyan. The Bolshevik communist press, which had at first
covered him in flowers, ended with its usual stereotyped phraseology and
called him a counter-revolutionary, petit-bourgeois, and so forth.
However, Malatesta was always the same. If there was a man in Italy, who
after fifty years of constant fighting, could repeat the poet Giuseppe
Giustiâs boast: âI have not flexed or hesitated,â it was him. His words
in the meetings of 1920 were the same as all his past propaganda since
1872. That âpetit-bourgeoisâ had for half a century combated the
bourgeoisie, small and large, and for all of his life had earned his way
as a laborer by the sweat of his brow. That âold counter-revolutionaryâ
hadnât done anything since he was a boy but propagate and prepare the
revolution. That âTolstoyanâ had been and continued to be the advocate
of all rebellions, had invited workers to occupy the factories and
farmers the land, had âcalmlyâ urged the people to arm themselves and
the revolutionaries to form armed groups, and (now that he has died it
can be said), wherever he has been able to, until the last moment, he
didnât limit himself to encouraging others; but put his own hands in the
dough, never stingy with those who were willing to do something, neither
with his help, nor with his direct participation.
Errico Malatesta magnificently embodied Giuseppe Mazziniâs motto of
âthought and actionâ. I canât say that he would have agreed to this
formula, given his antipathy towards all formulas; but if itâs true that
in Malatestaâs conception thought and will precede action, then itâs
also true that he had always, above all, tried to be a man of action,
tried to ignite action around himself â preferably action of the masses,
which he believed the most necessary, though he also worked
inexhaustibly for group and individual action, since mass action is not
always possible.
For him, ideas had no life of their own, other than through action.
Action not simply as an end in itself; not like the fragmented outbursts
of exasperated crowds that after a moment of fury become more passive
than before, nor like the blind violence of individual desperation
without a just and well-defined goal â he understood all of these and
found their explanation and justification in the social injustice which
provoked it, but didnât like them or approve of them â but instead
through the acts of people or of individuals who were motivated by the
premeditated will to do good, guided by reason and by a high sense of
humanity. But it was crucial that they were deeds and not only words,
actions and not vain academics.
It is enough to recall here that the old organizer of âpropaganda by
deedâ of the groups of Castel del Monte and of Benevento, in 1874 and
1877, always continued, until his end, showing up wherever there was
hope and the possibility of âfishing in the restless riverâ â to use the
malignant expression of the international police â of usefully laboring
for the revolution, following his intentions: openly wherever he could,
clandestinely in countries which he had been expelled from or where he
had trials and convictions to endure: in the Herzegovina insurrection
and in Serbia against the Turkish government before 1880; in Egypt,
rising up against the English in 1883; in Paris during the First of May
movements of 1890 and of 1906; in Spain in 1892 and Belgium in 1893
during the commotions of those years; in Italy in the time of the
mutinies of 1891, later in 1894, in 1898 and later participating in the
âred weekâ of 1914.
All of us remember his presence everywhere in Italy, after the war, in
the occupied factories as well as in the streets and the plazas in the
midst of the people. In 1921â22 he actively participated in all the
actions that were attempted to dam the tide of fascism, encouraging the
formation of the arditi del popolo and preparing for the last general
strike that preceded the âmarch on Rome.â
No dogmatic assumptions stopped him from examining every chance for
revolutionary action with ample support. If the situation appeared, he
would use parallel movements of people far from his ideas â or maybe
even wind his way through some adversaryâs revolutionary objectives,
like the enterprise of dâAnnunzio in Fiume in 1920. He abandoned this
soon, however, not bothering himself with it anymore as soon as he saw
that there werenât enough of the people he needed to overcome and defeat
the worst enemy tendencies.
But in such delicate and dangerous cases he always knew how to stay
balanced, and to keep the necessary distances, and it was important to
him that he act on his own responsibility without compromising others,
avoiding any possible underhanded, hidden motives of those who
approached him, constantly remaining the most self-consistent anarchist
who never lost sight for even a minute of the revolutionâs purpose:
freedom.
The dominant idea for Malatesta was popular insurrection, and this
preoccupation accompanied him in all his other activities and inspired
every one of his judgments about strategy and method. Because a serious
work of preparation for popular insurrection, made openly and directly,
would never have been tolerated by the massive government and bourgeois
forces, which would have cut him off at all costs in the beginning and
would have soon put him out of the game, Malatesta almost always
initiated simultaneously or beforehand another âcoveringâ work, legally
permitted, which more required the attention of all and distracted that
of authority â usually public agitation and papers concerning questions
of general interest (imprisonment of the elderly, domicilio coatto,
political victims, freedom of press) â that served the commonest and
freshest goals of propaganda and at the same time indirectly guarded the
flank of the other more important but less open work, nurturing a
favorable spiritual atmosphere for it among the sympathizers, the affine
elements and the masses in general. This was seen to happen frequently,
for example in 1897, in 1914 and in 1920, as Malatesta knew how to aptly
employ this system of his with optimal results.
Of the acts of individual rebellion â though convinced of the moral and
political utility that the best directed can assume in decisive moments
or for special motives, but conscious on the other hand of the great
difficulty of reaching a union every time of the two rarest qualities in
a single person, extreme energy and awareness which are however
indispensable â he never made incitatory propaganda. In his conferences
(in writings he sometimes made obvious allusions to it) he spoke only of
those that were necessarily produced in the course of a true and natural
insurrection. However, also outside of this case, though without
instigating anyone, he didnât hide the necessity that circumstances
sometimes produced, nor denied his fraternal cooperation when the
occasion arose to those who were voluntarily and irrevocably decided
with justice and goodness on their propositions.^([6]) And the next day
he didnât wrap himself up in reservations or in prudent denials, but
openly testified to the rebels the most moving and total solidarity of
his thought and feelings.
This line of conduct, of the wise and full revolutionary, who let no
small or large element of action escape that could influence events in a
feeling of liberty and social progress, finds a parallel in Italian
history in conduct no different possessed to that respect during the
many years of his long exile, that other great apostle that Giuseppe
Mazzini was, although the later stupid slander of his enemies and the
opportunist prudence of friends has contributed in several ways to
obscure and dissimulate this still very unknown side of the
revolutionary activity of the greatest author of political liberation of
Italy.
In action, Malatesta didnât know divisions of tendencies. And if he much
loved the comrades who understood his thought in its best expression, he
no less strongly loved those who had the same passion of revolt, even
when they were divided from him by some dissent about theory or
strategy. He didnât hesitate sometimes, to rudely show his disapproval
of some his closest friends, when they appeared for a moment to
subordinate the duty of solidarity with the rebels to considerations of
uncertain opportunity and cold doctrinarianism. There were certainly
violent deeds that he disapproved of and rejected; and if they occurred
he clearly spoke his criticism. But he didnât involve the persons of the
authors in an a priori fashion, in whom he saw no more than other
victims of the reigning injustice, which was truly the most responsible;
and if he knew the unselfishness and originating goodness of their
intentions, he rose up in their defense, without a care for the
so-called public opinion, against the legal vengeance which was
unleashed on them.
When the necessity arose of some action that appeared indispensable to
him, he didnât limit himself to giving advice about it, he didnât like
to tell others what to do; he himself worked with the rest and like the
rest. This was seen during the days of the âred weekâ in Ancona in 1914
and on other occasions. He didnât disdain modest assignments or the most
dangerous. A friend told me that, in 1914, before the events of June â a
general strike of the railroad workers and a possibly huge
insurrectional outlet were predicted to be imminent, and there was a
moment of fevered and pressured preparation of material to not be caught
unprepared by a lack of resources â one day Malatesta crossed the middle
of Ancona with a sack of explosives, under the nose of the cops who
watched him. His friend asked him afterwards if it was true and why he
hadnât entrusted that charge to others. âBecause I didnât have the
time,â he responded, âto call upon the more appropriate people, and I
wanted to prepare things so that it wouldnât occur to someone to use it
prematurely for another act, which would have ruined all of our more
urgent work at the time.â
This last episode illustrates the feeling of responsibility that never
left Malatesta, and might be thought of as a lack of prudence on his
part. That would be a mistake. He accepted risks, but he didnât look for
them without reason; and took all of the necessary precautions, without
exhibiting useless fear. He sometimes took precautions which others
around him, not understanding their causes, found exaggerated:
especially when he was simultaneously working on some other initiative
which interested him more, or when the risk could implicate third
persons. In reality, he didnât lack the shrewdness to fool the police
investigations and magisterial inquiries. But most of his shrewdness
consisted of his spontaneous geniality and naturalness: illustrated so
well by Edgar Poe in a celebrated novel, of hiding as little as possible
or not at all, like when he lived for nine months in Ancona incognito
and, while the police looked for him everywhere, he tranquilly strolled
about the city, frequented all the public places and went where he liked
with the only precaution of not being seen in the street together with
the better-known comrades.
The truth is that Malatesta, during fifty years, had mixed himself up in
a quantity of small and large acts and movements of revolutionary and
subversive nature; he had been imprisoned an infinitude of times, was
always under suspicion, and often tried, since the police intuited his
effective presence everywhere. However, he had almost never been caught,
as it is said, with his hands in the bag. He might be the Italian
revolutionary who, having done the most, was convicted the least â
barely two or three times in all of his long life â and unjustly then,
that is to say, without evidence, and for acts that werenât his or which
didnât constitute a crime. âI have been convicted only when I was
innocent!â, he jokingly told me one day, but not without a hint of
malice.
This fever of action that always possessed Malatesta is perhaps what
more than anything else distracted him from dedicating himself to a
methodic and continual intellectual work, which would certainly have
placed him among the most illustrious of the scientific and literary
world, following the branchy of learning which had consecrated his most
genial intelligence, and would have made him much better known than he
is today as a principal theorizer of anarchism, which despite everything
he was.
However, he didnât disregard in any way the joys of intellectual labor
and he often felt an acute nostalgia for it. But he considered it a bit
like the otium of the Romans in the old tempestuous republic, a bit
before it was an empire, for who true work was only that dedicated to
the worries of the State, to civil wars or conquest, the battles of the
forum, the tribute, or the senate, while the learning of letters and
philosophy was simply the pleasant repose of the days of truce between a
military expedition in distant provinces and a bloody internal fight
against a rival faction. In Malatesta the man of studies was constantly
defeated by the man of action. He truly had those âdevils insideâ that
Bakunin â who he so resembled in that subordination of theoretical work
to agitation â desired above all in his comrades, collaborators, and
disciples. The great Russian revolutionary immediately saw that in him,
since his first meeting in 1872 with the fiery young Italian; and XXX to
like him and consider him as his âBenjamin,â which was the name that
Bakunin gave Malatesta in the conventional language of conspiracy.
Malatesta had renounced the tranquility of pure intellectual work since
the age of eighteen, when he began to neglect his studies and eventually
abandoned them altogether to dedicate himself completely to propaganda,
revolutionary agitation and to the fight, never turning back until his
death. More than once, in the abandon of some intimate conversation,
when he explained some of his original and new ideas about the most
difficult problems of contemporary thought, and I asked him when he
would decide to explain them fully and not just hint at them in
occasional articles, he would respond to me, âLater, when I have the
time; you can see that now there are so many more important things to
do!â And honestly the practical work of the movement was always great,
and all of us felt that his work was indispensable; but we also felt
that the other work would be useful, especially when he would be no
more! Some of us, two of the most insistent being Max Nettlau and Luigi
Bertoni, often suggested to him to write his memoirs, that it would be
useful to contemporary history and to an understanding of the affairs
which he had found himself mixed up in; and he responded, âYes, perhapsâŠ
But there is no hurry; I will think about that when there arenât other,
more important things to do, when I am old.â
But since he always found something more important to do and never
recognized that he was old, his memoirs were never written. Basically,
he didnât want to write them, a bit because of an inner unwillingness to
speak about himself, and a bit because his scruples didnât allow him to
speak all of the truths. âHistory isnât written while the war is on,â he
would say, âand itâs more important to make history than to write it.â
However, an English editor made him the most favorable offer for a work
of this type while he was in London, and in his last years an Italian
editor did the same. But he was also repelled by asking the means to
live through purely intellectual occupations that would have distracted
him from the movement.
He always saw the repose of old age as far ahead of him. âOne is old
only when he wants to be,â he said, âand old age is an infirmity of the
spirit,â and laughingly advanced until the paradox arrived that âdeath
is a prejudice.â The following story is characteristic in this respect.
Some young workers and students communicated to him one day (he was
almost seventy) that they had created an âanarchist youth group.â âVery
good!â he told them, âcount me in your group, too.â He kindly criticized
the erroneous tendency to separate the younger elements from the others
and pointed out the truth, which he came to through long experience and
by his spirit itself, that often certain young people are older than the
elderly, and vice versa. In fact, at seventy-five he was still the
youngest of any of us.
Despite all, to regard Malatesta as an intellectual of the first order,
the few well-known pamphlets he has released suffice â in particular,
Fra Contadini, Al CaffĂš, and LâAnarchia are the three masterpieces in
content and form that are enough to establish a manâs fame, but he would
be recognized as such by those who could consult a collection of his
writings, unknown to most today, which he has published for sixty years
in papers and magazines all over the world. They would fill several
volumes. The majority of these writings, even the briefest and the most
current, almost never have an ephemeral character; and only with
difficulty can one find anything that doesnât contain something
originally his or that is for the most varied reasons worthy of being
remembered, even in writing about fleeting and very minor arguments. But
his articles are innumerable that, though dealing with uncertain facts
or controversial questions of the moment, are lifted to general
considerations and fully explain a whole framework of related ideas.
Certainly, it would have been hoped that Malatesta had left us a vaster,
organically and systematically elaborated work on anarchism and
revolution, to which he himself would have given a permanent and
definitive character. But causes stronger than his â aside from the
fever of activity which I have already mentioned â have impeded him:
some intrinsic to him and other more material and external.
On more than one occasion he had resolved, and has spoken about it with
his friends, to dedicate himself to a work of the necessary scale, which
would be the expression of his personal thought. Since 1897 he talked to
me about a book of his on anarchy, of which he had outlined the schema
and accumulated the materials, and which would maybe be published by the
editor Stock of Paris. He had put other materials together in London and
had already written something by 1913 for a work about âexpectation in
sociology.â In his last years, at the insistence of friends, he has
elaborated the whole plan of a work to be developed in two or three
volumes, something in-between memories and discussions about ideas and
methods, in which he would have incorporated some of his less-known past
writings, finished by a vision of how it would be possible to develop a
revolution in which anarchists could play a preponderant part. He had
also dreamt up a sort of utopian tale of an imaginary revolution, in
which he had wanted to speak his practical advice on how to prepare and
succeed in making revolution, and then to give it a reconstructive
anarchist direction. In a letter of 1925 he said, regarding these
projects, in response to something I had written him, âYou expect from
me a workable and working anarchism that marks a step beyond Bakunin and
Kropotkin; and to tell you the truth, I donât despair of satisfying
you.â
I donât know what he had made of all of those beautiful propositions.
Maybe something could lay among his letters; but, if it is likely that
there is nothing, there certainly is very little.
In his last time he would have been impeded by his constant poor health
and the terrible peacelessness in which the asphyxiating and torturous
fascist vigilance always kept him. But one of the strongest immaterial
impediments was certainly, not only at the end, buy always, his own
almost instinctual mental abhorrence to all formal and definitive
systemizations, and he tended to correct each solution, in which he
always saw anew some defect. This, united with an invincible inner
modesty, made him never content with what he wrote. So, when he didnât
write about the sting of the necessity of the fight or debate, or when
the typographist didnât tear the manuscript from his hands for the paper
which couldnât wait, he put the filled sheets on one side to reread the
next day, and the following day what he had done already displeased him,
he saw a thousand flaws and often finished by tearing it up and throwing
it all in the trash; or he rewrote it, corrected it, until external
circumstances didnât allow him to leave the inciting work, so it
remained permanently suspended for a while and later abandoned.
Despite all this, Malatestaâs writings which remain for us constitute on
their own a production so vast and have such great value that they would
be more than sufficient, if relocated and reunited, to give us, if not
the work that he could have, certainly not a work inferior to our
desire. Perhaps, on the other hand, also from the strictly intellectual
point of view, Malatestaâs thought, developed and expressed
fragmentarily in hundreds of articles, without an apparent logical
order, between one battle and another, in a study that was always made
in relation to the events he participated in, to the burning touch of
the fight and real life it lived ? more, in the middle of the
proletarian and popular movement, under the constant sway of contrasts
and controversy â maybe, I say, that Malatestaâs thought is closer to
the truth, more current and vital, more effective at guiding men in
conduct and action, more dynamic (as is said today), than that which
could have been elaborated in the calm solitude of a private study and
to arise from an intellectual speculation at the table, always, despite
all contrary effort, strongly separated from the continual movement of
men and of ideas.
Malatesta himself, despite his unsatisfiability , didnât show himself
contrary to a collection of his journalistic ? writing when I finally
proposed it to him; and knowing that I had amassed some of this material
of his, he supplied me with others â and only asked me to wait to
publish it so that he could mind to the selection, rearrangement, and
some notes and corrections. Our separation impeded this work however;
but Malatestaâs death would oblige us to decide finally to proceed now
to this republication of all of his writings, for which the legitimate
delays had stopped with his disappearance.^([7])
The thing isnât easy, but it is far from impossible. The greatest
difficulties are posed, it is true, by the critical moment of this
tumultuous and catastrophic historical period, in which anarchist
collectivity, that would be the most interested in completing such a
labor, and that which it is more of a duty to do, is more than any
involved in the fiery whirlwind of social tempest, and more urgent
assignments and debts absorb their energy and the material means of the
militants who are so poor. But these difficulties should be overcome by
men of good will, since there is for all a material interest that
Malatestaâs thought be presented in his most whole complex to the
attention of revolutionaries of the younger generations and to all the
workers and fighters for liberty, which can extract light and advice of
unparalleled value, exactly in which most are engaged today, and in the
revolutions that appear imminent.
The intrinsic impediments of character that Malatesta found in himself ,
of which I have already spoken, wouldnât be enough, it must be said
well, to make him not manage in the end, overcoming his
incontentability, to reach on intellectual terrain the final and
synthesizing crowning of his vast work that preceded, as he certainly
desired as well, if he had materially been able to have all the
tranquility and time needed. His exactingness would have contributed to
rendering more perfect this work of his. But time and tranquility he
would never have!
Apart from the demands of propaganda, the fight and of revolutionary
action, that for him constituted the categorical imperative of all his
life, he found ahead of him, continually, many material difficulties,
extrinsic, which impeded him from devoting himself to a methodical
cultural work with heart. I am not speaking here of the police
persecutions, prison, and flight that left him little time; these
entered the normal life of every militant revolutionary who, as
Malatesta himself said, âare never free and always in provisional
liberty.â The major material impediment was that of always having to
work to live.
It is also true that he had created this obstacle voluntarily. From a
rich family^([8]) as soon as he could he freed himself of all his
possessions, surrendering them to propaganda and to the poor, and
abandoning his university studies to be better off âgoing to the peopleâ
(as was said in 1870, at the example of the Russian revolutionaries), he
had wanted to learn a trade to live. From then on he had always been as
poor as a reed. He made himself a mechanic in the shop of his
internationalist friend Agenore Natta in Florence; and with that trade
he had then been able to earn his daily bread, except in those intervals
in which the higher causes of the fight constrained him to the work of
agitation and journalism, and this also was too absorbing and feverish
to permit him to concentrate on purely intellectual activity.
There were periods in which, if the manual labor of his occupation
wasnât necessary, he would have been able to enjoy the relative
tranquility needed for educational? activity, especially in the time
passed in London in the rather long pauses between one and another of
his trips on the European or American continent. But just then, in the
time of his greatest virility, an exhausting work absorbed him from
morning to evening, and many nights too had to be sacrificed to give
lessons to supplement his scanty earnings from manual work. The
electrical mechanic work confined him in his little shop in the
neighborhood of Islington and obliged him to go around London with his
toolbox on his back and take himself wherever he was called to adjust
electric or gas appliances, economic kitchens, and so on. âHe had to
install gas pipes and electric installations, or repair them, in places
that were cold and exposed to currents of air, sometimes on the ground
on iced pavement or on hard stone.â^([9])
Pietro Gori told me that once, during his exile in London of 1894, he
was walking with Kropotkin and some other comrade to look for Malatesta,
found him on top of a ladder with a hammer and chisel making a hole in a
wall, on the street, to hang the sign of a commercial firm. Kropotkin
upon seeing him exclaimed, âWhat an admirable man!â And Gori responded
to him, âYes, Malatesta is admirable; but what a sad world this is,
which constrains such a high intelligence to spend time, energy and
health in work like this, that so many others would know how to do,
preventing him from doing that which only he knows how to do! And what a
great mistake this is of our movement to not find a way to permit this
man to do that work useful to humanity which he would be so capable of!â
That Gori had more than a little reason I felt inside myself as well,
when in December of 1906 I went to London to spend seven days of common
life with him in the house where he lived, with the Defendi couple. The
family told me that they were content with my arrival, because Errico to
be with me had taken a week of vacation, of which (they added) he needed
for his health, given the serious work he did.
But even this was not outside of Malatestaâs will, not only because he
had chosen that life to be de facto part of the working people in the
midst of who and for who he fought, but because he had made it rule of
conduct to not ask the movement and the party in which he served for the
means to live. He himself had explained the reasons in some letters to
personal friends published after his death:^([10]) the question wasnât
raised of scruples or moral objections, but it was found that to live of
propaganda was translated practically in a bad example, by the effect
that it produces on the public, in excess inclined to see interested and
personal ends in everything. He would have felt diminished and paralyzed
by it, while to live by a work outside of propaganda allowed him a
greater freedom of spirit and movements.
Also when, by dedicating himself to fixed initiatives of a certain
duration and importance to the cause, that wouldnât have permitted him
and other occupation, he had to give up work for some time, he preferred
to live with the help of personal friends, rather that to weigh on these
same initiatives. He remained faithful when he could to such a norm of
conduct, until the most advanced age, obliged in spite of himself to
make some exceptions in his last years. In 1923, after the three years
of UmanitĂ Nova, he still worked. He was already seventy, when in that
year, taking myself to Rome to see him during the holidays of Pascua?,
it took me a day to find him in the same attitude in which Gori and
Kropotkin had seen him about thirty years earlier, from the heights of a
ladder in a large establishment in the capital delivering great blows to
a wall with a hammer to put electric mains in place.
For almost fifty years this life of his of artisan and laborer lasted,
less the short parentheses of the peaks of battle. His physical aspect
too was completely assimilated to his condition. Nobody in London in
1900, or in Rome in 1930, had imagined the rich and delicate student
from the University of Naples of thirty or sixty years past, in the man
modestly dressed, of bronzed face and calloused hands, if it wasnât for
a certain refinement of manners which revealed his fine education.
Without telling when he did the most humble labor (porter, ice-cream
vendor, etc.) which particularly difficult circumstances forced upon him
more than once, he has worked in his trade of electrical mechanic
wherever he stayed for long periods: even before 1880 in Paris, then in
Florence, in Buenos Aires, at length in London and finally in Rome â
until age, sickness and the isolation in which the fascist vigilance
immobilized him forced him to abandon manual labor and to allow help
with living to come from his family of soul-brothers and children that
saw and so loved in the comrades of faith scattered all over the world.
In early November of 1926, the last shop in which Malatesta worked still
three years before, in one of the streets of the old Roman papal, was
invaded one night and devastated by a horde of fascists, in hatred of
the noble worker of arm and thought who represented for them the living
antithesis of despotic and rapacious violence that had taken hold of
Italyâs government.
Having consecrated himself to the cause of proletarian emancipation and
of liberty, Malatesta sacrificed himself in whole to that cause, without
realizing he had done so and almost always with the impression that he
wasnât doing enough. In the final days he wrote to Bertoni and me in
bitter terms, and maybe to others as well. He would have wanted to live,
but âto do something good,â he who had done so much and offered
sacrifices without ever resting, maybe because he never considered them
as such. And of these not the least was certainly â though also maybe
not perceived by him â that of willingly renouncing what would have
given him the great privilege of intelligence, to whose fruits he would
have had the right even from the most rigorous point of view of his
ideas.
If he had been able to and preferred to dedicate himself to a labor of
learning outside of politics, for example in medicine which he had left
but which had always continued to interest him, or as well to
physical-mechanical sciences which occupied him at intervals, or to
historical and philosophical disciplines which he was learned in â
although he often pleased himself in making fun of the dilettantes of
philosophy â he would have been able to win the highest laurels and grow
himself the same a fortunate position, without any need to abandon his
anarchist ideas,. By example of his friends Kropotkin and Reclus. But he
didnât want this, though always studying for its own sake, stealing the
time to sleep and rest in order to keep himself abreast of all of the
most recent progress of learning and to keep his vast knowledge from
growing old and rusty. But his broad and fresh learning fed him in his
revolutionary role, with the goal of taking from it intellectual arms
and materials for propaganda and battle.
He spoke and wrote in French and Spanish as in Italian, and well enough
in English too, and he was an anarchist journalist and orator in all
four tongues. He knew enough German to read it, which ultimately served
him well by keeping him informed of the movementâs currents through the
German anarchist journals, which most easily escaped fascist censorship.
For some time he was able in and passionate about Esperanto, not because
he believed in the utopia of a universal language, but only because
Esperanto gave him a way to stay in touch with revolutionaries of the
most varied and distant countries. He was informed of the latest
conquests in applied physics and chemistry, of aviation (with which he
occupied himself in London, though before the first airplane plowed the
sky), and so on; not only for curiosity, but because in each branch of
those sciences he saw some practical use to arrive at forces of
opposition adequate to the enormous forces of privilege and oppression.
As in the realm of thought, as well as in practical life, in the air of
the fight and away from it, he never isolated himself from his
environment, nor distanced himself from reality, more collided with
them. Like the ancient philosophers, nothing which was human was foreign
to him. He knew to discover the good, although it might be scant, even
when it was hidden in the bad, and appreciated it. He wouldnât yield to
the bad for any price. He knew how to collect all of the favorable
opportunities to his cause, but disdained all opportunism. Severe with
himself, he was the most indulgent of the weaknesses and mistakes
attributable to human nature in those who seemed to have good
intentions.
But regarding him, those simple and seemingly insignificant opportunisms
were unknown to him, which in the breast of the same party sometimes
pushed the weaker or more disinterested to indulge in a harmful
tendency, to a mistaken preconception, to a utilitarian deviation, with
an error in method or doctrine.
His active life as an anarchist was a monolith of humanity: unity of
thought and action, balance between feelings and reason; coherence
between preaching and practice; adherence of the inflexibly fighting
energy to the manâs goodness; fusion of a graceful sweetness, with the
most rigid firmness of character; agreement between the most complete
trueness to his colors and a mental agility that escaped any dogmatism
and all made him affirm the uncertain needs of the camp of action ? â
and all to understand the aspects of progress, although apparently in
contrast, the camp of thought.
He was the complete anarchist. The use of the means necessary to win
remained, in what he said and did, in constant rapport with the
liberatory end being reached for; the enthusiasm and fury of the moment
never lost sight of immediate and future needs; passion and good sense,
destruction and creation, always harmonized, in his words and in his
example; and this harmony, so indispensable to win with fertility of
results, impossible to dictate from on high, he carried himself with
efficacy among the people, confusing himself with them, without worrying
if that made his personal work disappear in the vast and undulating
ocean of the anonymous masses. That which, far from diminishing it as
distinct individuality, made this shine even more luminously. The
crowds, however, didnât understand all that had been necessary : they
intuited well enough, about him, for some brief instant, that in his
teaching was the road to salvation, but they didnât master it, or
therefore make the effort needed to realize it. They acclaimed his name
at times, but took very little of his spirit. But it wasnât through any
fault of his.
Far from me is any intention of wanting to present Malatesta in these
pages as a perfect man without any defects! He certainly had defects,
though the pain of his departure and the great affection for him donât
allow me to see them now, or would make me forget them. The same fact
that he has been so universally loved is a proof that his humanity
participated in the common weaknesses, but more those that grow close to
the hearts of the people than those which distance. He would always
confess himself to be full of flaws, and maybe his worst were these of
excessive modesty and never being satisfied with himself, of which I
have already said something, that sometimes and in some camps have
excessively limited his workâs development, and in some environments and
circumstances have stopped him from giving all the fruits which could be
hoped from him. But I donât fear, certainly, exaggerating or falling
into vain adulation if I said that which, he being alive he wouldnât
have permitted, that he, a man of flesh and bone, fallible as all
mortals, was in every way better than many of his contemporaries,
already seated in the future city of his hopes/auspices , and at the
same time the closest to his times, ardent about the objective reality
of human nature and of factual conditions, not as he wanted them to be
in a distant tomorrow, but those which exist today with all their errors
and their deficiencies.
