Pietro Di Paola. The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880-1917). Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. 256 pp. $99.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-84631-969-3.

Reviewed by Andrew Hoyt
Published on H-Italy (August, 2015)
Commissioned by Matteo Pretelli (University of Naples "L'Orientale")

Anarchists in London

Anarchists are notoriously difficult subjects to study. They have this reputation for several reasons: they cloaked their activity in a security culture to avoid state persecution, their noninstitutional cultural activity was overlooked by social historians, and as highly mobile transnational migrants they often disappear from nationally focused narratives. However, recent develops in anarchist studies have begun to allow anarchism and anarchists to emerge from academic obscurity. For example, work by Jennifer Guglielmo has highlighted the role anarchist cultural-production played in building a diasporic movement, while Italian language scholars such as Maurizio Antonioli and Giampietro Berti have laid foundations for a new social history of anarchism’s base militants.[1] Additionally, work by Davide Turcato has blended biography and intellectual history to provide a contextual understanding of the lives of exiled anarchist thinkers like Errico Malatesta, while scholarship by historians such as David Berry and Constance Bantman has highlighted the importance of particular urban nodes in the transnational anarchist network.[2] All of these scholars are part of the larger emergence of anarchist studies as a growing subfield of research and scholarship. Pietro Di Paola’s recent monograph is perhaps the most recent example of this exciting and invigorating trend.

Di Paola’s work situates itself at the confluence of several vibrant fields, including transnational migration and diaspora studies, labor history, the history of radicalism, and studies on social movements. Or, as he states, “this monograph intends to contribute to the historiography of diasporic anarchism by exploring practical and ideological aspects of the Italian anarchists--their everyday lives as well as their ideological thought and its development--in London, one of the most significant nodes of the transnational anarchist network” (p. 5). He places his anarchist migrants, most of whom were also political exiles, into a larger tradition of Italian exile and diaspora rooted in the Risorgimento. Indeed, the exile experience is central to the book’s emotional core. This is made apparent in the book’s opening quotation of Pietro Gori (anarchist poet, musician, playwright, lawyer, criminologist, and journalist). Gori comments, “It is not easy to leave the loyal comrades of the first struggles, those with whom I cheerfully shared the harshness of an odyssey, without a storm of memories and sadness pouring into the heart” (p. 1). Di Paola argues that Gori’s experience of exile and dislocation was not unique. Rather his experience was shared by a large number of his fellow Italian anarchists.

For Di Paola, the Italians--along with Jews and Spaniards--were the major vectors for the dissemination of anarchism transnationally, spreading their ideology not only across Europe but also throughout the Americas and the Mediterranean basin. Drawing on the works of scholars such as Donna Gabaccia and Pier Carlo Masini, Di Paola focuses on the metropolis of late nineteenth-century London, a city that has already received some attention from Carl Levy and Hermia Oliver for hosting the most important anarchist thinkers from numerous different national groups. However, Di Paola’s work stands out from previous scholarship for its close examination of the Italian anarchist colony in London through a transnational lens sensitive to cultural production and social networks. His breadth and depth are partially the result of his combination of British and Italian sources and partially a result of his ability to synthesize discourses from both the English- and Italian-language scholarly communities. Indeed, Di Paola’s transnational archival research and his cross-national scholarly engagement combine to form a monograph of special quality and insight that should prove useful to scholars for years to come.

The first two chapters provide street-level detail--mapping and describing the anarchist community in London and exploring its relationship to the larger Italian immigrant colony. Di Paola starts off tracing the routes exiles took to reach London, reminding the reader of the political climate in Italy following the Paris Commune of 1871 and the birth of anarchism at the First International Workingmen’s Association. He stresses the heavy repression meteed out to anarchiss by Italian politicians such as Francesco Crispi, whom Di Paola describes as unleashing a “wave of violent repression … on Italian society” (p. 16) in which political repression in Italy surpassed any European nation outside Tsarist Russia and was comparable to that invoked by Mussolini decades later.

In response to these extraordinary measures of state violence, thousands of anarchists fled abroad. Many ended up finding their way to London, where the liberal British establishment maintained a largely open-door immigration policy and an unwillingness to extradite a person for political speech or for anything not considered a crime in England. Di Paola writes, “the tradition of free access was deeply rooted in British culture, being tightly linked with the idea of free-trade and based on an understanding of the advantages of utilizing foreigner’s skills” (p. 18). The British policy was in fact so welcoming that many European countries such as France and Spain began to deport anarchists and other unwanted elements directly to England. Thus many anarchists came to reside in the city on the Thames and it was there that they continued their fight against the national governments that had driven them abroad: plotting, raising funds, and printing propaganda materials to be smuggled back to their sending communities. Di Paola does an excellent job narrating these paths, exploring the government policies and the anarchist reactions. He does this through the careful use of British police records as well as those produced by spies paid for and dispatched by foreign governments, particularly Italy. Indeed the theme of spies animate the book both in the narrative moments of action and in Di Paola’s source material.

