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Hidden History: "Propaganda of the Deed" [1]
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Date: 2025-09-16
In the late 19th century, the anarchist movement carried out a number of political assassinations, which they called “propaganda of the deed”.
"Hidden History" is a diary series that explores forgotten and little-known areas of history.
Johann Most photo from Wiki Commons
By the latter half of the 19th century, political movements in Europe were at a crossroads. A wave of anti-monarchy and pro-democracy rebellions had swept the continent in 1848, but they had all been crushed and their ringleaders were rounded up and imprisoned. In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, the Paris Commune rose in rebellion with avowedly socialist aims, to be cheered on by radicals all over Europe—only to be destroyed by Prussian troops and French police, and followed by a bloody excess of executions. By 1880 the radical movement lay broken and beaten everywhere.
Now bereft of any means of carrying out mass protests or insurrections, the socialist political movement withered into insignificance, and it was the anarchists who came to the fore. With mass actions now impossible, the anarchists turned to individual methods of attacking the existing social order. One of these theorists was the Italian anarchist Carlo Cafieri, who termed his outlook “the propaganda of the deed”. It was based on earlier writings by the Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, who advocated a strategy of individual acts of violence by single actors, which would, he hoped, inspire the masses into action, thereby sparking the uprisings that would topple the government and lead to the anarchist utopia. Cafieri now took up Bakunin’s cudgel and began to encourage his followers to take up his tactics.
The “propaganda of the deed” idea split the anarchist movement. Anarchists who held more collectivist ideas, like the Russian Peter Kropotkin, along with the Socialist movement, viewed such individual acts of rebellion as ineffective and pointless, concluding that governments could be overthrown and society changed only by organized mass actions. Some anarchists, like the Italian Errico Malatesta and the American Emma Goldman, initially embraced the idea of individual actions, but later came to see it as a failure and argued against it.
In the United States, the most prominent of the “individual deeds” advocates was a German immigrant named Johann Most. In a series of public speeches and leaflets, Most encouraged anarchists and radicals everywhere to launch violent attacks against targets within the political and economic elite. He published pamphlets giving detailed instructions for making bombs with homemade explosives. "The existing system will be quickest and most radically overthrown,” he declared, ”by the annihilation of its exponents. Therefore, massacres of the enemies of the people must be set in motion."
Although Most never himself carried out any acts of violence, he and the other “propagandists of the deed” did inspire others, and the period 1880-1920 saw a long list of successful assassinations and failed attacks by individual anarchists.
In February 1880, anarchist plotters blew up part of the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in an unsuccessful attempt to kill Tsar Alexander II. Just over a year later, Alexander was then assassinated by members of the anarchist group Narodnaya Volya (“The People’s Freedom”).
In July 1892, during the Homestead steel strike in Pittsburgh, anarchist Alexander Berkman tried to shoot company executive Henry Frick. Frick survived, and the shooting provoked a massive wave of arrests and jailings of strikers and sympathizers, leading one union officer to bitterly declare that “Berkman hadn’t killed Frick, but he did kill the strike”.
In December 1893, French anarchist Auguste Vaillant threw a homemade nail bomb into the French National Assembly, killing one person. After his execution, several other anarchist bombings were carried out in retaliation. In June 1894, Italian anarchist Sante Caserio stabbed the French President Sadi Carnot to death. More assassinations followed: Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas del Castillo in August 1897, Empress Elisabeth of Austria-Hungary in September 1898, King Umberto of Italy in July 1900. In September 1901, an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz shot and killed President William McKinley at an expo in Buffalo NY.
The list went on and on, with at least 30 politically-motivated assassinations and attempts by self-proclaimed anarchists.
With the outbreak of World War One in 1914, however, governments around the world, including the United States, took drastic measures to insure internal political stability. Socialists and anarchists of every stripe were rounded up en masse and jailed. In the US, the Espionage and Sedition Acts made it a crime to merely criticize the war or the government, and hundreds of “enemy agents” were deported or imprisoned. (Socialist Party politician Eugene V Debs famously ran for President from inside his prison cell.) The “Palmer Raids” destroyed the Socialist Party, the IWW, and most other socialist or anarchist groups, and removed the political left as an effective force in American politics.
In the end, the anarchist “propaganda of the deed” actions killed a long list of individual politicians and business figures, but their real-world political effect was minimal at best. Not a single government had been toppled by their actions, and its only actual accomplishments seemed to be the jailing of most radical leaders and the virtual dismantlement of the socialist and anarchist movements.
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