This above all makes us regret enormously the emptiness he has left
among us as a militant of the revolution, as an animator of the crowds,
as a sustainer of energy, as a coordinator of efforts, in that total
fusion of spirit of the idea with the sense of reality of which will be
so necessary in the expected decisive days of courage and of the fight.
The rematch will come, we can be sure, after the routs which made the
sunset of life so anxious for him. However, he will not see it, already
he canât help or cooperate, as had been the dream of all his life and
the supreme of his last, disconsolate days. ?
Malatestaâs life is the best book he has written. It isnât possible,
therefore, to comprehend the historical figure of his in the perennial
value of feeling and of thought that remains through his writings,
without having present the complete painting of his long existence
through the social and revolutionary movement of more than half a
century. From here the necessity, before passing a sufficiently complete
exposition of his ideas, knowing at least summarily the history of his
life.
Max Nettlau, known as a scrupulously documented historian of anarchism,
had published ten or eleven years from Malatestaâs death a very
interesting volume about the life and work of the Italian anarchist
agitator. Editions have appeared in German, Italian and Spanish, the
latter being the most recently published (1923), the most complete and
detailed.^([11])
It was desirable that Nettlau complete this work with the story of the
years leading to his death. Nettlauâs book is a fundamental historical
work for one who wishes to know the life of Malatesta in relation to his
time and to the modern social movement. I should note that the pages
which follow draw heavily from this book, since my personal memories of
him are quite incomplete before 1897.^([12])
The limits imposed by the proportions of the work donât allow me to
stretch out all that I want and would suggest to me the affect about the
man. To say it all and say it well â which I feel incapable of â I would
have to give to the readers a work that would interest them like the
most moving of novels. There are episodes of secondary importance that
by force I will have to leave in the inkwell, which for the most diverse
reasons would not only bring the tale to life better, but would also
bring satisfaction of historical curiosity. I must also omit some of
these stories for one of the same motives that stopped Malatesta from
writing his own Memoires: that the hour still hasnât arrived in which to
say certain truths about third persons who are still living and which it
is a moral obligation to set aside. Other things, furthermore, though
interesting and perfectly safe to relate, would enlarge this work too
much.
The readers will excuse me, therefore, if the following biography of
Malatesta has become, against all my desires, too cold and schematic.
They will also understand the disproportion of means that comes of the
fact that the tale until 1897 is a reference taken from what I have read
or heard from others and from Malatesta himself, while the last
thirty-five years are more from my direct knowledge. On the other hand,
while the parts of the tale which refer to what has been published
several times will be more concise, there will be more detail on the
points about which little or nothing is known, or about which the
popular knowledge is erroneous or unclear.
â Meeting Bakunin.
The son of the couple Federico Malatesta and Lazzarina Rostoia, Errico
was born in Santa Maria Capua Vetere, near Naples in the province of
Caserta, on December 14, 1853. His family was wealthy and owned several
houses in Santa Maria. But when the boy was a student in the Lyceum,
while he was with them in Naples he lived in the Pignatelli mansion, on
a street by the same name. In Naples, Errico studied classics as a
boarding student of the Escolapiosâ ? schools (a religious order
dedicated to teaching), where he made friends with the home student
Saverio Merlino, though their friendship was still not political.
Since that time, the young boy showed the tendencies and spirit of
rebellion. He was fourteen in 1868 when he wrote an insolent and
menacing letter to the king Vittorio Emanuele II, signing it. As a
result, on March 25 he suffered his first arrest. It cost him dearly
since his father, a man of moderately liberal ideas, had tried to free
him by making the whole thing look like a prank, setting into motion
every connection he had with the official world in Naples. Errico was
detained all of that day in the police station. At night, after a rough
sermon from the questore who had wanted to shut him up in a correctional
house, the young boy was returned to his father.
During dinner at home, his father tried to reproach him and to tell him
to act more prudently at least, but the boy responded with such
uncompromising stubbornness and determination that his poor old man
ended by exclaiming with tears in his eyes, âMy poor son, I hate to say
it to you, but youâll end up on the gallows!â
The adolescent rebel digested what had already been a year or two of
Republican ideas. The Republicans were the historical party of the
Italian Revolution and irresistibly attracted the fiery student, who was
full of classical memories of ancient Rome and the heroic acts of the
still-unfinished Rissorgimento. Even from his exile Giuseppe Mazzini,
one of its champions, fascinated the young boy. Fifteen years later
Malatesta explained his republicanism of the time, which he thought
promised the realization of his hopes for complete liberty and social
justice, but he later found a better reflection of his hopes in
anarchist socialism.^([13]) Although frequently among the Republican
crowd, he didnât belong to the party. He asked, together with his friend
Leone Leoncavallo (the older brother of the musician), for entrance to
the âUniversal Republican Alliance.â The request was transmitted to the
Central Committee, that is to say to Mazzini, who rejected them because
he judged that the two aspirants had excessively socialist tendencies
and would soon defect to the ranks of the International.
Until that moment Malatesta had never heard mention of the
International, and he wanted to know what it was. He sought and found
it. He then met, among others, Giuseppe Fanelli, Saverio Friscia,
Carmelo Paladino, and Gambuzzi, and under their influence (especially
that of Fanelli and Paladino) he decidedly embraced â in 1870 â
internationalist ideas.^([14]) It is known that in Italy at that time,
socialism and the International owed their markedly revolutionary and
anarchist character to Bakuninâs influence, exerted since 1864. The
events of the Paris Commune of 1871 and the ferment for those strewn
everywhere reinforced Malatestaâs newly embraced faith, his enthusiasm
growing to a crescendo.
On August 4, 1872 a congress of internationalists from various parts of
the peninsula met in Rimini, known later as the âConference of Rimini,â
where the Italian Federation of the International Workersâ Association
was put together. Before this event isolated sections of the
International had already been diffused about Italy â the most important
of them being in Naples â workersâ fascios, resistance societies, and so
on. In Rimini a common organization was solidified. The president of the
conference was Carlo Cafiero and the secretary Andrea Costa. Malatesta
didnât participate in this conference, but soon became one of the most
active members of the Federation. Since January he had been the
Secretary General of the Neapolitan Labor Federation, whose program he
had formulated. He had collaborated the previous year (1871) with
Cafiero on LâOrdine of Naples,^([15]) and he was a regular contributor
to La Campana, also of Naples (1871â2), the most important
internationalist paper of its time, thanks to the vivacity, seriousness
and the density of its thought.
The Italian Federation founded in Rimini had a socialist-anarchist
revolutionary program, was anti-Marxist in its methods, and had a public
character due to its propaganda, but it was conspiratorial about the
insurrection that it tirelessly tried to provoke. Malatesta threw
himself into the work of the program body and soul, no longer worried
about his studies^([16]) or personal affairs and gave all of his
inheritance to propaganda and to the poor, as has been said elsewhere.
Indefatigable in his activities as an agitator and conspirator, he was
always in motion, able and serious, anywhere that something to do could
be found. He radiated an enthusiasm which communicated itself to all who
approached him. He was already a subtle and persuasive reasoner, soon
successfully exercising an extraordinary influence among workers and the
youth. This quickly made him into the Black Beast of the Italian police,
who followed his steps and pursued him without rest, detaining him at
every turn using the most trivial pretexts, or sometimes without even
these. Later, at his trial in Rome in 1884, he threw into relief the
fact that, without ever having been convicted of a crime to that day, he
had already completed more than six years of jail.
The same year that the Congress of Rimini was held, Malatesta went to
the anti-authoritarian International Socialist Congress of Saint-Imier
(September 15 and 16, 1872), leaving several days earlier to go Zurich,
where he met Bakunin for the first time. He remained in Bakuninâs
company a total of fifteen or sixteen days before and after the
Congress, and promptly came into a complete communion with his ideas. He
also participated in the âAlliance,â a sort of secret revolutionary and
anarchist fraternity which Bakunin had founded some years earlier under
the name âDemocratic Socialist Allianceâ and which was later called the
âRevolutionary Socialist Alliance.â
Despite his great energy, the young Errico had fragile health, and it
could be said that he was naturally sick. When he was about 15 or 16 his
doctor believed that he would have trouble reaching 24. Bakunin noted
this in his first encounter with him, when he saw Errico arrive in
Zurich with a cough and a fever. On the fiftieth anniversary of
Bakuninâs death in 1926, Malatesta spoke of this trip, recalling how he
met the great Russian revolutionary. Thinking he couldnât be heard,
Bakunin had said to one of the comrades surrounding him in his house,
âWhat a pity that he is so sick! We will lose him soon; he wonât be
around in six months.â^([17])
From then on the relations between Bakunin and Malatesta were close and
frequent. They saw each other often and wrote, and for some time Bakunin
had the young Italian anarchist as his secretary. Errico would be able
to go and spend time with him, especially in the period in which Bakunin
lived in the âBaronata,â a country house near Locarno in Switzerland.
Malatesta was at the Baronata in July of 1873 when Bakunin entrusted him
with traveling to Barletta, where Carlo Cafiero then lived, to put
together a rural feast with him in Spain. But Malatesta was detained
there, taken to Trani, and shut up in the city jail.
From the jail in Trani he managed to send a letter to friends on the
outside, but it was found by police in a notebook. An investigation was
made, and resulted in the prisoner being isolated in a daunting fort
called âthe tower of Tiepolo,â under the special custody of an
ex-religious guardian. But he, who had been in a military prison under
the Bourbons â a curious sort of patriot â became friends with
Malatesta, and the young revolutionaryâs letters left the jail more
easily than before. That guardian, who had been a member of the cabinet
of the minister Silvio Spaventa under the old government, confided to
Malatesta that he would love to kill the minister to punish him for
having abandoned his old comrades; and with the greatest secrecy he
showed him the dagger he had been honing for that purpose at the end of
every day.
In that period of imprisonment Malatesta also befriended the director of
the jail, a certain Carlo Battistelli, also an old patriotic political
prisoner. The friendship began with an enraged outburst by the director,
when Malatesta mentioned some âpolice agent.â A discussion took place,
and Battistelli became very sympathetic towards his prisoner. Malatesta
stayed in jail for six months and was freed, all without any concrete
accusation or trial.
These short episodes can serve to show the influence Malatesta exerted
over all those who came across him. We will see another example in an
episode not much later.
He suffered a little for his time in jail, but most of all for the great
waste of his busy life â at the time he left the jail in Trani, he had
been dedicated to work to prepare for the next insurrection in southern
Italy, joined in Locarno by Bakunin, Costa, Cafiero and others â his
health had been drained. His doctors ordered a period of complete rest
and he was invited by Carmelo Paladino to vacation for a few days at his
house in Cagnano Varano (during the carnival of 1874). Malatesta came
into contact with the strategic group of that little city, which met at
night in a pharmacy and in little time proceeded to come to grips with
the devil [idiom] in the form of the townâs auditor, the priest, and the
marshal of the guard, all from the pharmacy. For the final day of the
carnival they put together a political masquerade: âThe death of the
bourgeoisie,â and the funeral was held in the streets of the town, the
coffin surrounded in the funniest way by these four in disguises. After
Malatesta departed, something should be felt in the highest: the marshal
was transferred, the priest called by the bishop, and the auditor
censured by the prefect.
Congresses of Florence and Bern (1876).
The insurrectionary attempt of 1874 was promoted by Andrea Costa and
Bakunin, and was planned in the Bakuninâs house, the âBaronata,â
(Baronage) in December of 1873, while Malatesta was still in the Trani
prison. The youth left jail and headed for Naples where Cafiero caught
him up to speed on things, and he immediately dedicated his cooperation
in the affair. He freed himself ? in a brief parenthesis of repose in
Cagnano (mentioned above), made trips to all of southern Italy, which
was specially entrusted to him, and went to Locarno to meet with
Bakunin. The end of July saw him in Puglia for the final preparations.
Boxes of weapons were gotten from Naples, definitive dispositions were
taken, and in August, while the Italian police had already intuited
something of the affair and had made the first detentions of
internationalists and from among a faction of the Mazzinians favorable
to the project (the arrests of Villa Ruffi in Romagna), the movement was
initiated in several points of Italy.
Is isnât my task to tell that movementâs tale here, since it is already
know well enough. Instead, I will briefly allude to the actions which
Malatesta directly participated in, to illuminate his role and his
position in the midst of them more than anything else. The movement was
generally abortive, perhaps because the police were already prepared for
it, or perhaps because the popular rebellions due to the misery of
earlier in the year were already calmed. It also could have ended
because of some dissent that arose at the last moment between
internationalists (the rupture between Cafiero and Bakunin and the
formerâs departure for Russia), maybe because of other minor causes,
among them probably Costaâs insincerity. However, small attempts took
place everywhere, which later gave rise to a number of trials in Rome,
in Massa (Carrara), Liorna, Florence, Perugia, Palermo (or Giregenti?),
Trani, and in Bologna.
These last were the most important, because only in Emilia (the group of
the Castel del Monte meadows) were there remarkably dignified deeds, an
armed excursion and encounters with the police and soldiers. The trial
of Florence was also important, not for the concrete acts that werenât
produced, but for the great number of people involved and the notoriety
of some of them (among them Garibaldi), the scenes that were depicted,
and so on. Giuseppe Garibaldi had made it known to Bakunin that he too
would take part in the movement if it developed into something serious.
It wasnât to be. Bakunin was clandestinely in Bologna, from where he
managed with great difficulty to get himself to safety once the affair
ended.
At the beginning of the events in Puglia, which Malatesta should have
personally participated in, he found himself in Molfetta and should have
gone to Terlizzi. He was warned in time of an ambush of police
operatives to assassinate him, so he went by unusual streets and found
almost nobody; from there with another he went to Castel del Monte.
There, in the old castle of Federico II of Suavia, which was the decided
meeting-place, he was joined by some other isolated elements. As
Malatesta told the story later, âSeveral hundred conspirators had
promised to find themselves at Castel del Monte;
I headed to the reunion, but at the meeting-place, of the hundreds who
had sworn themselves in, we found six. It didnât matter; the box of
weapons was opened⊠it was full of muskets. [?] No matter. We armed
ourselves and declared war on the Italian army. We crossed the
countryside for several days, trying to take farmers with us, but found
no response. The second day we encountered eight soldiers, who believed
we were a much larger group and didnât fire at us. Three days later we
realized that we were surrounded by soldiers. There was nothing else to
do; we buried the muskets and decided to scatter; I hid in a haycart[?],
and in it I left the danger zone.â^([18])
The story, too brief, should have been finished, but they had too few
members. Nettlau says that the small group of insurrectionists in those
days was multiplied by activity and by constant mobilizations; it showed
up in Anria, Molfetta, Corato and Minervino, giving the impression that
other groups were involved, but it was always the same one. Malatesta
told me that the farmers approved of and were interested in the
propaganda, agreeing with what the conspirators proposed, but none to
the point of joining the insurrectionists. An episode: in one of those
incursions one day, at days [], taking a country road, the small gang
saw a patrol of soldiers coming towards them, led by a carabiniero. They
decided to fight and had their weapons ready, but when they were close
enough to make each other out, the carabiniero made a sign to Malatesta
as if he were a superior officer, stopped the soldiers and ordered them
about, and then they marched away. Malatesta had recognized the
carabiniero as his marshal friend from the masquerade in Cagnano Varano.
Today all this might seem puerile, but it wasnât in those times, still
full of recent memories of the attempts made by Mazzini, Garibaldi,
Pisacana, and so on, in which the small initiative spoke with such a
suggestive power, while hostility towards the government was so great,
the governing power of the new dominators still weak and the loyalty of
their own instruments [people] still uncertain. The intentions were
enormous, and from these was derived an optimism full of exaltation and
a deep seriousness.
The castle of Frederick I was being used as an arms dump and repair
point, of nocturnal rest and of rendezvous for the different sites of
planned actions. New recruits were expected until the end, and this
castle would be made into the center, the headquarters of a vast
uprising. The six insurrectionists had entrenched themselves there as in
a fortress from which they made constant forays, and by night its
occupants took turns as sentinels of an encampment. In the last of the
enterpriseâs five or six days, the Castel del Monte gang took the road
for Spinazzola. At a certain point on the road they stopped in a rural
area to rest. Gugliemmo Schiralli (who would later be a well-known
socialist in Puglia) arrived on a coach[/]cart, and notified the six
that they were tightly encircled. It was decided to disband. There were
haycarts there that had to leave; Malatesta and some others hid
themselves in them, and crossed the cordon of soldiers unnoticed.
Malatesta succeeded in arriving in Naples, where he was hidden several
days; then he left for Marcas, and was headed for the Baronata in
Switzerland, where he was expected. But in Pesaro he was recognized and
arrested. The carabinieros in the barracks were furious with him, having
read news in the papers that he had shot at their fellow soldiers in
Puglia. They stripped him and pretended to interrogate him. Malatesta
knew that a beating would come, and announced that he had great
revelations which could only be told to an examining judge. The judge
came, but Malatesta only confided⊠that he knew nothing and had been
unjustly detained. The first danger had been overcome; but the riflemen,
after the useless interrogation, locked him in a type of iron cage for
ferocious animals which was in the patio of the barracks, and everyone
went to stare at him there.
Finally, the order came to transport Malatesta to Trani. In chains the
whole voyage, he arrived in the city in Puglia and was led to the jails
he already knew. The director Battistelli, seeing his old boarder enter,
admitted him exclaiming sorrowfully, âOh, you got yourself trapped!â
The usual prison time followed. The directorâs friendship helped the
lawyersâ preparation of the defense enormously; in anticipation they
shared the versions of the facts and the witnesses in the jail. The
lawyer Lamberto Valbois defended Malatesta. The trial, which took place
from August 1^(st) through 5^(th), 1875, was an enormous and continual
propaganda meeting, which made the International much more popular than
before. It all ended with a general acquittal,^([19]) thanks to a
favorable verdict from eleven of the twelve jurors, some of whom wanted
to join the International a little later.
Shortly later Malatesta was once more in Ticino canton, at the
âBaronata,â where Cafiero was, already back from Russia with his woman,
Olimpia Kutusoff. Some other comrades were already there, but not
Bakunin. The break between Cafiero and Bakunin was definitive, and the
latter had established himself in Lugano. It had to do with a purely
personal disagreement, without hostility, and they still exchanged some
letters. Malatesta, who went to see Bakunin in Lugano, later told
Nettlau (from whom I have these details) that each one had spoken of the
other without resentment. I think that Malatesta tried then to reconcile
the two old friends, but he had the impression that from then onwards,
due to age and illness, Bakunin had finished his life as an active
revolutionary. But he had also ended physically: the indomitable Russian
agitator died eight or nine months after Malatestaâs visit, on July 1,
1876, in Bern where he had gone to recover.
Malatesta remained in Switzerland only briefly, and by September or a
bit later (1875) he made his first trip to Spain, where beyond busying
himself with propaganda and organizing for the International (also,
probably for the secret revolutionary Alliance), he took part in the
attempts to free a comrade from jail by shrewdness and by force. He
visited many areas (including Barcelona, Cadiz, and Madrid), but by the
end of October he had returned to Naples.
He was in that city when, at his friendsâ insistence, he accepted a
proposal to be admitted to Masonry, hoping to be able to repeat with
better luck the attempt already made by Bakunin to urge the association
to revolutionary ground. But he was soon disappointed and the only
result he obtained was to meet enthusiastic youths easily won by his
ideas. He stayed there less than two years, and in the epoch in which
Nicotera ascended to the ministry and the Masonry of Naples decided to
celebrate with flags aloft, Malatesta indignantly left and ever
afterwards fought Masonry like the most uncompromising enemy.^([20])
A curious episode in Malatestaâs life occurred in Naples at the end of
1875 or early 1876. He was denounced to be submitted to the
âammonizioneâ (Admonition)^([21]) and since the proceeding allowed
preventative arrest, Malatesta had resisted. Without abandoning the
city, he tried not to be caught by surprise and went by night to sleep
at one friendâs house or another. The police followed close behind.
One day, on a side street in Naples, he unexpectedly found himself
facing the old director of the Trani jail, Battistelli, who turned to
see him with great happiness and asked him a thousand questions.
Malatesta told him that he was hunted by the police and didnât know
where to hide himself to sleep when night arrived. âCome to my house,â
Battistelli told him, âI will hide you.â âWhere?!â âIn the jail!â He
said that he had been transferred from Trani as the director of one of
the jails of Naples. Malatesta accepted. So for several days, to not be
imprisoned, the feared internationalist took refuge⊠in prison!
In that period, the fever of action which the young revolutionary
reveled in drove him to go to Herzegovina to participate in the
insurrection that had broken out in 1875 against the Turks. By means of
a friend (Serafino Mazzotti) he made his intentions known to Bakunin,
who advised him not to, but he persisted in the idea and tried to
accomplish it shortly after being in Rome at a conference of
internationalists on themes of organization in March.
He left ^(â I couldnât even give an approximate date[22] â) and arrived
by Hungary at the banks of the Sava river. While he prepared to swim
across the river one morning in the open countryside, Hungarian police
in civilian garb, who seemed to be there to work the earth, ran up to
him and arrested him. They led him to the city (Neusatz) and from there
he was taken to Fiume, where after his rough words against the Italian
government, the consul turned the Hungarian police against him ?, who
then made him travel almost entirely by foot. The trip was long and very
painful (except the last brief trajectory through Austrian territory),
he suffered much hunger, and when he was turned over to the Italian
police a month later, he was unrecognizable, arriving dirty and with
tattered clothes and shoes.
However, a second time a little later, he went to Serbia with the same
goal, when Alceste Faggioli was also there, the famed internationalist
from Bologna. Nettlau writes that Garibaldi then encouraged young people
to those expeditions. Malatesta was certainly in favor, at some moments,
either in the hope that the intervention of conscious revolutionaries
might be able to give the insurrection a braver? direction, or as a type
of demonstration of bravery and fighting spirit that could enhance the
prestige of the Italian internationalists. But there, faced with similar
cases, he totally changed his attitude.
Returning to Naples from the Austrian frontier, he stopped briefly in
Florence where the Correspondence Commission of the Italian
International was then housed. In Naples he began again the work of
organization and propaganda. The Italian Internationalist Congress was
already being prepared, which Andrea Costa was occupied with more than
any, and in June it was decided to hold it in Florence. Everyone
expected this to be an interesting congress, since meanwhile a notable
ideological change had been outlined among the most known exponents of
the movement.
It was in those months which preceded the congress, effectively, when by
mail and live voice the question of collectivism and communism was
discussed lengthily among comrades. Until that moment all of the
International of the libertarian wing, which was the only one that
stayed active (the Marxist wing had been extinguished a little after
1872), considered collectivism as the best form of social reconstruction
above the economic terrain, following Bakuninâs ideas. But that already
didnât satisfy the thought of some Italian internationalists, including
Emelio Covelli, Cafiero, Malatesta and Costa.
Malatesta told Nettlau that he, Covelli and Cafiero discussed much in
Naples in those months, in long walks on the seashore, and arrived at
formulating the conception of communist anarchism.^([23])
The congress was fixed in Florence for October 1876, and the final
agreements decided it for the 21^(st) and 22^(nd). But the police lay in
waiting. The first internationalists arrived in Florence the 20^(th)
knew that the day before Andrea Costa, Natta, Grassi and others from the
Correspondence Commission had been arrested, the congress prohibited and
the spot where it should have been held occupied by the police. But
luckily all of the documents were out of danger. It was decided, despite
everything, to hold the congress. The comrade Fortunato Serantoni had
been sent to Pontassieve (a city of the province a few kilometers from
Florence) to see if there was a way to meet there or in the vicinity,
and the response was positive.
At night from the 20^(th) to the 21^(st) the congress-goers left
Florence individually, arrive in Pontassieve at the meeting-place, where
Serantoni â still a boy and unknown to the police â showed those
assembled, just as they arrived, the street and point where they had to
take themselves. This point was very far, in the hamlet? of Tosi,
faction of the Rignano commune, already among the Appenine? mountains.
The congress could only be started on the night of the 21^(st) of
October, after the congress-goers made a nine-hour march under a
torrential rain. About fifty delegated attended from every part of
Italy, not to mention the adhesions? sent by letter. The initial work
was done by four study committees; then discussions began, that carried
into the next day. But at a certain point news arrived that the police
had managed to know something in Pontassieve; a company of soldiers, a
strong number of guards and carabinieres had arrived in that little
town. Nine congress-goers had been detained, among them Enrico Bignami,
in the rail station. As a precaution, the day of the 22^(nd) the
congress was transferred en masse to the nearby woods, and in one of its
clearings the discussions continued peacefully.
The most important discussion was related to the conclusion of adopting
the principle expressed in the communist formula: âfrom each according
to his strengths, to each according to his needs.â All ideas of recourse
to the establishment of any form of government were refused, and to that
effect a great number of delegates had been given an imperative mandate
from their sections. The anarchist character of international socialism
was reaffirmed. Regarding tactics, participation in political and
administrative elections was condemned âbecause they divert the
proletariat and make of it an unconscious tool of the bourgeoisie.â
Later they addressed the press, relations between the sections,
international relations, propaganda in the countryside and in the army,
and above all among elementary teachers and among women (there was also
a representation from a womenâs group of Florence at the congress). In
the end, the congress was concluded after having named Errico Malatesta
and Carlo Cafiero, present there, as representatives of the Italian
Federation to the next congress of the International in Bern.
After the congress ended, a group of delegates continued to meet again
in Florence, and there a protest was edited and communicated to the
press, against the prohibition of the congress, the arrests and
arbitrary violation of freedom of assembly perpetrated by the executive
power. The protest carried seventeen signatures, among which I noted?
the names of Malatesta, Cafiero, Covelli, Serantoni, Temistocle
Silvagni, Napoleone Papini, Tomasso Schettino and others.^([24])
The eighth congress of the International Association of Workers began in
Bern four days after the one in Florence ended, and lasted from the
24^(th) to the 30^(th) of October. As Italian delegates, in addition to
Cafiero and Malatesta, were Giovanni Ferrari and Oreste Vaccari, sent by
other groups. I wonât elaborate on this congress, of which extensive
accounts can be found in numerous publications, and I will limit myself,
for brevityâs sake, to refer to what pertains to Malatesta, who
represented at it one of the most important parts.
He made an oral presentation about the ârelations to establish between
individuals and groups in the reorganized society.â He developed his new
ideas and those of his Italian comrades about the anarchic communism
(today too well-known to have to speak of them again here); he insisted
on the necessity of laboring and organizing action not only against the
authoritarian institutions, but also against the natural individual and
collective resistances with moral means; he proposed âpermanent
revolutionâ as a complex of fights, actions and reactions against
bourgeois society; he alluded to the necessity of studying the forms of
future organization as an âeffort to discover the future by the study of
the present and pastâ without pretensions of guaranteeing the future. He
also protested against the habit of calling ourselves and making
ourselves called Bakunists, since â he said â âwe are not him, we donât
share all of his theoretical and practical ideas, and we arenât him
above all because we follow ideas and not men, and we rebel against that
custom of incarnating a principle in a man.â
In that congress a separate section was made apart, in secret, excluding
the public and the journalists, on the theme: âSolidarity in
revolutionary action.â It was then when the question of insurrection was
discussed as âpropaganda by deed,â and Malatesta sustained the necessity
of making insurrectionary attempts that, directly attacking the state
and authority organisms and proceeding the most vast expropriations
possible to the benefit of poor populations, they would make among these
the most effective propaganda. It was in the course or as a consequence
of these discussions that the project was aired of an attempt of this
type in Italy, which would later coalesce in the movement of the known
âBand of Beneventoâ the following year. Malatesta told me that, when he
and Cafiero returned to Italy after the congress, they already agreed on
that project.
(Perhaps it was after the conference of Bern when the reference to
Malatestaâs second voyage to the Balkans (in Serbia) should be placed,
of which I have spoken earlier, after the account of the attempt to
penetrate into Herzegovina. But Iâm not sure, and I havenât found to
that effect anywhere other news apart form a fleeting allusion in one of
the notes taken after a conversation with Malatesta. Before the congress
it would have been difficult to have the material time, and furthermore
he himself told me that the Balkan movements continued still in 1877.)
Above all, the time was occupied in search of the financial means,
pledges?, and so on, for the projected insurrectionary attempt.
Malatesta and Cafiero struggled to find manual labor in order to earn
something, but in vain. Always with the object of finding money, they
made an escape to Neuchatel, where they met with Peter Kropotkin
(Malatesta and Kropotkin saw each other then for the first time), but
didnât obtain anything. Until, unexpectedly, Cafiero came up with five
or six thousand francs, the last of his possessions,^([25]) and this
plus a minor sum that a Russian socialist had put at his disposition
earlier, constituted the war fund for the revolutionary movement that
was prepared.
