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.

The exploitation he observed and experienced firsthand as a factory worker only served to increase his resentment. Hostility toward the system he perceived responsible for his suffering and the suffering of others translated into overt political consciousness by direct contact with the anarchist artisans and factory workers of Prato, where the movement enjoyed a sizable following. His willingness to defend those he considered victims of exploitation and arbitrary authority led him to be actively involved in strikes, to be imprisoned for defending fellow workers from police brutality, and eventually to internal exile on a remote island off the coast of Sicily.

Along with many of his comrades, Bresci emerged from these experiences a more resolute and committed militant. After his release, Bresci migrated to the United States, arriving in New York on January 29, 1898. Soon after, he moved to Paterson, where he joined some ten thousand Italians employed in the city’s silk mills and dye houses. In addition to its thriving silk industry, Paterson at that time boasted the highest percentage of avowed anarchists and anarchist sympathizers in the United States and possibly the world.

Bresci eventually found work as a skilled decorator in a silk mill in Paterson, for the relatively good wage of fourteen dollars a week. Adjusting easily to his new environment, in quick succession he married and became a father. Shortly before his return to Italy, his wife become pregnant with their second child.

Bresci was neither a madman nor a terrorist. He gave no indication of possessing the capacity to commit a political assassination. On the contrary, by any external measure, he lived a normal life, economically comfortable and emotionally secure in a stable environment with a loving family. He undoubtedly knew that to assassinate King Umberto (or to fail in the effort) constituted a suicide mission. Yet Bresci was prepared not only to forfeit his own life but also to risk the dire consequences that would surely befall his entire family. His willingness to sacrifice so much was obviously the product of his commitment to exact revenge for the injustices committed by King Umberto and the Italian government.

Having learned from newspapers that King Umberto planned to travel to Monza, Bresci spent two days reconnoitering the scene. He decided that the best time to strike would be at the conclusion of the festivities. The night before the gymnastics competition, he cleaned his revolver and cut crosses into the lead bullets with scissors to increase their lethality. On the day of the fatal encounter, Bresci left his hotel around noon, stopping first at a dairy bar for ice cream; half an hour later, he sat down in an outdoor seat at the Caffè del Vapore and ordered lunch. To pass the time, Bresci spent the rest of the day walking around town. He returned to the dairy bar four more times for ice cream.

By evening, Bresci had entered the royal park. He had intended to position himself along the road by which the king would enter, but the crowd was so dense that he was pushed toward the center of activities. As luck (for Bresci) would have it, he was now within three meters of the spot where the king’s carriage would park. With three well-aimed bullets he hit his target.

Neither Madman nor Conspiracy

The carabinieri, aided by members of the public, immediately surrounded Bresci and led him away. A lengthy investigation ensued, during which authorities in Italy and the United States worked diligently but unsuccessfully to prove that Bresci was part of a conspiracy. They found no evidence that he had acted in concert with anyone else and he was tried for murder. He was found guilty and issued the maximum sentence, which, because Italy had no death penalty, was life in prison.

In the court of public opinion, reactions were mixed. Supporters on both sides of the Atlantic saw Bresci as a noble, pure, and selfless avenging executioner who exacted retributive justice for the victims of state violence. In Italy, during the weeks and months following the assassination, the cry “Viva Bresci” reverberated in all forms of public gatherings and was scrawled on walls across the country. By some accounts close to 2,700 people — only a few of them anarchists, comprising all social classes, from peasants, artisans, and shopkeepers to priests, soldiers, and even some aristocrats — were tried for expressing their support for Bresci in one form or another.

In contrast, leaders of the Partito Socialista Italiano (PSI), founded in 1892, who were seeking political legitimacy by participating in the parliamentary system, distanced themselves from the regicide. Others reviled Bresci as a terrorist who killed a good man and sought to destabilize society. Bresci disputed this charge, claiming a distinction between violence perpetrated against individuals and acts of retaliation against a repressive social order. When interrogators asked why he had killed Umberto, he answered, “I did not kill Umberto, I killed the King,” thus dissociating the official position of his target from the flesh and blood man who occupied it. He manifested the same determination and sangfroid at every stage of his ordeal, which eventually resulted in his murder at the hands of prison guards in 1901.

Make Peaceful Change Work

Although they are separated by more than a century, Gaetano Bresci’s response to his interrogators in which he provided a political justification for his act of violence resonates in Luigi Mangione’s manifesto. By taking issue with the US health care system, which, he noted, has reaped enormous profits at the expense of the well-being of ordinary Americans, Mangione did not kill Brian Thompson, to — in the words of the Manhattan district attorney — “sow fear” among the public. He shot the CEO of UnitedHealthcare to extract retribution on a person in power responsible for the suffering and death of many. For Mangione, “these parasites simply had it coming.”

Surely, there are important differences between Bresci’s Italy and Mangione’s United States. In late nineteenth-century Italy, the right to vote extended only to middle- and upper-class males and restrictions on freedom of speech, press, association, and trade unions severely limited avenues available for peaceful protest. This is not the same as contemporary America. However, despite these differences, the attentats carried out by Bresci and Mangione have the same targets:  elites indifferent to human suffering and a political system in which all dominant parties are beholden to moneyed interests. The way to prevent this kind of political violence from recurring is not by increased surveillance and repression, but by fostering democratic alternatives to effect real change by peaceful means.