The Age of Globalization, page 10
Table 1 Assassinations
The first thing to notice is that all the major states are on the list, except for the United Kingdom and Germany within Europe, and China and the Ottoman Empire outside.37 Second, the anarchist assassinations of 1894–1901 were copycatted by radical nationalists thereafter. Third, while the nationalists typically killed their own rulers, anarchist assassins served their cause across national boundaries. Lastly, the prominence of Italians among the anarchists is very striking, and seems to confirm Pernicone’s reference to “the unique role played by Italians as missionaries of the anarchist ideal. Political refugees and emigrants, they established libertarian enclaves among Italian communities in France, Switzerland, England, Spain, the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Egypt and Tunisia.”38 Malatesta himself spent the years 1885–89 proselytizing in and out of Buenos Aires.39
Assassinations
Police Photographs of François Ravachol after his arrest in March 1892
Vera Zasulich (left); Sante Caserio, the assassin of French president Sadi Carnot, in captivity, June 1894 (right)
The shooting of President William McKinley by the Polish anarchist Czogolsz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, on September 6 1901.
And Rizal? He had left Spain in 1885, well before the first wave of anarchist “outrages” began there in 1888. The same is true of his time in Paris. Most of his post-1885 experience in Europe was in Germany, England, and Belgium, countries where anarchist activity was fairly insignificant. But he was an avid reader of newspapers, and followed world political trends with eager interest. The obvious question that arises is: did he actually know any European radicals personally? The evidence is circumstantial, but interesting.
A contemporary sketch of Luigi Luccheni’s assassination of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, September 1898 (left); Cánovas (right)
On February 4, 1905, Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich’s carriage was bombed by Ivan Kaliayev in Moscow.
In his old age, Rizal’s good friend Trinidad Pardo de Tavera wrote an article describing his close relations with two generations of Russian Nihilists in Paris. He said that like many others he had been an admirer of Alexander II.
También admiraba la osadía y el enorme sentimiento de responsabilidad de los nihilistas de quienes tenía referencias que me parecían muy apasionados por proceder de mi profesor de ruso, Michael [Mikhail] Atchinatski, famoso nihilista condenado ya en aquello época tres veces á la pena de muerte por atentados contra la vida de aquel mismo Tsar.
Yet at the same time I admired the daring and the enormous sense of responsibility of the Nihilists, about whom I had information that seemed to me all the more moving in that it came from my professor of Russian, Michael Atchinatski, a famous Nihilist whom at that time had already been three times sentenced to death for attempts on the life of that same Tsar.
The “terrible Nihilist” had fled to Paris to escape the hangman, but, alas, Pardo commented, tuberculosis killed him only three months after his great enemy’s destruction.
The rest of the article was devoted to two Russian girls to whom Pardo had been introduced by his professor of medicine, the “famous Tardieu.” When the surprised Filipino ventured that they would have very little in common, the great man replied thus:
Lo sé, lo sé, pero son vuestros hermanos espirtuales, de pueblos dominados por las tiranías religiosas y políticas, y presentes aquí en este patria, porque unos y otros venían en la seguridad de nuestra libertad.
I know, I know … But they are your spiritual sisters. All of you come from countries dominated by religious and political tyrannies, and are here now in this country because you have reached the safety of our liberty.
