The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Politics from a Distance 1474258492, 9781474258494

Citation preview

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London Politics from a Distance Edited by Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 Paperback edition first published 2019 Copyright © Constance Bantman, Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Contributors, 2018 Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover image: ‘Nature morte avec compotier et journal (Nature morte aux raisins. Les raisins)’ by Juan Gris © akg-images/André Held All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Names: Bantman, Constance, editor. | Silva, Ana Cláudia Suriani da, editor. Title: The foreign political press in nineteenth-century London : politics from a distance/ edited by Constance Bantman and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017025357 (print) | LCCN 2017059819(ebook) | ISBN 9781474258500(ePDF) | ISBN 9781474258517 (ePUB) | ISBN 9781474258494 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: English periodicals–Foreign languagepress–History–19th century. |English newspapers–Foreign language press–History–19th century. |English newspapers–England–London–History–19th century. | Englishperiodicals–England–London–History–19th century. | Press and politics–GreatBritain–History–19th century. | Foreign news–Great Britain–History–19th century. Classification: LCC PN5124.F6 (ebook) | LCC PN5124.F6 F672018 (print) | DDC 072.09/034–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025357 ISBN: HB: 978-1-4742-5849-4 PB: 978-1-3501-1893-5 ePDF: 978-1-4742-5850-0 ePub: 978-1-4742-5851-7 Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures List of Tables Contributors Introduction: The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Local and Transnational Contexts, Constance Bantman 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Newsprint Nations: Spanish American Publishing in London, 1808–1827, Karen Racine Cultural Identity and Political Dissidence: The Periodicals of the Spanish Liberal Exile in London (1810–41), Daniel Muñoz Sempere Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense and the Dissemination of the Enlightenment in Brazil, Isabel Lustosa and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva The Press as a Reflection of the Divisions among the Portuguese Political Exiles (1808–1832), Daniel Alves and Paulo Jorge Fernandes From Republicanism to Anarchism: 50 Years of French Exilic Newspaper Publishing, Thomas C. Jones and Constance Bantman The Italian Anarchist Press in London: A Lens for Investigating a Transnational Movement, Pietro Di Paola Political Contestation and Internal Strife: Socialist and Anarchist German Newspapers in London, 1878–1910, Daniel Laqua News of the Struggle: The Russian Political Press in London 1853–1921, Charlotte Alston The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865–1914, Ole Birk Laursen

Appendix: Biographies of Journalists Bibliography Index

vi viii ix

1

15 33 51 73 91 113 135 155 175 193 207 225

List of Figures Figure 1.1:

G. Cooke, ‘Al Pueblo Americano’, Biblioteca Americana, o miscelánea de literatura, artes I ciencias. London: G. Marchant, 1823, Frontispiece. Courtesy of General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations 17

Figure 1.2:

Francisco de Miranda, in J. M. Antepara, South American Emancipation.  London: J. Richardson; L. N. Pannier, 1810. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark: General Reference Collection DRT Digital Store 1446.h.4

19

Figure 1.3:

El evangelio de Jesu Christo segun San Lucas: en aymará y español/ transl from the Latin Vulgate, into Aimará by V. Pazos-Kanki and into Spanish by P. Scio de San Miguel. London: [s.n.], 1829. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark: Document Supply W90/9519 23

Figure 2.1:

First page of the prospectus of Josep Blanco’s El Español, 30 April 1810. © The British Library Board

37

First issue of Ocios de Españoles Emigrados, April 1824. © The British Library Board

44

First issue of El Emigrado Observador, July 1828. © Biblioteca Nacional de España

46

Figure 2.2:

Figure 2.3:

Figure 3.1:

Hipólito da Costa, drawing by H. R. Cook, printed by G. H. Lewis, published in A Narrative of the Persecution of Hippolyto Joseph da Costa Pereira Furtado de Mendonça, first edition, London: W. Lewis, 1811. © National Library of Rio de Janeiro 54

Figure 4.1:

First page of the periodical O Investigador Portuguez. Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra, 1812. © University of Coimbra General Library

77

José Liberato Freire de Carvalho, editor of O Campeão Portuguez ou o Amigo do Rei e do Povo, 1822. © National Library of Portugal

82

Figure 4.2:

List of Figures Figure 4.3:

vii

First page of the periodical Chaveco Liberal. O Chaveco Liberal, 1829. © National Library of Portugal

85

Front page of the first issue of La Voix du proscrit, 27 October 1850. © Private Collection.

