A sketch of the port of Aden, by José Rizal.

  José Rizal during his student years at Madrid Central University.

  What they “are” (colonially) is contrasted to what they “call themselves” (publicly) in the metropole. But there is actually a further elision, since many of these mestizos were Chinese not Spanish. (Indeed the Chinese mestizos vastly outnumbered Spanish mestizos in the Philippines.)18 The political esfuerzo involved probably explains why their newspaper called itself hopefully—and unmindful of the International—La Solidaridad. Thus one can suggest that Filipino nationalism really had its locational origins in urban Spain rather than in the Philippines.

  For four years Rizal studied hard at Madrid’s Central University. By the summer of 1885, he had received his doctorate in philosophy and letters, and would have done the same in medicine if his money had not run out. After Rizal’s execution at the end of 1896, Miguel de Unamuno, who though three years younger than the Filipino entered the philosophy and letters faculty two years before him, and graduated in 1884, claimed, perhaps truthfully, that he had, so to speak, seen him around during those student days.19 But for the purpose of this investigation, the most significant event occurred at the beginning of Rizal’s senior year (1884/85) when Miguel Morayta, his history professor and Grandmaster of Spanish Masonry, delivered an inaugural address that was a blistering attack on clerical obscurantism and an aggressive defense of academic freedom.20 The scholar was promptly excommunicated by the Bishop of Ávila and other mitre-wearers for heresy and for besmirching Spanish tradition and culture. The students went on a two-month strike in Morayta’s behalf, and were quickly supported by fellow students at the big universities in Granada, Valencia, Oviedo, Sevilla, Valladolid, Zaragoza, and Barcelona.21 The government then sent in the police, and many students were arrested and/or beaten up. Rizal later recalled that he had only escaped arrest by hiding in Morayta’s house and assuming three different disguises.22 As we shall see later, this experience, transformed, became a key episode in the plot of El Filibusterismo.

  There is only one other event from the student years that is here worth underscoring: Rizal’s first vacation in Paris in the spring of 1883. We have described earlier in some detail the excited letters he wrote to his family from the French capital. There is nothing remotely comparable for Madrid. Paris was the first geographical–political space that allowed him to see imperial Spain as profoundly backward: economically, scientifically, industrially, educationally, culturally, and politically.23 This is one reason why his novels feel unique among anticolonial fictions written under colonialism. He was in a position to ridicule the colonialists rather than merely to denounce them. He read Eduard Douwes Dekker’s Max Havelaar only after he had published Noli me tangere, but one can see at once why he enjoyed the Dutchman’s take-no-prisoners style of satire.

  By the time he graduated he had had enough of the metropole; he spent most of the next six years in “advanced” northern Europe. There are perhaps parallels with José Martí, eight years older than Rizal, who studied in Spain in the middle 1870s and then left it for good, spending much of the rest of his life in New York.

  BISMARCK AND THE NEW GEOGRAPHY OF IMPERIALISM

  At this point we must temporarily leave 24-year-old Rizal in order to look schematically at the three worlds in which he found himself situated in the 1880s—the time of Noli me tangere’s publication and the planning of El Filibusterismo.

  Otto von Bismarck

  Having routed the armies of the Austro-Hungarian empire at Königgrätz in 1866, the Iron Chancellor repeated this triumph in 1870 at Sedan, where Louis-Napoléon and 100,000 French troops were forced to surrender. This victory made possible the proclamation he engineered in January 1871—at Versailles, not Berlin—of the new German empire, and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. From this point on until the ruin of the Great War, imperial Germany was the dominant power on the European continent. In the 1880s, reversing an earlier policy, Bismarck began to interest himself in competing with Britain and France in extra-European imperial adventures—primarily in Africa, but also in the Far East and in Oceania. It is this last that connects most directly with Rizal’s trajectory.

