Published by the Jewish Anarchist Federation
New York City. 1924

The short sketch of Malatesta's life is based on the exhaustive study of Max Nettlau, published in Italian translation by "Il Martello" in New York under the title Vita e Pensieri di Errico Malatesta, and in German translation issued at Berlin by the publishers of the "Syndicalist." Max Nettlau, the profound scholar of the Anarchist movement, biographer of Michael Bakunin and author of Bibliographie de l'Anarchie, lives in Vienna, and like so many intellectuals in Europe, in distressing economic condition. May I express here the hope that he will find sufficient encouragement to continue his valuable task in the Anarchist movement? He was in contact with the most remarkable men and women in the revolutionary movement of our time and his own reminiscences should prove of great value to the younger generation.

The American publishers refuse to print the Biography on the pretext that it would not pay. No doubt, should an upheaval occur in Italy and Malatesta's name appear in the foreground, the same publishers would be only to eager to get hold of the manuscript. Meanwhile our comrades of the Jewish Anarchist Federation offer the short sketch as a homage to Malatesta on his seventieth birthday.

In a very sympathetic review of the Vita e Pensieri in the New York "Nation", Eugene Lyons states that Malatesta's life symbolized the romantic age of rebellion. True, but it is not the romance of self-conscious knight-errantry, of adventure for adventure's sake. It is rather the inevitable unfolding of a character unswerving in its devotion to a philosophy of action. Even at the peaks of his adventures Malatesta has remained kindly, retiring, modest in his habits.

Against the background of a Europe misruled by renegade Millerans, Lloyd Georges, Mussolinis, Eberts, Pilsudskis, and other of the fraternity of ex-idealists, the personality of Errico Malatesta attains an idyllic grandeur. At the age of seventy he can look back upon fifty years of intensive revolutionary work, thirty-six of them spent in busy exile. His life has a consistency, an almost apocalyptic directness which more than explains the adulation with which he is regarded among the comrades. It coincides, moreover, with a concentrated half century of social development. Its threads are woven closely into lives of the leaders during this period - Mazzini, Bakunin, Cafiero, William Morris, the brothers Reclus, James Guillaume, Stepniak, Kropotkin, and many others. It is a life that bridges the time of the Paris Commune and the Russian Revolution. Its course consequently has a tremendous significance.

When Malatesta returned to Italy in October, 1919, after being smuggled out of England on a coal boat by the head of the Italian Seamen's Federation, all the ships in the port of Genoa saluted his arrival, the city stopped work and turned out to greet him. His arrest soon after and the events in Italy which have forced him temporarily into the background of national life are recent enough to be generally known. Despite his age, Malatesta is still a vigorous social rebel, and the most stirring chapters of his life may still have to be written.

Hippolyte Havel

Errico Malatesta was born in Santa Maria Capua Vetere in 1853, Dec. 4, that is in Santa Maria, a little town occupying the site of Capua of antique fame, at two miles distance from the castle of Caserta.

Capua, in 1860, had a civilian population of about 10,000 and a large garrison. Being the administrative centre of the province called Terra di Lavoro, it may have harbored a numerous bureaucracy and appertaining quantities of lawyers and landed proprietors, the owners of the surrounding country. Caserta, on the other hand, with the Bourbon castle and large domain, was the scene of aristocratic and court life. Between these Santa Maria, now of about 30,000 inhabitants, may then have been an open rural town of small proprietors and merchants, and probably a landless agricultural proletariat, to which the neighborhood of Capua and Caserta, and that of Naples also, gave certain educational, trading, and other opportunities. It is in fact the centre of commerce of the Campania, rather flourishing and quite absorbed by commercial life. Let Malatesta himself, even if he remains silent upon his later life, give us a picture of his childhood which, to judge from these surroundings, may have been very quiet, but which, if we examine certain parts of contemporary history passing at close proximity to him, made him witness very stirring events at an early age.

I ignore whether the Bourbon misrule was always held vividly before his mind by family and local experience and traditions or whether even then children of middle class families with predominant material interests --- his father may have been engaged in commerce --- grew up without seeing this side of his life, just as the social question is kept from their eyes. But he was a boy of six or seven when, in 1860, the old system completely collapsed; then, for a moment, Europe's attention was riveted to his very own birthplace, for the garrison of official Capua marched against his own Santa Maria, held by none other than Garibaldi in person who fought a pitched battle and drove them back; official Capua was soon besieged and had to capitulate. A boy is not likely to miss or forget such days.

Even if young Malatesta had no special revolutionary initiative before he left Santa Maria - after frequenting the lyceum there - for the University of Naples, as an intelligent youth of liberal ideas he must easily have arrived at relatively advanced ideas, feeling the revolutionary patriotism so generally spread at that time. I see him recorded as a Mazzinist (by Angiolini, 1900), as inclining towards Garibaldi by Fabbri, 1921) but I should consider him at least a very unorthodox partisan of either. Mazzini represented apparently more unswerving republicanism and a higher social idea than Garibaldi, and in that sense Malatesta may have been attracted by him as being the most advanced revolutionist he then knew of. But there is no trace in all we know of Malatesta to show that the special ideas of religious mysticism and that peculiar pseudo-socialism which is in reality as anti-socialist as anything could be, which both are unseparable from Mazzini, though they do not affect his practical political thought - that these Mazzinian fallacies were ever accepted by Malatesta who seems to have jumped into internationalism and anarchism so neatly and quickly as if they had been familiar to him all along.