93

Figure 5.2:

Front page of L’Homme, 30 November 1853. © Private Collection

94

Figure 5.3:

Front page of Le Père Peinard, London Series, 16–31 October 1894. © International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) 100

Figure 6.1:

Front page of the first issue of L’Associazione, 6 September 1889. © International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam)

Figure 5.1:

115

Figure 6.2:

Headquarters of Freedom Press in Inner Court, 127 Ossulston Street, 1927. © International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) 119

Figure 6.3:

Front page of the single issue Cause ed Effetti, 1898–1900, September 1900. © International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam) 121

Figure 7.1:

John Neve in prison, Pierre Ramus Collection. © International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam)

144

Front page of the controversial August 1909 issue of The Indian Sociologist. © The British Library Board

186

Figure 9.1:

List of Tables Table 2.1: Table 4.1: Table 5.1: Table 6.1: Table 7.1: Table 8.1: Table 9.1:

List of Spanish periodicals published in London (1810–1845) List of Portuguese periodicals published in London (1808–1834) List of French papers published in London (1848–1905) List of Italian anarchist papers published in London between 1878 and 1912 (not exhaustive) Major German socialist and anarchist periodicals published in London, 1878 to 1910 Principal Russian-language periodicals mentioned in this chapter List of Indian and associated periodicals published in London and the diaspora mentioned in this chapter (1841–1914)

48 78 96 131 139 156 187

Contributors Charlotte Alston is reader in history at Northumbria University, UK. Her research focuses on Russia’s relations (both cultural and diplomatic) with the west. She has published on Russia’s border states at the Paris Peace Conference, Russian émigré organisations in the west, and the international influence of Tolstoy’s Christian Anarchist thought. Daniel Alves is assistant professor at the Department of History and Researcher at the Instituto de História Contemporânea, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. He has an MA in nineteenth-century history and a PhD in economic and social contemporary history. His areas of interest are urban history, history of revolutions and digital humanities. He has published several books, chapters and papers in Portuguese and on international peer-reviewed journals, mainly on economic and social history. Constance Bantman is senior lecturer in French at the University of Surrey, UK. Her main research interest is the history of the French anarchist movement before 1914, with a focus on transnational and transpolitical entanglements. She is the author of The French Anarchists in London. Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation (LUP, 2013), and she has co-edited several volumes on the history of anarchist transnationalism. Pietro Di Paola is senior lecturer in history at the University of Lincoln, UK. He obtained his PhD in politics at Goldsmiths College, University of London in 2004. His major research interest focuses on the transnational history of anarchism and radical movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is the author of The Knights Errant of Anarchy. London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). He is currently researching antimilitarist groups and their networks in Europe, South and North America before the First World War. Paulo Jorge Fernandes is assistant professor at the Department of History and Researcher at the Instituto de História Contemporânea, Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Portugal. He has an MA in nineteenthcentury history and a PhD in institutional and political contemporary history. His areas of interest are political history (state, elites, political parties, elections, history of the parliament, biography) and history of the press with a special focus on colonial press.

x

Contributors

More recently he has been working on humour, caricature and cartoon in a political perspective. He has published several books, chapters and papers in Portuguese and on international peer-reviewed journals, mainly on Political History. Thomas C. Jones is lecturer in history at the University of Buckingham, UK. His research interests include French and British radical politics and political thought, the role of exile and diaspora in transnational intellectual exchange, and the impact of the revolutions of 1848 on these phenomena. He has written several articles on French exiles in London and the Channel Islands after 1848 and is writing a book on the history of political and religious asylum in Britain for Harvard University Press. Daniel Laqua is senior lecturer in European History at Northumbria University, UK. His work explores the workings of transnational movements as well as the different manifestations of internationalism in nineteenth-/twentieth-century Europe. He is the author of The Age of Internationalism and Belgium: Peace, Progress and Prestige, 1880– 1930  (Manchester, 2013), the editor of  Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements between the World Wars (2011), and in 2014 co-edited themed journal issues on transnational solidarities (European Review of History) and humanitarianism (Journal of Modern European History). Ole Birk Laursen  is visiting fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at Goldsmiths College, UK, and a research fellow at the Danish Institute in Rome, Italy. His research concerns the history and literature of Black and South Asian people in Europe, with a particular focus on anticolonialism, nationalism and anarchism. He is co-editor of  Reworking Postcolonialism: Globalization, Labour and Rights (Palgrave, 2015) and Networking the Globe: New Technologies and the Postcolonial (Routledge, 2016), and is currently writing a book entitled  The Indian Revolutionary Movement in Europe, 1905–1918 (Liverpool University Press). Isabel Lustosa is senior researcher at the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa and a member of the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (IHGB), Brazil. She obtained her PhD in political science at the former Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro (IUPRJ), which is today the Instituto de Estudos Sociais e Políticos, Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (IESP/UERJ). She is a specialist in Brazilian press history. Her more recent publications deal with the cultural and political history of Brazil in the first three decades of the nineteenth century. She held the Simón Bolívar Chair of the Institut des Hautes Etudes de l’Amérique Latine, Université Sorbonne NouvelleParis  3 between 2010 and 2011, and the Sérgio Buarque de Holanda Chair of the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris, between 2012 and 2015. She is the author of, among others, Insultos impressos: a guerra dos jornalistas na Independência (Companhia das Letras, 2000); D. Pedro I: um herói sem nenhum caráter (Companhia das Letras, 2009) and Lampião: esperteza e violência (Claro Enigma, 2011).