  A look at any atlas will show why. Situated broadly across the crow’s flight from Hawaii to the Philippines lies a triangle of archipelagoes, with the Marianas at the northern apex and the Carolines and the Marshalls at the southwest and southeastern apices. The Marianas are roughly 1,400 miles due east of Manila, the westernmost Carolines about 600 miles due east from the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, and the Marshalls another 1,600 miles further east. From early imperialist times, when the Papacy had declared the Pacific a mare clausum for the rulers of the Spanish empire, up to the Napoleonic Wars, these archipelagoes had been generally regarded as under Spanish suzerainty. In fact Spain had little interest in them, except as coaling stations and as places to exile political troublemakers. Insofar as they were administered at all, the task was left to the Captain-General of the Philippines. But in 1878 Germany took the liberty of establishing a coaling station of its own in the Marshalls, following in the sea-steps of private commerce. In 1884, Berlin annexed northeast New Guinea (about 800 miles due south of the central Carolines), hitherto run by a private company. The following year it moved to claim the Carolines by raising the imperial flag on the island of Yap. Fearful of German power, the Spaniards hurried to crush local resistance to the hasty extension of Madrid’s “sovereignty,” and appealed to the Papacy to mediate. Rome confirmed this sovereignty, but the Germans won trade and coaling privileges, and through a deal with London took control of the Marshalls. The following year the Solomons were partitioned between the United Kingdom and Germany. In 1889, Samoa was made a tripartite protectorate under American, UK, and German joint control.24 (Echoes of all this imperialist hubbub are clear in El Filibusterismo, where the good-hearted indio student Isagani is divided between his sympathy for the repressed native islanders and his solidarity with Spain against the menacing Germans.) Rizal was under no illusions about Bismarck personally, but he was enormously impressed by Germany, which with its Protestant sobriety, its orderliness and discipline, its impressive intellectual life and its industrial progress, made a salutary contrast to Mother Spain. He was certainly happy to have his first novel published, not in Madrid, but in Bismarck’s Hauptstadt.

  In France, the Prussian triumph at Sedan was followed by a brutal siege of Paris from which the shaky post-Louis-Napoléon government fled to Bordeaux, only to reappear at Versailles to sign a humiliating armistice and, later, treaty. In March 1871 the Commune took power in the abandoned city and held it for two months. Then Versailles, having capitulated to Berlin, seized the moment to attack and in one horrifying week executed roughly 20,000 communards or suspected sympathizers, a number higher than those killed in the recent war or during Robespierre’s Terror of 1793–94. More than 7,500 were jailed or deported to distant places such as New Caledonia and Cayenne. Thousands of others fled to Belgium, England, Italy, Spain, and the United States. In 1872, stringent laws were passed that ruled out all possibilities of organizing on the Left. Not till 1880 was there a general amnesty for exiled and imprisoned communards. Meantime, the Third Republic found itself strong enough to renew and reinforce Louis-Napoléon’s imperialist expansion—in Indochina, Africa, and Oceania. A fair number of France’s leading intellectuals and artists had either participated in the Commune (Courbet was its quasi-minister of culture, Rimbaud and Pissarro were active propagandists) or were sympathetic to it.25 The ferocious repression of 1871 and after was a key factor in alienating these milieux from the Third Republic and stirring their sympathy for its victims at home and abroad. We shall look at this development in more detail later.

  Sedan also caused the withdrawal of the French garrison in Rome, which had guaranteed the Papacy’s dwindling territorial sovereignty, and its replacement by the forces of the new, increasingly repressive and inefficient Kingdom of Italy. The by now completely reactionary Pio Nono, aka Giovanni Mastai-Ferretti, deprived of all temporal power, declared himself and his office incarcerated, and struck back politico-spiritually with the threatened excommunication of any Catholic participating in the Kingdom’s political institutions. This stance persisted until the happy concordat with Mussolini at the end of the 1920s. Italian imperialism of a mediocre sort began in East Africa, while rural misery in the South was so great that between 1887 and 1900, half a million Italians left the country every year. Rizal visited Rome briefly in 1887 but seems not to have noticed anything but antiquities.