What he saw during these years of the social misery around him, whether this or the general political discontent, or friends, societies, a local propaganda or what else first propelled him into advanced movements, he may yet tell himself with many other details of his early life of which we can only give such a fragmentary and hypothetical account. But there can be a little doubt that an article in the "Questione Sociale" (Florence), about January, 1884, translated in the Geneva "Revolte" (Feb 3, 1884), most fortunately preserves a description of Malatesta's youthful mental evolution from abstract republicanism to living socialism. The article intends to point out a similar way to the young republicans of the eighties and in some respect may be compared to Kropotkin's "Appeal to the Young." Here only the biographical parts can be quoted as some length:

"More than fifteen years ago [about 1868] I was a young man, studying rhetorics, Roman history, Latin and Mr. Gioberti's philosophy. In spite of all the intentions of my masters to that purpose, school did not stifle within me the natural element, and I conserved in the stultifying and corrupting surroundings of a modern college a healthy intellect and a virgin heart.

"Being of loving and ardent nature, I dreamed of an ideal world where all love each other and are happy; when I was tired of my dreams and gave myself over to reality, looking around me, I saw here a miserable being trembling of cold and humbly begging for alms, there crying children, there swerving men and my heart became glaced.

"I paid closer attention and became aware that an enormous injustice, an absurd system were weighing down humanity, condemning it to suffer: work degraded and nearly passing as dishonorable, the worker dying of hunger to feed the orgies of his idle master. And my heart was swelled with indignation. I thought of the Gracchi and Spartacus, and felt within myself the soul of a tribune and of a rebel.

"Not since I heard it said around me that the republic was the negation of these things which tortured me, that all were equal in a republic, since everywhere and at all times I saw the word republic mixed with all the revolts of the poor and the slaves, since in school we were kept in ignorance of the modern world in order to be made stupid by means of a mutilated and adulterated history of ancient Rome and were unable to find some type of social life outside of Roman formulas --- from these reasons I called myself a republican, and this name seemed to me to resume all the desires, all the wrath which haunted my heart. I did perhaps not very well know what this dreamed republic ought to be, but I believed that I knew it, and that was sufficient: to me the republic was the reign of equality, love, prosperity, the loving dream of my fancy transformed into reality.

"Oh! what palpitations agitated my young breast! Sometimes a modern Brutus, in imagination I plunged a dagger in the heart of some modern Caesar, at other times I saw myself at the head of a group of rebels or on a barricade crushing the satellites of tyranny, or I thundered from a platform against the enemies of the people. I measured my size and examined my upper lips to see whether my mustache had grown; oh! how I was impatient to grow up, to leave college to devote myself entirely to the cause of the republic!

"At last the day I had wished for arrived and I entered the world, full of generous intentions, hopes and illusions. I had so much dreamed of the republic that I could not miss to throw myself into all attempts where I saw were it only an inspiration, a vague desire for a republic, and it was as a republican that I first saw the inside of the royal prisons...

"Later on reflection survived. I studied history, which I had learned from stupid manuals, full of lies, and I then saw that the republic had always been a government like any other or a worse one, and that injustice and misery ruled in republics and in monarchies and that the people are shut down by cannon, when it tries to shake of its yoke."

He looked at America where slavery was compatible with a republic, at Switzerland where Catholic or Protestant priest rule had been rampant, at France where the republic was inaugurated by the massacre of 50,000 Parisians of the Commune, etc. This was not the republic he had dreamed, and if older people told him that in Italy the republic would produce justice, equality, freedom and prosperity, he knew that all this had been said beforehand in France also and is always said and promised.

He concluded that the character of a society cannot depend on names and accessories, but of the real relations of its members among themselves and with the whole social organization. In all this there was no essential difference between a republic and a monarchy. This is shown by the identity of their economic structure, private property being the basis of the economic system of either. History showed that popular rights (in republics) were unable to alter this. A radical transformation of the economic system, the abolition of the fact of individual property must be the starting point for a change. So he felt horror from the republic, which is only one of the forms of government which all maintain and defend existing privilege, and he became a Socialist.

These clear statements can be supplemented by the following impressions written after Garibaldi's death (Garibaldi, signed E.M., in the "Revolte" of June 10, 1882):

... "I have combatted for a long time Garibaldi and Garibaldinism and always remained their decided adversary. Since I entered the Socialist movement I met on the road of the International in Italy this man, I will rather say this name, relying upon all his formidable glory, his immense popularity and uncontested greatness of character. Since he was more dangerous than other great adversaries by his unconscientiously equivocal attitude, his adherences quickly withdrawn or adulterated - I was soon persuaded that as long as Garibaldi was not eliminated, Socialism in Italy would remain an empty humanitarian phraseology, an adulteration of true Socialism - and I fought him with the conscience of fulfilling a duty, perhaps even with the exaggeration of a neophyte, and a man from the South in the bargain. Well, when I heard of his death, I felt my heart contract; I felt once more the same pangs of pain which befell me, quite young then, when the death of that other great Italian figure, Guiseppe Mazzini, was announced, though I was engaged in polemics against his program."

From the rest of this article I extract only this: ... "22 years after the Marsala expedition a pope and a king are still in Rome! I believe that Garibaldi could have crushed papacy in 1860 and made the Italian republic; and if this had led to civil and foreign invasion, so much the better! The movement of 1860 could have become a real revolution and Italy would have renewed the miracles of France in '92. I believe that since that time Garibaldi could have several times liberated Italy from monarchy, and that not only he has not done this, but he served for a long time as the safety valve of the monarchy." (The reason is because, however audacious in war, he was timid in politics, etc.)