Pardo went to visit the pair quite often and became fond of them. Both were from well-off families in Kazan, and had gone to St Petersburg to study medicine. There they became active Nihilists in their spare time, denouncing the Tsarist autocracy, police terror, and “Siberia.” As the Okhrana closed in on them, their parents summoned them to go home, threatening to cut off funds if they did not, but the girls, each about twenty years old, decided to flee to Paris and continue their studies there. Terribly poor, they survived on odd jobs and occasional translations. Under surveillance by the French police and the Russian embassy, they never complained, and tenderly looked after dying older Nihilists they knew. Pardo commented that no one could doubt the goodness of their hearts and their altruism, and this won them “el aprecio y el respeto de los estudiantes de todas las Facultades que constituyen el pueblo soberano del Arrabal Latino” (the admiration and respect of the students of all the Faculties who constitute the sovereign country of the Latin Quarter). They stayed in Paris until the accession of Nicholas II in 1894, when they returned home. But the following year they were tried for participation in an attentat against the new tsar, and were sentenced to life imprisonment in Siberia. Maria Michaelovna Lujine died on the way there, of the tuberculosis she had contracted in Paris, and Luise Ivanovna Krilof died a few months later, killed by the same disease, in the prison of Tobolsk.40
Pardo’s Russian teacher was dead before Rizal arrived in Europe, but he would surely have heard about the famous Nihilist from his friend. And it seems most unlikely that he would not have visited the rooms of the two Russian girls, along with Pardo, and chatted with them over the samovar always kept hot for guests. What is much less clear is whether they were strictly Nihilists. One suspects that in a Paris probably not very well informed about the intricate development of new subversive undergrounds in Russia, the term “Nihilists” served to cover a wide range of such groups.
CACIQUE SPAIN
Rizal’s third world was that of Spain and its once-vast empire—what was left in the 1880s was only Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, the Marianas and Carolines, Spanish Morocco and the Berlin-acquired, goldless Rio de Oro. In the nineteenth century, this world was unique in the zigzag of insurrectionary explosions in the metropole and in the colonies. (One will not find anything remotely comparable till after the Second World War. For France: the fuse was set by Ho Chi Minh’s political and Vo Nguyen Giap’s military victory at Dien Bien Phu, and set alight by Algeria’s FLN revolt leading to the collapse of the Fourth Republic, De Gaulle’s return to power, and the OAS’s retaliatory terrorism. For Portugal: military failures in Angola, Mozambique, and Guiné-Bissau led to the bloodless coup against Salazarist autocracy in Lisbon in April 1974.) It is worthwhile considering briefly the main features of this interactive zigzagging, for it was a phenomenon on which José Rizal was well informed, and by which his thinking was shaped.
In 1808, the odious future Fernando VII had organized a military revolt in Aranjuez which accomplished its main aim, the forced abdication of his father, Carlos IV. But Napoléon, at the height of his power, took this opportunity to send troops into Spain (occupying Madrid), on the pretext of a major intervention in Portugal. Fernando, who had rushed to Bayonne to negotiate legitimization of his succession with the Secretary of the World-Spirit, was immediately imprisoned. Joseph Buonaparte was then put on the Spanish throne. Resistance and rebellion broke out almost simultaneously in Andalusia and in Hidalgo’s Mexico. In 1810, a liberal-dominated Cortes met in Cádiz, which produced in 1812 Spain’s first constitutional order. The colonies, including the Philippines, were given legislative representation.41 Napoléon’s defeat brought Fernando back to power in Madrid with the full support of the Unholy Alliance. In 1814, he refused to recognize the constitution, inaugurated a new reactionary absolutism, and, in spite of a ruined economy, attempted to arrest the American revolutions for whom nationalism and in-Spain-repressed liberalism were the two main principles. Fernando failed completely in continental Spanish America, but held the loyalty of slave-owning Peninsulars and creoles in the Spanish Caribbean—who were out of Bolívar’s charismatic orbit, and petrified by the successful slave revolution in Haiti.
