National Post (National Edition)
Shattering the delights ‘of a bliss too perfect’
In 1567, men loyal to Mary Queen of Scots blew up the house of her husband, Lord Darnley. Explosive terrorism has been going strong ever since
There was a time when people were afraid to walk down the street because someone might blow them up. And it was downright dangerous to go to an opera or to the legislatures of the great countries of Europe. Or even to walk in the park.
There’s nothing unusual about our time. Except for the unusually savage horror of September 11, 2001, we’re just living in the same world, with different killers looking to make a point at the expense of the innocent and the comfortable. Through the post-Second World War years, the Front de Libération du Québec, the Irish Republican Army, Basque separatists and German communists, along with assorted other nutters, have succeeded in creating the kind of mayhem that we saw in Boston.
Terrorism has been around for a long time. The idea of using a bomb to make a point came into its own in 1567, when men loyal to Mary Queen of Scots blasted the house of her husband, Lord Darnley, with him in it. And it seriously upset Darnley’s son, James I of England, when Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes and their friends plotted to blow up the state opening of Parliament in 1605. If the cellar full of explosives had gone off at the right time, the entire House of Lords, House of Commons and most of the royal family would have been shredded.
Canada is no stranger to bombs. Rebel Benjamin Lett blew up Brock’s Monument on Queenston Heights in 1841, leaving Brock tombless for more than a decade.
But those were the gunpowder days, when you needed barrels of the stuff to make an impression. In 1867, Alfred Nobel patented dynamite, and, almost immediately, frustrated, angry and sociopathic people went to work making bombs with this much more potent explosive.
The Irish nationalist Fenians were on the cutting edge of the new technology. Their “Dynamite Campaign” began in 1867 with the Clerkenwell Outrage, the bungled attempt to free Irish nationalist prisoners from Clerkenwell Prison in London. None of the prisoners got way, but 12 neighbours died in the blast. Michael Barrett was executed for the bombing at the last public hanging in England.
There was a lull in the campaign for 14 years. Beginning in 1881, the Irish Republican Brotherhood planted bombs in Liverpool, Chester and Manchester. In 1882, they set off a bomb at Mansion House, home of the Lord Mayor of London. In 1883, they planted bombs in Westminster and at the office of The Times of London. They also bombed a gasworks in Glasgow. Bombs were set off in the London Underground at Paddington and Westminster Bridge stations.
The next year, the IRA set off a bomb in Victoria Station when the building was closed, and bombs were defused the same night at three other railway stations. On May 30, 1884, bombs went off at the Criminal Investigation Division, the office of the Metropolitan Police Department’s Special Irish Branch, the Carleton Club (a rookerie for Conservative MPs), and outside the home of Conservative MP Sir Watkin WilliamsWynn, injuring some pedestrians. Police defused a fourth bomb planted at the foot of Nelson’s Column.
At the end of that year, three members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, led by American Civil War veteran William Lomasney, were blown up while assembling a bomb on London Bridge. Less than a month later, another dynamite bomb exploded at the Gower Street underground station. And in the same month, bombs were set off in the House of Commons, Westminster Hall, and the Tower of London.
People were afraid of enemies that moved among them — anarchists and nihilists who believed they could bring down the social and political system through terror and assassination. In Russia, people mourned Tsar Alexander II, who was killed in 1881 when one of his legs was blown off a bomb thrown by a member of the revolutionary group Land and Freedom.
He wasn’t the only leader killed by anarchists and nihilists in the Belle Époch. In 1898, Italian drifter Luigi Lucheni stabbed Empress Elizabeth of Austria to death at a Lake Geneva resort with a sharpened file. He was sentenced to life in prison in solitary confinement. Umberto I (“The Good”), who had survived a stabbing attack in 1879, was finally done in by Giovanni Passanante, who
Leauthier walked out of the restaurant, found a police officer, and said he had ‘just stabbed a bourgeois and eaten a fine meal’
returned from New Jersey to Italy in 1900 to put a bullet into the king.
Few Belle Époch terrorist attacks created the kind of revulsion that swept Britain in 1882 when Chief Secretary for Ireland Lord Frederick Cavendish (brother of the Duke of Devonshire and a relative of Queen Elizabeth II) and his under-secretary Thomas Henry Burke, were assassinated. They were walking in Dublin’s Phoenix Park when they were attacked from behind by five members of an Irish splinter group called The Irish National Invincibles just hours after Cavendish arrived in Ireland. The killers were caught and hanged. Cavendish was buried in his family plot, with 300 Members of Parliament and 30,000 mourners following the coffin.
Right up until the beginning of the First World War, when the carnage in Europe inspired a temporary lull and/ or gave the angry and homicidal an outlet, the bombs kept going off.