From these occasional statements we may perhaps infer that young Malatesta never fell under the full influence of one of the advanced parties as such, that he rather conceived a republicanism of his own, comprehending from the beginning also the desire for social justice, and that when he first compared this Socialist republicanism with the existing republican parties, the result was unsatisfactory, and only the heroic revolutionary Socialism of the Paris Commune appealed to him: he found there what he had seen before in his dreams. In short, he was one of those in whom love for freedom and altruism were greatly and equally developed and who thereby are enabled sooner than others to arrive at Anarchist and Socialist conceptions, since these ideas in dim outlines already germ in their conscience.

In Angiolini's History of Socialism in Italy (1900), an indifferent compilation from reliable or questionable sources, we read that Malatesta, in 1870, a student of medicine and a Mazzinian like all young people then, was arrested in a tumult at Naples, underwent his first condemnation and was suspended from the university for one year, and the accidents of his life from this time hindered him to resume his studies.

In those years, I am told, meetings of students who had some reason for discontent, would often lead to the formation of street processions, demonstrating before government or university buildings, etc., and students whom the police would arrest repeatedly were finally suspended from their studies for certain periods of time.

This may have been Malatesta's case, and when we shall see in what events he took part during the six years following his entrance into the movement (spring 1871 to spring 1877), there will be no wonder that a quiet interval to resume these studies never occurred, and less so in the years following of prison and exile. I have never inquired how his family faced this situation; I can only say that his private affairs never occupied the public. I believe that material matters were quite indifferent to him, not in the sense of this being distracted, spiritualized or what not - he is the most sensible, practical man - but because real wealth, a career, leisure even, had no attractions for him, and he was always sufficiently handy and skilled, to work when necessary to get the cost of his frugal living. In 1877 the act of accusation, if correct, describes him as a chemist; he is also a mechanic, an electrician and has put his hand to other kinds of work. Three things he never would exert: paid politics, paid journalism, and paid labor officialism; but he had unloaded ships, looked out for the most unskilled work in the building trade, and so on. Thus the loss of a formal university career was nothing to him, his intellectual progress went on without that. Henceforth he gave all his energy to the cause, never retained by any ties, and his unpretentious private life need not occupy us further.

During the time of the Commune of Paris, March to May, 1871, Malatesta, the young republican student, in a cafe at Naples made the acquaintance of Carmelo Palladino, of the International section, a young lawyer who, seeing his inclination towards Socialism, took him aside and further initiated him into the ideas. Malatesta then joined the workers' group which continued the former section, other students of his friends also joined; the section took to life again, a school was formed, public agitation was resumed.

Of Palladino little is known, except that he settled sometime later in his native place of Cagnano Varano, in the secluded Monte Gargano region, where he died many years later in a tragic manner. He visited Bakunin with Afiero at the end of 1872 and is also mentioned by him as being in Locarno in 1874, after the failure of the Italian insurrection of that year. Malatesta speaks of him with sympathy and esteem; between themselves they evidently secured Naples (the section) for the advanced cause, and even won the support of Carlo Cafiero, an acquisition of the greatest value to their ranks.

For some time later (Malatesta tells) Cafiero returned to Naples from London as a London member of the International with certain powers given by him by the General Council; in fact, he was to found a section at Naples and was astonished to find that the section at Naples and was astonished to find that the section existed already. From these reasons his reception was rather cool, but in one or two months' time he saw for himself that the section was right and wrote to London in that sense.

Carlo Cafiero, born in Barletta (Apulia), 1846, of a rich and reactionary local family, after a clerical education and a beginning training for the diplomatic service, threw up this career, yet retained some mystical leanings which covered a deep yearning for altruist, even ascetic practice. Under these circumstances his casual presence at a large labor meeting in London called his attention to the International, and Marx, and specially Engels, who then took into his head to convert Italy and Spain to Marxism by means of Bignami, Cafiero, Lafargue, later on Mesa and a few others, did all they could to make him the man who would stamp out Bakunin's influence in Italy. Cafiero, boundlessly devoted to any cause which he once embraced, had a somewhat capricious mentality and was difficult to handle; Fanelli, Gambuzzi and Tucci agreed with him, but most is said to have been achieved by Malatesta, young as he was, perhaps because Cafiero found in him more than in any other a man who would really resort to action, as the events of 1874 and 1877 proved. The final touch was given by Bakunin in 1872.

It results then that Malatesta entered the movement by a way of his own, impressioned by the Parisian revolution and meeting an intelligent propagandist, Palladino, grown up in the Naples Socialist milieu first implanted by Bakunin's efforts. Most other Italian Internationalists of that time entered the movement also in 1871, but a little later, moved by the horrible repression which followed the fall of the Commune of Paris and full of indignation over Mazzini's attitude who not only condemned the Commune, but considered this the right movement to attack, nay to excommunicate and insult the International and Socialism in general. Many of those who up till then almost made a divinity of Mazzini now left him with disgust. Garibaldi maintained a correct attitude and wrote generous words, declaring the International to be the sun of the future, etc. But his insufficiency in political and social matters was more and more felt and many of his adherents left him in a friendly way, turning their efforts henceforth towards the rising International.