Max Nettlau points out a fundamental distinction between the movements
of 1874 and the one in Benevento which Cafiero and Malatesta helped
stage in 1877. The first promised to unleash an insurrection throughout
Italy, while the second had more of a demonstrative character of making
propaganda by deed. The movements of 1874 were prepared and inaugurated
in several parts of the peninsula. In 1877, on the other hand, the
action was specific to the Matese countryside, in the Benevento
province. Naturally, we shouldnât overlook their hope that the movement
would evolve and extend itselfâas Malatesta had always put it, âdeeds
bring about deedsââbut the concrete objective was to herald the
revolution by their example, regardless of what the eventual practical
outcome might be. It should be mentioned that Andrea Costa was adverse
to this movement and remained uninvolved.
The preparations went without a hitch, and a considerable number of
farmers had promised their help in the intervention. Many had been won
over by a certain Salvatore Farina, who could boast of having a local
influence. In the past Farina had conspired against the Bourbons with
his friend Nicotera, who was minister.* This time, he betrayed everyone
he knew and had them arrested, with the exception of Cafiero and
Malatesta, who knew how to skillfully avoid police investigations.
Contact with the farmers was interrupted by Farinaâs betrayal, but
preparations went on. The Russian revolutionary Sergei Stepniak
(Kravchinski) found himself in Naples at the time and wanted to
participate in the effort.
The movement was precipitated by an unexpected and unwelcome situation,
not surprisingly in similar circumstances. ? Stepniak, a Russian woman
and Malatesta had rented a house in Cerreto under the pretext of an
[the?] old womanâs convalescence, but really it would serve as an arms
dump.^([26]) The weapons arrived in large boxes on April 3, 1877. The
house was inadvertently being watched by the police, and two days later
a group of internationalists skirmished with the nearby soldiers who lay
in waiting: two of them were wounded and one died of injuries later.
There were arrests and the comrades, barely a quarter of the number they
had hoped, judged that they must immediately begin their campaign,
without waiting for the others. They left during the night, armed, and
stationed [posted?] themselves in the surrounding mountains where they
were joined by a few others who hadnât any weapons.
They numbered about thirty at that point, with Cafiero, Malatesta,
Stepniak and Cesare Ceccarelli at their head.^([27]) They crossed the
mountainous regions of Mount Matese between April 6 and 8âPietravia,
Montemutri, Fileti and Buccoâeating and sleeping by night in the houses
of farmers (who were paid generously for everything), until they arrived
at Lentino. They entered town flying a red banner and invaded the Town
Hall just as the Council was in session. In the name of the social
revolution, they declared the king an old fossil and demanded that the
Council hand over official documents, arms seized from citizens, and the
contents of the municipal coffers, giving a receipt of all this to the
town secretary in these terms: âWe, the undersigned, declare ourselves
to have come into possession of the arms [which lay] in the hands of the
municipality of Lentino, in the name of the social revolution.â The arms
that had been confiscated, tools, and the scant money that was found in
the treasury were distributed among the townâs inhabitants. The scale
for weighing the tariff on farmers was destroyed, and all official
documents irrelevant to the public good were burned. Speeches were made
and approvingly listened to by the townspeople.
They continued to the neighboring city of Gallo. Before they entered
they met the parish priest Vincenzo Tamburi, and obliged him to enter
with themâhe preceded them and calmed [pacified] the people by declaring
himself a communist as well. They invaded the municipality and proceeded
as they had in Lentino. After the final conference, according to
Nettlauâs account, a farmer took the spotlight and asked, âWho can
assure us that you arenât soldiers disguised to discover how we think,
and arrest us later?â Nettlau accurately observes that this mistrust
could have been caused either by the fresh memory of Farinaâs treachery,
or by the fact that the rebels were all Northerners. The Southern city
held much resentment against the government of Savoy, under Piedmont,
which had introduced obligatory military service in the South, and a
degrading, exploitative system of tribute.
In the meantime, government troops began to occupy the region, while as
with Puglia in 1874, the people listened with sympathy to the rebelsâ
lectures, but were careful not to join them. On April 9 and 10 the
insurrectionists fought the soldiers, eventually making a retreat.
Malatesta went into Venafro one night to buy ammunition, was almost
arrested, and saved himself only by fleeing into a forest. It began to
rain, snowing on the high mountain. The situation was desperate. Their
weapons, furthermore, had become unserviceable as soon as the cartridges
got wet. They wanted to cross over to the neighboring province of
Campobasso, but they would have had to scale a tall mountainâimpossible!
They discussed what to do, whether they should disband or not, and
decided to remain united. Two who wanted to leave hung back a short
distance. Malatesta and Cafiero would rather have saved themselves, but
were alone in this, so they chose to stay with the others to confront
their shared responsibilities. The twenty-six turned back and took
refuge in the hamlet of Cacetta a few kilometers from Lentino, and there
a farmer denounced them to the soldiers. Between eleven and twelve at
night, the military surprised them in the house and detained
twenty-three. Of the other three who had fled in time, two were
apprehended nearby, and the third was caught in Naples some time later.
Therefore the enterprise, which had lasted ten or twelve days, came to
an end. The arrestees were taken to the court prisons of Santa Maria
Capua Vetere. More arrests were made. Twenty-six, including Malatesta,
were in Santa Maria; eight were in the Benevento jail. The idleness of
prison wasnât entirely wasted. Cafiero occupied himself by writing a
Compendium of Marxâs Capital, and Stepniak the book Underground Russia.
; Malatesta wrote a report to the Correspondence Commission of Florence
about the details of the uprising, and several articles as well. They
studied, discussed, and so on. At the Ninth Congress of the
International held in Verviers (from September 5 to 8, 1877), a
statement was read, signed by those involved in Benevento, addressing it
from their jail as the âInternationalist Chapter of Mount Matese.â
Meanwhile, the king Vittorio Emmanuele II had died on January 9, 1878,
and that February his minister Crispi issued a general amnesty to
political prisoners. The implications for the band of Matese should have
been clear, but they were kept in jail because the magistrate doubted
whether the amnesty applied to the death of a soldier in Lentino on
April 5, 1877. The decision was made to send them before the Court of
Benevento for judgment, where the accused submitted two questions to the
jury: First, if the accused were guilty or innocent of the death of the
soldier; second, if they were guilty, whether the death had taken place
in the course of the insurrection or not. If the death had occurred in
the course of the insurrection, it would be a political crime and the
amnesty would apply. In April all of the accused were transferred to the
Benevento jail, and in August, 1878 the trial began. During the trialâa
new chance for propagandaâthe accused stated that they had shot over the
heads of the soldiers; but regardless of all this, the jury found them
entirely innocentof the act at all, and they were acquitted.
Among those figuring in the trialâs defense was Francesco Saverio
Merlino, Malatestaâs trusted lawyer. Merlino was a lawyer in Naples at
the time, without firmly decided political views; but when he read in
the papers that his teenage friend was in jail and accused of the events
of Matese, he offered himself to the defendants.
Malatesta accepted his help with pleasure, and in the long prison
colloquiums between the detainee and his defense, he took the
opportunity to explain his own ideas to Merlino, giving him arguments to
allow him to prepare a defense with some knowledge of his cause. But to
defend Malatesta, Merlino had to become an internationalist, socialist
and anarchist, and when he pronounced their defense he had indeed become
all of these. In the same year, Merlino published his first propaganda
pamphlet: Regarding the trial of Benevento: a [Bozzetto] on the social
question (A proposito del processo di Benevento, Bozzetto sulla
questione socialeRegarding the trial of Benevento, Bozzetto on the
social question).
(1881).
When he left jail in August, 1878 and returned to Naples, police
observation became more suffocating than ever before, and it had already
been unbearable! The police were constantly at his heels, annoying and
provoking anyone who came by, or whose house he went to, and among other
things, this kept Malatesta from finding the work he needed to earn a
living.
His parents were already dead, leaving him an inheritance that would
have guaranteed his comfort in those times. I have already mentioned
that he had devoted all of his liquid inheritance (a little over fifty
thousand lira) to propaganda, and had spent it in the work of conspiracy
and insurrection, since 1877. He had been left several houses in Santa
Maria Capua Vetere, rented by poor people. Nettlau gives the testimony
of an old comrade, seemingly well-informed, that shortly after leaving
the Benevento jail he returned to Santa Maria and signed the houses over
to the renters without any remuneration.^([28]) And thus he became the
proletarian he would continue to be for the rest of his life.
Furthermore, the government showed an obvious intent to be rid of him.
From moment to moment he was threatened by an arrest that would send him
to âdomicilio coattoâ â a preventative measure of Italian police in
which repeat offenders or those judged incorrigible were banished to the
small islands lying along the coast of Southern Italy and Sicily. This
measure had already been applied to some internationalists, arbitrarily
from a legal point of view. Malatesta decided to remove himself from the
country, at least for a little while, and left for Egypt where other
comrades had already taken refuge.
In the last months of 1878, Malatesta had found work as a private
employee in Alexandria, when on November 17, Passananteâs attempt
against king Umberto I took place in Naples. The monarchic and bourgeois
element of the Italian quarter in Alexandria organized a demonstration
that ended in a chant of âDie, internationalists!â The internationalists
held a protest meeting in return, but on the morning of the chosen day,
the police proceeded to arrest various comrades. Malatesta was detained
a little later in the day as he left a friendâs house for lunch. Some
[there?] had been bribed by Italian police agents to finger suspicious
types, and they prepared an ambush to eliminate him.
In custody, Malatesta asked that he be handed over to Italy. His
protests went unheard; he was taken aboard a boat and sent off, and only
on high seas did the captain tell him that he would be not be unloaded
until Beirut, Syria. He disembarked there with only 20 francs in his
wallet, and after walking a bit in the city he presented himself to the
local Italian consul, reiterating his demand to be sent to Italy.
âForbidden,â the consul told him, âYou are not welcome in Italy,â adding
his irritated opinion of the Italian government, and of his Alexandrian
colleague who had sent Malatesta to him.
âBut I donât have the means to live here, where I donât know what to
do.â
âDonât dwell on that; go to the hotel and everything will be paid for.â
âI donât want to be kept,â Malatesta exclaimed, âIf you canât repatriate
me, then arrest me and lock me in the jail.â
âImpossible. Why would I do this for no reason?â
âI will give you the reason soon enough; Iâll hurl this inkwell in your
faceâŠâ (he made a motion to grab the inkwell from the table). The consul
entered into [arraignments]: he couldnât send him back to Italy, but he
could have him shipped to Smyrna. Malatesta refused at first, but
eventually chose to accept. He embarked a French boat departing for
Smyrna, the Provence. Onboard he met another comrade, Alvino, in
approximately the same situation as him.
At sea, Malatesta forged a friendship with the boatâs captain, a certain
Rouchon, who agreed not to make him get off in Smyrna, but allowed him
to continue the voyage with him. Malatesta and Alvino [therefore]
wandered all the coasts of the eastern Mediterranean, until they arrived
on the shores of Italy. He stayed briefly in Castellamare, where the
Italian police had been informed that Malatesta was passing through,
[until?] arriving in Liorna. There, police agents boarded and tried to
detain the two internationalists, but the captain refused to hand them
over without an explicit order from the French ambassador. Liornaâs
comrades were also alerted and went to see Malatesta. In the afternoon
the police came on board with the city prefect at their head, who
respectfully gave the captain a telegram that âauthorizedâ (not ordered)
the handover of the fugitives. But the captain tore up the telegram and
gave orders that âthose gentlemenâ be accompanied to the stairs and seen
off. Meanwhile, the dock and a few boats were filling with many comrades
and workers from Liorna, who met the empty-handed functionaries with a
loud hissing as they climbed down from the Provence.
The steamboat continued on its way and the two Italians stepped off? in
Marsella. From there, Malatesta proceeded to Geneva where he was caught
up in events. He met Kropotkin there, who together with Herzig and
Dumartheray [had?] put together the venture of Le Révolté and he helped
them with the material work of the first issues.^([29]) But at that
moment he was almost exclusively occupied with the events of Italyâin
the middle of great misery, to the point of literally suffering from
hunger. While the trial began against Passanante for his attentat
against the king [in Naples], he wrote a violent manifesto that came to
a close with these words: âUmberto of Savoy, they say that you are
valiant. Prove your courage by condemning Passanante to death!â On
account of that manifesto, Malatesta and the other Italian refugees were
expelled from Switzerland.
From Geneva, he departed for Romania where he would stay for some time,
painfully earning his meager bread giving French lessons, and he ill. He
soon left for France. We met in Paris at the end of that year, 1879. He
put himself to work as a mechanic. Soon, he was one of the most
passionate in the movement, part of a revolutionary socialist group
which included Deville, Guesde, and Jean Grave. He began to speak at
public meetings, participated in street demonstrations, and argued with
Marxists in the papers. This went on until, after denouncing an Italian
spy and agent provocateur at a public meeting, the French government
expelled him, giving him five daysâ time to leave. He changed houses and
names (taking âFritz Robertâ) but didnât leave. He was arrested shortly
thereafter, on March 8, 1880, and [soldiers] took him [and a group] to
the border.
He went to Brussels^([30]), to London, and then back to Paris in June,
where he had to complete four months of jail for violating the expulsion
order. He left for Lugano, Switzerland. He had gone simulatedly, in
early 1881, with the intention of remaining there, since he wasnât safe
from the expulsion of 1879 which he had never been given official
notification of, and doubted that he dealt with an expulsion from only
the Canton and Geneva, not all of Switzerland. Instead, he was arrested
on February 21. After fourteen days of jail he was accompanied to the
border. He set out again for Brussels, but he was detained there as
well. Finally, he headed for London, in March, 1881.
After such risks, Malatesta could enjoy a bit of tranquility in London.
But it was a very relative tranquility! Among other things, he had to
[contar] how difficult it was to make a living, and to overcome it he
tried a bit of everything, selling pastries and ice cream in the
streets, and he managed to open a small mechanicâs shop. In London too,
he began to work on the movement immediately. He planned to publish an
Italian paper that summer, LâInsurrezioneâof which only the circular was
releasedâsigned by himself, Vito Solieri and Cafiero. The latter, his
good friend, more like a brother, was already affected by the serious
mental illness which would leave him utterly mad a bit later.^([31])
Malatesta xxx the first of the greatest sorrows of his life.
The International Revolutionary Socialist Congress was held in London
that year (from the 14^(th) to 19^(th) of July, 1881), which could
really be considered the last meeting of the old International and the
first of the anarchist International. Malatesta was the main organizer,
along with Gustave Brocher. His intention was that the congress attempt
to revive the first International, which was already dead almost
everywhere. This was the last conference. He had to overcome the
prejudices against the congress of Kropotkin himself, who from afar had
suspected a [simulada] maneuver of Marx, completely nonexistent. Not
only were the last surviving sections of the International in different
countries invited to intervene, but also the autonomous anarchist groups
and revolutionary socialist circles. Really [de hecho] almost all the
anarchists intervenedâamong the better known Kropotkin, Merlino, Herzig,
Neve, Louise Michel, and E. Gautierâand some of the more advanced
socialists.
âMalatesta represented the Tuscan Federation of the International, the
sections of Forli and Forlinpopoli, the Figli circle of the Workers
[Lavoro] of Alexandria, the workersâ circle of TurĂn and Chiavasso, the
revolutionary socialists of Marsella, the socialists of the Marches,
anarchists from Geneva, the revolutionary socialist Alliance of TurĂn
and the Federations of the International from Constantinople and from
Alexandria of Egypt. In the session of July 15^(th) he spoke at length.
He said, among other things, âwe want a revolution. We belong to
different schools, but we all want a revolution. We all agree that
insurrection is necessary, one which must destroy the conditions of
present society. Political revolutions arenât enough for our objective,
which is to wholly destroy the bases of society, and we canât arrive at
harmony with those who want dictatorship and centralization. The
autonomy of groups is necessary. Agreement [acuerdo] until the
revolution. Is the International necessary? A new organization is
needed, similar to the International, keeping its name, but which
emphasizes the principles in a revolutionary way. The economic fight
cannot stand alone, political fight is necessary; since property is not
destroyed if the authority which maintains it is not destroyed at the
same time. In Italy, a political shakeup can make an economic uprising
possible. Leave the choice of methods to each group. Mass adhesion to
the International with accentuation of its principles, autonomy and
solidarity for the truly revolutionary actionsâŠâ^([32])
Malatesta made every effort to have the congress accept his point of
view. Formally, he was successful in part (an [apariencia] of
organization was made concrete, an office of correspondence was named,
and so on), but in substance his hopes were frustrated. Persecutions in
the different countries absorbed all the activity of the comrades and
the full organizational work and the necessary ongoing international
relations; and on the other hand, under the influence of the French
anarchist circles, already gripped by that time by a strong
anti-organizational spirit. âKropotkinâs exact tale, published in the
RĂ©voltĂ©â, according to Nettlau^([33]), âmakes it clear that Malatesta
was one of the few who had a clear idea of how valuable a practical
solution to the problem of organization would be. But there was a
formidable opposition against him, so that at a point he had to exclaim:
âWe are impenitent doctrinarians.â The majority of the participants in
the congress both wanted and didnât want an organization, that is to
say, they considered all practical steps to realize it as an attempt
against autonomy itself.â
Despite the precautions taken to guarantee the safety of the discussions
in the face of international police investigationsâamong other measures,
the delegates were given a number in place of their nameâa French police
agent participated in the congress in the person of a certain Serreaux,
who issued a violent paper in Saint Cloud (near Paris) called La
RĂ©volution sociale, which he managed to have Louise Michel, Cafiero,
Gautier and others collaborate in. Two months later that subject, who
had aroused suspicions for some time, was unmasked by Kropotkin and
Malatesta in particular^([34]); but that didnât stop certain details of
the congress of London being used by the police against Malatesta and
Merlino at their trial in Rome in 1884.
Social Questionâ of Florence. â With those sick from cholera in Naples
(1884).
The anarchist correspondence commission that Malatesta took part in,
named by the London congress, didnât show many signs of vitality. The
fact that Malatesta only stayed in England a few more months speaks to
this. When âUrÄbÄ« Pascha captained the rebellion that broke out in Egypt
in June of 1882 against the Europeans, and on July 11^(th) the English
bombed Alexandria, Malatesta formulated the project of going to join the
insurrectionaries. In August he had made it out of Europe, together with
Cesare Ceccarelli, Gaetano Marocco and Apostolo Paulides.
The military cordons drawn about the city and the continual small
skirmishesâa story told many years later by Icilio Parrini, then living
in Alexandriaâkept them from reaching their goal. They planned to
disembark in Abu Qir, and to reach Ramley overland, near the Nile. The
most dangerous and risky decision was their attempt to cross Maryût
lake, which was dry due to the Mahsnondich canal closure. As with the
preceding attempts, this last obstacle didnât stop them; however, the
soft lake bed obliged them to retreat.^([35])
In a final attempt by boat, they thought they had landed safely, but
instead they found themselves surrounded by English soldiers, detained,
and [devueltos] to Alexandria. From there Malatesta decided to return to
Italy. I donât know where or for how long he stayed meanwhile (maybe in
Alexandria itself); but the fact is that in spring of 1883, some time
after March, he clandestinely disembarked in Liorna and took himself to
Florence.
The police soon became aware he was nearby. He still cherished the idea
of keeping the libertarian-leaning socialist forces in Italy united, and
as we will see, he also held on to the idea of giving the
internationalist movement new life. He wrote a pair of articles to that
effect during a debate with Andrea Costa in [english] LâIlota of Pistoia
in April. He had the chance to see his friend Cafiero in the mental
hospital in Florenceâwhat a state he was in! Though he recognized
Malatesta (not so with other friends), poor Cafiero made such absurd and
extravagant speeches that all possible hope of recovery was lost. Among
the many comrades in Florence at the time, [M] he soon renewed his
propaganda work, particularly to neutralize Andrea Costaâs propaganda,
who two years previously had abandoned the anarchist ideas of his early
youth for good, had been named a deputy, and was a supporter of
electoral and parliamentary strategies. But in May 1883, Malatesta was
preparing to release a new paper, working for Agenore Natta as a
mechanic, and he was arrested.
On March 18^(th) of that year, the twentieth anniversary of the Paris
Commune, commemorative revolutionary manifestos had been distributed in
various Italian cities, thanks to the pen of Francesco Saverio Merlino,
while Malatesta was still in Egypt, and heading for Liorna. Some
well-known internationalists were posting the manifesto on walls around
Rome and they were detained. During the persecutions being made left and
right by the police, the manuscript of the manifesto was found. Merlino
was detained in Naples, and all were notified that there would be a
conspiracy trial against them. Malatesta had meanwhile disembarked in
Liorna, and was detained later in Florence with no legal reason; since a
pretext was needed to hold him captive, he was included in the trial
against the prisoners from Rome and Naples. In the Roman jails, a spy by
the name of De Camillis was put in a cell with one of the most
inexperienced of the detainees, hardly a boy, and persuaded him to cast
all of the blame on Malatesta, to say that he had written the manifesto
and had given out the addresses to help send it to various locations.
âSince,â insinuated De Camillis, âMalatesta is out of the country, weâll
save everybody without harm to anyone.â And thus the proof against
Malatesta was fabricated.
But the conspiracy trial was serious enough to be left to the competence
of the Appeals [Assisi] Court, and in its hearing it was immediately
certain that the jurors would have acquitted everyone. So the name of
the crime was changed, âconspiracyâ was scrapped for âassociation of
neâer-do-wells,â a less serious charge, but under the jurisdiction of
the correctional tribunal, whose mechanical [de carrera] magistrates,
docile as ever to the governmentâs orders, would condemn them. But the
new style of accusation didnât allow for preventative prison, and so by
November the accused were all set free, in provisional liberty,
Malatesta having suffered six months of jail and the others eight.
Malatesta went immediately to Florence, where the first issue of the
paper The Social Question (La Questione Sociale) was released a month
later (December 22, 1883).
This was the first important publication under Malatestaâs care: a
cultural paper, yet rich in propaganda and debate, both theoretical and
practical.^([36]) Noteworthy articles appear there (I remember one piece
about Benthamâs ideas which lasted several issues, surely written by
Merlino), a part of Malatestaâs work, Anarchy, appeared later as a
pamphlet, and above all lively, controversial writings about patriotism,
masonry, the republic, parliamentarianism, and so on. The most heated
debate was with the renegade Andrea Costa, which occasioned Malatestaâs
trip to Ravenna for a controversy, which Costa [acaboâ por negarse]. An
article appeared there in which Malatesta explained his evolution from
republicanism to anarchism, translated a little latter in Révolté of
Geneva (I have said more above).
The paper was soon the object of police attention and suffered two or
three brief interruptions. In the meantime, the hearings of the Rome
trial were pursued, whose principal session was held the 29^(th) of
January, 1884; it lasted three or four days. Malatesta was present with
the other defendants, who all made energetic and lofty declarations.
Malatesta âspeaks frankly, is assured, and biting to the point of
impropriety, declaring himself a member of the International
Workingmenâs Association; his speeches at the end of the trial promised
to cause a scandal until the president took the floor from him. The
tribunal distributed the sentences: Merlino, four years of jail;
Malatesta and D. Pavani, three years; A. Biancani, two and a half years,
C. Pernier and E. Rombaldoni, fifteen months; L. Trabalza and Vennanzi,
six months. Their defense were the lawyers Pessina, Nocito and
Fazio.â^([37])
A detail typical of this trial was the thesis sustained by the kingâs
representative, who took pleasure in acknowledging that the accused,
taken one by one, were honest and hard-working people; but, taken as a
group, as associates, they became âevildoers.â [malhechores] And they
were sentenced as suchâŠ
The trial over, they appealed their sentence and won the right to remain
in provisional liberty, so Malatesta returned to Florence to continue
editing La Questione Sociale. This appeared until August 4, 1884. At the
summerâs end, Malatesta and some comrades from various parts of Italy
went to Naples as medical volunteers, to care for those stricken by a
cholera epidemic. The two anarchists Rocco Lombardo and Antonio Valdre
died there, taken by the illness. The known anarchist Galileo Palla
distinguished himself in a special way by his selflessness, energy, and
spirit of sacrifice. Malatesta, as an ex-medical student, was entrusted
with a section of sick people who would have the highest recovery rate,
because he knew how to force the city of Naples to give food and
medicine in abundance, which Malatesta then distributed liberally. He
was decorated a sworn official of [benemeârito], which he refused. When
the epidemic ended, the anarchists abandoned Naples and published a
manifesto explaining that âthe true cause of cholera was misery, and the
true medicine to prevent its return can be nothing less than social
revolution.â^([38])
After Malatesta returned to Florence in January, the Roman Court of
Appeals discussed a final [recurso] appeal by those charged. Merlinoâs
prison term was lowered by a year and Trabalza acquitted, but then six
months of police surveillance were added to each sentence. Those
sentenced went to the Supreme Court as a last resort, which only
confirmed the sentences; but before this was definite, they had all
taken refuge outside of the country. Malatesta was one of the last to
flee and the order to catch him had already been issued. He found
himself in Florence at Nattaâs house, whose shop he had been working in.
One day the house was surrounded by police. Malatesta pretended he was
ill, avoiding an immediate arrest. Meanwhile, his escape was organized.
He was shut up in a big box of sewing machines and moved from Nattaâs
shop to a wagon waiting outside. A policeman politely offered to help
lift the box into the wagon. Shortly after, Malatesta set out on the
road to the border, and proceeded to get on a boat for South America (I
couldnât give an exact date, but it should have been in March or April,
1885).
It should be recalled that it was during this period of his stay in
Florence that Malatesta published the well-known pamphlet, âAmong
Farmersâ (Fra Contadini), a dialogue which later became a huge success.
During the same period, he relished for some time the idea of
resurrecting the old International or at least its Italian wing, and
even [incluso] anonymously published a projected program. But the
project held no hope of practical realization.
(1885). â In search of gold. â Return to Europe (1889).
Malatestaâs emigration to South America had to be planned in concert
with some other comrades. In Buenos Aires, he found other comrades who
had actively militated with him in the files of the International:
Agenore Natta, Cesare Agostinelli and others, some of them younger like
Galileo Palla. Natta and Malatesta set up a small mechanicâs shop to get
by, and Malatesta began his propaganda work anew, either amidst the
numerous emigrated Italian workers, or among the indigenous element,
whose language he was soon familiar with. He put together a socialist
circle, in which, or for which, he gave continuous conferences, debates,
etc. He had frequent discussions and arguments with the republican
element, then numerous among Italian expats, and for some time published
a little Italian paper, to which he came to give the name La Questione
Sociale.
I have been able to consult an incomplete collection of this little
paper in Italy, but I donât remember any precise dates. No more than ten
or twelve issues were released, which were published in and around
August 1885. The paper, almost entirely full of local questions and
discussions, never assumed the importance of its Florentine namesake,
from which it reproduced some of the most salient articles. Malatestaâs
important activities were, instead, to promote the rise of workersâ
resistance organizations, and memories of him are still kept alive in
Buenos Aires, where his propaganda became raised in such feeling the
formation at that time of the bakersâ association, which was one of the
most Florentine of those that followed, the most animated by the spirit
of liberation and revolution. His best collaborator in this work was
Ettore Mattei, dead some years later, who was one of the most renowned
and valiant apostles of workersâ anarchism in South America.
In 1886, news spread that there were rich yields from the gold-laden
sands of Argentinaâs extreme south, so the idea came up among a group of
comrades that they would go after these, hoping to obtain a considerable
sum to dedicate to propaganda. Malatesta, Agostinelli, Palla, some
Meniconi and another departed in steerage for the straits of Magellan
and disembarked on the beach in Cabo Virgenes. Laboring for local
businessmen, at 14 degrees below zero [C?], they met their needs for
three months, plus the funds for a [casilla], and headed for the golden
zone. But it was disillusioning. The highest-yielding zones had already
been hoarded by a company of speculators; in the others there was little
to do. The gold was scarce, barely earning enough to live, and it cost
them hard toil. The five fed themselves by hunting nutrias, [a rodent?]
abundant in those lands. They also worked for some time on the companyâs
payroll, being scandalously robbed.
They remained in the area of Cabo Virgenes for more than seven months,
through the deep polar winter, until they were convinced that there was
really nothing they could do, and decided to depart. Malatesta rode by
horse for Gallegos River, with the thought of securing a steamboat there
for the comrades who preferred to stay put and wait for it to pass by
Cabo Virgenes some days later. The steamer arrived, but didnât wait. The
news broke on the coast, and the boat turned to get underway while the
four comrades, still distant, ran towards the beach. Then Galileo Palla
dove into the water, in that almost frozen sea, and swam towards the
steamer while the rest waved a shirt and shouted. The steamer stopped,
threw a launch into the water to recover Palla and took him on board.