  On his return to Europe in February 1888 via the Pacific, Rizal made a brief stop in mid-Meiji Japan, and was impressed by its orderliness, energy, and ambition, and appalled by the rickshaws. It was gratifying, of course, to see a non-European people protect its independence and make rapid strides towards modernity. Though he spent a short time in Hong Kong, China itself seems to have been off his map. He reached San Francisco at election time, when anti-Asian demagogy was at its height. Enraged at being kept for days on board ship for “quarantine” purposes—the ship held about 650 Chinese, very useful for racist anti-immigration campaigning—he hurried across the continent as rapidly as he could. Nothing was less likely to impress him than the corruption of the Gilded Age, the post-Reconstruction repression of black former slaves, the brutal anti-miscegenation laws, the lynchings, and so on.26 But he was already foreseeing American expansion across the Pacific. He then settled contentedly in London to do research on early Philippine history at the British Museum, and seems to have taken no interest in the gradually growing crisis over Ireland. (Living on Primrose Hill, was he aware that Engels was ensconced close by?)

  But this apparently calm world of conservative political dominance, capital accumulation, and global imperialism was at the same time helping to create another kind of world, more directly related to Rizal’s fiction. Indeed, already in 1883, he had sensed the direction of things to come.

  Europa amenazada continuamente de una conflagración espantosa; el cetro del mundo que se escapa de las temblorosas manos de la Francia caduca; las naciones del Norte preparándose á recogerlo. Rusia cuyo emperador tiene sobre sí la espada de Nihilismo como el antiguo Damocles, esto es Europa la civilizada …

  Europe constantly menaced by a terrifying conflagration; the scepter of the world slipping from the trembling hands of declining France; the nations of the North preparing to seize it; Russia, over the head of whose emperor hangs the sword of Nihilism, like Damocles in Antiquity, such is Europe the Civilized.27

  LE DRAPEAU NOIR

  The year Rizal was born, Mikhail Bakunin escaped to western Europe from Siberia where for a decade he had been serving a life sentence for his conspiratorial activities against tsardom in the 1840s. The following year, 1862, Turgenev published Fathers and Sons, his masterly study of the outlook and psychology of a certain type of Nihilist. Four years later, a Moscow student named Karakozov attempted to shoot Alexander II, and was hanged with four others in the great public square of Smolensk.28 That same year Alfred Nobel took out a patent on dynamite, which though based on highly unstable nitroglycerine was both simple to use, stable, and easily portable. In March 1869 the 22-year-old Nihilist leader Sergei Nechayev left Russia; he met Bakunin in Geneva, where they coauthored the sensational Catechism of a Revolutionary, and returned to Moscow a few months later. Bakunin kept up (strained) relations with the Nihilist leader despite the notorious murder of a skeptical student follower, later fictionalized by Dostoievsky in The Possessed.29

  Alexander II’s assassination by Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries in St Petersburg on March 1 1881.

  The nihilist leader Sergei Nechayev.

  Towards the end of the 1870s, by which time the Nihilists were being succeeded by small clusters of narodniki as the clandestine radical opposition to the autocracy, political assassination, successful and failed, had become quite common in Russia. 1878: in January, Vera Zasulich shot but failed to kill General Fyodor Trepov, military governor of St Petersburg; in August, Sergei Kravchinski stabbed to death General Mezentsov, head of the Tsar’s secret police. 1879: in February, Grigori Goldenberg shot to death the governor of Kharkov, Prince Dmitri Kropotkin; in April, an attempt by Alexander Soloviev to kill the Tsar in the same manner failed; in November, Lev Hartmann’s attempt to mine the imperial railway carriage proved abortive. 1880: Stepan Khalturin successfully blew up part of the Imperial Palace—8 died, 45 were wounded. Nobel’s invention had now arrived politically. Then on March 1, 1881—fifteen months before Rizal landed in Marseilles—the spectacular bomb-assassination of the Tsar occurred, by a group calling itself Narodnaya Volya (the People’s Will), an event that reverberated all over Europe.30 (The assassination of US President Garfield a few months later was barely noticed.)

  The storms of Russia were to have profound effects across Europe. They can be symbolically represented in one epoch by Bakunin (born in 1814), who died in 1876, and, in a second, by Prince Pyotr Kropotkin (born in 1842), who escaped from a Tsarist prison to western Europe that same year.