The situation within the International and within all these local movements was rather complicated and can but briefly be resumed here. The General Council, directed by Marx and Engels, had already begun to introduce an arbitrary regime by replacing the public congress by a private conference (1871) and by trying to impose in this way certain ideas peculiar to the Socialism of Marx, notably the necessity of political action, which in practice meant electioneering and parliamentary tactics, the reduction of Socialism to Social Democracy. Against this the Jurassians protested at Sonvillier and issued their appeal, the so-called Circular of Sonvillier (November, 1871), Bakunin wrote in all directions to explain this protest which e.g. the section of Naples seconded by a letter of Palladino to the General Council. It was difficult to make these interior dissensions understood by the new sections who were sometimes older societies whom a few enthusiasts had been able to induce to join the International and who had now practically to inaugurate their work by protesting against the inner dealings of a society, the exterior prestige of which they did not wish to impair and of which they were as yet not even formal members. And all of course felt that propaganda, organization, federation and action were required and not squabbles with persons in London, who had no practical experience whatever of the Italian situation. There was the strongest inclination on the part of all these young revolutionists, many of whom had seen fighting and conspirations before, to throw all formalities overboard, to do without the General Council of London, to declare themselves Internationalists of their own right and to go to real work. Bakunin, whom the Marxists still denounce as the man who undermined the International, in reality almost wrote his fingers off in these months, wrote that monument of patience, the letter of forty pages in 4° to the Romagna sections (al Rubicone [L. Nabruzzi in Ravenna] e tutti gli altri amici), Jan. 23, 1872, and very many other letters and manuscripts, to induce the sections to comply with the formalities required and to join in a regular way. He did so, of course, because he still believed in regular congress and a fair and open discussion with Marx on principles and considered it important, in the presence of reaction and persecution all around, that all shades of Socialist opinion should live side by side in the International, with mutual toleration from the "unique front," as the present term calls it.

Sometimes sections were formed or local republican societies declared themselves in favor of the International and a third way was found when in the Romagna, the Emlia, Tuscany mixed labor unions were created, all adopting the name of a local Fascio operaio; they might contain Garibaldians and Socialists at the beginning and would rapidly develop towards the International; moreover their leading spirits would, by conferences, inaugurate a movement of federation of always larger proportion.

No detailed report exists of the Rimini Conference (August 1872), only an oblong sheet, Associazione Internatoinale dei Lavoratori. 1a Conferenza delle Sezzioni Italiane (rimini, 1p.), containing the resolutions which were also printed in the Bollettino dei Lavoratori (August 31), then secretly issued at Naples.

For the conference in a well remembered resolution had protested against attempts by the General Council to impose upon the International a special authoritarian theory, namely that of the German communist party; it declared to break all solidarity with the London General Council, while affirming its economic solidarity with all workers, and it convened a general anti-authoritarian congress to meet in Switzerland on the very day of the proposed Hague congress of the International. While Marx considered this as Bakunin's supreme move to supersede the International, it was in reality an independent, headstrong act of the young Italians which Bakunin and his friends in other countries never endorsed and which was not acted upon. The Italians did not take part in the Hague Congress where only Cafiero assisted as a spectator, and they met their comrades from other countries only when they returned from the Hague and all met in Switzerland, Malatesta included.

It is not feasible to explain here the story of the inner dissensions of the International, nor even the echo they found in Italy with anything near to completeness. These are not old forgotten party squabbles, but debates, moves and countermoves which bear great resemblance to those of our very time, and it is regrettable that some only, Malatesta among them, have this past chapter of Socialist history and experience before their mind, while to others it remains unknown or worse than that, distorted by partial accounts (to use a mild term), which have been disproved long since but which are always carelessly revived.

* * * * *

Malatesta of foreign places saw first Zurich, where the Russian students' Socialist movement flourished that year, and he saw the Jurassian Internationalists, refugees of the Commune and the Spanish Anarchist delegates, etc. I ignore at what time he began to read Spanish; but I have myself seen some few rests of the Spanish papers sent to Italy at that time, the Barcelona Federacion, a Mallorca paper, etc., and I am convinced that Malatesta by such readings and the acquaintance of the delegates - of whom T.G. Morago may have struck him most - early conceived a lasting interest in the Spanish movement.

Of these pleasant days in the Swiss Jura, when all co-operated to obliterate by strengthened solidarity the miserable impression of the Hague Congress, Malatesta remembers the little detail, that children of the locality took Bakunin to be Garibaldi. Of Malatesta himself the sober Jurassians had the best impression; he always was for determined, straight attack, not for any roundabout ways.

In this way, under friendly and happy auspices, Malatesta entered the inmost circle of the most advanced movement of the time, the youngest of all and well liked, if the name Banjamin, by which Bakunin's diary designs him, had any such meaning.

The Italian Congress was convened on January 10, 1873, to meet on March 15 at Mirandola, where Cleso and Arturo Cerretti lived. But the local section was dissolved, C. Cerretti arrested and the corresponding commission invited the delegates to meet at Bologna where a first meeting took place on March 15 in a factory. On March 16 Andrea Costa, Malatesta, Alcesto Faggioli, A. Negri and other delegates were arrested, but the congress succeeded to meet in yet another place; 53 delegates of 50 sections. Local federations of Naples, Florence, Ravenna, Rimini, Turin, Mirandola, Modena, Ancona, Siena, Pisa, Rome; sections of Forli, Faenza, Lugo, S. Potito, Fusignano, Fermo e circondario, Menfi, Sciacca (Sicily), Osmimo and other small localities.

As this is not a history of the Italian International, I may not record the resolutions modifying the organization, nor the very interesting theoretical and general resolutions, some of which show either Bakunin's own hand or the largest possible influence of his ideas. In any case it was resolved not to take part in an international congress unless convened to propose the following reforms: (1) Integral restoration of the old introduction to the platform of the International; (2) solidarity in the economic struggle to be declared the unique tie between the associates, leaving to each federation, section, group or individual full freedom to adopt the political program which they prefer and to organize themselves in conformity with it publicly or secretly, always provided the program be not opposed to the object of the association, the complete and direct emancipation of the proletarians by the proletarians themselves. (3) Abolition of all authority and central power within the society and consequently full freedom of organization and complete autonomy of the sections and federations.