But once there, the captain refused to look for the other three; and
then, Palla, though still soaked and stiff with cold, made ready to
throw himself into the water again and return to his comrades. He was
forcefully pinned down, but he made so much noise and yelled so that the
passengers were moved and obliged the captain to send a launch in search
of the rest.^([39]) When the steamer arrived at Gallegos River,
Malatestaâwho had lived there for that time working as a [mozo de
cuerda]âalso boarded the boat, meeting the comrades who had left fifteen
days earlier, and together they proceeded to Patagonia, where they were
let off like shipwrecks. And when the next steamer left Patagonia for
Buenos Aires, they all returned to the Argentine capital.
After this tormentuous parenthesis, Malatesta resumed his earlier life
and, save a brief escape to the neighboring Montevideo in Uruguay,
stayed in Argentina until the middle of 1889. Shortly before he left,
the daily papers made a fuss over him, naming him the chief of a band of
counterfeiters.
Italian police would take advantage of this incident during the trial
against him in Ancona (1898), but the truth was soon unearthed. Galileo
Palla had been arrested by the police, and in a break-in they had found
a false Argentine bill. Given that he was known as an anarchist and as
Malatestaâs friend, the police organs insinuated that he and Natta had
made false money. But it all came to an end there. Recognizing Pallaâs
good faith and innocence, he was set free and nothing was started
against Malatesta and Natta, the latter remaining in Argentina for
years. Malatesta departed soon after (in late 1889). The previous year,
Cesare Agostinelli had gone to Italy and upon returned to his Ancona, he
founded the anarchist paper The Free Pact (Il libero patto, 1888â1889).
â In Switzerland, France, Belgium and Spain. â The Italian movements of
1891 and 1894. â International Socialist Workersâ Congress in London. â
LâAnarchia (1896).
By 1889, Malatesta found himself in Nice, and the first issue of
Association (LâAssociazione) was published on October 10^(th). The
paperâs platform and intention were to found an international socialist
anarchist revolutionary party, [preconizando] resting on agreement,
mutual support, and reciprocal understanding between anarchismâs diverse
schools. He was especially interested in bringing communist and
collectivist anarchists closer together, [the latter?] who were still a
majority in Spain at the time.
He couldnât stay in Nice long due to his expulsion from France ten years
earlier. When he used the pages of Association^([40]) to unmask the old
spy Terzaghi , revealing that he had renewed his nefarious work from
Geneva under the false name of Azzati, the French police hunted for
Malatesta, but before they found him, he had taken refuge in London.
After three issues of his paper were written in Nice, another four were
released in London. Association had to be shut down after issue 7
(January 23, 1890) because a foul comrade, one Cioci, disappeared one
day and took all of the paperâs money with him.
It was a great shame, since Association had been perfectly [mucho
esmero] edited and full of interesting material. Merlino had also
collaborated in it. He published noteworthy writings about
parliamentarianism, the choices of protest, communism and collectivism,
organization, the practice of theft, etc.
Malatesta, who had in the meantime set up his usual small mechanicâs
shop in the neighborhood of Islington, didnât lose his spirit. He
published a series of pamphlets, including the definitive edition of
Among Farmers (Fra Contadini) and the first edition of Anarchy
(LâAnarchia), and returned to writing for Italian and French anarchist
papers. Most of all, he worked to establish relationships with Italian
comrades, and give a stronger push to the movement on the peninsula. One
result of this thrust of organizing work was that comrades decided to
arrange an Italian anarchist congress the following year.
These were the first years of international First of May demonstrations
and they had developed a strong revolutionary character everywhere.
Sensational events were anticipated, especially in Paris, so Malatesta
left for that city at the end of April 1890 in the hope of being able to
participate in a serious movement. A later, critical article^([41])
clarifies his intent, or at least what he believed he would be able to
do, and what he certainly would have advised comrades to do: encourage
great demonstrations in the streets, and use the occasion to take all of
the anarchists and a part of the demonstrators a few of the richest
[altos] neighborhoods of Paris, such as Monmartre or Belleville. using
the fact that aAll of the police forces would be concentrated in the
area of the Seine, and it would be possible to entrench themselves in
those [popular] neighborhoods, raising barricades and defending
themselves. Perhaps they wouldnât have controlled the battlefield more
than a few days or hours, but meanwhile the expropriation could begin
and the masses would see it, deeds which would serve as windows to the
revolution. Given the situation in France and Europe at the time, it
would have made an enormous impression and been tremendous propaganda.
Malatestaâs hopes werenât realized, however, and he returned to London
days later.
We owe Malatestaâs pen for a long and energetic abstentionist manifesto
published in November 1890, on the occasion of general elections in
Italy. It was a type of âdeclaration of warâ and âwar to the deathâ to
the Italian dominators, signed â[por encargo] by charge [?] of anarchist
groups and Federationsâ by seventy comrades residing abroad, among which
are found the names, aside from Malatestaâs, of the most famous comrades
of that time: Luigi Galleani, Saverio Merlino, Amilcare Cipriani, Nicolo
Converti, Francesco Cini, Galileo Palla, Attilio Panizza, and
others.^([42]) In those times Malatesta clandestinely went to Paris,
while Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa were both there. Through
Ciprianiâs intervention then, Malatesta made up with Costa, with whom he
had violently broken off all relations around 1880, when Costa abandoned
his principles, but their reconciliation was very superficial.
Preparations for the Italian congress continued, and it was decided that
it would be held in the Ticino canton. Publicly it would be held January
11, 1891 in Lugano, and socialists of every current were invited to
participate. (There was still no permanent separation between anarchists
and socialists, despite their deep theoretical and practical
disagreement; the so-called official separation occured in Italy at the
Genoa conference of 1892, and in the series of international conferences
in London, 1896.) The work of local preparation in Lugano had been done
by Attilio Panizza, Francesco Cini and Antonia Cagliardi. Cini was
arrested and expelled due to an incident provoked by the police, and
Amilcare Cipriani, who at that moment declared himself an anarchist, was
to substitute for him. The Swiss police were alarmed and all the
European police agencies sent their agents to Lugano. At the last
moment, the congress was outlawed and an announcement made that any
congress-goers who had previously been expelled from Switzerland would
be arrested. But on the day of January 7, word spread that the congress
had already been held, in Capolago, and had completed its work. It had
lasted three days (January 4, 5, and 6) and many delegates had
participated, among them Cipriani, Malatesta, Merlino, Gori, Molinari,
and Luigi Pezzi (Galleani was arrested during the trip).
The anarchist position triumphed at the congress (barely two or three
socialists attended, and remained spectators moreover) along the lines
Malatesta had already sustained in Association while in London. Their
resolutions were published in a pamphlet, and also in The New Society
(La Societé Nouvelle, Brussels), [illustrated] by Merlino. The most
important two resolutions were: the constitution of a revolutionary
socialist anarchist organization in Italy, and the preparation of great
demonstrations in every city for the next First of May. Agreements were
secretly made to try to give those demonstrations an insurrectionary
impulse. After the congress, despite investigations made by the Swiss
police, Malatesta slipped away and departed like all the rest. He
returned to London without inconvenience, and was still there in March,
since the 18^(th) commemorated the Paris Commune.
In consequence of the agreements made in Capolago, Cipriani began a tour
of conferences and meetings a little later in central and southern
Italy, which concluded with the great meeting of Rome on the First of
May, in the Santa Croce plaza in Gerusalemme (), ended â as you will
recall â tragically and with the arrests of Cipriani and a number of
other comrades. Grave events also took place in Florence that day.
Malatesta had clandestinely arrived in Italy in April and was there
until some time after the events. He visited northern Italy and part of
the central regions. I donât know whether he was in Rome or Florence on
the First of May. He stopped for some time in Carrara, where there was,
and had been for a long time, a powerful anarchist nucleus ready for
action. When he abandoned Italy for Switzerland, he stopped in Lugano,
in Isaia Paciniâs house where, tipped off by an Italian spy, the Swiss
police finaly managed to detain him (July 22, 1891).^([43])
Tried for violating the expulsion, he was sentenced to 45 days in jail,
at the end of which he was kept in prison because the Italian government
had in the meantime asked his extradition. The pretext was that
Malatesta had organized the Capolago conference, that the events of May
1^(st) had been decided there, and that these were ordinary criminal
deeds. But the federal tribunal of Lausana denied the extradition with a
ruling that was a slap to the Italian government. It said, at a certain
point: âThe Italian government pretends that Malatesta and his
companions are neâer-do-wells, which obscures the political nature of
their crimes; rather, these very documents sent by the Italian
government turn out to deal with its political enemies, those who it
wants to get rid of, slandering them as evildoers.â But the satisfaction
that might have given him didnât prevent Malatesta from serving another
45 days of jail for it, three months in all, after which he returned to
his London refuge.
He must have left London shortly after that, because at the end of the
year and the beginning of 1892 he was in Spain; first in Barcelona,
where he stayed some time and wrote for El Productor (The Producer)â in
it he had a debate with P. Schicci, who then wrote for the Porvenir
anarquista (Anarchist Future), which tended to be anti-organizational â
then in Madrid, Andalusia, and so on, holding a tour of conferences
together with Pedro Esteve. He was still there when on January 6, 1892
the Jerez revolt of the Border broke out, which was suffocated in blood.
The Spanish police, who suspected his hand in events, hunted for him
frenetically, but he disappeared and arrived in London a few days later.
In those years, 1891â92, Malatesta waged long, heated, and sometimes
rough debates with anarchists who disagreed with him on the the broadest
range of questions: organization, syndicates, morality, assassinations,
and so on. At the time of the Capolago conference, Le Révolté criticized
him bitterly as well. In London, violent manifestos were issued against
Malatesta, Merlino, Cipriani, and others. In Paris some sheets entitled
Il Pugnale (The Dagger) appeared in the same tone. Those discussions
naturally had repercussions in Italy and continued for a while. To
support his ideas, Malatesta wrote many articles in several papers (La
Révolté and En-dehors of Paris^([44]), La Campana of Macerata, La
Propaganda of Imola, and more). An interview with Malatesta about the
assassinations appeared in Le Figaro of Paris. He also gave conferences
on these arguments, and had spoken discussions in Londonâs anarchist
clubs. He exercised more than a small influence in that period, from
1892 to 1895, over the French anarchists living in London during the
persecutions which followed the frequent assassinations of those years.
This influence is also responsible for the impetus with which some
refugees who returned to France gave themselves over to a methodical
work of penetrating the labor movement.
But he continued to interrupt his stay in London, where he always worked
as a mechanic, with secret escapes to the Continent, any time the chance
for a popular revolutionary movement presented itself. Though he had
been banned from Belgium since 1880, he went there with Carlo Malato in
1893^([45]) during the big socialist labor agitation for universal
suffrage. It ended in a general strike that at one point looked like it
would become a revolution. Amilcare Cipriani was also there, but for his
job. The next year, 1894, during the more or less socialist movements in
Sicily, and the insurrectionary anarchist attempt of Carrara, he was
again clandestinely in Italy â this time in concert with Saverio
Merlino, Carlos Malato and Amilcare Cipriani, but each in different,
determined areas â visiting the greater part of the northern and central
peninsula. He spent a few days in Ancona as well, where he edited an
issue or two of the anarchist paper LâArt. 248 (Article 248*) which was
published there, and the pamphlet Il Commercio (Commerce). The Italian
police knew he was nearby, all the papers spoke of it, he was hunted
ferociously, but after being where he wanted to be (in Milan, meeting
with Filippo Turati), and after the unfortunate end of the movements,
returned to London unscathed. Cipriani and Malato likewise made it to
Paris, but a spy denounced Saverio Merlino and he was detained in
Naples.
From mid-1894 to early 1896 there was a period of strong reaction
against anarchists in almost all of Europe, and its press fell silent
almost everywhere for more than a year. It was still possible to do
something in England, and many refugees took shelter in London,
especially those from Italy (Gori, Edoarno Milano) and France (Emile
Pouget, Guernieau, Malato, and more). The house and the business of the
Defendi couple, where Malatesta lived, 112 High Street in Islington, was
a convergence point for everyone that arrived in London. How many stormy
and brotherly discussions were had in the little kitchen through? the
grocery store of the good Defendi family, that served an an Athenaeum!
And how many projects, hopes, sorrows⊠The French police had marked that
address at all the post offices, in order to seize all the mail sent
there.
It was amidst the strong number of anarchist refugees from various
countries in the British capital, that a regular? and well-organized
intervention was concerted in the latter half of 1895, agreed upon by
all the English comrades, of the anarchist forces and workers of a more
liberatory and revolutionary bent, in the next international socialist
labor Congress that would be held in London the following year.
Malatesta was one of the most active authors of the ensuing
preparations: he wrote a long manifesto, solicited an envoy of delegates
and delegations for the comrades in London, made propaganda among the
English elements, including those who werenât anarchist, and so on. The
hope that many at the conference would affirm their anarchism, even if
they werenât quite a majority was made possible by the libertarian
stance taken by many French syndicates, under the urging of F.
Pelloutier, Pouget and Tortelier; by the determination of a strong
anarchist current among the nucleus of German socialists that followed
Landaver; by the anti-Marxist tendencies of some English socialists,
like William Morris, Tom Mann and Keir Hardie; by the prevalence of
libratory socialism in Holland, with Domela Niuewenhuis; by the
Germanist faction of French socialism; and so on. Such that, when in
July (from July 27 to August 1, 1896) the congress met in London, the
social democrats and Marxists would only have a majority because of the
great number of its German, Belgian, and English delegates, and because
of the largely fictitious representations and delegations which had
arrived from the most distant and tiny places.
Malatesta played a notable part at the congress^([46]). He was one of
the few anarchist orators who managed to impose and make himself heard,
despite the systematic and noisy obstructionism of the disciplined
Marxist majority. He was the delegate for most of the libertarian
Spanish workersâ associations (who werenât able to send their own
representatives due to the reaction), for some Italian anarchist groups,
and for a French syndicate. Fernand Pelloutier was the delegate of the
Italian Bureaus of Labor; Pietro Gori, of Italian groups and workersâ
societies of North America. Regardless, the Marxist majority imposed
itself and easily managed to vote the definitive exclusion of the
anarchists, of the anti-parliamentary socialists and all the labor
unions that didnât accept the conquest of the public powers, from future
international socialist congresses. Malatesta wrote a lively tale of the
Congressâs sessions in two or three articles for the Italia del Popolo,
a republican daily of Milan, and summarized his ideas to that respect in
the pamphlet LâAnarchia, which he published after the congress (Longon,
August 1896).^([47])
This pamphlet LâAnarchia, beyond specifying the position of anarchism
and socialism, in contrast to social democracy, also aimed to reaffirm
anarchismâs socialist and humane character in contrast to its
individualist tendencies, to defend the practice of anarchist and labor
organization and to react against the amoral and inconsiderate
tendencies of some forms of anarchist propaganda and activity. That
publication was very influential over the Italian anarchist movement,
and it can be said that it laid the foundation for a well-defined and
methodical orientation, which Malatesta himself would go to Italy and
personally propagate and defend shortly afterwards.
movements in 1898. â Arrest, trial and verdict. â Jail and âdomicilio
coatto.â â Escape. â âLa Questione Socialeâ of Paterson (1899â1900).
Only a few months later, in March of 1897, Malatesta was underground in
Ancona, Italy once again, this time to publish a new paper:
LâAgitazione. About a month after his arrival I had the great pleasure
of seeing him for the first time, as I have related in the Introduction.
His 1884 sentence would be enforced within a few weeks, but he arrived
with the urgent desire to quickly dam the devastation threatened by
Saverio Merlinoâs recent shift towards parliamentary socialism.
Merlinoâs extraordinary ingenuity and learning, his obvious good faith,
and the influence of his name made the menace that much more dangerous.
Malatesta didnât hesitate to take a stand against his old friend and
comrade, though preserving the utmost calm and cordiality in the
argument they held. A brief discussion between the two had already taken
place through public letters in a popular Roman daily,^([48]) and it was
pursued at length in LâAgitazione, in the first issue (March 14, 1897),
and all through that year. When the controversy ceased, its effects were
evident. Almost no anarchists followed Merlinoâthe only notable
exception was the young lawyer Genuzio Bentini, who later became one of
the most eloquent socialist representatives. Merlino remained isolated,
too revolutionary, eclectic and independent to be accepted in the
socialist scene, but too legislative for the anarchists although they
continued to remain on the most friendly terms until his death.
Malatesta gave Merlino the widest freedom to develop his ideas in
LâAgitazione that year, and, naturally, refuted him in the most complete
fashion.
The need to remain hidden made practical action and public propaganda
next to impossible, but this didnât take away from his intellectual
work. The new paper, which I believe has been the most historically and
theoretically important of those which Malatesta has edited, had more
the character of a magazine than a broadsheet, and its impressiveness
brought it to the immediate attention of both comrades and adversaries.
Due to his influence, more than a few new members, especially
socialists, crossed to the anarchist camp: among others, Giuseppe
Ciancabilla, editor of Avanti!, and Mamolo Zamboni of Bologna (father of
the Anteo Zamboni who made an attempt on Mussoliniâs life in October of
1926). It was LâAgitazione, in conjunction with the activity he stirred
up at conferences, which ignited an anarchist movement of coherent ideas
and deeds in Italy, never nearsightedly absorbed in the moment.
The ideas and tactics that Malatesta proposed in this paper were the
same as those expressed in the first issue ? of LâAnarchia in London. In
that he had emphasized a critique of Marxism and individualism, he
reacted against Kropotkinâs tendencies towards harmony and spontaneity â
though without polemizing against him directly, and almost without
naming himâhe insisted on the necessity of organizing anarchism into a
party, and of propagating the first wave of syndicalism and direct
action in Italy.^([49]) The language he used to argue propaganda and
critique the active institutions was serene, completely devoid of verbal
violence and rhetoric. There were comrades who reproached him at the
time for being âtoo English,â but he replied that he preferred to speak
in a way that would be accepted and understood by the public, rather
than writing in a grating fashion that would only appeal to the
converted, distancing him from the people or provoking the seizure of
the paper. That would be the same as not saying anything. In
LâAgitazione he experimentally showed how the most transgressive and
audacious things could be said with the least violent and most
reasonable words.
The tone of the paper and its rapidly rising popularity worried the
Italian government. Its agents had already discovered that Malatesta had
disappeared from the outskirts of London and they began to suspect that
he was in Ancona or a suburb. A cloud of spies, in the most assorted and
comical disguises, fell upon the little city. All over the province of
Marcas they barged into the houses of old internationalists and they
seized days worth of the paperâs correspondence, but in vain.
Surprisingly, Malatesta rarely hid himself physically. The only
precaution he took was to leave the house alone and never in the company
of other anarchists. At times known rivals would stumble across him, and
he didnât refrain from holding several conferences in the area
(including the cities of Iesi, Fabbriano, Porto S. Giorgio, and
Foligno), where he simply presented himself by the name of Giuseppe
Rinaldi. A bit later he published a letter in LâAgitazione pretending to
be written from a distant little Italian city, in which he protested
against the snooping police. In it he acknowledged that he had been in
Italy all along, but wrote that he was avoiding public attention in
order to stay out of prison, since the old sentence from Rome was still
a threat regardless of whatever right he had to be left in peace.
In the end, after nine months of remaining hidden, he was discovered by
chance in November. To unearth the secret of her husbandâs mysterious
visits, a woman went to the house where Malatesta had been living, 24
vĂa Podesta. Ignorant of everything, she believed he had been seeing
another woman who lived on the top floor of the building, and got in her
face on the street. The offended neighbor shouted that the womanâs
husband had been seeing âsomeone hidden.â It was a small scandal and a
meeting was held. That night his friends advised Malatesta to quickly
change houses; but he chose not to. He preferred to face whatever would
come. The next morning police went to the house and had to do no more
than push an open door to find an unknown man writing at a table, in the
middle of a mass of books and periodicals. He immediately told them who
he was and was arrested, then taken to the precinct with a pile of his
letters; but a few hours later, and with only brief explanations to his
interrogator, everything was given back to him and he was left free.
Then, able to move about with liberty, he took a more active part in the
movement. He multiplied his lectures in the city and province, held
debates with speakers from other parties, organized meetings, and so on.
Sadly, it would be for only a short time. In January, the riots ? over
the steeply rising price of bread began in the South and eventually
propagated to the province of Marcas, and later engulfed all of Italy
for about half a year. During a popular demonstration on the 18^(th) of
January, Malatesta was arrested with a group of comrades on a city
street. Also arrested were Adelmo Smorti, the administrator of
LâAgitazione, Felicioli, Bersaglia, and others. In great numbers they
were subjected to trial for the crime of âcriminal association.â There
was a novel development in this trial: until then anarchists brought to
trial regularly denied the fact of being organized, entrenching
themselves well in a conception of anti-organization, but Malatesta and
his comrades declared themselves to be organized, reclaiming the right
of anarchists to associate in a party.
This sparked an agitation in all of Italy âfor the freedom of
association,â promoted by the Socialist Anarchist Federation of Rome,
and conducted with fervor through the columns of LâAgitazione, which
continued printing despite the repeated seizures and the successive
arrests of the various editors who arrived from abroad to take charge of
the work (Vivaldo Lacchini, Nino Samaja, Luigi Fabbri). More than three
thousand comrades, in the name of an infinitude of anarchist groups and
circles, pressed a public manifesto â in which they declared their
faith, affirmed their association as a party and their total solidarity
with those on trial in Ancona. The protest spilled across the borders.
Comrades and sympathizers of other European countries and famous members
of other popular parties were associated with it, among the first [?]
Giovanni Bovio.
The trial became a true civil war for public liberties, aside from being
like so many others an optimal medium for anarchist propaganda. The
sessions took place before the Correctional Tribunal of Ancona from
April 21 to 28; they were rich in incidents, the accused making
energetic declarations, and finally Malatesta making a self-defense that
moved everyone. Numerous witnesses spoke in favor of those on trial and
of the freedom of thought and association, including Enrico Ferri,
Saverio Merlino, and Pietro Gori, the latter making use of the occasion
to give one of his captivating conferences in defense of the anarchist
ideal. Despite all of this, the desired acquittal was not obtained;
Malatesta was sentenced to seven months of detention, Smorti, Felicioli,
Panfichi, Petrosino, Bellavigna, Baiocchi and Bersaglia to six months,
and Cerusici was acquitted.
This time, as had also taken place in the trial against Malatesta,
Merlino and comrades in 1884, the representative of the prosecution paid
homage to the personal honesty of the accused, who had become
âdelinquentsâ only by the fact of being organized. The public Minister
said more regarding the morality of the accused: he noted with prestige
That when Malatestaâs propaganda had begun in Ancona, there had been a
noticeable drop in delinquency in the city, especially disputes, violent
acts, drunkenness, and things of that sort. But, he added, delinquency
had diminished only because much more grave things were in the works!
For this reason, the sentences were handed out, however not the tributes
for the official accuserâŠ
However, from a political point of view this verdict was a victory
because the accusation of âcriminal associationâ had been ruled out,
radically changing Italian jurisprudence with regard to the anarchist
associations, which were not yet considered to be composed of evildoers,
but merely subversives. It was also a benefit materially, since criminal
association could imply sentences of up to five years of seclusion [?]
and seven for the leaders, or supposed leaders, while seditious
association couldnât receive more than a maximum of 18 months of
detention. The verdict was later confirmed in appeal and in and
therefore became definite.
During Malatestaâs time in prison the popular disturbances had been
communicated from the South to the North of Italy; a few days after the
trial, May 8 (1896), there were outbursts in Milan more violent than the
previous, followed by a fierce repression with much death and injury.
The reaction unleashed on all Italy was of the most implacable type.
LâAgitazione was suppressed and the few editors who remained free either
were detained or fled. The Parliament approved extraordinary laws,
domicilio coatto was overhauled and outfitted with worse systems than
before. Malatesta should have been freed in mid-August and the rest a
month earlier, but they were all kept in jail and condemned to five
years of domicilio coatto on the islands. Malatesta was transported to
Ustica, later arriving on Lampedusa.
He wasnât on the island for long. The idea of escape presented itself
immediately and spontaneously, faced with the Mediterranean, while on
that type of sterile and inhospitable boulder he felt that he passed his
days bored and useless. His transport from Ustica to Lampedusa was
motivated precisely by the governmentâs fear of an escape, easier from
the first than the second island. Instead, in Lampedusa the task was
easier thanks to a circumstance similar to his friendship with the
director of the Trani jail in 1874. Malatesta inspired such a vivid [?]
sympathy in the head of the penal colony that he told him and the other
political prisoners about all the favorable conditions, closing his eyes
to everything. Many deportees lived outside their destined places of
captivity, had correspondence with the mainland, and made excursions to
the interior of the island. The preparations for escape were made with
ease. I know he was also helped by the socialist Oddino Morgari, who
visited the colony once in his capacity as Parliamentary representative.
The truth is that on the night of May 9^(th) (1899), in the most total
darkness and a choppy sea, Malatesta, the comrade Vivoli from Florence,
and a fellow prisoner swam to a fishing boat which (the Sicilian
socialist Lovetere on board) they hoped would take them away, and once
aboard they set course for Malta.
The director of the colony still didnât know of the escape, when the
following day a government inspector arrived on the island. It appears
that some word of Malatestaâs projects had already reached Rome. The
inspector asked to see Malatesta, but⊠Malatesta couldnât be found. In a
word: the flight was discovered and the news telegraphed to Rome and
Girgenti. New prisoners were arrested, friends and comrades of Malatesta
suspected of complicity, and the directory of the colony quit a few days
later. Those arrested and transferred from Lampedusa to Girgenti,
finding themselves in the jails of this city, received a visit one day
from the ex-director who wanted to say hello. He shared their joy over
Malatestaâs escape, only exclaiming with bitter sorrow and almost with
tears in his eyes, âMalatesta had no trust in me; if he had told me, I
would have escaped with him, too!â
Malatesta arrived in Malta. He was there eight days waiting for the boat
which would take him to England, and some time later he was in London,
in his old lodgings in the neighborhood of Islington.^([50]) He didnât
stay long. Accepting invitations which came from North America, in
particular from his old Spanish friend Pedro Esteve who lived in
Paterson, N.J., he conceded to go and spend a few months propagandizing
in the United States. By August he was in Paterson.
Nettlau recalls in his book that while Malatesta was a prisoner on the
island, socialists and republicans proposed to make him a candidate in
the communal elections to oblige the government to free him; but he
refused energetically with a letter to the Avanti! of Rome (January 21,
1899). Saverio Merlino, who perhaps consulted with the socialists and
republicans who made that proposition, tried it again in May after the
jailbreak; but Malatesta protested again with a letter to Jean Grave
from London (Les Temps Nouveaux, Paris, June 9).
In Paterson, N.J. the anarchist paper La Questione Sociale had been
published since 1895 with a communist anarchist program in the name of
the group âDiritto allâEsistenzaâ (Right to Existence). But it had been
entrusted to Giuseppe Ciancabilla since 1898, who abroad and during his
stay in Paris had turned little by little towards anti-organizational
individualism. The paper changed its orientation some, but the Diritto
allâEsistenza group remained faithful to their original program. When
Malatesta arrived in Paterson, the contrast between the group and the
paper became more acute; in a meeting it was decided by eighty votes
against three that the paper remain faithful to the original
organizational program; Ciancabilla retired and founded another paper in
West Hoboken, LâAurora. La Questione Sociale was then entrusted to
Malatesta, who enlarged the format and gave it his usual personal touch.
La Questione Sociale under the editorship of Malatesta was like a
continuation of LâAgitazione. As was inevitable, in several issues it
sustained an animated debate against LâAurora, and the divergence of
ideas assumed a personal character for a moment, due to the special
temperament of Ciancabilla and maybe that of Malatesta. It was during
this debate, and as an unintended consequence of it, that during a
conference, in the heat of discussion, Malatesta was shot with a
revolver and lightly wounded in the leg. But Malatesta energetically
refused to give importance and continuity [?] to the incident; he didnât
speak of it in the paper, and when distant friends insisted on making
vehement protests, he intervened with these simple words, in an
impersonal way: âThe comrade Errico Malatesta â seeing the protests that
are published in the Italian papers, in addition to those that were sent
directly to us, regarding the little disgrace that occurred to him and
which we believe isnât worth the pain of discussion â thanks the friends
who have wanted to express their sympathies in this manner, but begs
them⊠to cease.â^([51])
During his stay in the U.S. he gave numerous propaganda conferences in
Italian and Spanish in the most important cities from the Atlantic to
the Pacific, sustained various arguments, including several with the
socialist representative Dino Rodani. In the paper that he edited, he
published some essays on theory and tactics, some of fundamental
importance, which were translated and reprinted more than once in other
countries. Notable among these was a series of articles on âIl nostro
programmaâ (Our Program) that he used later in 1920 while in charge of
editing the program of the Italian Anarchic Union in
Bologna.^(=> #sdfootnote54sym *
) But personal reasons soon decided his return to London.