And the Philippines? The Sarrat revolt of 1815, named from a township in the Ilocano-populated northwest corner of Luzon, was quickly and violently repressed. In 1820, a military revolt in Andalusia, headed by the mayor of Cádiz, forced Fernando briefly to accept a liberal constitutional order. But Castlereagh’s London, Metternich’s Vienna, Alexander I’s Petersburg, and Fernando’s kinsman in Paris would have none of this. A French military expedition restored autocracy in 1823, the mayor of Cádiz was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and hundreds of liberals and republicans were executed, brutally imprisoned or forced to flee for their lives. That same year, and in response to these events in the metropole, a creole-led mutiny occurred in the colonial military which came within an ace of seizing Manila, and would have done so had it not been betrayed from within.42 Its leader, the mestizo Captain Andrés Novales, had earlier fought for Madrid against the South American independence movements.43
Three Worlds 2: The Caribbean
One can easily detect a comparable conjuncture in the years 1868–74. Isabel’s regime was overthrown in September 1868 by a military–civil coup in which General Prim y Prats, the machiavellian liberal politician Práxedes Sagasta, and the conspiracy-minded radical republican Manuel Ruiz Zorilla were key players. We have already seen the consequences of this explosion in Cuba and the Philippines. But in Spain itself the next six years were ones of extraordinary political turbulence. Prim y Prats’s assassination at the end of 1870 doomed the monarchy of Amadeo of Savoy, which led to the proclamation of a Spanish Republic on February 11, 1873. The new regime lasted in reality only eleven months—during which time it experienced four Swiss-style rotating presidents—till the generals moved in (guided behind the scenes by the sly Andalusian conservative politician Antonio Cánovas del Castillo), dissolving the Cortes in January 1874, and restoring the Bourbon monarchy in the person of Alfonso XII at the end of that year. Among the key reasons for this démarche was, as one might have surmised, the imminent threat posed by Céspedes’s Cuban revolt to the integrity of what was left of the old Spanish empire. Meantime, however, there was an extraordinary effervescence in the Spanish public sphere. Republicans were briefly legal for the first time in living memory. Bakuninian and Marxian radicalism gained their first political footholds, and in the widely popular “cantonalist” political movement of 1873 for radical decentralization of the polity many young anarchists and other radicals got their first experience of open, mass politics.
With this background we can now consider Restoration Spain as Rizal encountered it at the beginning of the 1880s. Its dominant politician, Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, was born in 1828—the same year as Tolstoi—to a petit bourgeois family in Málaga. A prolific and accomplished historian, he was also a devious and ruthless politician.44 A liberal cabinet minister at thirty-two, he moved quickly to the right after the fall of Isabel, and became the key architect of the Bourbon Restoration. His ambition, aside from accumulating power, was to create a stable order, in a state notorious for decades for its chaotic inner life. Order meant ending the country’s civil wars and eliminating caudillism; in this he was successful during his life, but they returned with a vengeance later. It also meant repressing the radical Left and any signs of serious anticolonial separatism in the empire. In effect, one could see him as a sort of Spanish Bismarck. After Cánovas’s assassination in 1897, the ex-Reichskanzler would say: “He was the only European with whom I could have a conversation.”45 But Cánovas recognized that Bismarckianism depended on royal favor, and so was ultimately ephemeral. Deeper and more lasting order he detected in the United Kingdom, where power passed safely back and forth between conservative and liberal elites in a systemic way, while industrialization advanced headlong, and imperialism by leaps and strides. This is why he was wont to say that he was a great admirer of British parliamentary government, and why he proceeded to set up, with the help of Sagasta, a peculiar parody of the Gladstone–Disraeli duumvirate. Schumacher has pithily described a corrupt, cacique-ridden regime which lasted essentially till the end of the century: “[T]he two leaders permitted the entire system to be vitiated through managed elections … As more serious crises came to be resolved, each would yield power to the other and the successor government would then proceed to manage an election in which a respectable minority of candidates would be elected with a scattering of outstanding republicans and Carlists to give verisimilitude to the Cortes.”46 Salvador de Madariaga put the same judgment in local terms. Canovism, he observed, was intended to create a “bullfight” politics, where elections were manipulated, caciquism was the order of the day, and the Cortes was a monumental theater, which could play in classical, gypsy, or musical comedy genres depending on Cánovas’s direction and script.47 The Spanish Disraeli ruled in 1875–81, 1883–85, 1890–92, and 1895–97, while his Gladstone filled most of the spaces in between. The worst domestic and colonial repressions typically occurred under Cánovas, while timid reforms were occasionally accomplished under Sagasta.