The congress, from given considerations, declared itself atheist and materialist (ateo e materialiste) and anarchist and federalist (anarchico e federalista) and recognized no political action except such which, in unison with all the workers of the world, directly leads to the realization of the principles exposed, rejecting all co-operation and complicity with the political intrigues of the bourgeois, may they call themselves democrats and revolutionists. It was further declared that, if the workers of other countries differ from these ideas unanimously accepted by the present congress, this is their full right and will not prevent our solidarity with them, provided they abstain from wishing to impose their ideas upon others.

The publication and circulation of these resolutions were delayed by the arrests; finally the Belgian Federal Council proposed to invite the Jurassian Federation to convene the general congress --- hence the Geneva Congress held in September, 1873.

Andrea Costa wrote in 1900 (Bagliroi di socialismo. Cenni storici, Florence) that, though the Socialists of Naples had already been molested, the present arrests were the signal of stupid and vile persecutions which lasted for seven years [and which, if they then ceased for Costa who entered politics, for anarchists continue until this day]. Then for the first time the International was charged to be a criminal body (associacione di malfattori), but the tribunal not yet endorsed these governmental views and the arrested were all discharged after two months of prison, but other arrests followed, at Lodi, Parma, Rome, etc.

Cafiero and Malatesta passed 54 days in prison, which lead up to the beginning of May; Cafiero then went home, to Barletta (Apulia), to realize his fortune of considerable size but impaired by such hurried sales of land and the bitter animosity of his family, etc. He foresaw that he might be altogether deprived of the use of it, when the revolutionary destination to which he had devoted it in his mind became known. Of Malatesta we know nothing for five or six week, but then he went to Locarno and passed some time, some weeks perhaps, with Bakunin.

During the summer of 1873 a Spanish revolution seemed imminent, and finally, urged on by his Spanish friends, Bakunin resolved to go there himself. But only Cafiero could give the necessary money and his affairs at Barletta were not yet terminated. So Bakunin and Malatesta decided to impress the importance of the matter further upon him, and since this could hardly be done by letter, Malatesta traveled to Barletta, where he was arrested three days after his arrival - and kept in prison for six months, to be discharged afterwards, of course without any trial. This may cover the time from the middle of July, 1873, to January, 1874, since he remembers that news from Alcoy - where a movement took place on July 9 - precipitated his journey.

At that time - as Z. Ralli (Zamfir C. Arbure, a Roumanian, then in the Russian movement) remembers - he and Malatesta copied a very long theoretical letter by Bakunin to Spain, full of references to anti-statish, federalist tendencies and events in Spanish history. But they, Bakunin and Malatesta (who would have gone to Spain with Bakunin), also keenly watched the present Spanish events which were disappointing in a high degree. Bakunin, writing in July, 1874, in a private document, bitterly speaks of the lack of energy and revolutionary passion in the leaders and in the masses. Malatesta, who in 1875 in a Spanish prison and elsewhere saw men of these movements, gives some criticism of events in San Lucar de Barrameda and Cordova in an article in the New York "Grido degli Oppressi" (Spanish translation in the Brooklyn "Despertar" of April 1, 1894). P. Kropotkin heard other accounts of the failure from P. Brousse and Vinas. It is not possible to enter here upon this subject to which the report given by the Spanish Federation to the Geneva congress (1873) gives a first introduction; other information is found in an often translated short history of the Spanish movement by Arnold Roller (1907).

Malatesta thus missed this experience and missed also half a year of development in the Italian movement. During this time a number of provincial congresses were held to found ten regional federations, those of the Romagna, Umbria and the Marches, Naples, Piemont, Liguria, Venetia, Lombardy, Tuscany, Sicily and Sardinia. Not all of these federations had a formal existence, nor did some of them, and their papers, last very long. For whatever the International began to build up, the government very soon demolished, not by bringing any legal charges against the societies and their members, but simply by administrative measures, dissolution and arbitrary arrests of known propagandists, as that arrest of Malatesta in Barletta, where certainly not a soul but Cafiero ever knew or heard anything of the Spanish plans. But these dissolutions etc. had no lasting effect, since the active members kept together and soon found another way to organize a local society. This outlawry by the government necessarily led to that state of mind which considered further patient propaganda quite impossible or useless and which pressed for revolutionary action. In this way the events of 1874 were brought under way.

* * * * *

The insurrectionary movement of August, 1874, large in conception, small in actual execution, were the necessary outcome of ever increasing tension and expectancy on the part of most of those who since 1871 had so frankly accepted the social revolution as their ultimate aim. Propaganda was almost made impossible by persecutions and we must not forget that all the complicated labor questions of later years, involving reforms and legislation, had not arisen in Italy at that time, large industries were only beginning and hardly did exist in the more revolutionary parts, middle and southern Italy. There were mainly numbers of intelligent skilled workers, more or less isolated, and masses of very poor and ignorant workers, laborers, small farmers, and peasants. A movement would be quicker decided upon and prepared then than in years later and the failure of the Paris Commune and of the Spanish movements of 1873 was rather an incentive for the Italians to try to do better. After putting aside Mazzini and Garibaldi as insufficient and ineffective to deal with the social problem, the International was or felt under a moral obligation to make a revolutionary effort by itself, and so this was prepared since the end of 1873.