Before going back to England traveled to Cuba to give a few conferences.
He arrived February 27, 1900, and gave the first conference on March 1
in the Workersâ Circle. The local government had prohibited it, and only
at the last moment allowed it on the condition that the subject of
anarchism not be treated. Malatesta made a complete exposition of his
anarchist principles without ever using the word âanarchy,â and at the
very end, ironically pointing to where the government delegate was
seated, said, âAs you can see, since there wasnât any other choice, I
have spoken of everything but anarchy.â He gave three other conferences,
evading the governmental prohibitions as he could, but these were
finally so constraining that Malatesta decided to leave, and embarked
once again for New York on March 10.^([52])
In April, he was in London.
Anarchist congress in Amsterdam (1907). â In prison in London. â Return
to Italy (1913).
After his departure from the United States, Malatesta remained in
England for thirteen years without interruption, save for brief trips to
the continent.
In the year of his return, July 29, 1900, King Umberto I was shot to
death with a revolver in Monza park by the anarchist Gaetano Bresci. He
had come from America expressly to avenge, in the person of the monarch,
the victims of the war in Africa and the workers massacred from 1894 to
1898. He hoped to put an end to the anti-liberal and reactionary regime
that oppressed Italy, for which the king carried the greatest
responsibility, and he tried to push Italians to rebellion by the
example he set.
It was recognized later, in articles by Enrico Ferri, Filippo Turati and
others, that the assassination made the Italian situation much more
democratic. At the time, however, the deed brought on stupid shows of
feigned pity and [pageantry] love for the dead monarch, in reaction to
which Malatesta â who had known Bresci in Paterson and become his good
friend^([53]) â published a pamphlet in defense of the hero of Prato,
Cause ed Effetti (London, September 1900), explaining his gesture as a
logical âeffectâ of the âcauseâ embodied in the tyrannical and bloody
monarchy.
In London, naturally, he took up work as a mechanic (he was an
electrician as well now) in his little workshop in Islington, close to
his apartment. As I have already had the occasion to say, work absorbed
the majority of his time and above all exhausted him, in a way that left
little to dedicate to his constant and continual intellectual work. He
would also devote his nights to giving lessons in Italian, French, and
general culture to any student that fell on him, to supplement the
miserable earnings of his manual labor. Moreover, he dedicated much of
his time to following the intellectual currents, not only of the
particulars of anarchist practice and ideology of different countries,
but also of the developments in contemporary scientific and
philosophical thought, which he paid attention to with great interest.
Nothing was foreign or uninspiring to him, and as an electrical mechanic
he wasnât content with the day-to-day work which his clients engaged him
in, but through books and magazines tried to extend his knowledge more
and more.
The idealist and the combatant, however, were always alive in him, even
when his interests lay in things that appeared furthest from the object
of his dominant passions of a revolutionary and anarchist. In the
various currents of contemporary thought he always found new arguments
to support his own ideas, and these ideas grew fresher. In the progress
of mechanics, physics and chemistry he looked for weapons that could
give the revolution ways to confront the dominant classâs formidable
arsenal of death and destruction. But he didnât exaggerate the
importance of his knowledge. He saw things as they were, finding what
little use he could take from them and leaving the rest aside. For
example, it was during this stay in London that he diligently cultivated
Esperanto, without believing in any way that grandiose results would
come of it. He contented himself with being able to, by the medium of
Esperanto, have friendships with comrades of the furthest countries,
where the differences in language had impeded all correspondence.
Neither the everyday work, nor the necessities of life, nor the constant
study that was indispensable to his intellect prevented him from doing
what he could for propaganda and for the movement, however tightly
poverty constrained the means of his activity. Always remaining in
contact with the English movement and the few Italian comrades in
London, he contributed from time to time to the papers of different
languages and followed the events of Italy with passion.^([54]) In 1901
he founded, with a group of comrades, the publication LâInternazionale,
of which only four issues were printed; in 1902 Lo Sciopero Generale
(General Strike), in Italian and French (three issues) and La
Rivoluzione Sociale (nine issues); in 1905, LâInsurrezione.^([55])
He also shared the hopes of many anarchists of that time about the
development that direct action labor syndicalism had taken in France, of
which he had been a precursor, in a certain way, since 1890. [?] In 1906
this movement was at its apogee and anarchists exercised a preponderant
influence in it. On the eve of the First of May it was dreamt that the
French working class, especially in Paris, would take the opportunity of
the traditional demonstration to take to the streets and openly wage
battle for the eight-hour day. Malatesta was then hidden in Paris and
stayed there until the next day. He published a pamphlet in Italian,
LâEmancipazione, to which Cipriani, Malato, Felice, Vezzani and others
also contributed. It didnât create many illusions: âthis movement will
not mark,â it said, âa great conquest, maybe it wonât even be a great
battle, but at least we hope that there is a big demonstration and a
great experiment that will bear fruit for futurity.â
But he returned to London disappointed. At the yearâs end, invited by
Malatesta and charged by a group of Italian comrades from North America,
I went to London and stayed in his house for a week in December, 1906. I
slept in an improvised bed at his side, and as can be imagined the
conversations stretched across day and night. He had taken a week-long
vacation from work, and could spend the entire time with me. What
surprised me most was his diminished faith in the syndicalist movement,
which had been so great in 1897 and later. Paris had given him the
impression that syndicalism was already in a declining phase and that it
followed was decreasing rather than bolstering the liveliness of the
anarchist element. Above all he had the impression that the fightersâ
beautiful tempers had immobilized them and put them in positions of
responsibility and leadership within the syndical organizations; and
that on the other hand, the hostility of the revolutionaries found gory
and violent expression only against the pettiest little wheels of state
machinery, the police and urban guards, or against the unknown
strike-breaking scabs, while they never took action against those most
responsible, or against the capitalists, who they instead went and
discussed with in a friendly way, with hat in hand.
âImagine,â he said, âthat on the First of May, in a demonstration, the
police chief Lepine accidentally found himself somewhere in Paris, lost
and separated from his agents in the middle of a crowd. They didnât
touch a hair; people encircled him respectfully and even cleared the
street so that he could retake it with his people. If it would have been
a poor isolated agent or a scab, they would have obliterated him with
blows.â
I didnât share his opinion yet, maybe because in Italy revolutionary
syndicalism was still in its ascendant phase and it allowed me many
illusions; but three or four years later I saw that his previsions had
been realized there as well.
More, he told me of his fear that the spirit of rebellion was fading
among Italian anarchists as well, indicated by their tendency to take
the easiest roads, though without falling in a true and proper
incoherence with their principles. âSyndicates, groups, federations,
strikes, conferences, demonstrations, and cultural initiatives â yes,
they are all beautiful things and also necessary, but all this becomes
useless without the fight and the direct and active takeovers, without
concrete revolutionary deeds. These deeds may ask grave sacrifices and
may seem to ruin for the moment the practical work and particularly
sympathetic initiatives, but are those which keep open the doors of
futurity and of real victory.â One day when we were talking in his
little room, I saw a manuscript of his on the table about âAnarchists
and violence.â Knowing his ideas on the debate, I asked if he would have
it published. âNo,â he responded, âthis isnât the moment. Today it seems
to me that anarchists suffer from the opposite defect of the violent
excesses that occupied me in this article. Itâs better to react now
against the tendencies towards accommodation and living quietly that are
showing in our environments. Now itâs more urgent to resuscitate the
revolutionary passion that lies languishing, the spirit of sacrifice,
the love of risk.â About all this I found myself in total agreement with
him.^([56])
I remember that, a few months after Mateo Morralâs attentat against the
king of Spain in Madrid, Malatesta told me that the editor of an
important and reactionary English daily insisted on tearing an interview
from him, or at least a few words denouncing the act. Malatesta had
refused: âYou are enemies, and explanations arenât given to enemies.â
Since the editor was insistent and kept talking of the innocent people
hit by shrapnel, Malatesta at some point grew impatient and interrupted
him, âHonestly, that poor gentleman wounded to death was without
exception innocent.â The journalist, on leaving, said to him, âItâs
alright that you havenât wanted to concede me an interview; but I have
already done it, and Iâll publish it just the same.â âBelieve interviews
now!â, Malatesta concluded.
I returned to Italy as if it were a bath of enthusiasm and faith.
Malatesta had promised me, that he would soon return with us, work on
our papers, and so on, and I therefore went to several Italian cities in
preparation. But I wouldnât succeed in persuading many people about the
projects that had been suggested, and the circumstances Malatesta
believed indispensable for his return to not be in vain would wait many
years yet. Another reason that he didnât move from London was to make it
easier to attend the next yearâs international anarchist Congress in
Amsterdam, which was held from the 24 to the 31 of August, 1907.
At that congress, Malatesta played a crucial part, with noteworthy
discourses, including some on anarchist and syndicalist organization,
which helped a position equally distant from individualist exaggerations
and syndical unilateralism gain prevalence.
He argued in particular with Pierro Monatte, exponent of the syndicalist
current.
Having gone to the congress myself, together with the late comrade
Aristide Ceccarelli, who I had the pleasure of spending the seven days
with. (I remember his brother was with him, a shopkeeper in Egypt, then
traveling and only at the conference by chance since he wasnât a
comrade.) At the congress, when I went to vote on syndicalism I signed a
different motion than theirs (Monatte, Duvois, etc), however I later
also gave the vote to them, for it didnât seem to completely contrast
with what I preferred. On that occasion Malatesta gave me an interview,
this one authentic, for an Italian paper. I lived for journalism then,
and they had asked me for some articles about the congress, helping me
earn part of the tripâs expenses. The interview was published upon my
return in Il Giornale dâItalia of Rome (I donât remember the date).
Malatesta wrote a long account of the congress, summarizing and making
commentaries, expounding his ideas on the most important arguments, in
Les Temps Nouveax of Paris.^([57]) In similar articles he discussed
syndicalism in Freedom of London and Il Risveglio of Geneva (1908 and
1909). In Amsterdam he had been named a member of the Correspondence
Commission of the âAnarchist Internationalâ that he had dreamt up with
R. Rocker, A. Schapiro, J. Turner, and G. Wilquet, its headquarters to
be in London. But the comrades of various countries, more worried about
the internal movements of each one of their nations, sadly didnât take
the international project seriously, and so little by little the
function of the âBureauâ of London ceased.
Max Nettlau describes in his book the years of Malatestaâs life which
follow in minute enough detail; his relationships with Kropotkin,
Tcherkesoff, Tarrida of MĂĄrmol, E. Recchioni, Arnold Rollor, and more.
He notes that in this period Malatesta began to feel the weight of age,
together with the hazards of his profession. He once cut his hand while
working badly enough that it was a wonder he avoided a blood infection.
Often he would have to install ducting for gas and electricity, making
repairs, and was frequently obliged to work in cold places, exposed to
wind and sometimes laying on the freezing pavement. This started another
attack of pulmonary inflammation that put him in danger of death some
weeks; and if he was saved it was only by the attentions of his guests,
especially the woman of Defendi, who took the most careful and incessant
care of him.
In December of 1910 Malatesta had an adventure as unpleasant as
involuntary, that could have serious consequences for him, even without
his cold blood and the general opinion of his healthâs eventual
consequences. He had permitted a Russian terrorist from Letonia to work
for his wages in Malatestaâs Islington machine shop. The Russian,
abusing his hospitality, had taken a cylinder of oxygen which was used
later in a robbery attempt. Discovered, he and his comrades, caught
red-handed, defended themselves with shots and were followed to his
house on Sidney Street, where they were bombarded and died with the
valiant dignity of a good cause. The act had extraordinary
repercussions. The police soon discovered the origin of the cylinder and
its passage through Malatestaâs shop. He proved what had happened and
wasnât bothered any further. But imagine the consequences for him in a
different environment (Italy, for example), or in England itself if
things had gone otherwise and the truth of his words could have been
cast in doubt.
The incident gave Malatesta the opportunity to write one of his clear
and precise articles about the practice of robbery and the relationship
between the legal robbery of the bourgeoisie and the illegal:
âCapitalists and thieves,â in Les Temps Nouveax of Paris.^([58])
When in 1911 the Italian government, with Giolitti at its head, brought
the country to conquer Tripolitania and Cineraica, with the clear goal
of shifting popular attention from internal questions and to alleviate
the more and more urgent pressure of the working masses, it seemed to
Malatesta that the conditions lacking in 1907 would be realized in Italy
(although outside the anarchist party). He wasnât mistaken: the African
war revitalized revolutionary spirit in the proletarian opposition,
which before had appeared sunken in the dead valleys of predominant
reform. He wrote to several of us about his intention to return to
Italy.
I had an indirect proof of such propositions from Malatesta upon seeing
enter my house one day, in Bologna, to a type, a certain Ennio Belelli,
who called himself an anarchist and sometimes wrote in prose and verse
in our papers, residing in London, who Malatesta had point out to me in
1906 and told me to stay on guard because, without concrete or
sufficient positive elements, he was very suspicious that he was a spy.
Belelli told me that he had arrived in Italy âcharged by Malatestaâ to
study the terrain for his possible return. He was obviously a liar; but
certainly smelled something and he came on the bill of whoever paid him
to make sure of it. I understood that the doubts about him were
increasingly founded: Belelli was an agent of the Italian government in
London, with the special assignment of watching over Malatesta and his
surroundings. There wasnât a sure proof though and I tried to not let
him understand anything. But he surely intuited all the same that there
were suspicions, he saluted me after having accepted a meeting the next
day, and then didnât return to see me. I learned a little later that he
had returned almost immediately to London.
Regarding his intentions to return to Italy was an article that
Malatesta sent those days to the paper LâAlleanza libertaria of Rome
(Che fare?, in no. 133 of September 21, 1911), in which he for the
moment didnât recommend holding a congress which that paper had planned
and said his ideas about that which anarchists should do before to
accomplish the destiny of the movement.
Meanwhile, the war in Africa was pursued and turned into war against
Turkey. Socialists and anarchists had taken a position against it. An
anarchist soldier, Augusto Masetti, had shot at his colonel in the
barracks in Bologna, while he was lined up with his companions in the
streets to leave for Africa. The environment was increasingly
irritating. In London, Malatesta also made propaganda against the war
among the Italian element. He published a pamphlet too, La Guerra
Tripolitania (London, April 1912). It was then when the spy Belelli was
revealed as what he was. He had the shamelessness to accuse Malatesta of
being⊠an agent of Turkey! Malatesta prepared to unmask Belelli in a
manifesto, signed under his own name: Errico Malatesta alla Colonia
Italiana di Londra. Per un fatto personalo. He proposed that a judge and
jury be put together to decide whether he was a slanderer or Belelli a
scoundrel. Belelli steered clear of accepting the challenge and
preferred to denounce his accuser before the English tribunals for
offense to his honor (without the help of proof, naturally); and given
the English jurisprudence, Malatestaâs conviction was inevitable.
In effect, on May 20^(th) he was condemned to three months of prison,
without the ability to appeal, and recommended to the government for
expulsion from England. That provoked the indignation of the English
public and the workersâ unions. The Manchester Guardian dedicated an
in-depth article to Malatestaâs defense on May 25^(th); an eloquent
letter from P. Kropotkin appeared in The Nation; an agitation committee
sprang up; there were reunions and meetings, and so on. The government
recognized that the expulsion couldnât take place, and when Malatesta
left the jail he could remain in London without anybody bothering him.
In the meantime there had bee concrete proof from Rome (by way of Arnold
Roller) that Belelli was truly a spy in the service of the Italian
government; and the documentation was published in the pamphlet La
Gogna, edited by the Italian anarchists in London. Belelli disappeared
from his London environment and was known to have returned to Italy.
Gustave Hervé, having gone to London at the end of that year, still in
that uncompromisingly socialist revolutionary time, to give a
conference, Malatesta was to hear him in Shoredith Hall. Although
declaring himself always revolutionary, Hervé alluded, since some time
past, to a change of strategy â to a ârectification of point of view,â
he said â but in his words, Malatesta intuited the future turncoat; he
took up word against him and reaffirmed the goodness of the
insurrectionary method which Hervé had abandoned, stopping himself,
among other things, about the relations between war and revolution.
Those ideas of his he expounded synthetically in an article a little
later in the magazine Le Mouvement Anarchiste from Paris (nos. 6â7 of
January-February 1913).
As his health continued to be delicate, still more compromised by his
recent stay in English prisons, he thought already of abandoning
England, when a circumstance presented itself that decidedly persuaded
him to depart for Italy.
to London (1914).
Since 1911, the Italian anarchist scene was belabored by disgusting
internal and personal disputes, fomented above all by two or three
individuals of an argumentative character who soon defected to the
bourgeois camp, and I â who bore the disgrace of being friendly with
some of the contenders, and who made the mistake of getting drawn into
those disputes â had separated myself from the movement, had stopped
writing papers, and had retired to a country town in Emilia to become an
elementary-school teacher. It was the spring of 1913 when and old and
esteemed comrade, Cesare Agostinelli, one of Malatestaâs most faithful
friends, proposed that I cooperate on a new anarchist paper in Ancona,
where he lived.
He sent word of his project to Malatesta as well, who approved of the
idea, replying that a new paper would be useful in bringing peace to the
anarchist camp and putting an end to the quarrels; and that the Italian
scene, worn raw by the war in Tripoli, demanded our engagement in a
âpracticalâ work, which a well-done paper would serve excellently for.
He promised he would collaborate, suggesting that we give the paper the
beautiful title of VolontĂ (Will), and also promised, if the paper was
well presented, that he would come to Ancona to edit it as soon as he
could arrange his affairs to leave England.
Agostinelli told me that he was very content with this good news; he put
me in charge of editing a circular to announce the paper, which I did
immediately, and in short, the first issue of VolontĂ was released on
June 8, 1913. After reading a pair of recently published letters written
at the time to Luigi Bertoni in Geneva,^([59]) one can see that
Malatesta was immediately passionate about this new initiative.
According to him, it should serve above all as âcover for a more
practical work,â in other words, a work of spiritual and material
preparation of a revolutionary and insurrectionary nature. Apparently he
saw in Italy the conditions indispensable to that work, conditions he
felt were lacking after my trip to London in 1907.
The new paper in Ancona soon had the strong marks of Malatestaâs
previous papers. Although he didnât sign it, Malatesta wrote the paperâs
platform in the first issue and other articles, both signed and
unsigned. He continued his copious collaboration from London for about
two months, until his doubts gave way and he departed for Italy. He made
a detour through Milan and was well received by the socialists; on that
trip he met Mussolini, director of the Avanti!, who had an editor
interview him and extended his cordial relations. He went by Bologna,
where I could hug him and learn his intentions, and before mid-August he
arrived in Ancona, from whence he sent out an ardent âCall to the
comrades of Italy,â^([60]) in which he happily confirmed that there was
a great awakening among the popular Italian masses, who were marching
towards revolution, and he encouraged comrades to show that they were a
match for the escalated situation, concluding the essay with, âOne more
time, to work!â
From its first moments, the paper VolontĂ had a clear and obvious tone
of preparing for revolution; which didnât stop it from simultaneously
beingâas Malatestaâs other publications had beenâa laboratory of ideas.
Articles and interesting discussions appeared there about socialism and
parliamentarianism, syndicalism, the general strike, anarchist
organization, insurrectionism, individualism, theft, education, atheism,
protectionism, free trade, the republic, war, militarism and so on. The
ten dialogues of âIn the CafĂ©â were printed anew, having been
interrupted in 1897 in LâAgitazione, and he added four new
dialoguesâstill not the last. A long debate took place between Malatesta
and James Guillaume (writing from Paris) regarding syndicalism, focusing
on its history and theory, in which both summarized unpublished memories
and details about the first International and about Bakunin.
The âcoverâ work obviously wasnât any less serious and interesting that
what was âcovered.â But it was the latter which most interested
Malatesta, and he dedicated himself to it in body and soul. Before
anything else he managed to end the old disputes, which werenât even
mentioned two or three months later, and he redirected the anarchist
element towards a path of accord and common action, pushing theoretical
differences to second place. At the same time, he contributed to a
spiritual gathering together of the dispersed revolutionary elements in
the different subversive movements, entering into relations with all the
people who seemed to have a revolutionary good will or who might be
helpful in an insurrectionary movement, surveying the terrain in all
environments, with no need for contracts or negotiations of any type
with the various official parties, towards which he remained absolutely
uncompromising.
He was in several Italian cities (Rome, Milan, Florence, Bologna,
Liorna, Turin, and more) to give conferences and hold meetings, and in
each place he established relationships, met new people and learned
things. As a journalist, he attended wherever popular and proletarian
forces met â a gathering of ex-internationalists in Imola, the socialist
Congress of Ancona, a republican one in Bologna, and a meeting of
syndicalists in Milan, etc. â and on those occasions he studied which
elements would be most inclined to a serious united movement. He was
partial to the work of the Italian Syndical Union which was founded
shortly before and seemed to be the most opportune for his intentions
and closest by the participation that some anarchists had in it. He
personally intervened, though not as an official delegate, in the
syndical congress of Milan (December, 1913) and was invited to speak in
a session on the margin of the congressâs ordinary sessions. At the
republican congress in May of 1914, he was called to the platform after
the sessionâs conclusion and delivered a revolutionary and
anti-monarchical discourse that excited those present. He heatedly
participated in the antimilitarist agitation for the liberation of
Augusto Masetti and against the disciplinary companies?; and on and on
like this.
He still took the opportunity, two or three times between August 1913
and June 1914, to meet with Benito Mussolini. The latterâs
revolutionary, Blanquist language and the audacious and antimonarchical
position he emphasized in the Avanti! had allowed Malatesta to
momentarily trust that the restless Romangnan could, at the right
moment, contribute strongly to precipitate the Italian situation. But he
didnât fool himself for long. One May night in 1914, during the syndical
congress of Milan, the two of us went to a meeting with Mussolini at the
Avanti! They spoke at length, and I listened. Malatesta entreated
Mussolini to explain his position on the argument for a possible Italian
insurrection; but he didnât manage to extract a single word from him
indicating a precise will. The director of the Avanti! was totally
dominated by his aversion to the reformists, entirely internal and
partisan, and he showed the greatest distrust and hatred of the
syndicalists and republicans; he was sick to death with the house of
Savoy, with the generals, with Giolitti, and so on. But as to the
revolution, he showed a superhuman skepticism and shot flames against
âquarantottismâ (against the mentality of 1848). Upon leaving and
already on the stairs, referring to Mussoliniâs off-handed judgment of
Giulio Barni and Libero Tancredi,^([61]) who he called hypercritical and
nothing more, Malatesta told me, âDid you catch that? He called Barni
and Tancredi hypercritical, but he is the one who is hypercritical and
nothing more. This guy is only revolutionary in the paper. I want
nothing to do with him!â
Italian anarchists were preparing a national congress for the following
summer, with Malatestaâs support, when the events of the âRed Weekâ
burst out in Marcas and Romagna, which interrupted all work. As often
happens, the revolutionary preparations, barely begun and still
insufficient, were prejudiced by a serious, improvised deed that
precipitated before the events.
Demonstrations all over Italy had begun the first Sunday of June, the
official holiday of the Statute, to demand the release of Augusto
Masetti and the abolition of disciplinary military companies. That
morning, on June 7, 1914, police had broken up groups of demonstrators
in the streets of Ancona and had arrested Malatesta, setting him free a
few hours later. The announced meeting was held that afternoon in Villa
Rosa, the seat of the Republican party, and orators of various parties
spoke, including Malatesta. At its conclusion, the thousand or so
demonstrators found the street entrances blocked by guards and riflemen;
unavoidable conflict ensued. Under the guardsâ fire, three people were
left dead on the pavement and several were wounded.
The proletariat immediately took to the streets. A general strike was
proclaimed. There were assaults and robberies against the armories,
customs guards were expelled, and the public force was obliged to retire
to their quarters. The following day the whole city was in the peopleâs
hands; the movement was propagated like a wildfire to all of Marcas and
Romagna. In cities and towns, from Foligno to Rome, and from Imola and
Ravenna to the North, we saw the public force disappear, and the
insurrectionary crowds remained the masters of the situation. The trains
stopped running and only the agitation committeesâ automobiles went from
town to town; food was needed; in the countryside all vehicles were
detained, demanding safe conduct from the Committees?. In Fabriano, a
company of soldiers fraternized with the workers; in Forli a church was
burned; near Ravenna a general of the army was taken prisoner.
Meanwhile, news of the events of Ancona spread out like light throughout
Italy. The proletarian, syndical, and political organizations declared a
national general strike.^([62]) But this, outside of Marcas and Romagna,
didnât last more than two and a half days, cut short in the culminating
moment by a traitorous order to end it from the General Confederation of
Labor. However, Marcas and Romagna were abandoned and remained in the
breach until the next Sunday. Anarchists, socialists and republicans
maintained their posts in the streets in a touching unison, day and
night. In Ancona, Malatesta, among the first, inexhaustible, always in
the middle of the crowd, in the Chamber of Labor? and in the plaza,
repeatedly entreating the people, advising, encouraging. On Friday the
12^(th), he? published a proclamation in which rumors were referred to
that the revolution extended through? Italy and that the monarchy was at
the point of falling, suggesting the most urgent means to the provisions
and for the extension of the movement and pointing to not believe or
lend an ear to news of the order to cease the strike from the
Confederation.
But in the meantime, the Italian government sent colossal masses of the
army to everywhere in the rebelling regions to interrupt the resistance.
By Saturday it was recognized that the party was over. Military trains
began to arrive about the lines put in conditions by the battalions of
Zapadores. On Sunday the 14^(th), the military occupation was complete
everywhere, even in the smallest towns. On Monday the strike ended even
in Marcas and Romagna; the âred weekâ had gone by. A day or two later,
Malatesta could stay in Ancona, with the only precaution of switching
houses. He still prepared an issue of VolontĂ . The in-depth article of
his was titled âAnd now?,â and continued: âNow⊠we will continue. We
will continue more than ever full of enthusiasm, acts of will, of hope,
of faith. We will continue preparing the liberating revolution, which
will secure justice, freedom, and well-being for allâ (no. 24 of June
20, 1914).
Unexpectedly, even before the paper was released, it was noticed that
the police had gone to his usual residence to arrest him. He had
vanished. An automobile took him to Southern Italy, where, in a small
station, superficially disguised â he had simply put a fashionable
wind-breaker? over his clothing and had shaved â he took the train for
Milan in first class. At night he passed by the Ancona station,
militarily occupied, and arrived in Milan; from there, by Como, he
arrived at the Swiss border, which he crossed without any holdups. By
Lugano and Geneva, through Paris, he arrived a few days later in London.
On June 24^(th) the Avanti! published a brief note from him greeting
friends and comrades, letting them know that he had returned to his old
home.
Return to Italy (1919).
Friends had been able to see him in Paris, en route, and some dailies
(among others La Guerre sociale and La Bataille Syndicaliste),
interviewed him. In London, Malatesta reconstructed the events of Ancona
in another two extensive and detailed interviews for Italian dailies (Il
Secolo of Milan, June 30, and Il Giornale dâItalia of Rome, July 1,
1914). He wrote an article about the argument for Freedom, the known
anarchist organ of London, of which an Italian translation appeared in
the Cronaca Souversiva of Lynn, Mass. (July 25, 1914).
This other parenthesis from battle closed, in London Malatesta again
took up the life that was habitual for him since he was 25. Despite the
years gone by, he returned to his trade of electrical mechanic, not
neglecting to scan the horizon in search of precursory signs of a new
tempest that would call him again to his favorite terrain. And already,
precisely in those days of his return to London, the European horizon
was covered in clouds, the first thunder was heard, and the air was cut
by the first beams of the tremendous, imminent war.
But his attention was diverted for some time from the external affairs
by a serious misfortune that affected the Defendi family, whose guest he
had been for many years. The woman Emilia, who had given him the
attention of a caring sister in his previous illnesses, grew sick
herself and died after a bitter agony, amidst great spasms. He helped
the family tend to her throughout the course of her sickness, until the
last instant. The friends who had the occasion to see Malatesta in the
intimacy of his London refuge, among that family who considered him as
their own, surrounded by the many children, big and small, of the
Defendis, who loved him like the most appreciated relative, can imagine
the state of his soul, of a heart so big and so full of tenderness for
all those about him.
