Pietro Di Paola,The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880–1917),

Reviewed by: David Goodway, Leeds, UK

For some forty years at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century London was a major anarchist centre. Its anarchists, however, were not indigenous but exiles from European autocracy and intermittent oppression, the largest communities being French, Italian, Spanish and Russian, including a vigorous Yiddish movement. Their lingua franca was French, not English. In 1903 the Commissioner of Metropolitan Police believed that 95 per cent of anarchists in London were foreign.

This rich and important topic is at last finding its historians. Constance Bantman’s able coverage of The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation (2013) is accompanied by Pietro Di Paola’s study of the Italian exiles, the first two titles in a new series of ‘Studies in Labour History’, previously published for the Society for the Study of Labour History by Ashgate and now taken over by Liverpool University Press.

After the new Italian state had curbed the movement within Italy itself during the 1880s, Italian anarchist exiles had an extremely high profile internationally, carrying anarchism all over the globe, most particularly to the Americas. In London they did not involve themselves with local affairs – other than attempting to organize Italian catering workers, their overwhelming concern always being with developments in their home country. Pietro Di Paola has only been able to come up with 300 names of militants who settled in London. They co-existed alongside a substantial immigration of economic refugees, the total of the Italian-born in the capital rising from about 3,500 in 1881 to almost 11,000 in 1901. Although the anarchists’ activities do not seem to have increased the politicization of the overall colony, their clubs, meetings and lectures were disproportionately influential, the musical and theatrical events as well as dances being especially popular.

The impunity which the British authorities accorded the émigré anarchists in general, not just the Italians, attracted the concern and censure of foreign governments. So concerned was the Italian state that the exiles were subjected to extensive surveillance, through both policemen dispatched from Rome and informers. Indeed Di Paola is heavily dependent in his resourceful analysis on their voluminous reports in the Ministry of the Interior papers, now in the Archivio Centrale dello Stato in Rome.

The quandary afflicting successive British governments was twofold. They experienced significant pressure from other governments expecting co-operation in not only the surveillance but the suppression of anarchism. Yet they needed to uphold the principles of individual freedom and political asylum highly prized by Britons. At the International Conference against Anarchism, held in Rome in 1898, the British delegates were to oppose almost all the proposals the others advanced. Di Paola follows Bernard Porter in believing that, even before the Aliens Act of 1905 made the first inroad into unrestricted immigration, substantial surveillance and containment of the anarchists was being undertaken by the Metropolitan Police’s Special Branch. He has discovered additionally clear evidence that the police were engaging in freelance work for the Italians. One ambassador, Count Tornielli, commented that ‘the venality of English policemen must be taken into consideration by those who need them’ (154).

Di Paola has been ill-served by his publisher. His intelligent monograph demanded extensive copy-editing, yet has not received it. In consequence his meaning is frequently either obscure or ambiguous and his exposition hard going even for the most attentively sympathetic of readers. On a lesser, but still important level, there are numerous small errors, typos and bibliographical oddities. Italicization is particularly bewildering: used where it is not required and lacking where it is, as well as utterly inconsistent.

From 1891 Olivia and Helen Rossetti with their brother Arthur edited The Torch, which, having left their Primrose Hill home and ceasing to be handwritten and duplicated, became in 1894 for two years the principal English-language periodical for activist anarchism in London. Their grandfather Gabriele had been an early Italian political exile in the 1820s. His children Dante Gabriel, both poet and painter, and the poet Christina Rossetti were to become extremely well known. Another son, William Michael, the father of Olivia, Arthur and Helen, although not an anarchist himself, joined in 1905 an anarchist committee opposing the deportation of Adolfo Antonelli and Francesco Barbieri for their glorification of the assassination of Umberto I five years previously. Antonio Agresti, a bourgeois anarchist, who arrived in London in 1891, was to marry Olivia Rossetti. The invaluable roman à clef A Girl among the Anarchists (1903) – from which Di Paola quotes effectively – was co-authored by both Rossetti sisters and published under the pseudonym ‘Isabel Meredith’. All of this is much muddled by Di Paola (21, 26, 32, 110, 169, 227).