© 2016 Mark Bray ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE ANARCHIST INQUISITION: TERRORISM AND THE ETHICS OF MODERNITY IN SPAIN, 1893-1909 By MARK BRAY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey In partial fulfillment of the requirements For the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in History Written under the direction of Temma Kaplan And approved by __________________________________ __________________________________ __________________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2016 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Anarchist Inquisition: Terrorism and the Ethics of Modernity in Spain, 1893-1909 by MARK BRAY Dissertation Director: Temma Kaplan “The Anarchist Inquisition” examines how a nascent international human rights discourse grew out of a broader “ethics of modernity” in response to anarchist terrorism and state repression in Spain from 1893-1909. As authorities enhanced the scope of their arrests and torture and curtailed civil liberties in response to the bombing of a procession in Barcelona in 1896, an international movement for the rights of the victims of the Spanish state was born. In the next decade, several more instances of governmental brutality sparked campaigns that mobilized notions of human rights, even if they did not use the exact term. Using police records, press coverage, and correspondence between diplomats, activists and politicians in archives across Spain, France, the Netherlands, and England, I place Spain at the center of the story of how terrorism catalyzed the development of human rights. ii Acknowledgements First I would like to acknowledge the financial support that made the completion of this dissertation possible. Thank you to the Rutgers History Department for awarding me several Mellon Summer Research Grants and providing me with several years of fellowship. Thank you to Fulbright Foundation for awarding me a Fulbright/IIE fellowship to Spain. Thank you to the Rutgers Center for Cultural Analysis for including me in their “Totality” seminar and thank you to the Rutgers Graduate School for awarding me a Mellon Dissertation Fellowship this past year. I would also like to thank the historians and archivists who provided me with invaluable assistance as I navigated archives in Spain, France, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. Thank you to Eduardo González Calleja, Ángel Herrerín López, José Antonio Piqueras, Antoni Dalmau, Joan Casanovas, Jaap Kloosterman, Frank Mintz, and Fabien Delmotte. Next I would like to thank Temma Kaplan, Melissa Feinberg, and Jochen Hellbeck for mentoring me over the years. Through seminars and many one-on-one sessions they molded me into the historian I had to be to complete this massive project. I am especially appreciative of my advisor Temma Kaplan who had faith in my abilities and potential as a scholar and pushed me to pursue Spanish history in a wider European and global context. Thank you also to John Merriman for serving on my committee and providing rich historical models that inform my perspective on the writing of history. Finally, my fondest regards to Ms. Y. Barragan. iii 1 Introduction In the early 1890s, anarchist bombers, such as Ravachol in France or Paulino Pallás in Spain, ushered in a decade of unprecedented violence against the state that included assassinations of presidents and prime ministers, kings and queens. This decade of “propaganda by the deed,” the term anarchists used to describe the propagandistic goal of their assaults against symbols of oppression, resulted in the death of more than sixty and injuries for over 200 across Europe, the United States and Australia.1 Fin de siècle anarchist violence, like the doctrine of anarchism itself, has long been characterized by Marxist and liberal scholars alike as the last gasp of the “primitive,” pre-modern revolutionism of the marginalized lower classes who the expansion of trade unionism, social democracy, and parliamentary politics had failed to tame.2 But what if anarchist propaganda by the deed was actually an accelerant to the development of ‘modern’ politics rather than an exceptionally noisy obstacle? This dissertation makes that very claim. It argues that at the turn of the twentieth century anarchists were central to the development of what many have considered the modern political concept par excellence: human rights. I show how anarchists played key roles in human rights history during this era in three ways. First, Spanish anarchist propaganda by the deed inadvertently stimulated the development of transnational human rights activism long before many historians have acknowledged by provoking such extreme state violence that the treatment of anarchists became an important litmus test for 1 Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878-1934 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2014), 36. 2 E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in archaic forms of social movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: W. W. Norton, 1965). For a thorough refutation of this position see Temma Kaplan, Anarchists of Andalusia 1868-1903 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977). 2 evaluating the rights of prisoners. The scale of repression meted out by the Monarchy in response to anarchist propaganda by the deed steadily increased from the early 1890s onward until it boiled over into an international scandal with el proceso de Montjuich in Barcelona from 1896-1900 when the acuteness of the anarchist threat provoked mass arrests, torture, executions, a widespread lack of due process, and harsh anti-anarchist laws that limited civil liberties. The Spanish government’s brutal anti-anarchist measures were undergirded by the argument, widely echoed in the press, that the desire of the anarchists to violently destroy the existing social order rendered them no better than animals, and thereby excluded them from the rights to which men were entitled. The intensity of the anarchist threat incited the state into a campaign of dehumanization against those who politicians and the media had denounced as the universal enemies of society. Yet, the plight of anarchist and other radical prisoners in Barcelona was so extreme that an international network of unionists, lawyers, freemasons, journalists, politicians, freethinkers, and other allies skillfully re-signified the state’s campaign of dehumanization into a movement of humanization on behalf of some of the most marginal prisoners in Western Europe. Much like the anti-slavery campaigns of earlier decades and the Congo and Portuguese West African campaigns of the next decade, the international campaigns in support of Spanish prisoners could most passionately fight “in the name of the rights of humanity”3 when defending those whose humanity was most thoroughly denied. 3 El Imparcial, June 25, 1899; El País, June 25, 1899; La Época, June 25, 1899; L’Intransigeant, June 1, 1897. 3 These campaigns succeeded not only by developing diverse transnational coalitions, but also by rhetorically targeting the Spanish monarchy where it felt vulnerable: its rapidly disintegrating empire and peripheral status in relation to the ‘Great Powers’ of Europe. Campaigners adeptly linked the Crown’s peninsular abuses with the atrocities it was committing in Cuba and the Philippines (and later to the Moroccan war of 1909) to conjure up the potent image of the “Revival of the Inquisition in Spain.” These activists tapped into a widely shared value system I refer to as “the ethics of modernity” that associated modernity with ethical national conduct and therefore argued that groups and individuals who committed atrocities were ‘backwards,’ ‘uncivilized,’ and mired in the Middle Ages. The Spanish prisoner campaigns soiled the Crown’s international reputation during the war with the United States when it started to realize the importance of promoting a positive reputation abroad after distancing itself from international relations over the previous decades in favor of dynastic and religious bonds.4 After the success of the first international campaign to liberate the prisoners of Montjuich castle in Barcelona in 1900, campaigns on behalf of anarchist prisoners effectively implemented the transnational human rights template that the Montjuich campaign developed over the next decade. Moving into the twentieth century, these campaigns forced the Spanish government to develop an appreciation for the potential international ramifications of domestic repression. This paved the way for several more campaigns to free imprisoned anarchists who otherwise would have been forgotten behind bars. 4 Sebastian Balfour, Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4. 4 Anarchists made their second contribution to human rights as activists. Not only human rights canaries in the European coal mine, anarchists spearheaded all of the campaigns in defense of Spanish prisoners and even played an important role in the campaign to exonerate Captain Alfred Dreyfus during the French Dreyfus Affair at the turn of the century. Former Spanish prisoners such as the engineering professor Fernando Tarrida del Mármol and the lay teacher Joan Montseny tapped into broader networks to collaborate with anarchist allies such as Dreyfusards Charles Malato and Sébastien Faure in France, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis in the Netherlands, Joseph Perry and Peter Kropotkin in England, and Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre in the United States to start