But the personal misfortune didnât stop him, however, from feeling the
deep universal misfortune that befell humanity in that tragic summer.
And when the painful spectacle was had of such a part of European
socialism dragged, even morally, into the general disaster, taken to
renege in an instant the internationalist preaching of half a century,
and put itself on the side â in Germany as in France, in Austria like in
England â of the bourgeois governments and the militarisms of their own
countries; when Malatesta saw even anarchists, but from the best and
among his most loved friends, following by an able action of the spirit
the same path of collapsed ideals, a pain still greater invaded his
soul. He didnât hesitate then to separate himself from the friends who
had been diverted in such a pitiful way, and to say high and strongly
his faithful thought to revolutionary anarchist internationalism.
After Kropotkin published his famous declaration swearing himself to the
cause of the allied English-French-Russian armies, Malatesta published
in Freedom (London); in Il Risveglio (Geneva); and in VolontĂ (Ancona)
(no. 42 of Novermber 1914),^([63]) a concise and consuming article:
âAnarchists, have you forgotten your principles?â, which expressed with
exactness the opinions and feelings faithful to his ideas. The
friendship between him and Kropotkin which had lasted almost forty years
was broken, though saving for each other, regardless, mutual esteem and
respect. âIt was,â he told some years later, âone of the saddest and
most tragic moments of my life (and I dare say for him as well), that
after a discussion in extreme duress, we separate as adversaries, almost
as enemies.â^([64])
Like the above article indicates, Malatesta had said at some point that,
disregarding all, he foresaw the rout of the German armies as the least
evil, since that would have provoked revolution in Germany, Mussolini â
who a bit earlier had crossed from the most absolute neutralism to the
most warlike interventionism and had founded against his party and in
favor of war the new daily Il Popolo dâItalia in Milan â latched on to
this isolated phrase to accuse Malatesta of contradiction and to sustain
the need for Italian intervention against Germany. Malatesta responded
with an article letter, dated December 1, 1914, where he showed the
contradiction to be nonexistent and said that the first condition for a
revolution to be produced, is that the revolutionaries not betray their
cause in any country. Mussolini took care not to publish that response,
which appeared later in the anarchist papers (VolontĂ no. 46 of December
24).
Despite the censorship of press and mail, Malatesta never ceased his
propaganda against the war for an instant, either personally in London,
or elsewhere with articles, letters, calls, and so on. Some of his
writing sent to the headquarters of VolontĂ were intercepted by the
English post, as he pointed out in a letter to Luigi Molinari on October
9 (published in LâUniversitĂ popolare of Milan). But later he managed to
get some to Italy, France, and Spain. In March 1915 he helped edit an
international antiwar manifesto, dated in London, but signed, in
addition to him, by a number of known anarchists from every country:
Domela Niewenhuis, Emma Goldman, A. Berkman, L. Bertoni, C. Frigerio, E.
Recchioni, L. Combes, L. D. Abbot, Hippolyte Havel, A. Schapiro, and
more (VolontĂ , no. 12 of March 20). One of his most important articles,
very extensive, was: Mentra la strage dura (VolontĂ , no. 14 of April 3),
in which he predicted the unleashing of the war, which had later been
fully realized. And when, nonetheless, Italy was also dragged into the
fiery crucible by the monarchy, he shot a cry of anguish and cholera in
Freedom, âItaly too?â^([65])
In 1916, the world having diffused anguished voices and hopes of peace,
the interventionist anarchists who followed Kropotkin published a
manifesto in protest against âthe premature peaceâ and for war carried
out until the German military potential was completely crushed. This was
the âmanifesto of the sixteen,â so-called because there were sixteen
signers, including Kropotkin, J. Grave, C. Malato, M. Pierrot, A.
Laisant, C. Cornelissen, and P. Reclus. Malatesta protested in turn
against them in an article in Freedom (April 1916), that was later
clandestinely printed in Paris with the title âGovernment anarchists.â
In Italy all publication attempts were halted by censorship.^([66])
In the same year, 1916, Malatesta asked the Italian consulate in London
for a passport to return to Italy; given the state of war, it would have
been impossible to return in any other way like he had done in the past.
On one side, in England the military reaction impeded, in what followed,
all movements or manner of showing self-thought; and on the other,
Mslatesta had foreseen that in Italy, where the people had remained
unanimously hostile to war and revolt germinated under the yoke of
militarism, an increasingly revolutionary situation was growing. That
impression was confirmed later by the discussions of the Italian
socialists who went to London and who he had the chance to meet. He had,
in truth, the order to capture and try him hanging over him for the
events of the âred week;â but despite that, he wanted to return at all
costs and desired to face the trial which awaited him in Italy.^([67])
He was inexorably refused. And he continued living in London another two
and some years, which I will ignore entirely. What can be affirmed is
the happiness with which he had to greet the outbreak of the Russian
revolution in February 1917 and the growing interest with which he would
follow its development all of that year. I knew that he had intended to
leave for Russia, but it wasnât possible; and then he dropped the idea
because of the impotence his ignorance of the Russian language would
have kept him in. But I am not certain of all this.
Since 1917 I donât remember more than one letter, to Armando Borghi,
where he repeats his wish to return to Italy and speaks of the Italian
governmentâs insistence on denying him a passport; he speaks of the
uselessness of the anarchistsâ participation in the congress of
parliamentarian socialists in Stockholm and about how useful an
Internation upon other bases would be instead; he disapproves of the
Italian Syndical Union pledging itself to the Zimmerwald movement,
despite the pleasure he viewed this with; and finally, gives news of the
little to no importance of the revolutionary socialist currents in
England (Guerre di Classe, Florence, no. 53 of November 16, 1917).
I donât know if he occupied himself with the Russian revolution in any
special way. It would be necessary to consult Freedom (London) regarding
that. But his ideas about the triumph of Bolshevism in his breast, could
be predicted since then, given his uncompromising, anarchist
irreductibility. Basically, such ideas, radically adverse, though
initially sustained by a certain sympathy (especially before the triumph
of the Bolsheviks), were reaffirmed in a letter he wrote me from London
on July 30, 1919 and which I published in the rearisen VolontĂ (Ancona)
(no. 11 of August 16, 1919). He felt the greatest sympathy then for the
Italian socialists, who not withstanding certain incongruent attitudes
and the patriotic conduct of its reformist factions more towards the
right, had honorably held high the banner of internationalism against
the reigning chauvinism and militarism during the war, and the most
active opposition possible in the circumstances and their mentality. A
sign of this sympathy is found in his intervention in a meeting in
London, convoked by the local section of the Italian socialist party in
November 1919.
Meanwhile he insisted several more times on obtaining a passport. The
ministers changed in Italy, but all posed the same negative, though two
successive amnesties erased all legal imputation against him. Finally,
only by mid-November 1919, the consulate in London had an order to give
him his passport, due to the intense agitation made on the peninsula to
this effect by the Italian Syndical Union. But it was as if he hadnât
obtained it. Prompted by the Italian government, the official France
denied the necessary visa to cross its territory and the English police
stopped all boat captains from carrying the prohibited rebel. Then
Italian comrades interested the captain Giuseppe Giulietti in the
affair, who was secretary of the Italian Federation of Sea-Workers
[ital], and he sent his brother Alfredo to London to prepare Malatestaâs
flight. Truly he, by his intervention, finally managed to embark
disguised in Cardiff on a Greek cargo boat which took him to Taranto,
where Alfredo Giulietti went by land to wait for Him. He, to pretend the
thing and cover in some way the boat captainâs responsibility, took
Malatesta up quickly and without anyone catching on to Geneva in a fast
wagon-bed, where they arrived together after crossing all of Italy
absolutely unrecognized.^([68])
congresses. â Occupation of the factories. â Arrest (1920).
Therefore outstandingly disembarked in Geneva on December 24, 1919,
Malatesta triumphantly returned to public Italian life. In the great
Ligurian city he was accepted by an enormous crowd that applauded him.
The boats anchored in the port sounded their sirens and hoisted flags in
happiness, the popular neighborhoods were decorated with red banners and
the people announced? Malatesta in the streets and plazas with a type of
delirium. In a great meeting, where he spoke to give the greetings of
Italian anarchists to that magnificent orator Lugigi Galleani â also
recently returned from North America â he also took the stage to give
thanks to? and to say right away what he would later have to repeat
everywhere: that the hour of revolution had arrived and that we had to
quickly prepare ourselves to make as soon as possible, before the hour
slipped away.
He immediately started a feast of propaganda from Geneva and of
exploration of all of northern and central Italy. In every city â Turin,
Milan, Bologna, Ancona, Rome, Florence, etc. â and the same in the
little provincial and country centers, innumerable masses of people
pressed to acclaim him and listen to him. In Bologna, where he stayed in
my house and I could have a first exchange of ideas with him, in a great
meeting in the Communal theater he insisted on the need for revolution,
since, he said, âif we let the favorable moment pass we will have to pay
later in tears of blood for the fear that we now infuse? the bourgeoisie
with.â
âThe anarchist Malatesta,â said the Corriere della Sera (Milan) on
January 20, 1920, âis for now one of the greatest figures of Italian
life. The city crowds run to meet him, and they donât hand him the keys
to their doors as they used to in another time, only because there
arenât keys and there arenât doors.â
He, though being naturally content with the revolutionary significance
that the great popular acceptance? had, a few days later thought he
should put the brakes on those homages which seemed to him to assume an
overly personally apologetic character, and printed a short letter to
friends, in which among other things he said, âThank you, but enough! âŠ
Hyperbole is a rhetorical form which shouldnât be abused, and exalting a
man is politically dangerous and morally unhealthy for the exalted and
those exalting.â
While he was at the point of ending that first feast of propaganda,
approximately two months after his arrival, in mid-February, the
terrified Italian government wanted to arrest him. On the occasion of a
trip between Liorna and Florence, the police took him off the train in
the small station of Tombolo, and transported him in a car to the
Florentine jails. But the immediate, spontaneous protest of the people
in the Tuscan cities, where he had gone to proclaim a general strike,
forced his liberation. The next morning found him in Bologna.
A personal memory: Malatesta, some months earlier, had written me from
London, extending himself to explain to me his ideas about what should
be done to make an Italian revolution. He told me that the movement
should be started âin a low key,â gradually elevated, and meanwhile to
work intelligently on practical terrain, solidifying relations, making
contact with other revolutionary forces, and so on. He came to speak of
those ideas in my house upon his arrival to Bologna, after the arrest in
Tombolo, and he interrupted me in conversation: âItâs impossible to
follow that road! I didnât think I would find a boiling? like this. It
already isnât a matter of preparing the terrain â itâs ready. Itâs
precisely, instead, to make what we can as soon as possible, because the
revolution is already underway, much closer than I thought writing you
from London.â I shared his opinion, and only later did the most
anguishing doubt come to me about the revolutionary character of that
remarkable popular enthusiasm and the fear that this wouldnât make the
real depth of things seen.
Corresponding to those first weeks of 1920 was the idea that was held
for some moments among a small circle of revolutionaries, to utilize the
situation created by Gabriele dâAnnunzio with the occupation of Fiume at
the head of some remnants of the army faithful to him, made a month
earlier and lasting until December 1920. The thing wasnât accomplished
and it stayed secret for two years, and not even later was much known
about it, because those who had occupied themselves with the affair had
closed themselves in, all for understandable reasons, in the utmost
reserve. Now it can be said that Malatesta was one of the few (even the
primary one) mixed in the brief negotiations at the time about the
project. But he, appealed to several times, always refused to give
explanations, impossible without the consent of everyone interested. In
a letter from June 1920 he told me that the part of the truth which
could be made public was this:
âIt deals with, basically, an insurrectionary project in 1920, a type of
march on Rome, if you want to call it such. The first person to
conceptualize the thing, which would have been able to get support from
Fiume of men and especially of arms, put as a sine qua non condition the
assistance, or at least the approval, of the socialists, for the best
chance of success, or because he feared being denounced as an agent of
dâAnnunzio. A couple of meetings were held in Rome regarding this; the
socialists didnât want to know anything, and did nothing.â I donât feel
authorized, not even now that Malatesta is dead, to say more. Who can
imagine the course that events would have taken then, if the socialists
had a little more practical revolutionary sentiment?â
In late February, meanwhile, Italian anarchists managed to make the
daily UmanitĂ Nova appear in Milan (February 27, 1920), which Malatesta
had accepted the direction of from London, and written the programmatic
circular. He fixed his residence in Milan. But from there he continually
attended all of Italy when comrades called him, to give conferences,
hold assemblies, reunions, strikes, and more. Everywhere, his presence
gave rise to imposing demonstrations, often tumultuous. It should be
said that his condescension? was much abused, robbing him therefore of
the time to accomplish more positive work, that only he would be able to
do. He was called to a city for a day; he arrived and found that tasks
had been prepared for him for a week, that assemblies and gatherings
were convoked for all of the province, with theaters and paid halls, and
so on. And he, seeing the sacrifices already made by comrades, didnât
know how to refuse and stayed there.
The Italian police, increasingly irritated?, tried to provoke some
âoutrageâ? everywhere to capture or assassinate him. Their intention was
visibly understood on several occasions. In Milan, Piacenza, and
Florence, among others, the police were seen to open fire ostensibly at
points where he was found. Then the press most unashamed by scandal
reproached him for not having been assassinated, assaulted him with all
types of injuries, ridiculous slander, and true and proper incitations
to homicide.
Meanwhile, UmanitĂ Nova prospered. In vain, sneakily, the government
tried to create obstacles to its publication, refusing or slowing paper
that had already been paid for from the authorized paper mills. The
miners of Valdarna presented a threat at one point of striking the
lignite mines if the anarchist daily wasnât given paper, and only then
did a government telegram consent to hand it over. The rebel paper
reached a release of 50,000 copies, and a revenue that exceeded a
million liras.
In UmanitĂ Nova, as usual, Malatesta developed his propaganda, calming
and fiery at once. He always insisted, like a refrain, on the concept
affirmed in his first conferences: to make revolution soon, to make use
of the favorable hour, under penalty of paying later for the enemyâs
fear. His line, as in the past, had two aspects: clarification of
anarchist ideas and preparation for the revolution. He pursued? the
propaganda of anarchist communism, with a great feeling of comprehension
and conciliation of all the anarchist tendencies. He favored the
revolutionary âunited front,â but the first agreement should be
stability among anarchists; then, the most possible, without betraying
principles and preserving total freedom of action, with all the other
proletarian and revolutionary forces, the anarchist forces alone
couldnât be enough to defeat the resistance of the state and the
bourgeoisie. He insisted often on practical means in the time of
revolution: particularly on the necessity of destroying everything that
is noxious, but guarding oneself well, save in cases of extreme
impelling necessity, from destroying what might be useful to the life of
the insurrectionary populations, like houses, means of transportation,
tools for working, edible items, and so on.
He continued propagandizing and defending the libertarian conception of
socialism and of revolution in contrast to the authority of the social
democrats and the Bolshevists. In the paper he sustained more than one
debate with the one and the other; conserving, however, in the limits of
the possible, the greatest cordiality of the form. The Communist
sectarianism hadnât become so weighty and irritating, by which only in
the last times the debate with this sector had become a little bit more
bitter. The relations with the social democrats were tenser, especially
with certain confederate reformist factions, which in the most decisive
moments pressured to throw water on the fire or discredit the popular
rebellions. As soon as he arrived in Italy, he had to deal tiresomely
with some Lobardan politician who had injured and prejudiced, before the
authorities, those clearly implicated in a movement in Mantua. But he
didnât like to attack anybody without serious motives.
He dedicated much activity to organization as well, called from party of
the anarchist forces. Since April 1919 in a congress in Florence an
Italian Anarchic Union (Unione Anarchica Italiana) had been constituted,
following the principles and strategy that he had favored since before
1890. When he arrived in Italy he had sworn himself to its action,
participating in it constantly. In the two congresses of July 1920 in
Bologna, and November 1921 in Ancona, his intervention was one of the
most active and influential; he compiled, on the foundation of something
old he had written, the Unionâs program approved by the congress of
Bologna; he was a member of the general Council; he represented it in
various conferences, political and proletariat, public or secret; he
defended it serenely, but firmly, against critics from the
anti-organizational comrades; he edited motions and manifestos for it
more than once, the last of which, that of the first of May, 1926, when
the Union had already been taken to a miserable clandestine life under
the reigning fascist terror.
He furthermore flanked the activity of the Italian Syndical Union with
the most ample spirit of solidarity, intervening directly in all
agitation or movement in which he could concur â the known organization
of class of revolutionary syndical tendencies, that since 1914 onwards
was inspired and directed preferentially? by anarchist comrades â though
conserving and reaffirming his particular opinions (adverse on many
points) facing syndicalism and the varied questions that were referred
to him. He didnât view the division of labor on syndical terrain
favorably, but understood the unavoidable relationships that derived
from the past, and realized the uncertain usefulness of the Syndical
Union, as such it was, for the cause of revolution, considered imminent.
He therefore accepted, without discussing it too much, the state of
affairs, and stayed together with the labor organization that most
approximated anarchism, and only opined that it become a responsibility
for anarchists to be organized, and to be better in one organization
than in another. The important point for him was that anarchists,
organized or not, or adherents to the trade organizations of whatever
tendency, stay anarchists and help develop anarchist action wherever
they found it.
All sectarianism and exclusiveness of tendency was not to be found in
him, about the question of anarchist organization and about the syndical
organization, content to collaborate on the practical and revolutionary
terrain, on every possible occasion, with all anarchists, even those who
dissented from him. And until the end he wanted UmanitĂ Nova to be the
organ for all the anarchists, and not solely of its own current, though
recognizing that in normal times it would be preferable to make a paper
of homogeneous orientation.
The paper culminating Malatestaâs activity was the summer of 1920, when
it appeared that the revolution would break out from one moment to the
next, between the mutiny of Ancona in June^([69]) and the occupation of
the factories in September. They were multiplied; interproletarian
reunions, secret negotiations for action, practice for the acquisition
of arms, conferences and assemblies, agitation for the political
victims, and son on, until in the occupation of the factories they were
handed over, day and night. Meanwhile since the paper advised what to
do, he? intervened personally in the factories occupied in Milan to
sustain the resistance, ran to the more or less clandestine reunions
between anarchists and supporters, to sustain the most opportune
propositions, and he opposed himself everywhere to whoever advised the
limitation or cessation of a movement so well begun.
That which he sustained then in public and in private was this: that an
occasion could never present itself which would be better to win almost
without spilling blood; to extend the occupation of the metallurgy to
all the other industries and lands; where there werenât industries, to
take to the streets with local strikes and rebellions which distracted
the armed forces of the State of the large centers; from the smallest
localities, where nothing could be done, to help the larger, most near
places; entered in activity of action groups; to arm ourselves in the
greatest possible numbers, and so on. It would be too long to say it
all, and maybe it still isnât the time. It is known how the movement was
frustrated by the deliberation of the General Confederation of Labor,
dominated by the social democrats, to return the factories to the owners
under the promise of the Giolitti government from a law that would
introduce worker control to the factories.
In vain, the anarchists (and Malatesta in the most energetic way)
opposed themselves to and fought here and there to galvanize the
movement, particularly where by their numbers, or with the daily UmanitĂ
Nova, or through the Italian Syndical Union, they had major influence.
In all of Italy the proletariat beat a retreat, and began to lose heart,
the uncertainty and disillusion began among the masses. The general
enthusiasm was extinguished and the will to fight remained in the most
restricted revolutionary minorities, that the government managed to
quickly isolate. The bourgeoisie came to rear its head, and crossed from
the defensive to the offensive.^([70])
About a month later, the day after grandiose assemblies in all Italy in
defense of the political victims, and of an afternoon of general strike,
October 14, ended in some cities with bloody tumults, the government
began the reaction against anarchists.^([71])
In those days Malatesta was in my house in Bologna, where he slept for
two weeks. A very relative rest! It was in those days when â beyond
participating on October 10 in the reunion of the General Council of the
Anarchic Union â he worked on the revision, reordering, and ending, with
other final dialogues, of his little book of discussion, In the Café,
published a bit later in its first full edition. Without mentioning it
to him, comrades announced him as an orator in the Bologna meeting â he
opened it by reading the manifesto which we heave referred to â he
basically spoke that day together with other orators in Umberto I Plaza,
before an enormous crowd. After the meeting he went to the Chamber of
Labor with some of us to write a letter refuting the Resto del Carlino,
which had accused it of being a âsleeping houseâ; and while we were
there news arrived of a serious confrontation between demonstrators and
public forces in the center of the city, near the jail, with dead and
wounded from both groups. Two days later he left for Milan where, as
soon as he arrived, October 17, 1920, he was arrested.
A day or two earlier other editors of UmanitĂ Nova had been detained as
well, and still earlier, Armando Borghi and other militants from the
Syndical Union. Other detentions of anarchists followed in different
parts of Italy. UmanitĂ Nova continued being published all the same,
some of the detainees were set free; but Malatesta, Borghi, Corrado
Quaglino (editor of the anarchist daily) and Mario Baldini were kept in
jail and tried in Milan. Dante Pagliai, the paperâs manager?, and some
others, editors, administrators and contributors were implicated in the
trial as well; but these last, except Pagliai, missing, were left out of
the accusation later, during the trialâs hearing.
fight against fascism. â The âMarch on Romeâ (1922).
The blow was strong. A conference of syndical parties and organizations
was immediately held in Florence, and despite the promises made earlier,
all protest action was refused. Anarchists were left standing alone. At
the meeting, Serrati, who directed the Avanti!, called Malatestaâs
arrest a âtransitory episodeâ and said that nothing could be done about
it. This attitude gave even more air to the government and bourgeoisie;
the reaction was intensified. Fascism had arisen a year and a half
earlier, and until that moment it had been insignificant and ridiculous.
To everyoneâs surprise, it saw its ranks swell, reared its head, and in
Bologna on November 21, barely a month later, it inflicted the first and
most serious defeat to the proletariat socialist forces, robbing them of
the streets and municipal responsibilities?. This was the beginning of
the debacle which would end two years later with the âmarch on Rome.â
Malatesta and his three comrades, in the meantime, were still in jail.
The powers of justice couldnât manage to base and plausible accusations
against them, but nevertheless they didnât want to let go of their
prize. The hearing threatened to be inconclusive, and the trial was
postponed endlessly. The defendants, exasperated, decided to resort to a
hunger strike so that the court would either free them or specify the
charges against them and take them to trial, and they began on March 18,
1921. At the end of a few days the news spread that Malatesta, due to
his age and uncertain health, was reduced to such exhaustion by the
hunger that he ran a serious risk of death. All of labor and subversive
Italy trembled, but without an effective attitude of efficacy. Local
strikes in protest broke out in Romagna, Tuscany, Valdarno, Carrara, and
Liguria, but the ceased almost immediately and no success? was in sight.
Among anarchists exasperation reached a climax. UmanitĂ Nova published
anguished and urgent calls. Meanwhile, in different parts of Italy,
almost like a challenge, the fascist violence mounted, and the most
lethal and bloodiest of these episodes was had in Milan itself: the
assault of the socialist circle of Bonaparte street, the night of March
21, with the death of the socialist Inversetti,. Two days later, the
night of March 23, a bomb exploded against a side door of the Diana
theater, in Port Venice, killing twenty people inside and wounding many
more.
The terrible attempt, as is understood, had a vivid repercussion in all
Italy, and more still in Milan. The source wasnât immediately known; the
most contradictory guesses were made. But it was easy to predict â as
events later confirmed â that it traced to an individual act of
anarchists, decided by exasperation and desperation, arrived at
paroxysm. Malatesta who, though understanding and explaining acts of
such a type as an inevitable product of social injustices and the
provocations of the powerful, had always showed in his propaganda the
most determined adversity to them, experience the most painful
sensation, more lacerating still by the thought that the object of
affection towards him shouldnât be foreign. He and his comrades, after
having consulted among themselves, ended their hunger strike.
Meanwhile, the fascists, on the same night as the attempt, an hour or
two later, assaulted as a gang the offices of UmanitĂ Nova, closed and
deserted, at midnight, and destroyed everything. But they didnât
completely succeed in the proposition, because barely some months later,
May 14, the anarchist paper they so hated restarted their publication in
Rome â at first bi-weekly, then, in early July, daily again â under the
provision direction of Luigi Damiani.^([72])
The trail against Malatesta was held before the Court of Appeals? of
Milan, from the 27^(th) to the 29^(th) of July, 1921. The blamed
Malatesta and Borghi, beyond their personal positions in relation to the
accusations which were made against them, illustrated the Italian
situation as it had been since 1919, and affirmed their ideas. In the
defense was, with other lawyers, Saverio Merlino, the old and
indefatigable friend of Malatesta. But the light of discussion the
accusations against the blamed seemed so clumsy and unsustainable, that
the kingâs prosecutor himself was seen forced to exclude all existence
of a crime. Therefore, Malatesta who intended to end by speaking a
self-defense, that, like in the earlier trials, would have been able to
make good anarchist propaganda, was robbed of the opportunity to deliver
it, and limited himself to a brief declaration invoking, even in the
unavoidable fight, a near future that would be more civil and human than
the barbaric violence which fascism in Italy provided in that moment â
and would have to continue giving it in what followed â a spectacle so
sad.
It all ended with a general acquittal, and the afternoon of that final
day of debate, Malatesta was free again among us and the comrades of
Milan. Fifteen days later, in Rome, he returned to his post as the
direction of UmanitĂ Nova.
Meanwhile, during the ten months that Malatesta was in prison, fascism â
aided secretly? by the government, financed by the high bourgeoisie,
supported by the police and government, supported by the police and
military forces and by all the antisocialist parties â was imposed in
almost half of Italy. It was already undisputed master in Emilia,
Tuscany, Polesina and in other minor points. Resistance to fascism was
posed, more or less, by anarchists, communists, socialists, republicans,
in addition to the various syndical organizations. Malatesta immediate
threw himself into the contest, and with UmanitĂ Nova and his personal
activity, and in some cases as representative of the Italian Anarchic
Union, participated actively in all the attempts of proletarian
resistance against the new whip. He intervened, as in the past, in all
the reunions possible, public or clandestine; he favored the formation
of squads of âarditi del popoloâ that organized themselves for armed
resistance; he contributed with his advice to the formation of the
Alliance of work concerted among the various Italian syndical organisms;
he stimulated in every way the different initiatives of individual and
collective action.
I have already noted his participation in the anarchist congress of
Ancona from November 1 to 4, 1921. Malatestaâs intervention regarding
this could be interesting regarding the discussion that was had there
about the Diana attempt in Milan. Immediately after the event, the
correspondence commission of the I.A.U., before even knowing the authors
and under whose responsibility, had made a public declaration where it
expressed its anguish for the mourning of the dead and the resultant
blood, threw the responsibility on the ruling class, provocators and
killers of freedom, putting anarchism in safety and referring to ideas
about some similar acts explained at other times by Malatesta. As some
comrade in the congress made reservations about such a declaration,
Malatesta defended it, declaring himself in agreement with it and
sustaining that the Commission had completed an anarchist debt to
express its own opinion on that occasion. In another of his discourses,
regarding the mission of anarchist in the labor movement, he fought the
ideas of those who would have wanted to make allegiance to the Syndical
Union mandatory for anarchist workers. Though expressing towards this
body the greatest sympathy and the warmest preference, he upheld the
freedom of the comrades to belong to the syndicates which they believed
would do the most useful work, on the condition that this action be
uncompromisingly inspired by anarchist ideas.
Some month later, April 23, 1922, Malatesta was with other comrades
(Pasquale Binazzi, V. Cantarelli, Fabbri, N. da B. and H. M.) in
representing the Anarchic Union in a conference in Spezia with the
anarchist-Bolshevist Hermann Sandormirsky â chief of the press committee
of the Russian sovietist delegation to the interstate conference of
Geneva â in search of information and for an interchange of explanation
of the position of anarchists in Russia faced with the Bolshevik state
that they pursued. On that occasion the fascists in the place intended
in vain to disturb the reunion, kept at a distance by the improvised
intervention of the proletariat of Spezia. At base of those
conversations, which were developed in depth, a brief debate was held
between Malatesta and Sandormirsky in the columns of UmanitĂ Nova. From
May 9 to 31, the trial took place in Milan for the Diana tragedy of
March 23 of the previous year. The anarchists Giuseppe Mariani, Ettore
Aguggini and Giuseppe Boldrini were directly accused as authors, the
first two confessed, the third innocent and declared such by the other
two. There were another fourteen accused of minor acts, arbitrarily
linked to the events of the Diana under the generic title of association
to commit crime. Mariani and Boldrini were condemned to military prison;
Aguggini, a minor, to thirty years of reclusion. The others had
sentences varying from 4 to 16 years of reclusion. Three were acquitted.