  The Communist International’s first two congresses, held in peaceable Switzerland in 1866 and 1867, went ahead quietly enough with Marx in the central position. But Bakunin’s influence was strongly felt at the third congress held the following year in Brussels, and Bakuninists were already a majority at the fourth congress, held in Basle in 1869. The fifth congress was supposed to assemble in Paris, but Sedan made this impossible. By the time it was finally held, in 1872 in The Hague, it was hopelessly divided. In the year of Bakunin’s death it was dissolved, though Bakuninist congresses continued to be held till 1877.31 That same year the word anarchist in its technical-political sense was coined, and spread rapidly and widely (though it was also obvious that there were competing and crosspollinating currents of thought about anarchism’s aims and methods).32

  Anarchism’s emphasis on personal liberty and autonomy, its typical suspicion of hierarchical (“bureaucratic”) organization, and its penchant for vitriolic rhetoric made its appeal especially great under political conditions of severe repression by rightwing regimes. Such regimes found it much easier to smash trade unions and political parties than to keep track of, penetrate, and destroy dozens of self-generated autonomous groupuscules. Anarchist theory was less contemptuous of peasants and rural labour than mainstream Marxism was then inclined to be. One could argue that it was also more viscerally anticlerical. Probably these conditions help to explain why revolutionary anarchism spread most successfully in still heavily peasant, Catholic post-Commune France, Restoration Spain, and post-unification Italy, Cuba—and even Gilded Age immigrant-worker America—while prospering much less than mainstream Marxism in largely Protestant, industrial, semidemocratic northern Europe.

  In any event, at the end of the bleak 1870s there arose in intellectual anarchist circles the theoretical concept of “propaganda by the deed,” spectacular attentats on reactionary authorities and capitalists, intended to intimidate the former and to encourage the oppressed to re-prepare themselves for revolution. Historians tend to mark the beginning of this new phase by the almost comically unsuccessful uprising of April 1877 in Benevento, northeast of Naples, organized by two young Neapolitans, Errico Malatesta and his rich friend Carlo Cafiero (who had earlier bankrolled Bakunin from the safe northern shore of Lake Maggiore), and twenty-five year old Sergei Mikhailovitch Kravchinski aka Stepniak (1852–95), who had joined the 1875 Bosnian uprising against the Turks, and would go on, as we have seen, to kill the head of the Tsar’s secret police.33 Put on trial, the two Italians were acquitted in the cheerful atmosphere created by the young Umberto I’s accession to the throne in 1878. (The same ambience allowed the young anarchist cook Giovanni Passanante to get off lightly when he narrowly failed to kill the young king with a knife etched with the words Long Live the International Republic.)34 Two months after the Benevento affair, Andrea Costa, a close collaborator of Malatesta, gave a talk in Geneva theorizing the new tactic. In early August, Paul Brousse published an article in the radical Bulletin de la Fédération Jurassienne explaining that words on paper were no longer enough for awakening the conscience populaire; the Russians had shown the need to be just as ruthless as the Tsarist regime. The gentle Kropotkin then swung into action in the December 25, 1880 edition of Le Révolté, theoretically defining anarchism as “la révolte permanente par la parole, par l’écrit, par le poignard, le fusil, la dynamite … Tout est bon pour nous qui n’est pas la légalité” (permanent revolt by means of the spoken word, writing, the dagger, the gun, and dynamite … For us everything is good which is outside legality).35 It remained only for Le Drapeau Noir to publish clandestinely on September 2, 1883 a “Manifeste des Nihilistes Français” in which the claim was made that:

  Depuis trois ans que la ligue existe, plusieurs centaines de familles bourgeoises ont payé le fatal tribut, dévorées par un mal mystérieux que la médicine est impuissante á définir et á conjurer.

  In the three years of the League’s existence, several hundred bourgeois families have paid the fatal tribute, devoured by a mysterious sickness that medicine is powerless to define and to exorcise.

  Errico Malatesta

  Revolutionaries were urged to continue the insinuated campaign of mass poisonings (Rizal had just made his first happy trip to Paris a few months before).36 These were all signs that some anarchists were thinking about a new kind of violence no longer solely targeted, à la Russe, against state leaders, but rather against those regarded as class enemies.

  We shall look in more detail later at cases of “early terrorism” by young anarchists. But a quick glance at the spate of spectacular assassinations that erupted in the twenty years prior to the onset of the Great War will show some interesting features.