Contributors

xi

Karen Racine is associate professor of Latin American history at the University of Guelph, Canada.  She earned her BA (Honours) in history at the University of Saskatchewan and her MA and PhD at Tulane University.  She is the author of Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution 1750–1816, and co-editor of two volumes on the Atlantic World in Rowman & Littlefield’s Human Tradition series, and Strange Pilgrimages: Travel, Exile and National Identity in Latin America.  Her articles have appeared in The Americas, Hispanic American Historical Review, Journal of Caribbean History, Historia Paedagogica, Journal of Genocide Research, Irish Migration Studies in Latin America and several edited collections.  She is finishing a book-length study of Spanish Americans in London from 1808 to 1829 and a general history of Latin American independence in an Atlantic context. Daniel Muñoz Sempere is lecturer in modern Spanish culture at King’s College, London. His research interests include the study of relations between literature and politics in Spain during the long eighteenth century, as well as the literature of social observation and the cultural production of Spanish refugees in London. He is currently working on an annotated critical anthology of Mariano José de Larra’s artículos de costumbres. Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva  is senior lecturer in Brazilian Studies at University College London, UK. Her main research areas are nineteenth-century Brazilian literature, fashion and press history, especially the works of Machado de Assis, the relationship between literature and the press, and the internationalization of fashion magazines. She is the author of Machado de Assis’s Philosopher or Dog?  From Serial to Book Form (Legenda, 2010), the co-editor, along with Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos, of Books and Periodicals in Brazil 1768–1930 (Legenda, 2014) and the co-editor, along with Marcia Abreu, of  The Cultural Revolution of the Nineteenth Century: Theatre, the Book-Trade and Reading in the Transatlantic World (I. B. Tauris, 2016).

Introduction: The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London: Local and Transnational Contexts Constance Bantman

This volume explores the history, roles and functioning of the foreign political press in London in the long nineteenth century, from a political, social, cultural and editorial perspective. Bringing together contributions by political and cultural historians and literary studies specialists, it builds on research into exile and transnational political activism conducted in the last twenty years or so, in which the press and print activism always feature as key themes but without a detailed analysis of their role in daily life and politics, nor with a comparative focus.1 Tellingly, the comprehensive Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (2009) does not include a specific entry on press history. Neither have historians of the British press examined in depth the extraterritorial political press, aside from colonial and imperial contexts, which have received much attention. It would certainly be unfair to claim that the transnational turn has bypassed press history, as evidenced for instance by some comparative studies,2 sections on globalization and transnational exchanges in Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2017)3 and the forthcoming (2018) Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, 1800–1900 respectively, and the work conducted in recent years by the Transnational network for the study of foreign-language press, Transfopress, as well as networks with a wider remit, such as the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals (RSVP) and the European Society for Periodical Research (ESPRit). The Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals covers foreign titles extensively, while the editors of the 2016 Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth Century Periodicals and Newspapers ‘interpret “Britain” … as an extendable conceptual, geographic, and political space that often overlaps with locations of other social groupings not just of nations but of reading communities’, and the Handbook includes a stimulating section on the ‘Geographies’ of newspapers and periodicals.4 More specifically, the Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism acknowledges the significant contribution to the British political press of prominent European radicals such as Karl Marx, Giuseppe Mazzini, Louis Kossuth and Peter Kropotkin.5 Growing awareness of the cross-border dimensions of media history has led to a recent call to reframe predominantly national histories of media and communication in a transnational perspective.6 The significant but uneven impact of digitization and open access on research prospects must also be stressed. Most of the periodicals examined here have not