The movement of 1874 had probably some very vital defects; it depended on a multiplicity of prearrangements, appointments, a given order of initiatives, etc., and a few arrests or accidents obstructed this complicate mechanism. It could not have been ready for action when the popular riots took place, for the rifles (as the trials shows) appear only to have been acquired in the latter part of July; whether Cafiero's journeys - for he contributed most of the money - caused any delay, I cannot say. It is extremely likely that the example of Bologna would have been followed in many other localities where preparations had been made; as it is, all was probably done in most places to undo these preparations and to destroy their traces. Some say that Costa was too optimistic and too superficial in reckoning upon support promised. The initial ferment, an immediate question attracting the people and rousing the indifferent was evidently wanting and everything fell flat. But the attitude of the prisoners during their many months of arrest and the trials contributed greatly to rebuild the prestige of the International.

Among those who kept faith and did the best they could was Malatesta in the South.

On August 20th Cunilia Belleria, Bakunin's young Ticinese friend, writes from Locarno to Bakunin at Splington: A friend from Naples arrived here [Carmelo Palladino]. He says that nothing can be done. Those whose address you want are hiding or in prison. Malatesta is expected here; if he does not arrive today, this would be a bad sign. At the Naples post office for twelve days a police officer is waiting for people who would call for letters addressed to D. Pasqualio, care of Nicolo Bellerio [Malatesta's address, the same which Bakunin's diary of 1872 contains, as mentioned above].

He was expected in vain; for traveling north he was arrested at Pesaro, between Ancaria and Rimini, being perhaps (as he thought) already betrayed or recognized when leaving Naples. He then passed long months of preventive imprisonment at Trani in Apulia.

The smallness and almost idyllic character of the few real events of August 1874 did not impair the popularity of the International. Success was not the only god worshipped then and in magnis voluisse sat est was still recognized - a generous intention ranks before success. Had not Mazzini's practical attempts all failed and was Garibaldi ever less beloved on account of the failures of Aspromante and of Mentana? And the government treated the matter as the Bourbons themselves would have treated an ancient political conspiracy; endless months of preliminary arrest were followed by monster trials, the Bologna trial terminating only on June 17, 1876 after three months' duration. This and the cheerful and plucky attitude of the accused created interest and sympathies and these trials are the most impressive and thereby the most important feature of the whole movement of those years. By implicating on the shallowest pretenses republicans and democrats, occasion was given to call Garibaldi and the old Mazzinian leaders like Aurelio Saffi as witnesses for the defense (at Florence); all this and the shabby police evidence and before all the youth, unblemished character, courage, defiance and yet altruist gentleness of the accused and able critical and rhetorical efforts of the defending lawyers - all this created an atmosphere of general sympathy and all the official evidence and the prosecutions' denunciations of socialism met with contempt.

The series of trials had an ugly beginning however. At Rome (May 4-8, 1875) sentences of ten years penal servitude and similar terms of simple prison were pronounced; but another trial had to be ordered - May 11-18, 1876, only a year later - which ended by acquittals. The Florence trial (June 30-August 30, 1875) - of which the republicans published a long report, Dibattimenti; Rome, 1875, 529 pp. - was simultaneous with Malatesta's trial at Trani (Apulia) early in August, seven accused; acquittal August 5. The good news from Trani thus cheered up everybody at Florence and though a poor man was sentenced to nine years hard labor for an alleged act of violence, and two received a nominal sentence for the possession of arms, all the others were acquitted. A trial of 33 Umbrian internationalists, at Perguia, ended similarly (September 24), also later trials of Leghorn and at Massa Carrara. The prisoners from the Marches and the Abruzzi (Aquila) were tried with the Bolognese and Romagnols in the largest of all trials, that of Bologna - March 15 to June 17, 1876 - where Costa was the leading spirit.

On August 29 Cafiero wrote to Bakunin; "the effect of the trial of Malatesta and Co. in the three Apulias is incredible. The jury - the richest men of the province even - immediately after the verdict shook hands with the accused who were received in triumph". These news from Malatesta or from local friends - for Trani is the town next to his native Barletta - were also sent by Cafiero the "Plebe" (Lodi) and reproduced in the Jura "Bulletin" (September 5). The trial lasted five days [August 1-5], the whole population was interested in it, not only the educated classes. The jury was composed of the richest landowners and there was military display. The public prosecutor told the jury verbatim: if you do not find these men guilty, they will come some day to abduct your wives, violate your daughters, steal your property, destroy the fruits of the sweat of your brows, and you will be left ruined, miserable and branded with dishonor. The jury after the verdict mixed with the cheering crowd and publicly and privately in Trani the acquitted met with the most cordial expressions of sympathy. If only the government would multiply the trials, Cafiero concludes, they may cost years of prison to some of us, but they will do our cause immense good.

About this time Malatesta made a few days visit at Locarno, discussing with Cafiero the reorganization of the Alliance. Cafiero and his Russian wife with whom was also S. Mazzotti, lived then at the Baronata in the very poorest way, caused by Cafiero's financial ruin.

It may have been at that time (about September 1875) that Malatesta's journey to Spain was discussed or arranged, for the purpose of rescuing Charles Alerini from the Cadix prison. Alerini, a Corsican, had entered Bakunin's intimate circle when the latter was at Marseille, October, November, 1870, trying to reorganize the movement that had failed at Lyons in September. when Bakunin was in great danger of arrest, Alerini helped him to escape from Marseille and now Bakunin seems to have been anxious to repay his action. For Alerni since April 1871 was a refugee in Spain; he was one of the Hague delegates of 1872 where Malatesta knew him as a brisk lively Southerner. With Paul Brousse and Camille Camet he also was of that small French group in Barcelona which in 1873 published the "Solidarite Revolutionaire". Whilst Brousse made his way to Switzerland, the revolutionary events of that summer sent Alerini and so many other Spanish internationalists and other rebels to prison for a number of years.