Chapters 3 and 4 explore the major activities organized by the Italian anarchists, such as demonstrations, conferences, and meetings. But Di Paola cannot do this without also exploring some of the major personalities behind these events, such as Errico Malatesta, who moved the printing press for his journal L’Associazione from Nice to London in 1889. He also unpacks some of the major conflicts, controversies, and arguments that animated the community. In particular he reveals the major players behind the two ideologically dominate strains of anarchism active in the city from the 1870s until the outbreak of World War I: organizational and anti-organizational anarchism. This “great schism” works as the major narrative structure in the center of book. And while it is fair to say that Di Paola’s sympathies lie with Errico Malatesta and the organizationalists, the author does not ignore their ideological rivals. Indeed, groups like Gli Intransigenti di Londra e Parigi, L’Anonimato, and La Libera Iniziativa along with leading figures such as Vittorio Pini and Luigi Parmeggiani receive extensive examination. Di Paola looks at their propaganda tactics, their “illegalism” and fringe lifestyles (for years Parmeggiani sold counterfeit art to Europe’s elite), and the biographies of the most noteworthy figures, just as he does with Malatesta. In fact the falling-out of individuals, the personal insults and abuses, and the way ideology and personal association fracture and turn through the last decade of the nineteenth century are particularly well narrated. This is the section of the book where the pages seem to become the most inhabited, where intellectual history and biography collide to produce memorable moments of debate, danger, and recrimination. Di Paola also shows how the conflicts occurring in the anarchist clubs of London affected propaganda tactics and ideological development abroad and how events abroad had reverberations in the London colony.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the debate between organizationalists and anti-organizationalists was dying down, and as the Giolitti government liberalized trade-union legislation anarchists turned increasingly to labor organizing. Not only had the heads of many European nations been assassinated by anarchists, but the turn to popular organizing and away from individual action represented even a greater threat--the general strike, which many saw as “the first step towards a popular insurrection aiming at the destruction of the government” (p. 97). Di Paola take us deep into the intellectual world in which these new politics were coming to shape anarchism in this new century with particular attention to important journals such as Lo Sciopero Generale. We also see the Italian anarchists attempting to emerge from the ethnic ghetto as they engage with British trade unionism and the growing power of various state-based and electoral socialist and communist trends.

Di Paola takes us through various publication and propaganda projects, various attempts to organize workers and strikes, and several major cases of arrest, trial, and state oppression in a period in which the British government was becoming less tolerant of the many political radicals housed in its capital city, a change made most clear by the introduction of the Alien Act in 1905. This chapter takes us all the way to the years just before the First World War, when the Italian diaspora was particularly engaged with antimilitarism due to Italy’s increased expansionistic policy in the Mediterranean, specifically in Libya. Here we see the extent to which Italians abroad were still focused on politics at home. This focus on the issues affecting the sending community has been occasionally used by scholars such as Constance Bantman to “raise a number of questions regarding the effectiveness of the anarchist movement in achieving its international ideals,” an accusation Di Paola responds to by arguing that “if the anarchists failed to develop an ‘institutional internationalism’, they definitely created a distinctive subversive culture and self-conscious ideology which helped them to feel part of an imagined transnational community” (p. 9).

It would be natural to follow this chronological narrative directly into the start of the First World War, which tore apart the world in which anarchism had grown and drove anarchists into opposing camps regarding intervention. However, before exploring the impact of the war on anarchism, Di Paola spends a chapter examining the surveillance of the Italian anarchists by the British and Italian states. This move, while breaking with the chronological flow that dominates most of the book, highlights a phenomenon that all the previous chapters have already made clear--the anarchists were watched obsessively by numerous governments and their informers. Di Paola has used these sources in all the early chapters but it is in chapter 5 that he finally explores the actual functioning of these police systems. He names the informants and provides biographical background; he explores their motivations (political and financial), their various rates of success, and their competitions. Indeed, while Italian spies occasionally collaborated with the British, at times different Italian policing groups actually competed with each other.

