Abstract
Reviewed by: Marcella Bencivenni, Hostos Community College, The City University of New York, USA
On July 29, 1900, Italy’s King, Umberto I, who had previously escaped two attempts at his life, was shot and killed by Gaetano Bresci, a young Italian anarchist weaver who had migrated to Paterson, New Jersey in 1898. Despite finding a better life in America, Bresci had apparently decided to return to Italy and kill the king to avenge the victims of the brutal governmental repression of radicals that took place in the 1890s.
Conventional historiography has generally held that Bresci acted alone. In Architettura di una chimera, Enrico Tuccinardi and Salvatore Mazzariello suggest instead that far from an individual act of revenge, Umberto’s regicide was a complex event that must be understood as part of a broader political scheme of different but “convergent interests”—an affair that involved, in intricate ways, anarchists from both sides of the ocean, socialists, and even nostalgic Bourbons (p. 6).
The fruit of meticulous research over three years, the book’s starting point is a letter dated 18 May, 1901 written by “the most important and feared” Italian anarchist, Errico Malatesta, from exile in London, to an anonymous comrade in Paris—identified by the authors as the painter Felice Vezzani. The letter, published in its entirety at the beginning of the book, alludes to some revolutionary schemes and ongoing negotiations with a mysterious “Signora” to secure the financial means needed to carry out the plan.
Written 10 months after the regicide and four days before Bresci’s alleged suicide, the letter was intercepted by the secret police in France and sent to Italian authorities. Scholars of anarchism have long debated its true meaning, suspecting, as Benedetto Croce first suggested in 1926, that the mysterious woman alluded to by Malatesta was Maria Sophia, the last queen of the Kingdom of Naples (by marriage to Francesco II of Bourbon), who had been removed from the throne 40 years earlier. Animated by a common hatred for the newly established Italian state, the ex-queen and the anarchists apparently conspired together to overthrow the Savoy monarchy, each thinking of using the other to further their own distinctive and diametrically opposed interests: the restoration of Bourbon power on the one side, and the establishment of anarchy on the other.
While not the first to hypothesize this bizarre marriage, Tuccinardi and Mazzariello are the first to take it seriously. Convinced that the letter can cast new light on the regicide, they have carefully examined every point, name, and explicit and implicit reference alluded to in the text. To back up their findings they have also consulted both secondary and primary sources, including some overlooked archival documents that provide further credence to a presumed alliance between Malatesta and Maria Sophia to subvert the House of Savoy.
Unfolding like a detective’s investigation, the book is organized into seven short chapters detailing the intricate web of people and events surrounding Bresci’s attentat. Weighing available evidence, the authors submit to the readers a series of conjectures and speculations that essentially support the idea of the anarchist specter in fin-de-siècle Europe and validate the conspiracy theories of the Italian Interior Minister, Giovanni Giolitti, and other contemporary authorities. Their research not only confirms Malatesta’s sojourn at Queen Sophia’s residence in Neuilly, France, from 1 to 7 February of 1901, but also gives new impetus to the idea originally advanced by Croce that Malatesta was planning Bresci’s evasion and that he might have been behind the regicide in the hope that it would ignite the desired revolution.
Despite its intriguing story and provocative argument, Architettura di una chimera has one major limitation: it seems written largely and almost exclusively for scholars of anarchism familiar with the main events discussed in the book. Its scope, in other words, is too narrow. There is, for example, no or little discussion of anarchist ideology, Italian history, or fin-de-siècle revolutionary movements. With a few notable exceptions, such as the chapter on Angelo Insogna, the book’s main characters and their motives remain mostly underdeveloped. Granted, this might have been beyond the authors’ scope, but placing the story of the letter and its interpretation within a broader historical and intellectual context would have made a much stronger book and appealed to a much larger audience.
Also, perhaps inadvertently, the authors seem at times too authoritative in their final judgements, overstating the significance of their evidence and discounting other possibilities. Perhaps more importantly, while suggesting that their book might lead to a re-reading and perhaps even “a historiographical revision of primary importance” (p. 5), the overall importance of their findings—the way they change the larger historical narrative—remains less clear.
While it may be true that Malatesta was aware of Bresci’s plan to kill King Umberto and may have plotted Bresci’s escape, it is also true that his ideas differed from Bresci’s when it came to issues of anarchist violence and organization. While Bresci was unquestionably closer to the position of anti-organizational anarchism, Malatesta subscribed to a softer position. As his letter suggests, anarchist ideas and anarchist motives were quite complex and fluid, and in light of the extreme and continued repression from the state it is not unthinkable that he considered joining forces with old enemies to further his revolutionary plans. What is more astonishing is the level of paranoia of the Italian authorities and the lengths they went to to suppress anarchism and prevent insurrection, as evidenced by the likely murder of Bresci by the prison guards on Giolitti’s orders.
These criticisms aside, Tuccinardi and Mazzariello’s investigation makes several important contributions to the expanding literature on Italian anarchism. First, Architettura di una chimera underscores the deep transnational and cross-national character of the Italian anarchist movement. Echoing recent work by other scholars such as Nunzio Pernicone, Davide Turcato, and Pietro Di Paola, it shows that Italian anarchists were closely connected through intense correspondence, newspapers, and physical movement back and forth between Italy, Europe, and America. Second, it provides extensive evidence of the intense and widespread fears of the establishment toward subversive forces and the central role that Italian authorities played in aggressively suppressing them, particularly the anarchists. Indeed, in what is perhaps the book’s main strength, the authors effectively reconstruct the hidden world of espionage—the network of spies (Ennio Belelli and Enrico Insabato), ambassadors (Count Giuseppe Tornielli), quaestors (Vincenzo Neri), and police (Francesco Leonardi) working together to monitor radicals, follow their activities, and undermine their plans. Finally, this study casts additional light on a number of important but little known rank-and-file anarchists—Angelo Insogna, Oddino Morgari, Oreste Ferrara, and Arturo Campagnoli—all of whom played a significant role in the movement, showing the intricate and organic way in which the anarchist movement operated.
Overall, Architettura di una chimera is an important book about a delicate phase of Italian history that requires more attention. Tuccinardi and Mazzariello’s research efforts, evidenced by long and detailed footnotes (with information that might have occasionally been better integrated into the body) are especially admirable. Scholars of anarchism will appreciate the amount of archival information, especially the police reports contained in the book, including many original French and Spanish memos which have been published in the original language with Italian translation.