Of this journey which took place that autumn or a little later Malatesta speaks in a humorous spirit. The local comrades at Cadix considered the rescue easy. He was immediately admitted at the prison as if he had entered a hotel and passed the whole day with Alerini and 30 or 40 comrades, prisoners from Cartagena, Alcay and Cadix (1873). Finally, Malatesta boldly asked the chief warder to let Alerini walk out with him to see the town. Some pieces of gold jingling in his hand disappeared in the other's palm and next day Alerini, in company of two warders, was permitted to join him. The local comrades had arranged for a ship, the warders were made drunk, but - Alerini hesitated and would not go. There was nothing left that night but the considerable trouble for Malatesta and Alerini - to restore their drunken warders to their prison home. On the day following Alerini seemed more disposed to go away, this time a single coin of gold and one warder were sufficient, a sober man this time, but upon whom a sleeping draught appeared in the evening. Alerini was free to go and seemed determined to leave, but was found lingering in a room outside and simply would not go - so Malatesta gave it up. Alerini may have had a local sweetheart or was disinclined to re-enter revolutionary life; his time was over in fact.

I am almost sure that in this journey Malatesta also visited Morago at Madrid, possibly also in prison, if not in hiding, a much more serious man than Alerini. The Spanish International kept together through all these years as a secret association, yet meeting at many conferences, printing secret papers etc.; a Barcelona paper, Revista Social, edited by Vinas, was for years the only outward sign of the movement. P. Kropotkin took great interest in the Spanish International in 1877 when he intended to go there to join a proposed movement. He went there in fact in July, 1878, under somewhat different circumstances and received lasting impressions. All this would have interested Malatesta also, had not new action and new prisons retained him in Italy.

The inner history of the Italian movement since the repression in 1874 is usually repeated from F. Pezzi's book (1872) who was in the position to know diverse plans or proposals reanimated in 1875 chiefly among the Swiss exiles. Malatesta thinks very small of these matters which came to nothing. That a Comitato Italiano per la Rivoluzione Sociale continued to exist or was reconstituted in Cafiero's circle becomes evident from a letter from Cafiero to Bakunin of August 27, 1875. When however Malatesta, the prisoners of Florence and others were gradually liberated since the latter part of 1875, a reconstruction of the International, if possibly by a public congress, was of course the move under preparation, though the largeBologna trial was still outstanding and regard for the prisoners, I take it, demanded discrete action until the trial was over.

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Malatesta passed this winter at Naples (1875-1876); in an occasional article, A proposito di Massoneria ("Umanite," Oct. 7, 1920), he tells of this period of his life:

I was a freemason when I was a little younger than now - from October 19, 1875 to March or April 1876.

I returned to Naples... [after the acquittal at Trani]... we were acquitted in spite of our most explicit declarations for Anarchism, collectivism (this term was then used) and revolutionarism, because at that time the bourgeoisie, especially in the South, did not yet feel the socialist peril and it was often sufficient to be an enemy of the government to have the sympathy of the jury.

I returned under the spell of a certain popularity and the Mason wanted to have me among them. A proposition was made to me. I objected my socialist and anarchist principles and was told that masonry was for infinite progress and that anarchism could very well enter within its program. I said that I could not have accepted the traditional form of the oath and was told that it would be sufficient for me to promise to struggle for the good of humanity. I also said that I was not willing to submit to the ridiculous "probations" of the initiation and was told that they should be disposed with in my case. Briefly put, they wanted me at any cost and I ended by accepting - from this reason also that I was struck by the idea to repeat Bakunin's attempt which had failed, to lead back Freemasonry to its ideal origins and to make a really revolutionary society of it.

So I entered Freemasonry . . . and became quietly aware that it served only to advance the interests of those brethren who were the greatest frauds. But since I met there with enthusiastic young men who were accessible to socialist ideas, I stayed there to make propaganda among them and I did so to the great scandal and rage of the big heads.

But when Nicotera became Premier and the Lodge decided to meet him with band and banners, Malatesta could but, as he says, "protest and leave". (From that time their relations were only hostile).

About that time Malatesta for the only time in his life went out of his way to serve another cause, that of the Herzogovina insurrection against the Turks. He spoke of this movement with Bakunin in 1875 and remembers that Bakunin recalled the strong attitude of former British statesmen on such occasion, maybe of Lord Pamerston and others. Bakunin must have known of his idea to go there himself and had Mazzotti tell him of the good people in England who make socks for the heathen negroes and have no eyes for the half naked poor at home; Mazzotti remembered as Malatesta's reply that whenever Carthago was attacked, Rome was defended.

This movement had the strong support of Garibaldi; Celso Cerretti was there, also Alcesto Faggioli (after the Bologna trial). In July 1875 Stepniak, D. Klemens and Ross went there of which the last returned soon, completely disenchanted; as he soon met Cafiero in Rome, it is just possible that Malatesta then heard this side of the question which was also alluded to in the Jura "Bulletin". But there was no help for it and some rivalry with the Garibaldians and the desire to do some harder fighting than in 1874 may also have had their effect. In those years the Mazzinists and Garibaldians were already completely drifting away from inner action with republican arms and were cleverly made to spend their enthusiasm and sometimes give up their lives in the service of Italy's unofficial foreign policy. Already in 1870 Garibaldi had balanced the blow struck at the prestige of France by the occupation of Rome, when he immediately afterwards assisted France in the war and since then the rough and ready Garibaldians fought for Italy in the Balkans and in Greece, whilst the more cultivated Mazzinians undertook the more literary and educational propaganda in the Italian-speaking districts of Austria.