A trial was held later for one abroad.
In that trial, Malatesta, though showing his well-known good judgment
about the act, took the most ardent defense of the accused, not only of
minor acts and the innocent, but also of those most responsible. He
offered himself for testimony and spoke to the jury in their defense;
but his offer wasnât legally admissible or advisable, according to the
lawyers. In substance, in some articles that he dedicated to the trial
in UmanitĂ Nova, he sustained that the authors of the attempts had
committed it in an irresponsible state of passion, that their excitation
had been from wholly idealist motives, altruistic and disinterested, and
for that he rallied all the attenuations and discriminations possible in
their favor. However, words of such high human sentiment were too high
for that low environment to which he directed them, to be able to be
heard. And so the first tragedy was crowned and aggravated by a new
tragedy!
Fascism disgracefully proceeded, with methodical, criminal abuse of
power and its absolute impunity, the submission of other Italian
regions, like Puglia, Lomellina, and Veneto; in July the gangs of
blackshirts concentrated in Ravenna and mourning and destruction were
sown in almost all of Romagna. The Alliance of labor wanted to play the
last card and proclaimed a defensive general strike on July 30, 1922 in
all of Italy, which anarchists, communists, and revolutionary socialists
proposed since a moment. Malatesta, who pressed for such a thing in
UmanitĂ Nova, used the weight of all the personal influence that he
enjoyed among the greater part of the exponents of the proletarian
organisms, with which he was in contact day and night in those times, so
that the strike would be declared. It was, but the hopeless attempt
didnât reach the effect it pursued, and was suffocated in blood by the
fascist gangs and the official police. Fascism planted itself as master,
with the most ferocious violence, in Marcas and Milan as well.
The camp of intervention directed by Malatesta was restricted bit by
bit, and was increasingly limited to Rome and its surroundings, where
the labor resistance on one hand, and on the other the hypocritical and
opportunist politics of the government, dictated in the capital for
diplomatic convenience, to save face, still impeded the open penetration
of fascism. UmanitĂ Nova could be published, but already couldnât be
diffused in the provinces, outside a very few places: everywhere, like
most all the antifascist press, the paper was either seized in the mail,
or taken from the vendors and burned, and vendors, subscribers, and
buyers were beaten with sticks in the streets. Daily publication had to
be suspended and it became a weekly, after the last disastrous general
strike in August (with number 183, August 12).
A short serene and elevated parenthesis in Malatestaâs tormented life in
this period was had by an escape to Switzerland in September. Though
expelled from there since 1879, it was to hold the fiftieth anniversary
of the historic anti-authoritarian conference of Saint-Imier, where â
Bakunin and Malatesta present â in September of 1872 the modern
anarchist movement had been born. Malatesta, searched for in vain by the
Italian and Swiss police, passed across the mountains, stayed peacefully
in Bienne the 16^(th) and Saint-Imier the 17^(th), participated actively
in the international anarchist reunions that were convoked, and returned
across the border, peacefully, to Rome. Of the discussions held in those
conference of Malatesta about the different problems of revolution â in
particular with the anarchist Colomer, crossed later to Bolshevism â a
colophon of argumentative articles appeared a bit later in UmanitĂ Nova
and in Le Libertaire (Paris).
A month after Malatestaâs return from Switzerland, or a little later,
the famous âmarch on Romeâ took place â in late October â with which
fascism managed, thanks to the kingâs complicity, to assume power
officially, breaking the last formalities and obstacles of the Italian
constitution.
On this eve Malatesta still didnât lose hope for Italyâs salvation. We
had seen a few days earlier, in a private reunion among comrades from
different parts of Italy in Rome â on the occasion of the reunion of the
administrative council of UmanitĂ Nova â and he was still optimistic.
But his optimism was totally refuted by events. The consequences that
befell? Italy are well known. In Rome some small group of audacious
people tried in vain some resistance in the neighborhoods of San
Lorenzo, Porta Trionfale, and CittĂ Giardino. The fascist forces that
converged from everywhere and entered Rome on the side of the army, as
soon as Mussolini was called to the Quirinale by the king, made all
opposing force impotent. A ridiculous detail: in Piazza Cavour, fascists
found a caricature of Malatesta in one of the houses they invaded and
devasted, and shredded it with their bayonets, then burned it.
But MAlatesta wasnât personally molested. Only on the night of October
30, in the distant neighborhood of Santa Croce in Gerusalemme, the
editing and press of UmanitĂ Nova was assaulted and partly destroyed. A
new invasion, some days later, completed the destruction. Malatesta
succeeded, however, to publish another two issues in other presses, in
an energetic and direct language faced with the triumphant enemy., But
then the government intervened directly, first using police to formally
prohibit the typographers from printing the paper, and day? later with
an order to arrest the administrator Giuseppe Turci, which meant the
seizure of all the papers, accounting books, and the money that remained
in the coffers.
UmanitĂ Nova therefore died, whose last issue (196) was from December 2,
1922. A trial began later against Malatesta and a number of editors and
contributors to the paper in Rome and other parts of Italy; but it was a
simple pretext to oblige its suppression, since nothing more was spoken
of it later.
(1924â26). â Persecutions.
The quill broken in his hand, Malatesta didnât lose his drive. He looked
for and found a small place for rent, 87 San Giovanni, in Laterano, near
the Coliseum, and there he set up a modest electrical mechanicâs shop.
He returned, then, after three years of journalistic battle, to the
profession he had taken up on occasions in London from 1882 until 1919.
Work wasnât lacking, maybe because he was still able and strong enough
despite his sixty-nine years, maybe because of the great sympathies he
enjoyed in the most diverse environments. But soon a difficult fight of
another type began for him, with the fascist police who followed him
everywhere he went to work on electrical installations, gas stoves,
repairs, and so on. The agents annoyed and tried to intimidate those who
regularly gave him work. In April of 1923, the papers were occupied with
an improvised break-in of the house of a high military chief, in the
neighborhood of CittĂ Giardino Aniene, where Malatesta was installing
electrical equipment.^([73])
In the intervals that work left free, he continued to occupy himself
with the events of the anarchist movement. Besides the persistent work
of stimulus and propaganda that he developed with his personal influence
among those who came close and of the skills with which he maintained
the files of comrades in coalitions, that which naturally escaped all
documentation, we found a pair of articles of his in two publications
done in Rome by Temistocle Monticelli: Per la prossima riscossa (the
pamphlet Solidarietà , Rome, February, 1923) and Perché il Fascismo vines
e seguila a spadroneggiare in Italia (in the paper Il Libero accordo,
Rome, no. 78 of August 28, 1923). In the paper Fede! that was started in
Rome that year by Luigi Damiani, earlier the editor of the suppressed
UmanitĂ Nova, I remember among other things a pair of articles of his
arguing with the communists (nos. 7 and 11 of October 28 and November
25), and a report written by request of the Italian Anarchic Union to
the anarchist Congress of Paris (that should have been held at the end
of that year, but wasnât): âConduct of the anarchists in the labor
movementâ (Fede! no. 3 of September 30).
Malatesta turned seventy at the end of the year (1923), and war displays
of sympathy and affection arrived from various parts of the world from
comrades and friends. Meetings were held in Paris and Buenos Aires in
memory and solidarity with the old warrior. In Italy these displays
stayed contained within modest limits of familiar intimacy due to the
observation and the fascist reaction. But his closest friends took the
opportunity to offer him the means to a work more useful to the cause,
and at the same time less dangerous and more independent. By the
initiative of the paper Fede!, with the cooperation of comrades in Italy
and abroad, several thousand lira were collected to enable Malatesta to
start a new, regular paper of his own. And so it was that on January 1,
1924, the semimonthly magazine Pensiero e VolontĂ appeared in Rome.
In its beginnings the fascist regime consented to, in Italy, a legal
mask of freedom of press, obligated to this by the old official
political constitution that couldnât be entirely abolished at once,
though later this freedom was limited as much as possible, illegally,
with the private violence of its bands of thugs and arsonists, and by
means of arbitrary and exceptional police measures. Malatestaâs new
magazine would make use of that surviving gust of freedom.
Pensiero e VolontĂ had the character of all of Malatestaâs other
publications: clarity and serenity of ? language, dignified before the
enemy, intransigent in its ideas, sharp observation of the facts, depths
and thought. Given the situation, he ? was obligated to escape or elude
certain arguments of real life, or better to treat them in a manner
imposed by the circumstances. But when it was necessary, Malatesta would
frankly say what pertained to the all-powerful dominators of Italy, and
to Mussolini himself, signing what he wrote, as he did, for example,
when Mussolini spoke of a pretended âAlbertini-Malatesta ring,â to
insinuate the existence of fantastic relations between the anarchist
hostility to fascism and the opportunistic and moderate opposition of a
few conservative monarchists, or when he dared to brag in the foreign
press of the liberty shown by his government to the known anarchist
agitator.
The life of the magazine was soon difficult and laborious because of
this. Barely six months later, on the day after the fascist
assassination of Matteoti, the government established censorship of the
press, Pensiero e VolontĂ began to be the target of seizures, which were
so frequent that throughout early 1925 the magazine couldnât publish
regularly.
Often, after the first edition was seized, the expurgated second and
third drafts were as well, not to tell of the postal sabotage and
arbitrary fascist seizures in each locality. The twenty-four regular
issues could only be printed the first year; in the second (1925) only
sixteen issues were released, and sixteen in the third, with five more
installments of the censored issues.^([74]) The final issue was no. 16
of October 10, 1926. Number 17, given to the printer in early November,
with an article by Malatesta against the death penalty proposed by the
fascist government, would never appear. The government completely
suppressed Pensiero e VolontĂ , as it suppressed all of the antifascist
or merely independent Italian press after Anteo Zamboniâs attempt on
Mussoliniâs life in Bologna, in late October.
Malatestaâs voice was thereby constrained to the most total silence, and
he was cut off from any way of living through intellectual labor.
Although his advanced age would have permitted him, ? he wouldnât be
able to return to his manual labor, since his electrical mechanicâs shop
on S. Giovanni street in Laterano, entrusted to his worker friends three
years ago, had been invaded and devastated by the fascists after
Zamboniâs attempt. Anyway, in the situation that followed, nobody would
have given him work.
So since then, Malatesta could live â together with his companion Elena
Melli, with who he had been together with since 1921, and with her
daughter Gemma who he adored like his own daughter â only with the help
of the comrades who were most nearly like friends and others who, though
distant, took interest in him. This help never failed him, until the
end, the modest bread that he needed; though it couldnât be anything
more than the help of poor people to a poor man. He who knew Malatesta
couldnât do less than think of his spiritual displeasure in a similar
position, he who had always given all to others and would never have
wanted to cost anyone a cent. But it wasnât more than an inevitable
consequence of the enemyâs prepotency, like the material and moral
aggravations of imprisonment, and of the flights of his past. In
reality, his was the condition of a prisoner, whose children and
brothers try their best to alleviate the sufferings of prison.
A prisoner he was, truly, despite all appearances, since fascism little
by little isolated him in plain Rome from all contact with the
surrounding world. More than once among the near and distant advised him
to flee; but he didnât want to. Since the beginning of November, 1926,
all freedom had been suppressed, the government adopting the most
draconian means and the bloodiest persecutions against all free men and
enemies of fascism, the exodus of Italians who felt most menaced had
intensified, or for who the Italian atmosphere was most unbearable. For
a certain time, Malatesta was allowed to leave and the opportunity was
offered to him by Swiss and French friends. But he preferred to stay,
and advised others to leave: it was just (he told them) to stay in
place, to set an example of resistance to the rest, to look forward to
the occasion of an action impossible from far away, to do what little
could be done, to remain in a condition to stay informed of the ? events
that would be decided from one moment to the next, and so on.^([75])
Later, especially when the Spanish revolution took place, he had wanted
to depart; but then it was too late.
Through the end of 1926, the persecutions against him, although in a
simulated and hypocritical form, grew progressively. Already by
September, 1926, after Gino Lucettiâs attempt against Mussolini, he had
been arrested (and his partner too) and held in prison for 12 days.
After the other attempt of Zamboni in Bologna, he had escaped arrest
only by hiding himself for several days. But at the end of the year,
after the flight of Turati from Italy, and more still through mid-1927,
after the clandestine exit of other people who were known to be his
friends, the vigilance against him intensified until it was literally
asphyxiating, and furthermore dangerous for those who came near him.
They didnât stoop ? to imprisoning him, lacking all visible pretext for
that, and on account of his age â those older than 70 werenât sent to
confinement â and fascism feared the enormous repercussion that his
arrest would have had outside of Italy, and maybe the spirit of
retaliation that the deed would have raised among his comrades. It was
preferred to have him as a hostage, in a type of house confinement,
surrounding him with an ostentatious and insuperable barrier of police.
Already since the end of 1921 or the beginning of 1922, some months
before the âmarch on Rome,â Malatesta had rented, with his small family,
an apartment of two rooms and a kitchen on 8 Andrea Doria street (then
Piazzale degli Eroi), on the third floor, in the Porta Trionfale
neighborhood. His apartment, for which he paid a modest rent, formed a
part of the vast complex of the Peopleâs Houses Institute of the Commune
of Rome. And Malatesta lived there until his death.
foreign anarchist press. â Sickness and death (1938).
Since the beginning of 1927, the fascist government had installed a type
of police guard in the doorway of the building where Malatesta lived,
posted there day and night and outfitted with cars and motorcycles.
Later there was also a sentinel on the third-story landing, by the door
to his apartment. When Malatesta left, he was followed everywhere by an
escort on foot and in vehicles. If he entered a house, the police would
pretend [?] to enter as well, or would prevent Malatesta from entering.
If someone went to Malatestaâs house, they were detained and left free
only if they werenât a subversive; and it was intimated that they never
return. If somebody said hello or stopped him in the street, they ran
the same risk; the least that would happen would be that they were
entered in a register.^([76]) His partner Elena Melli and her daughter
Gemma were also followed as they left the house. The police dedicated to
Gemma, a student, would also enter the scholastic locales ? and wait for
her outside the hall during her lessons.
It would never end if we began to tell of the details of this oppressive
observation and the incidents that took place. I will relate some of the
most salient:
The building Malatesta lived in had a secondary exit, which the police
sealed with a wall. Of two friends, a father and son, who came to visit
him once, one was sent to confinement and the other subjected to
âammonizioneâ (special observation for the public security). An English
woman who Malatesta had known in London, met him and invited him to her
house, and because of this had so many annoyances that she repentantly
broke off all relations with him. A known lawyer who had arrived in Rome
from the provinces wanted to make a courtesy visit to him, and that
sufficed to have him arrested for an entire day, and that briefly only
because his friends, highly placed people and well-seen by the regime,
made a serious effort to liberate him. Another time Malatesta,
interested in one of his daughterâs professors, wanted to go to one of
his lessons at the university: that was enough for the professor to see
his conferences suppressed and himself submitted to a hearing. In one
instance, a grave incident took place to the young Gemma; a policeman
had bothered one of her comrades from school and she had protested. In
revenge, the policeman waited for her near Malatestaâs house and hurled
her into the chairs near a café, wounding her seriously.
Those that know the sociable and affectionate nature of Malatesta will
understand the emotional suffering brought about by this isolation, and
even worse than the isolation, the constant danger of bringing harm and
misery to those who were driven by affection to approach him. It was he
himself, for the most part, who since the first moments told all of his
friends to abstain from visiting him to avoid disagreeable irritation.
When he saw in the streets some friend or acquaintance in the distance
who looked like they would approach him, he winked and made signs to the
incautious person to pass him without a word, lest they fall into the
hands of the police who followed him.
This grievous situation was aggravated by the most rigorous censorship
that his letters were subjected to. All of the foreign periodicals were
seized; and it was a solemn event for him when, by some error of the
surveillance, some friendâs paper arrived in his hands. The same often
happened with books; what was seized included the known English book by
Ishill about Elias and Elise Reclus. It was intended, without success,
to prevent the Banks from transmitting the money that was sent to him
from friend outside the country. One check was returned to the bank that
it came from, a first time, with the motivation of treating it as
âantinational money.â The bank in turn expedited the check, making the
ridiculousness of the event observed.
All of the letters that arrived were read by a special office and then
handed over, often with long delays, to the recipient; and some
periodicals werenât given back at all. But complete interception was
renounced, clearly because the government had found it more useful to
its goals to send the letters on their way, to read all that which could
have been of interest. Astute, but useless, because Malatesta had warned
everyone to only write what they would be able to write to a person in
jail. At times, with the certified mail that hadnât already been opened
in the office, one of the police guards entered the house with the
mailman and pretended that Malatesta opened them in his presence,
particularly to seize imprints or of periodicals that were in them.
These preventative measures didnât impede others of a repressive nature.
From time to time Malatestaâs house was broken into, some book or paper
would be seized, or some article he was working on or hadnât sent off,
or a letter. An article he had written in French for SebastiĂĄn Faureâs
Anarchist EncyclopĂŠdia (La Enciclopedie Anarchiste), about
âdeterminism,â met this fate in the hands of the police. In another
instance an English article about âScience and anarchyâ was confiscated
as he was about to send it. But generally, the pretext for going to his
house was to interrogate him or⊠to stay informed of his health, simply
with the goal of making sure he was home if he didnât leave by his usual
time. There was no shortage of more serious incidents. In 1928, after
the explosion of a bomb in Julius Caesar square in Milan, his partner
Melli was detained, only because she had lived in that metropolis of
Lombardy for a long time. She was held in jail for about two months
without being questioned by anyone, and without and motive at all,
besides the obvious one of tormenting Malatestaâs family.
It was unavoidable that with the passing years, Malatestaâs always
indecisive health would fail him. In early 1926, he had one of his
bronchial attacks, complicated by a strong hemorrhage which alarmed his
doctor, who advised him to spend the summer season by the sea. In July
he went with his partner and her daughter to Elena, a small town at the
edge of the Tirreno, near Gaeta. But, the police wouldnât leave him in
peace. As would happen later in Rome, whoever approached him was
arrested. Moreover, those who arrived in town from the outside were
detained if they were known leftists, as happened to the lawyer Di
Mambro from nearby Cassino when he got off of the train, âBecause
Malatesta is in town,â he was told. After two or three days, the friend
who enjoyed Malatestaâs hospitality was cruelly pelted and beaten by the
fascists. To avoid other incidents with his friends, Malatesta was
pressured into returning to Rome. The same thing, more or less, was
repeated five years later. His condition had grown serious, he was very
weak and the doctor came to recommend that he leave to breathe the ocean
air of some beach. Malatesta went with Gemma to Terracina, not very far
from Rome. This time a truck of policemen and their chief followed him
from the capital. It is pointless to recount the new vexations he
suffered, along with whoever approached him or the girl. It was pointed
out and prohibited to speak a word to the waiters who served him in the
café. ? A poor girl of 14 years who had met Gemma on the beach and went
to visit her was called by the police and threatened in such a way that
she became sick and bedridden with a fever. The youth of the place began
to show a malhumor and Malatesta, to avoid other incidents or
endangering people on his account, interrupted his cure almost before it
began and took the train for Rome.
The greatest fear of the government and the police was that Malatesta
would find a way to escape and take refuge in another country. It is
true that their intentions changed little by little. He already wasnât
of the opinion that it was best to stay in Italy. I had written him more
recently that I regretted having left, he responded that he had made a
mistake and that he was convinced that his sacrifice to remain there had
been useless. It had become unbearable for him to live that way. To be a
type of bait for the police, who lay in waiting with the aim of catching
and putting under their power those who showed affection or interest in
him, humiliated him and made him suffer. More than once he told me and
wrote that he preferred the confinement of jail a thousand times to that
âlibertyâ of his, false and hypocritical.
When later the fall of the Spanish monarchy grew in this birth
unexpected revolutionary situations, he felt more strongly the weight of
the immobility forced upon him. On April 25, 1931 he wrote to me: âI
have a fever (donât be alarmed, I speak metaphorically) for the events
of Spain. It appears to me that the situation presents great
possibilities and I would like to go there. I am infuriated to be here,
enchained.â How well it is understood! He always had the same hopes as
Bakunin for a possible Spanish revolution. He had been there more than
once through the first International; some of his closest friends were
Spanish, the language was familiar to him; and if he had been able to
go, he really would have been able to develop the most useful action.
But it was already impossible! The police should have been able to
divine his desire; and in Terracina they were made to understand it
easily. Precisely in that summer of 1931 a project had been aired, not
entirely fantastic, to organize his flight from Italy. But the eternal
speakers and stupid publications in the papers made the smallest
beginnings impossible to realize, and perhaps were the cause of a more
rigorous vigilance over his surroundings.
But it shouldnât be believed that the tormentuous and difficult position
Malatesta was put in by the persecutions, disturbances and illnesses
impeded him from continuing to live his intellectual and spiritual life,
in harmony with his sentiments of free man, of a revolutionary and an
anarchist. On the contrary. He didnât renounce in any way, despite the
silence to which he was constrained in Italy, to say his ideas, to
stimulate action, to denounce the infamies of the oppressors, to
cooperate in the incessant elaboration of libertarian ideas, to be
interested in the international social and anarchists movement. There is
no important question which, in these last years and until the eve of
his death, has been debated in the anarchist camp, which he hasnât
spoken his opinion about. He wasnât stingy with advice and exhortations,
in particular if he heard the echo of certain antipathetic controversies
among comrades, or if he believed to discover dangerous deviations in
some theoretical or tactical attitudes. ? In addition to the articles
for papers, he wrote to an infinity of comrades, he said all that he
thought and knew without worrying about the censor, and directed words
of affection, stimulus and hope to all, in which could always be seen
the same strong human love and his unshakeable confidence in the future.
After 1926 until his end he continued his writing, always so lucid and
original â at that point only published abroad â and contributing to the
anarchist press. They would be too many to enumerate. The majority have
appeared in Il Risveglio Anarchico of Geneva, and finally not a few in
LâAdunata dei Refrattari of New York, where his last article has
appeared in chronological order, about what is called âanarchist
revisionism,â March 12, 1932. He has beneficially written other
articles, moreover, for La Lotta umana and Le Libertaire of Paris, for
Studi Sociali of Montevideo and Probuzhdenie (a Russian magazine) of
Detroit, Michigan, and probably for other publications that I have
ignored or forgotten.
Some of these writings, of notable breadth, have a special importance,
as for example his critique of the âAnarchist platformâ project of group
of Russian comrades (1927), a study about the âregime of property after
the revolutionâ (1929), another about the mission of âanarchists in the
actual momentâ (1930), one of memories and critiques of Peter Kropotkin
(1931), and more. Most important, especially from the historical point
of view is a long preface to Max Nettlauâs recent book, Bakunin and the
International in Italy (Bakunin e lâInternazionale in Italia, Geneva,
1928), a type of retrospective description of revolutionary Italy around
1870. I have said (in another part of this work) his most recent
intentions to prepare a type of theoretical and historical
re-elaboration of his ideas in connection with the memories of his life.
But I havenât known anything more of that. Most likely he lacked the
time, and above all the tranquility, to do it.
Meanwhile the blows to his health became more frequent and menacing.
After the serious sickness of yearly 1926, he had recovered enough,
though continuing to pay tribute each winter to his old bronchial
infection that had always tormented him since a boy. He had a most
serious relapse in the spring of 1931, and he hadnât completely
recuperated. The next summer, he who had never suffered from the heat,
even enjoying it when others found it unbearable, for the first time
felt himself exhausted by it. The sickness contributed to dishearten him
that summer and in autumn (1931) on two occasions, and seriously, from
his partner, having tried as hard as she could to help him day and
night.
With winter he began to feel worse, between continuous highs and lows,
though without overly serious relapses. The worst weakness persisted and
grew, despite the resistance of his spirit. On the new year of 1932 he
wrote me a brief postcard: âOne freezes here, literally and
figuratively; and I am frozen up outside and within.â He anxiously
awaited the spring sun, confident of a renovation of his forces. His
heart resisted less and less. He had moments of suffocation, sometimes
provoked by the smallest movement, and to alleviate it he resorted again
to the oxygen respiration. His will fought energetically against the
illness, and by March he began to feel better. His letters to friends
became more frequent, longer, more calm; he wrote some articles again.
But it was for a short time.
On March 26, 1932, a bronchiopulmonary attack, on top of his chronic
bronchitis, locked him in bed. This time the illness was very grave. On
April 9 he was at the point of death; the danger lasted several days,
receding little by little. But the recovery was slow and uncertain. He
managed to abandon the bed, to go from one room to the other, to sleep
peacefully for several hours. The fatigue bothered him less and the need
for artificial oxygen diminished. He began to write to friends again.
But the recovery was interrupted a bit later by strong fevers, and the
fatigue returned. This crisis appeared surmounted, so much so that on
June 30 he wrote me a note with words of hope reborn.
But in what followed not many illusions were made. As I later
understood, he wrote slightly more refreshing letters to me, because he
knew that I was sick as well, and didnât want to afflict me. But to
another good friend of his, Luigi Bertoni of Geneva, he opened his
spirit more. His last letters were another reflection of his soul, so
full of a will to live, full of love of the idea, of tenderness for all
the comrades in faith.
âI spend,â he wrote to Bertoni, âpart of the day half-sleeping, as a
fool (I generally canât sleep at night), and by the other half I live
the intimate tragedy of my spirit, that is to say, I am shaken by the
great affection that comrades feel for me and at the same time my
torment by the feeling of having merited it so little and, what is much
worse, by the growing awareness of already not being able to do anything
in the future. Frankly, when one has dreamt and waited so, it is sad to
die in the conditions in which maybe I will die, perhaps on the eve of
the awaited events. But what do you want! Maybe there is no more remedy
than to wait for the end holding before my mindâs eyes the image of that
which I have so desired and who I have so loved.â And in another letter
to the same person, on June 30, â⊠In relation to my health, here they
would make me believe that I am better, and I to not too afflict you to
feign to believe it. But I know that it isnât true. It is true, however,
that the good time and heat, in which I so trust, still havenât begun:
there is, therefore, place to hopeâŠâ^([77])
Someone near to him wrote me after his death: âHe didnât want to leave
his desk: night and day he was there in that chair, at his table, and he
wouldnât be seen to abandon that place at any price. He only left for a
moment to lie in bed or sit in an armchair. When he was in agony and
already couldnât move, a small movement he would make with his feet: the
act of getting out of bed to go to the table. Because the table
represented life for him, where he was busy with his dear ideas, where
he related with distant comrades, reading and rereading his letters and
writing them⊠He always thought of his comrades, and the great pain he
was going to cause them. He was moved almost to tears when his thought
went to his most loved friends and he saw them receive the news of his
deathâŠâ
On July 11 he tried to write me for the last time. But that day he
couldnât finish the letter and send it. I had it later, written
laboriously and so almost interminably. On the 18^(th) he got worse.
However, he wasnât resigned to defeat. He couldnât be in bed, save some
moments; and he stayed at the table or reposed in an armchair. He didnât
lose spirit; his memory was always accurate and sure, his intelligence
didnât suffer any alteration, although he slowly lost his physical
powers. On the morning of July 21, the eve of his death, he sat to eat
with his family, read the paper as was his custom and when the mail
arrived, his letters were read by Elena. He spoke of politics a bit with
the doctor who came to visit him. He found a way ? to write to his niece
TristĂĄn in Egypt and to a comrade in Paris, and noted in the paper some
brief thought about society and the individual, which showed him to be
in his usual lucidity of intelligence.^([78])
At midday he sat at the table, as always, and made himself eat a little.
He split the rest of the day between the desk and armchair until 9 at
night. Then he laid down, to not get up again. At night he deteriorated
enough, and at about 3 in the morning he went in to agony. However, he
preserved consciousness even then, responding to those speaking with
signs with his head. His heart gradually resisted less, and twenty
minutes after noon, July 22, 1932, ceased beating.
Errico Malatesta had died! Our loved comrade, the friend, the brother,
the father of so many of us, the faithful defender of the proletariat,
the apostle of revolution and anarchy, had ended his long, laborious and
heroic journey. Now he belongs to History.
I think it would be good to add here the news received from Rome about
Malatestaâs funerals:
âAs soon as the Roman police knowing that Malatesta had died, they took
all measures to prevent comrades from going to see him and to avoid a
possible agreement between them for the funerals. Ten police and a
commissioner, beyond those already in regular service there, were spread
out on the stairs of the building where Malatesta lived. They took the
personal data of all those who approached the dead manâs door.
