Michele Angiolillo

Michele Angiolillo Lombardi (5 June 1871–20 August 1897) was an Italian anarchist, born in Foggia.

Barcelona bombing and Montjuïc repression

In June 1896, a bomb was thrown at the Corpus Christi procession in Barcelona. The attack precipitated an aggressive reprisal against Spanish anarchists, socialists and republicans. Thus, four hundred alleged revolutionaries were jailed at Montjuïc Fortress, overlooking Barcelona. Many died due to subsequent tortures.

Of the 87 prisoners taken to the tribunal, eight got death sentences and nine were condemned to long imprisonment. The other seventy one accused revolutionaries were declared innocent by the tribunal, but were deported anyway, to Río de Oro, a Spanish colony in West Africa, on the orders of Antonio Cánovas del Castillo, Spain’s Prime Minister at the time.

The assassin

Revenge for the Montjuïc persecutions was the reason Angiolillo arrived in Spain from Paris via London, using a false identity. There is some evidence that Angiolillo originally had in mind killing one or two young members of the Spanish royal family, but was dissuaded by this by Puerto Rican revolutionary leader Ramón Emeterio Betances, who suggested Cánovas del Castillo as a target instead. Angiolillo finally found Cánovas alone at the thermal bath resort of Santa Águeda (now a psychiatric hospital), in Mondragón, Guipúzcoa, on 8 August 1897, and shot him dead. The Prime Minister’s wife hurried to the scene, shouting “Murderer! Murderer!” after the gunman. Angiolillo, in turn, bowed and declared, “Pardon, Madame. I respect you as a lady, but I regret that you were the wife of that man.”

Angiolillo allowed the authorities to capture him and vehemently denied other parties' involvement in the assassination. Probably he hoped thereby to prevent the Spanish government from using the search for Canovas’ killer as an excuse for heavier repression. He was executed by garotte in the nearby town of Vergara.

References

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