However, all this was veiled, as usual, by clouds of fine words and generous feeling knows no reasoning and so, between Gladstone and Garibaldi, Malatesta also went to Trieste, but was sent back to Italy. He tried again and arrived at Newsatz (Croatia), on the way to Belgrad. He was sent back forcibly again from place to place and took 30 days to reach Udine where the Italians kept him in prison for a forthnight, mistaking him for an absconding custom officer. Then he had to return to Naples by administrative order and on the way there stayed a short time in Florence.

During the next three months at Naples (between July and October 1876) Malatesta, Cafiero and Emilia Covelli constantly met; Covelli, a friend of Cafiero from childhood, an ardent internationalist, was a gifted writer who had given particular thought and study to economic questions; he edited 'L'Anarchia' (Naples, August 25-October 6, 1877), one of the best papers of the International which, by the way, in 1876-77 had a good organ in the 'Martello' of Fabriano and Tesi (end of July, 1877). Was it Covelli's influence that led them to consider the economic side of their ideals? In any case Malatesta tells that in their walks along the seashore they then arrived by themselves at the idea of communist anarchism.

This was a new step forward, for until then the economic description applied to anarchism was collectivist. This meant: collective property and that the worker should receive the full product of his labor. But - they now asked themselves - how to determine this? A general standard would have to be established to which all must submit - this implies authority - and moreover since physical force, skill, etc., are different, the weaker and the less able would be the victims of such a system - which means inequality and a new form of exploitation, the creation of new economic privilege. Hence the products of labor should also be collective property and accessible to all in the measure of their wants. This is designated communism, only the word had then been discredited by the authoritarian character of Cabet's and other systems.

It is remarkable that in the beginning of 1876 the same idea (accepted by the Florence congress in October) was incidentally mentioned in a diminutive pamphlet published in Geneva by Francois Dumartheray, a refugee from Lyon. Dumartheray, Perral and others had for years belonged to a small and very advanced Geneva section called "L'Avenir" where those ideas had matured and Dumartheray was in 1879 one of Kropotkin's comrades and helpmate on the 'Revolte'.

These ideas originated for yet another time in Kropotkin's mind when he was working for anarchist propaganda in Switzerland. They are formulated in his Idee anarchiste au point de vue de sa realisation pratique, read before the Jurassian sections October 12, 1879, whilst Cafiero resumed then in Anarchie et Communisme, laid before the Jurassian congress of October 9-19, 1880. from that time they were generally accepted except in Spain.

Even among the Icarians themselves in those years a free communist tendency sprang up (represented by the paper 'La Jeune Icarie,' etc.); there the young generation denied to the earlier Icarian settlers the exclusive right to the fruits of their gardens and from trees which they claimed as individual property.

Leaving the Icarian episode apart, these parallel developments may be described as the first important new steps of anarchism since Bakunin's retirement; the adoption of the tactical principle of propaganda by deed was a second step, and the replacing of formal organizations by free groups will soon mark a third one. The desire to eliminate all possibilities of authority and to realize the most complete freedom, inspired all these developments; also, I believe, the feeling that action on a very large scale (like the Commune of Paris) was less near at hand than expected some years ago and that extension and intensification of the propaganda was necessary before all. These modifications were not always accepted and appreciated by the older comrades, but there was no ill feeling. Only traces of the old ideas remained, so in Malatesta's case an adherence to the earlier ideas on organization and a belief in the near (and not only the remote) possibility of collective action.

* * * * *

The insurrectionary movements of 1874 and 1877 differed fundamentally. In 1874 a general rising was expected, by some at least, ad the example of Garibaldi in Sicily and Naples, of the Spanish political revolution of 1868 and of the Commune of Paris was still before all. In 1876-77 the purpose was before all effective Socialist propaganda by an example set to the country population which could not be reached by other means. The idea was further that the local movement, if it could expand and hold out a certain time, would be seconded by similar outbreaks in town and country and thus lead to a general movement.

By accident Stepniak (Sergei Kravtchinski), returned from Montenegro, then lived at Naples and was already known to the internationalists. He was interested in the proposed insurrection and, having been an officer of artillery, he composed a manual of military instructions for the band. Stepniak, a Russian lady and Malatesta took a house at San Lupo, near Cerreto (Benevento Province), nominally for an invalid lady, but it was to serve for storing weapons (April 2). On the 3rd the weapons arrived there in large cases. The house was, however, watched by gendarmes (April 5), and when some internationalists approached it, firing began; of two wounded gendarmes one died later; some arrests took place, and the others, hardly the fourth part of those expected, took to the mountains at night time, being joined afterwards by a few more who were unarmed.

According to the report written by Angiolini, the 27, conducted by guides, led by Malatesta and Ceccarelli (35 years, merchant born at Savignano, died 1886 in Cairo), always conversing with Cafiero, feeding and sheltered in farms, between April 6 and 8 marched by the mountains of the Monte Matese Chain, by Pietrarvia, the Monte Mutri, Filetti and Buco to Letino, entering in silence, with the red flag and invading the municipal building where the council was sitting. They declared the king deposed in the name of the social revolution and demanded to hand over the official papers, weapons, etc., and cash. The clerk, demanding some authorization, received a document, signed by Cafiero, Malatesta and Ceccarelli, saying: "We the undersigned declare to have occupied, arms in hand, the municipal building of Letino in the name of the social revolution." Then rifles, confiscated tools and the little cash were distributed among the village people, an apparatus to calculate the flour grinding tax was broken, and the whole of the papers, tho