On May 4, 1886, someone set off a bomb during a labour rally in Chicago’s Haymarket Square. A police officer was killed in the blast. His colleagues opened fire into the smoke and dust, killing seven of their own men and at least four protesters. Four men were hanged for the bombing after a trial that was, then and now, considered a sham.
But France took the brunt of the violence. On Dec. 8, 1893, Auguste Vaillant planted bombs in the French Chamber of Deputies, injuring 20 people. He would have killed many more, but his arm snagged on a woman’s dress as he threw the home-made bomb, which was cobbled together from explosives and scraps of metal that Vaillant had scrimped and saved to buy.
When Vaillant was guillotined, Emile Henry took revenge by tossing a bomb into the popular Café Terminus and shot at a police officer who chased him. He later told the court that condemned him: “I wanted to demonstrate to the bourgeoisie that from now on it would no longer enjoy the delights of a bliss too perfect, that its arrogant triumphs would be troubled, that its golden calf would be violently shaken on its pedestal until the final push would topple it in mud and blood.”
Bomber François Ravachol, who tried to blow up the judge and prosecutor in an 1892 anarchist trial, dug up the corpse of the Contesse de Rochetaille, hoping to steal whatever jewelry was on the corpse so that he could afford to continue his terror campaign. When he was caught, Matthew Carr wrote in his 2006 book The Infernal Ma
chine, “the accordion-playing sociopath proved surprisingly popular with some of the French middle-class intellectuals who gravitated towards anarchism in the Belle Époque, who variously compared him to Socrates and Jesus Christ.”
But the radical chic urbane crowd was hardly safe. The year that Vaillant tried to re-make the French political landscape, anarchist and shoemaker Leon Leauthier dined in a fine restaurant, then lashed out with a knife at the people closest to him, killing the Serbian ambassador. Leauthier then walked out, found a police officer and said he had “just stabbed a bourgeois and eaten a fine meal.”
The mayhem died down a bit after French president Sadi Carnot was assassinated in 1894 in retaliation for Vaillant’s execution. But the French anarchy briefly surfaced in London, where a bomb went off at the Greenwich Observatory, killing no one but the French anarchist who planted the explosives.
The violence spread to Spain, where, in 1893, someone bombed the Liceo Opera House in Barcelona, killing 22 people in the audience. Five years later, someone threw a bomb into the Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona, killing 14 people. Spanish authorities launched a wave of repression and torture. It ended with the execution of five of the 400 people arrested after the attack. The following year, in retaliation for the Barcelona executions, Michele Angiolillo shot the Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Canovas dead outside a health spa. Angiolillo was garroted.
America wasn’t safe. President McKinle y was killed in Buffalo by anarchist Leon Czolglosz in 1901. In 1910, a bomb set off in the Los Angeles Times building by a union activist killed 21 people, and another 100 were seriously hurt.
Beginning in 1914, bombings blamed on the followers of the Italian anarchist Luigi Galleani took place in New York, Boston, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. In 1916, 10 people were killed in a bomb attack at a Preparedness Day rally in San Francisco. The bombers were never caught and no one took responsibility. In Milwaukee, a bomb killed nine policemen and a woman at a police station in November 1917. That one may have been set off by a German saboteur. And the jury is still out on whether the fire that destroyed the Canadian parliament building in 1916 was an accident.
Certainly, there were German agents, supervised by Franz von Papen (who was later to play a key role in Hitler’s rise to power and was one of the few people acquitted at the Nuremberg War Crimes trials), loose on this continent, planting bombs. Most were set off in industrial plants in the New York City area, but there was also an abortive plot to blow up the Welland Canal. In July, 1915, Prof. Eric Muenter set off a bomb in the reception room of the U.S. Senate. He fled Capitol Hill and, the next day, tried to kill J.P. Morgan Jr., and was caught. He killed himself in jail four days later.
There was a wave of anarchist bombings in Europe and the United States after the First World War, which culminated on Sept. 16, 1920, with an attack on Wall Street that killed between 33 and 38 people and wounded 300 others. It was the first recorded use of a car bomb (in this case, a horse and hay cart), detonated by someone who was never caught. The blast obliterated the horse, ripped apart ground-floor brokerage firms and flung cars down the street. But cleaners got to work, the stock market reopened the next day, and the Constitution Day event held the day after the attack was attended by thousands of New Yorkers.
Maybe these attacks should be forgotten. Indeed, some terror campaigns are forgotten — such as the Irish Republican Army bomb campaign of 1939-1940.
The IRA set off bombs in London and Coventry from January 1939 until the summer of 1940. The spree ended when German bombs began raining down on London and, presumably, any IRA members who might still have been in the city. If only there were a more peaceful method of rendering terrorists irrelevant, the world would be a better and safer place.