âOther police on bicycles circled about the houses in a generous radius,
to dissolve the groups which formed, to stop comrades from heading to
the house, and to avoid all type of news of his death from spreading.
With all this, fifteen comrades, mean and women, could meet.
âThe funerals were marked for Saturday the 23^(rd) at 3 in the
afternoon. The itinerary was set by the police themselves. The press
maintained absolute silence: not a single line! The obituary notices
sent by relatives as paid notes werenât published. For the news to be
known on the outside, the foreign papers telegraphed the Press
Association of Rome to get confirmation.
They responded affirmatively; but in Italy nothing was made known.
âThree cars of family and friends followed the hearse?. Then came the
police automobile, which was consecrated to observation of Malatesta,
full of police; other police functionaries followed in a wagon?, others
still on bicycle.
âThe only flowers permitted were a wreath from the family and relatives.
Only consented-upon writing: âTo Errico Malatesta, Eduaro and TristĂĄn,
Elena and Gemma.â (Eduardo and TristĂ n were two of his nephews.) The
flowers from children in the vicinity would be left in the empty
apartment. The red carnations from comrades were only allowed in the
coffin. Poor Gemma wanted to follow her father with a bouquet of red
flowers, to deposit them later in his coffin. The police said that they
wouldnât permit her the ostentation of throwing the, Gemma, hopeless and
pained, hurled the flowers she had in her arms out the window. So their
departure was permitted.
âThe law allowed funeral processions to travel half a kilometer of
street by foot; but this time even a single step was prohibited. The
relatives and friends had to get in their cars as soon as they left the
doorway and follow at great speed. On the length of the street, in all
the intersections? the hearse passed, âby accidentâ there were riflemen
and police to stop the comrades from crossing or going down the same
street as the rapid and short procession. It was like that everywhere up
until the cemetery.
In the cemetery many other police and characters from Central
Interrogation waited. Police guards were left before the coffin all
night. Sunday at 6 in the morning the coffin was lowered into the grave,
in the common area of the poor people, amidst the dead of the people,
that people for whom Malatesta had fought his whole life.
âSince then two police take turns in the cemetery to take the
affiliation of those who dare to approach the grave. A comrade who knew
nothing of this went and was detained a moment before it. The police
took his affiliation and accompanied him to Interrogation; there he was
interned in a cell, where he was left for fourteen hours.
âMalatesta, having died as he lived, outside all religion, had been
taken to the cemetery without a cross; and his relatives had given
dispositions in order that crosses not be placed on his tomb. But orders
from the government of Rome were exact and unbendable: a cross was
placed even above the grave of the atheist anarchist. The next morning,
when his comrade Elena Melli went to the cemetery, she saw the cross,
went to take it immediately; but had to go to declare that she had
removed it as his wife. Later, Elena was called to the police for this,
though they didnât bother to offend her pain with useless reproaches.â
(From Rome, July 30, 1932.)
The announcement of Malatestaâs death deeply moved the world of
revolutionary workers and filled the anarchists of all countries with
sorrow. Even his adversaries were inclined to respect before the noble
figure of the great Italian revolutionary who had ceased to live.
Only fascism wanted to distinguish itself, beyond its borders, intending
to throw a pile of mud on his tomb when it had barely closed. A fascist
daily from Buenos Aires, official organ of the party that dominates
Italy and spawned XXX by the Italian Embassy, published on July 25, 1932
a blurb in which, after making ironies about the unanimous condolences
of the leftist press of the Argentine Republic, about the abundant
columns dedicated to the memory of the extinguished, fantasized about
the pretended moral and material help given to Malatesta by Mussolini in
the last moments of his life: morally, speaking to him several times,
providing him with books; materially, finding him lodging and
co-operating in his sustenance.
It is useless to say that it deals with the most ridiculous lies;
Mussolini and Malatesta were for a brief time friends â of a superficial
enough friendship, anyway â in 1913â14; but all relations between them
ceased after the last polemic letter from Malatesta to Mussolini (see
the biography), from London, in December of 1914, regarding the war.
They didnât see each other, nor spoke, nor wrote. As to Malatestaâs
sustenance, after he was put by fascism in an absolute impossibility of
earning his bread in any way, he was always provided for, until the
final instant, modestly, but sufficiently, by his comrades. Far from
procuring him books, Mussoliniâs police seized those that arrived by
mail. The lodging that Malatesta rented from the Institute of Peopleâs
Houses of the Commune of Rome since before the âMarch on Rome,â he had
always paid for from his wallet.
When I read such piggishness in the paper alluded to, against that which
other papers (including a fascist one) protested, I believed it a stupid
invention, in the place, of whatever editor. But when I knew that
similar voices had circulated in some dailies of North America, I had
thought that the breeze of slander had been breathed from Rome, without
worrying about it much, it is understood, there where the truth was too
well-known and where it was preferred to hush up the news of the manâs
death, whose name alone caused the tyrants such panic. A paper of New
York also spoke of the living space put at Malatestaâs disposition by
the government; and another of Chicago even spoke of a chalet in the
vicinity of Rome. The sincerity of journalism is remarkable!
Elena Melli, the comrade of ideas who in the last twelve or thirteen
years had also been Errico Malatestaâs life companion and had tended to
him so lovingly, creating the warmth of domestic housekeeping in his
surroundings and permitting him to enjoy, at least in the intimacy of
the house and the family, what bit of tranquility that was still
possible in the tempestuous Italian life and under the inquisitorial
persecutions of the fascist regime, he had pursued with his tenacious
will that the remains of our loved friend would have a dignified and
long-lasting grave.
Recourse has been had, for the not insignificant expenses, to the aid of
comrades and friends scattered throughout the world, and it has been had
immediately and sufficiently. And therefore in little more than a year
his pious wish and that of those who loved Malatesta has been satisfied.
Malatestaâs tomb is found in Campo Varano, the monumental Roman
cemetery, in division 30, third file, number 20, to the left of the
broken column, beyond the ossuary. It is very simple: a rectangular
stone lightly inclined, with his first and last name in letters 11
centimeters high, date of birth and death in 4 centimeter letters, and a
flowerpot with a smelted photograph, encased. Name and date are in zinc
letters.
âforced domicile,â a system of house arrest instituted by X in Y because
Italian fare, roughly meaning to do, make, create, or build, in contrast
to the phrase often used at the time, XXX
See the âDeclaration of Principlesâ in this volume.
[1]
A. Borghi, in âErrico Malatesta in 60 years of the anarchist struggleâ
(âErrico Malatesta in 60 anni di lotte anarchiche,â New York, 1933
pp. 139â140) points to an article in The Post (La Stampa) of TurĂn,
written by Bendetto Croce and reprinted later in his book âMen and
events of old Italyâ (Uomini e cose della vecchia Italia. Bari,
1927), in which an intrigue is vaguely spelled out, involving
Malatesta, Maria SofĂa and some Isogno, an agent of the ex-queen,
âin 1904⊠to liberate Bresci, regicide of Umberto of Savoy.â It
serves us well to remember that Gaetano Bresci had committed suicide
(or was assassinated) in Santo Stefano prison in 1901, almost three
years earlier.
[2] It is unlikely that I exaggerate. Something similar happened with
the guards who watched Pietro Gori shortly before his death in 1911.
Furthermore, it is treated, as is well understood, extraordinarily, then
itâs also true that in the same year (1914) in Ancona, and later in
Milan, Piacenza, Florence, etc., in 1920, soldiers and police were seen
to disagree bloodily in the distance, but towards Malatesta, with the
apparent intention of assassinating him.
[3] Published in Studi Sociali of Montevideo, no. 21 of September 30,
1932.
[4] Its author was the director of LâIniciativa, a certain Armando
Casalini according to what I was told later, who was eventually
discredited by the republicans, distanced from his party and became
fascist. He was a fascist deputy in the Italian parliament when he was
killed by a Roman laborer in 1924.
[5] I remember one nasty and virulent article titled âThe acquitted,â
after the Milan trial of 1921 in the conservative paper LâArena of
Verona (July 31, 1921) â unsigned, naturally.
[6] Without wanting to give this circumstance more significance than it
should have, it isnât superfluous to remember at this point Malatestaâs
friendly relations with Miguel Angiolillo and Gaetano Bresci until the
eve of their equanimous acts.
[7] After the above was written, the first volume of Scritti by
Malatesta appeared (Geneva, Editions of âRisveglio,â 1934, 358p. in
octavo); containing the writings of the daily UmanitĂ Nova.
[8] The lovers of romantic ideas, especially abroad, have fantasized
about a Malatesta descended from the old patriarchs of Rimini. That is
empty. It appears that the Malatesta family was of noble origin, but it
had no known link to the counts of Malatesta of the historical Roman
family.
[9] See Max Nettlau: Errico Malatesta, p. 185.
[10] See two letters to Luigi Bertoni, of June 1913, in the Risveglio
from Geneva, no. 852 of October 22, 1932.
[11]
M. Nettlau: Errico Malatesta, the life of an anarchist. Translated from
the German by D. A. de SantillĂĄn, revised and augmented by the
author, Ed. La Protesta, Buenos Aires, 1923. 261p. â When this work
of mine was almost finished, another book about M. saw light in
North America, by Armando Borghi: Errico Malatesta in 60 anni di
lotte anarchiche (Storia, critica, ricordi). Preface by SebastiĂĄn
Faure. Ed. âEdizioni sociali,â P.O. Box 60, New York, N.Y. 283p. â
It is a book that studies the action of M. as a militant in relation
to the anarchist movement, with a markedly argumentative and
propagandistic character. It has also been useful to me to correct
some points of my narrative and has enriched it with some notes.
[12] I wrote, during the Malatestaâs prison time in Milan from 1920â21,
biographical points about him for the magazine La Rivolta Ideale from
Bologna, that were re-edited several times in other papers and in a
pamphlet, or as a preface to pamphlets of Malatesta, in Italian, French
and Spanish. But they contained some inaccuracies, errors of dates, and
so on, that Nettlauâs book and information lost to Malatesta himself
later have permitted me to correct.
[13] In âThe republic of the youth and of the bearded menâ in the paper
La Questione Sociale of Florence, no. 3 of January 5, 1884. Reprinted in
the Almanacco Sociale Illustrato for 1925, pp. 67â70, Casa Editrice
sociale, Milan, under the title âHow I became socialist,â though this
edition is missing some argumentative final lines which would have
prevented its publication. Max Nettlau cites several paragraphs in the
book mentioned above, pp. 18â20.
[14] These details, some by voice and others by letter, come directly
from Malatesta, and at some points I have adopted his precise words.
[15] Malatesta said âLâOrdineâ to me, but I seem to remember that the
complete name of the paper was Il Motto dâOrdine.
[16] Malatesta abandoned his studies in the fourth year of medical
school at the University of Naples. In Socialism e socialisti in Italia
by Agostinelli (cited by Nettlau), it is said that while a student,
Malatesta was detained in a tumult in Naples, convicted for the first
time and suspended from the University for a year. Nothing more is known
of Malatestaâs life as a student.
[17] Pensiero e VolontĂ of Rome, no. 11, July 1, 1926.
[18] This story, which I had also read before (I canât remember where),
I found reproduced without a source cited, in an issue of LâOperaio
Italiano, a syndicalist reformist organ of Paris, August, 1932.
[19] The other similar trials in the rest of Italy (Bologna, Florence,
Rome, Liorna, etc.) ended with other such acquittals and with the same
result of the growth of enthusiasm and of extraordinary propaganda.
[20] See Nettlau: an article by Malatesta, âA proposito di Masoneriaâ
(Regarding Masonry) in UmanitĂ Nova, from Milan, October 7, 1920, and a
letter of his to I Resto del Carlino of Bologna, dated October 14.
[21] These were legal proceedings against dangerous individuals which
implied special police observation, an obligation to periodically appear
before the questura, not to change housing or to travel, not to be out
of the house at night, not to attend reunions, theaters, cafes, inns, to
stay away from âsuspiciousâ persons, and so on; and all this under
penalty of arrest and conviction to jail.
[22] Malatesta spoke about this with me at length in the summer of 1913,
telling me of adventures that would be too long to repeat here, however
interesting. But I avoided asking exact dates or taking notes, which
might have suggested to him my biographical projects which, at least
then, he wouldnât have approved of.
[23] A movement of ideas in about the same direction was also made in
Switzerland among some French-language elements.
[24] I find these details in an article of mine: Frugando fra vechi
giornali, in the magazine Pensiero e VolontĂ of Rome, no. 7 of May
16-June 15 1925. Many details were told to me by Malatesta and, in 1904,
by Fortunato Serantoni, dead at close to twenty-five years. Others about
the Congress of Florence and the succeeding one of Rome have been
extracted in Il Martello, by Fabriano and Jesi, issues of the 17 the 26
of November, 1876, from Nettlauâs book, and so on. I point out that here
for briefness I have summarized everything in the most summary way.
[25] Nettlau specified that Cafiero had spent, for the purchase of the
Baronata in Ticino canton, for propaganda, insurrectionary attempts, and
so on, from 250 to 300 thousand liras, which represented, however, very
little of the effective value of his inheritance, liquidated carelessly
for a much lower price.
[26] Following Nettlauâs version, taken from that of Angiolini:
Socialismo e socialisti in Italia, already cited, modified somewhat to
agree with the elements extracted from other lectures and from
conversations with Malatesta.
[27] The participants, less three or four (counting Cafiero and
Malatesta) were all from Southern and Central Italy, including many
Romans like Ceccarelli.
[28] I canât remember who told me that Malatesta had given the property
away while he was in the Santa Maria C. V. jail, and that in the jail he
signed the necessary official paperwork to a notary. I donât know which
of the two versions is correct, but it is of no importance.
[29] âTcherkesoff and Malatesta give us a handâ (P. Kropotkin, âHow
RĂ©voltĂ© was founded,â an article translated from Les Temps Nouveaux of
Paris in the magazine Il Pensiero of Rome, no. 18 of September 16,
1909). The well-known anarchist communist organ Le Révolté began in
Geneva on February 22, 1879, was transported to Paris in 1885, becoming
La RĂ©volte in 1887, and later Les Temps Nouveaux in 1885, until it
ceased publication in August of 1914.
[30] From Brussels, in April, 1880, Malatesta sustained an intense
correspondence with J. Guesde and his mouthpiece, the paper LâEgalitĂ© of
Paris, in defense of the âRegional Spanish Federationâ of the
International slandered in the paper in the lamest fashion by a
pretended Spanish correspondent. Malatesta even saw himself as obliged
to send his padrinos to Guesde. See the narration of the affair in Le
Révolté of Geneva, no. 5 of May 1, 1880.
[31] Malatesta told me that by 1879, when they met in Geneva a little
after the foundation of Révolté, Cafiero gave at intervals the first
signs of mental alienation.
[32] From a letter of D. A. SantillĂĄn, with points taken from Max
Nettlauâs works.
[33]
M. Nettlau: Errico Malatesta. âLa Protesta,â Buenos Aires, p. 130.
[34] Also from Nettlau, see Kropotkin, Memories of a Revolutionary.
[35] See Anarchism in Egypt (Lâanarchismo in Egipto), by Un Vecchio (I.
Parrini), in Human Protest (La Protesta Umana), San Francisco,
California, no. 40 of January 9, 1904.
[36] Nettlau notes that a complete collection of this paper is found in
the library of the British Museum in London, where some friend of good
will would be able to go to copy the most important articles for a
future edition of Malatestaâs writings.
[37] From the daily Il Messaggero (Rome), no. 34, of February 3, 1884
and following.
[38] Nettlau, op. cit., of Le Révolté (Paris).
[39] This episode (which Nettlauâs book mistakenly attributes to
Malatesta and not Palla) was aptly narrated by Malatesta, with other
details of Pallaâs life of more than forty years, in an article:
âGalileo Palla and the events of Romeâ (Galileo Palla e i fatti di
Roma), in [en] La Rivendicazione (Forli), no. 20 of May 23, 1891.
[40] Terzaghi had distinguished himself in the days of the International
as an agent provocateur in its rank and file. He played a double game:
now a Marxist, now the most violent extremist. He edited a paper in
Turin. He was discovered as a spy by Cafiero and, after having made
under journalism of blackmail, disappeared. He returned to work after
1880 under the name Azzati, but sent only letters to comrades and never
allowed himself to be seen in person. Malatesta rediscovered his
epistolary intrigues in 1889, and he was finally âliquidated.â
[41] See La RĂ©volte (Paris), the issue after May 1^(st), 1890.
[42] Regarding this manifesto, Galleani told a curious episode (cited by
Borgi, Errico Malatesta, etc. op. cit., pp. 83â84). Cipriani wanted to
sign the manifesto for Andrea Costa as well, who in that perios made a
show [alarde] of revolutionary intentions. As someone mocked Ciprianiâs
[ingenuity], he was infuriated: âTomorrow I will take you Costaâs
signature, [contad con ella].â But he returned disappointed from a visit
with Costa. He fell into a chair, sighing desolately: âAndrea is a lost
man; he didnât want to do it.â
[43] Many details about the Capolago Congress, about Malatestaâs trip to
Italy, his return to Switzerland, the detention, and so on, where told
to me by the comrade Antonia Gagliardi who died in Bellinzona in 1926.
[44] One of Malatestaâs primary writings about revolutionary terrorism
was published in En-dehors: âUn poco de teorĂaâ (A Little Bit of Theory)
(August 17, 1892), reprinted later on various occasions. That article
gave rise to a written debate with Emilio Henry, against Malatestaâs
ideas. Henry, a learned, intelligent and virtuous anarchist, would be
guillotined two years later as a consequence of a terrorist attempt. E.
Zoccoli speaks of the debate in his well-known book about La AnarquĂa,
which I donât have at hand.
[45] I donât remember this date well, but I have recently seen it given
by Nettlau. I found the confirmation in LâAgitazione (Ancona) of 1897,
where Malatesta reproduced with his notes, under the title âHow what is
wanted is won,â some letter from Belgium to the Avanti! (Rome) from
which it is deduced that the sharpest period of that movement was
exactly in 1893. Carlos Malato gathered that type of expedition in a
joking way in the chapter âThe Belgian campaignâ in his book Les
JoyeusitĂ©s de lâExil (ed. P. V. Stock, Paris, 1897).
[46] On the occasion of the Congress, but outside of it, the anarchists
who arrived in London also held various important meetings to understand
among themselves the orientation of their own movement and of the
propaganda among the working masses. Among other things, Malatesta
expounded his own ideas there about the agrarian problem (see Nettlau,
op. cit).
[47] An orderly, complete and impartial story of the congress is found
in the book Le socialisme et le CongrĂšs de Londres (Socialism and the
London Congress) by A. Hamon (edit. P. V. Stock, Paris). Se also Pagine
di Vagabondaggio (Pages of Vagabondage), vol IX of the works of Pietro
Gori (edit. âLa Sociale,â Spezia), pp. 99â117: Il Congresso
Internazionale Operaio e Socialista di Londra (The International
Socialist Workersâ Congress of London).
[48] Il Messaggero of Rome printed Merlinoâs first letter winning
anarchists over to the electoral method in no. 29 dated January 29,
1897. Malatesta responded in no. 38 of February 7; Merlinoâs reply came
in no. 41 of February 10.
[49] It was in LâAgitazione where, while hidden, he published the first
ten dialogues of his work En el Café. It was interrupted by ulterior
circumstances and only pursued and finished years later.
[50] These details of the escape from Lampedusa are taken in part from
Malatestaâs comrades who remained on the island, and in part have been
taken from an article by the dramatist Achille Vitti in a paper whose
name I donât remember. Vitti was in Malta with his troupe at the time
and spent a few days with Malatesta.
[51] La Questione Sociale of Paterson, N.J., no. 8 of October 28, 1899.
After Malatestaâs death, regarding that incident, a North American
journalist said some untrue things in his book, attributing the revolver
blast among other things to Ciancabilla, who wasnât even present. To
restore and correct this muddy story, LâAdunata dei Refrattari of New
York (no. 5 of January 28, 1933) clarifies that Malatestaâs shooter had
been an outcast who was not given any consideration among comrades; some
Pazzaglia, who disappeared immediately after the movement and died a few
years later.
[52] See the article âVisita de Malatesta a La Habana en 1900â in La
Revista Blanca of Barcelona, no. 229 of December 1, 1932. Malatesta
published a call to the Cuban people on that occasion in La DiscusiĂłn of
Havana (March 10, 1900); and an interview with him appeared in the same
paper (February 28). In the anarchist paper El Nuevo Ideal he also
published an open letter to Cuban comrades, reprinted later in La
Questione Sociale (April 7).
[53] I have been told for years (but I donât know how much truth it
hold) that the night Malatesta was shot in America, it was Gaetano
Bresci who with obvious danger to himself threw the fiend holding the
revolver to the ground and disarmed him.
[54] One of his interventions I remember sharply, as it served as a
lesson to me. I was in Rome in 1901 and the editor of LâAgitazione when
the president of the United States was killed in Buffalo, on September
7, by the anarchist Czolgosz. Fooled by false news in papers, I wrote
about the act, disapproving of it, in a totally unjust and out-of-tune
article. Malatesta promptly responded with another article:
âArrestiamoci sulla china,â in which he indignantly protested against
what I had said, vindicating the socio-political character of the
attentat, the importance of it being a revolutionary act that, opportune
or not, gave its generous author the right to the most cordial sympathy
of anarchists (published in LâAgitazione, Il Risveglio, and La Questione
Sociale of Paterson).
[55] Iâm obliged to state that, while Malatesta contributed and
participated in the work, the paper LâInternazionale was edited by S.
Corio; and Lo Sciopero Generale edited by a group of Italian and French
comrades (Corio, C. Frigerio and others). I only remember having read
the circular announcing the LâInsurrezione.
[56] I had the occasion in those days to read a manuscript of his, a
short drama in three acts: Lo Sciopero, that had been performed a while
earlier by a crew of Italians in London, comrades and sympathizers. They
told me that they had liked the work very much, and I had also. But
Malatesta â who had consented with disgust to my reading it â told me he
considered it a mistake and made me promise that, however it had fallen
into my hands, I would never have it published.
[57] In the magazine Il Pensiero of Rome, nos. 20â21 of October 16 and
Nov 1 of 1907. In the same magazine, that I edited with Pietro Gori from
1903â11, can be found reprints of almost all of Malatestaâs articles
that seemed most important to me from Les Temps Nouveax, Freedom, and
the Italian papers and London pamphlets mentioned previously.
[58] In Italian in Il Pensiero of Rome, no. 6, March 16, 1911. A
characteristic detail: the socialist Benito Mussolini made an
enthusiastic apologia of the tragically deceased protagonists of Sidney
Street in a completely opposite feeling from Malatestaâs, in the
magazine Pagine Libere of Lugano (no. 1 of Jan 1, 1911).
[59] Il Risveglio Anarchico (Geneva) no. 859, October 22, 1932 (âLettere
di Malatestaâ).
[60] VolontĂ no. 10 of August 17
[61] Both were contributors to Avanti! at the time, though not
socialists. Giulio Barni was a revolutionary syndicalist, very popular
then, who died later in the war. Libero Tancredi (the pseudonym of
Massimo Rocca), then an individualist anarchist, later a national with
the war, then fascist; first a friend, later a personal enemy of
Mussolini. He was a fascist deputy in 1924. Now he is out of the country
and said to be an antifascist.
[62]
B. Mussolini, in the Avanti! (Milan) which he directed, energetically
sustained the movement and continued to defend it until after it
ended. But all of his work was limited to that journalistic
intervention and to the participation at a few points in a show of
protest?, one day in Duomo plaza in Milan, from which he retired as
soon as things became a little bit serious. Later, some to exalt him
and others to criticize him, were who spoke of Mussolini as the
âchief of the Red Week.â Nothing could be more absurd and false.
Mussolini calmly stayed several kilometers from the regions in
revolt. It is true that, having the primary organ of the Italian
working class in his hands, his support was not discounted; and
Malatesta, as a practical man, recognized it, though he didnât
delude himself some? about Mussoliniâs revolutionary dispositions to
pass from words to acts. About Mussoliniâs purely journalistic role
in the movement of those days, consult the book by Armando Borghi,
Mussolini en chemise (Les Editions Rieder, Paris, 1932, pp. 51â65).
[63] VolontĂ (Ancona), above all thanks to Cesare Agostinelli, but after
Malatestaâs march, continued its publication until May 19156, and
sustained a long and rough campaign against the war and against
inverventionism.
[64] Peter Kropotkin, memories and critiques of an old friend of mine,
in Studi Sociali (Montevideo), no. 11 of April 15, 1931.
[65] In Italian in Il Risveglio (Geneva), no. 394 of June 12, 1915.
[66] Il Libertario (Spezia) tried to publish it in vain.
[67] Malatesta has told the tale in diverse environments of these
attempts towards a passport and about the way that he managed to return
to Italy. He spoke about all this at length in his statements in the
Milan trial in 1921. See Errico MAlatesta, A. Borghi e Compagni davanta
ai giurati di Milano, by Trento Tagliaferri, ed. P. Gamalero, Milan, pp.
25â28.
[68]
A. Borghi, in his book cited above (p. 181), tells a story of this
trip. In a parade in Tuscany, having assumed Malatesta in the window
of the train, a rail worker that surely believed him to be a âvile
bourgeois,â shouted in his face, âLong live socialism!,â to which
Malatesta responded louder, âLong live anarchism!â I have to imagine
the stupor of that worker on feeling outdone in heresy by that
ignorant Croesus in a sleeping car!
[69] The mutiny was determined for the negative by the troops sent to
Albania, an din the revolt, for the most part of anarchists, military
elements also participated actively. The directors of Italian socialism,
who called themselves revolutionaries, almost all personally converted
to communists, gave then another proof of their incomprehension. During
and immediately after the events of Ancona, the influential exponents of
the democratic bourgeoisie demolish [missing something] the monarchy and
proclaim a republic. The socialists didnât want to know a thing; the
direction of the party, by a majority of one vote, gave its unfavorable
opinion âbecause they didnât want a bourgeois republicâ; or âthe
dictatorship of the proletariat or nothing.â They had the latter, and
the beatings as well. As if the fall of the monarchy at that moment
wouldnât have meant an open road to all that the people had wantedâŠ
[70] To be exact I should say that, at least in my opinion, the best
moment for revolution had already passed by the time the factories were
occupied; but if it had been dared, through that extraordinary occasion,
it would have still been possible to recover what lost to win.
[71] These assemblies were the only result obtained by the âunited
front,â exclusively dealing with the defense of the political victims,
in two congresses of the various syndical organizations and the
proletarian parties of Bologna (August 28 and 29) and Milan (October 4)
â in which Malatesta with others represented the Italian Anarchic Union.
In the first congress a manifesto was edited in common (UmanitĂ Nova of
August 31). These reunions had extended the pact of mutual defense faced
with the reaction in waiting; but the pact, as will be seen, was
shattered in the next congress in Florence in mid-October. The âunited
front,â even with such a limited reach, lasted barely fifty days.
[72] For more exactness: the weekly, from May 14 to early July, lightly
modified in name (LâUmanitĂ Nova in place of UmanitĂ Nova) was edited
with better personal criteria by Damiani, who had remained almost only
in the paper.
[73] La Voce Repubblicana of Rome, April 7, 1923 (article reproduced by
Nettlau).
[74] The magazine was increasingly seized not only for some article on
the reality of the Italian situation, or fascism, but even for the most
remote and minor arguments imaginable. I remember the seizure of an
article of mine of a pedagogic character about the âgovernment of the
family.â Of a juvenile writing of Elise Reclus, mounted in 1851, the
first edition was seized, and the title of the second was changed, the
word âlibertyâ removed, and several lines suppressed.
[75] He wrote to some abroad then in that feeling. One such letter to
SebastiĂĄn Faure was published by him [Faure], after the death of
Malatesta, in Le Libertaire of Paris, no. 266, August 5, 1932.
[76] For at least a year, Malatesta managed to elude the police
surveillance and from time to time saw some comrade more intimately with
a strategy; but even these hidden contacts, especially after 1928,
became little by little impossible, or almost.
[77] Il Risveglio Anarchico of Geneva, no. 854 of July 30, 1932.
[78] I have here, by way of a ? document, the notes Malatesta wrote on a
sheet of paper that day (July 21):
âLa sociĂ©tĂ© aura toujours une tendance Ă trop sâimmiscer dans le domaine
individuelâ (Rienzi). La sociĂ©tĂ©? pourquoi ne pas dire, âles
gouvernementsâ or more exactly âthe othersâ? But others, if they are not
stronger, if they are not a government, do little harm.
âHe that hurls a bomb and kills someone walking by says that, a victim
of society, he had rebelled against society. But the poor dead man could
say: âBut is it that I am society?â