In chapter 6, Di Paola turns to a cultural history of anarchist spaces, focusing on the politics and sociability of their clubs which dominated the anarchist colony in London, noting that the anarchist refugees in England and in other centers of the political diaspora developed “an extensive and elaborate social infrastructure that contributed to produce a distinctive subculture and community” (p. 157). Building on the work of scholars such as Marcella Bencivenni, Di Paola argues for the importance of cultural production in the anarchist milieu.[3] As he explored the theater, music, and festival life of the London colony we are aware of the hidden currents of doubt, suspicion, and conflict that animated its underbelly. He examines the role women played (notably in the drama societies), and explores the libraries and the educational projects initiated by the anarchists, stating that “clubs were essential instruments of organization, but they accomplished other functions as well. From the 1870s, anarchist clubs bolstered both the creation of a network between refugees of different nationalities and the establishment of links with British radicalism” (p. 161).

Di Paola goes on to give us details on different boarding houses and soup kitchens and descriptions of what life was like in these spaces; he narrates approaches to the clubs down narrow alleys, the security measures employed at the door. He also explores the way these spaces were described in the mainstream press and the lurid and emotive descriptions of anarchist women and the general discourse about the clubs that circulated in more respectable circles. Di Paola concludes that the clubs “played a significant role in the dissemination of anarchist ideas and forms of organization. They provided a home away from home: havens for refugees who often felt shut out from English life … the clubs were at the heart of the experience of anarchist exiles in London” (p. 183).

After this foray into cultural history the author returns, in the last chapter of his book, to the end of his chronological exploration of Italian anarchists in London. He ends with World War I because, he argues, by the end of the war most of the major anarchist organizers such as Errico Malatesta had left England all together. The breakup of the London node is insightfully narrated by Di Paola with a detailed focus on the divide that exploded between interventionist and antimilitarist anarchists. Led by Peter Kropotkin, the Russian intellectual and long-time grandfather figure of the movement, anarchists such as Jean Grave supported the war against German aggression, which they feared would spread a right-wing reaction across the European continent. Opposed to them, Errico Malatesta and others argued against any national war project, staying true to their belief that the only just war is class war. This debate deeply divided the community. This conflict contributed to the end of the great era of Italian anarchism in London. Di Paola is careful to note that Italian anarchist did not completely disappear from the United Kingdom, and important Italian anarchists such as Vernon Richards and Marie Louise Berneri remained active in the 1920s and 1930s--organizing against fascism and supporting the Spanish Republic’s fight against Franco.

Di Paola follows his text with a delightful collection of biographies of his major players that helps the reader recall many of the stories he has explored in his dense scholarly work. If there are any detractions to be made it is that these biographies are not used more systematically, that we do not get more statistical social history in terms of the composition of base militants who made up the movement, of their professions and lives, sending communities, and family networks. Also, the various maps Di Paola presents his audience with do not show change over time. It would have been useful to be given more than static images of the anarchist scene in London, and those interested in more complex readings of city-space and map-based argumentation may be left wanting. Regardless, Di Paola’s exhaustive use of archival sources produced both by the anarchists themselves and by the various national police who watched them from the shadows makes the book a gem of primary source research. Di Paola has provided the field of anarchist studies with an invaluable base for understanding their Italian-speaking world in London. He has brought together sources from archives in multiple countries in a way that reflects not only on the anarchists but on the policing states that meticulously gathered data on their lives and actions. This book should be considered essential reading for anyone interested in late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century political culture, anarchism, and migration as well as anyone attempting to do transnational studies of social movements in general or the policing of such movements by state systems.

Notes

[1]. Jennifer Gugliemo, “Italian Women’s Proletarian Feminism in the New York City Garment Trades, 1890s-1940s,” in Women, Gender and Transnational Lives: Italian Workers of the World, ed. Donna Gabaccia and Franca Iacovetta (Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Jennifer Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Maurizio Antonioli, Giampietro Berti, and Pasquale Iuso, eds., Dizionario Biografico Degli Anarchici Italiani, vol. 1: A-G (Pisa: Biblioteca Franco Serantini, 2003); Maurizio Antonioli, Giampietro Berti, and Pasquale Iuso, Dizionario Biografico Degli Anarchici Italiani, vol. 2: I-Z (Piza: Biblioteca Franco Serantini, 2004).

[2]. Davide Turcato, Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); David Berry and Constance Bantman, eds., New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism: The Individual, the National and the Transnational (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010); Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013).

[3]. Marcella Bencivenni, Italian Immigrant Radical Culture: The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890-1940 (New York: NYU Press, 2011).

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Citation: Andrew Hoyt. Review of Di Paola, Pietro, The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880-1917). H-Italy, H-Net Reviews. August, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=44764

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