THE ORDERS: DISPOSSESSED AND POSSESSED
For what follows next, it is crucial to understand Cánovas’s policies toward the generally reactionary Spanish Church. In 1836, the Regent’s first minister, Juan Mendizábal, had decreed and carried out the expropriation of all the property of the religious Orders in Spain; during Glorious 1868, Antonio Ortiz, head of the Gracia y Justicia ministry, had abolished the Orders themselves—in metropolitan Spain. Mendizábal was no Thomas Cromwell, so that the Orders were compensated by being put on the state’s payroll. The clerical properties were put up for auction, and, especially in rich rural Andalusia, were snapped up by members of the nobility, high civilian and military officials, and wealthy bourgeois, many of them absentee owners. Relatively mild Church exploitation was succeeded by ruthless agribusiness methods. Hundreds of thousands of peasants lost access to land, and swelled the numbers of paupers, half-starved day laborers, and the “bandits” for which the region became famous after 1840. The Andalusian Cánovas made no attempt to roll back what Mendizábal had decreed, though he sought and secured strong Church backing against the rising tide of liberalism, Masonry, republicanism, socialism and anarchism.48 (It was he who in 1884 sent the police into Central University at the call of the bishops.) Nor did he restore the independent position of the Orders, who, after all, were directly responsible to Rome not to himself. But there was one striking exception to all these changes—and that was the colonial Philippines.
It had begun centuries earlier, in the time of Felipe II. The conscience of the aging monarch had been sufficiently stung by the revelations by de las Casas and others of the inhuman depredations of the conquistadors in the Americas that he decided to entrust his last major imperial acquisition largely to the religious Orders, who indeed managed the relatively peaceful conversion of the bulk of the local population. The remote Philippines had no “lay” attractions comparable to Potosí, and so the Orders largely ran the colony, especially outside Manila. In the course of time, the Dominicans and Augustinians especially acquired vast properties both in Manila real estate and in hacienda agriculture.49 Furthermore, from the start the Orders had insisted on carrying out conversions via the dozens of native languages (only then would conversions be deep and sincere, it was claimed) which they assiduously attempted to learn. This monopoly on linguistic access to the natives gave them an enormous power which no secular group shared; fully aware of this, the friars persistently opposed the spread of the Spanish language. Even in Rizal’s time, it has been estimated that only about 3 percent of the population of the archipelago had any command of the metropolitan language, something unique in the Spanish empire (with the partial exception of ex-Jesuit Paraguay). In the nineteenth century the Spanish political class understood this situation very well, and, perhaps rightly, reckoned that without the Orders Spanish rule in the Philippines would collapse.50 Hence the only Order-controlled seminaries tolerated in Spain after Ortiz’s démarche were there simply to provide new young friars for the Philippines. At the same time, many friars traumatized by their ‘defenestration’ in Spain headed off for safety and power on the other side of the world. Thus, in the Cánovas era, friar power was as peculiar to the Philippines as slavery was to Cuba. But slavery was finally abolished in 1886, while in Manila friar power was not seriously undermined till the collapse of the whole system in 1898. From another angle, one can see that Filipino anticolonial activists were inevitably faced with a hard choice which was not open to Cubans and Puerto Ricans: to reject Spanish or spread it. We shall see later on how this question shaped the narrative of El Filibusterismo.
BLACK WINGS
When an alarmed Captain-General Izquierdo suspected that the machinations of the International were behind the extraordinary Cavite strike of the autumn of 1872, what made the idea plausible to him? After Isabel fled Madrid in September 1868, Bakunin was much quicker off the mark than Marx. He immediately sent his close Italian friend, the ex-Mazzinist, ex-Garibaldist Giuseppe Fanelli, to Barcelona and Madrid to inform and organize the most advanced local radical activists.51 In spite of the fact that Fanelli knew no Spanish, he had an instant and powerful impact. (Probably people in the Italian community in Barcelona helped out.) The Centro Federal de las Sociedades was formed early the following year, and sent two Bakuninist delegates to swell the Russian’s majority at the Basle Congress of the International in September. Early in 1870 the Federatión Regional Española (FRE), the Spanish section of the International, was publishing La Solidaridad, and a little later it held its first and only Congress in early-industrial Barcelona.52
