Anarchist ideas were not only argued in books. They shaped uprisings, unions, schools and communities, and also a wave of violence that still colors the word “anarchist.”

The Paris Commune

After France's defeat by Prussia, the people of Paris took control of their city in March 1871. The Paris Commune lasted about two months, from March to late May 1871. Its elected council included followers of Proudhon alongside other radicals. It separated church and state and allowed workers' cooperatives to take over workshops abandoned by their owners. The French army crushed it in the “Bloody Week” of late May, killing thousands; the Communards also shot hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris. Anarchists admired its self-governing, federal spirit, while Marx drew his own lessons from it.

Propaganda of the deed

From the late 1870s some anarchists embraced propaganda of the deed: the idea that dramatic acts, often violent, would inspire the masses to revolt more effectively than words. In the 1880s and 1890s anarchists bombed cafés and theaters in Paris and Barcelona and assassinated several heads of state and government, including French President Sadi Carnot in 1894, Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas in 1897, Empress Elisabeth of Austria in 1898, King Umberto I of Italy in 1900 and US President William McKinley in 1901. Not every famous killing of the era was anarchist: Tsar Alexander II was killed in 1881 by a Russian revolutionary group called People's Will.

The movement argued bitterly about this violence. Some defended attacks as revenge for executions and massacres of workers. Others, such as the Christian anarchists inspired by Tolstoy, rejected violence entirely. Kropotkin and many others concluded that isolated attacks alienated ordinary workers and brought crushing repression, including new anti-anarchist laws in France, an international police conference in Rome in 1898, and a 1903 US law barring anarchists from immigrating. Many activists turned instead to revolutionary trade unions, an approach called anarcho-syndicalism, aiming at a general strike that would let workers take over industry.

Spain, 1936

Spain had the largest anarchist movement in the world. The CNT (National Confederation of Labor), founded in 1910, was an anarcho-syndicalist trade union with hundreds of thousands of members by the 1930s. In July 1936 army officers rose against the elected Republican government, starting the Spanish Civil War. In Barcelona, workers including CNT militants helped defeat the rising in the city.

What followed is called the Spanish Revolution. In Catalonia and Aragon, workers and peasants collectivized factories, transport and farms. Committees ran trams, workshops and restaurants; hundreds of rural collectives pooled land, and some replaced money with vouchers. Accounts differ on how voluntary this was: some peasants joined eagerly, others felt pressured, and some collectives let individual farmers stay outside. In the first months, revolutionary violence by various groups on the Republican side, anarchists among them, killed thousands of people seen as enemies, including several thousand priests, monks and nuns. Franco's Nationalist side carried out its own mass killings, which most historians judge to have been larger.

In November 1936 leading anarchists joined the Republican government, a decision many in the movement opposed. Tensions with the communists and the government erupted in street fighting in Barcelona in May 1937. Afterward the government curtailed the collectives, dissolving the anarchist-led Council of Aragon that August, and Franco's victory in 1939 ended the experiment.

Communities and schools

Quieter experiments continued: individualist anarchist settlements in the United States such as Josiah Warren's Modern Times on Long Island (1851), and Modern Schools inspired by the Spanish educator Francisco Ferrer, executed in 1909, which emphasized learning without coercion.

Worked example: an argument in 1894

Imagine a crowded back room in Paris in 1894, shortly after a bomb has exploded in a café, and the police have begun mass arrests of anarchists. Four people argue.

The first defends the attacks: workers have been shot during strikes and comrades executed, and the bourgeoisie must learn that violence cuts both ways. Words, she says, have changed nothing.

The second, a Tolstoyan, answers that killing contradicts everything anarchism stands for. A movement against domination cannot be built on terror against people who happened to be drinking coffee.

The third, a printer and union member, makes a practical case. Every bomb gives the government a reason to pass harsher laws, close newspapers and arrest organizers. Workers who might have joined the movement now see anarchists as murderers. Better to build unions, he says, and prepare for a general strike that could stop the whole economy without a single bomb.

The fourth, an older activist, says she understands the anger but agrees with the printer. Revolutions are made by millions of people, not by a few individuals with explosives.

Historically, the printer's view largely won. Over the following decade, many French anarchists joined revolutionary trade unions, and anarcho-syndicalism became the main form of the movement in France, Spain and elsewhere, leading eventually to the CNT. The era of attacks did not end at once, but it left a lasting association between the word anarchist and bombs that the movement has never fully shaken off.