Before Luigi Mangione, There Was Gaetano Bresci
Gaetano Bresci was a 30-year-old anarchist who assassinated the king of Italy in 1900. The establishment press cast him as a madman, but many ordinary Italians saw his actions as due vengeance for the state’s bloody repression of workers’ protests.
Illustration of Gaetano Bresci during his transfer from prison to the Court of Assizes in Italy, ca. 1900. (Fototeca Gilardi / Getty Images)
Even before police apprehended Luigi Mangione, Tik Tok users bestowed a nickname on the alleged killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson: the adjustor. The label refers to insurance adjustors who evaluate claims to determine liability and negotiate settlements. The play on words points to the intense anger that many Americans feel for a health care system that seems more concerned with generating profits than saving and enhancing lives. Now, finally, someone was taking action to even the scales. The term, and the act that inspired it, are closely tied to our present moment. Yet they also sit within a historical tradition, that of the giustiziere or “avenging executioner” that dates to the nineteenth century. The most iconic example is Gaetano Bresci, a thirty-year-old silk weaver who assassinated the King of Italy, Umberto I, on July 29, 1900.
On that day, as the king was about to depart from the Parco Reale in Monza, a city not far from Milan, where he had presided over a gymnastics contest, Bresci shot him three times. The king died within minutes. Bresci, who was born in Tuscany and later moved to Paterson, New Jersey, had returned to Italy in spring 1900. He assassinated the king as punishment for his having signed a decree imposing martial law to quell the May 1898 protests in Milan against rising food prices — before bestowing Italy’s highest military honors on the general who ordered grapeshot to be used against the unarmed demonstrators, killing hundreds. The government’s lethal response was the latest in a series of repressive measures intended to thwart efforts by industrial and agricultural workers to fight economic exploitation and force their way into a political process that had long excluded them and ignored their interests.
The Birth of an Anarchist
The youngest of four children, Bresci was born in the town of Coiano, near Prato, on November 11, 1869. The Bresci family lived a precarious existence. At age eleven, Gaetano began work as an apprentice in Prato’s expanding silk weaving industry. By age fifteen, he had become a fully qualified silk weaver as well as an active member of Prato’s anarchist group. Bresci’s conversion to anarchism resulted from the poverty he and his family had endured, which generated resentment toward Italy’s social order.
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