Murder triumphant

Abstract

This chapter shows the folly of the police pursuing the IWMA–Communard conspiracy theory, by chronicling the spate of assassination attempts carried out across Europe in 1878. Attempts to link the shootings and stabbings to the supposed conspiracy denied the reality that Europe’s radicals were fragmenting rather than coming together in the 1870s, their allegiances split over whether to follow Marx’s vision of a communist revolution or Bakunin’s talk of an anarchist utopia. Beneath this schism, individual assassins and the world’s first terrorist organisation, Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), emerged to practise a new form of terrorist violence. This trend reached its crescendo in Russia in 1881, when People’s Will carried out the era’s most spectacular terrorist attack – the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by a suicide bomber. This promoted an overhaul of Russia’s secret police and clumsy efforts to create a reactionary conspiracy against terrorism, in the form of the nationalist sect, the Holy Brotherhood. Neither this group nor the efforts of the tsar’s new secret police – the Okhrana – could stop the spread of terrorism in the 1880s, as People’s Will provided inspiration similar to that which Orsini had given radicals in the 1860s. The key to this inspiration was the tool by which People’s Will had taken the Holy Tsar’s life – dynamite.