2

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

been digitized and are not currently available online; when available, they are often extremely expensive. Such restrictions reflect their enduringly marginal position as well as the practical reality that ‘large-scale digitization projects rarely harvest material across national boundaries’ and remain overwhelmingly biased towards Englishlanguage publications.7 Nonetheless the study of foreign periodicals has benefited from the general spur in newspaper and periodical research made possible by digitization and online access, including initiatives by specialist centres such as the International Institute for Social History in the Netherlands and European-wide platforms such as Europeana. In the British context considered here, however, much of the literature on the Victorian and Edwardian press retains a mostly national focus, leaving exile, immigrant and expat publications largely unexplored, as ‘the forgotten ones in global press history’.8 The link between personal mobility in its many forms and the circulation of political ideas in the nineteenth century is now clearly established; its various channels are well known, be they institutional or informal, such as personal networks, clubs, epistolary links and political commemorations. Within this broader context, the role of newspapers and periodicals as key venues for the construction and dissemination of political ideas and identities and the formation of political communities on a variety of scales calls for closer scrutiny, as does the status of London as a hub of transnational politics throughout the long nineteenth century. To start addressing this gap, this volume proposes a long-term perspective covering over a hundred years of press history, framed by two era-defining international conflicts: the Napoleonic Wars and the First World War. The century unfolding in between these was similarly marked by recurring revolutionary and counterrevolutionary upheavals, in connection with nationalist movements and those championing political liberalization and more radical forms of democratic politics. The volume focuses on London, a key destination for political exiles and immigrants throughout the century, and a site of intense international networking and political writing activity. A structured professional French-language publishing industry, both cultural and political in its focus, already existed in London in 1776,9 and was part of the Europe-wide and transatlantic French-language gazette market. As documented here, with the examples of Correio Braziliense (1808–22), El Español (1810–14) and El Colombiano (1810), Britain had a flourishing foreign press culture and a long tradition of hosting political journals and book publishing from the very beginning of the nineteenth century. The city offered technical skill, the availability of foreign typesets as well as access to diffusion networks; it also allowed editors to establish an audience. In some cases, they could count on the crucial financial support of their compatriots and fellow exiles (as with the Portuguese Microscópio and many anarchist publications), their homeland government (O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra), and, in one rare case, the protection of members of the British royal family (Hipólito da Costa’s Correio Braziliense) to carry forward their enterprises. For groups with long intergenerational traditions of exile or migration to London, the pre-existence of communities was another incentive (as highlighted in particular in the chapters focusing on France, Germany, Italy, Portugal and Russia), especially as other possible destinations gradually closed their doors as the century advanced.

Introduction

3

British press culture was also, of course, the product of specific political conditions, starting with the existence of a ‘reasonably free’ press in London, to cite the early nineteenth-century Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra (examined here by Alves and Fernandes). By the end of the eighteenth century, ‘the sanctity of the liberty of the press’ had become enshrined, and the ‘Fourth Estate’ concept emerged: the press was perceived as a means of protection against governmental oppression, with a key mission to educate and enlighten the people in political matters, and integral to popular sovereignty.10 Britain was an exception in Europe due to the gradual removal of political censorship in the early nineteenth century, even though freedom of the press was mitigated by obvert practices such as the prohibitive ‘taxes on knowledge’ targeting the radical press. At a time of sustained or increased political persecution and censorship internationally (as underlined in most of the chapters collected here), British press laws were relaxed as the nineteenth century advanced, and newspaper taxes were reduced or removed between the 1830s and 1860s, although deregulation was quickly followed by the introduction of new forms of control through libel laws.11 The modalities and evolutions of this key aspect of British liberalism from the revolutionary period to the 1920s form a red thread in this volume: a central questioning regards the conditions and limitations within which such freedom of the press actually operated, for instance through (self-)censorship, confiscation or actual prosecution (as with the Orsini and Johann Most cases) – all within a wider liberal context which allowed the foreign press to flourish, and also generated considerable reflection and comparisons on the part of the journalists. This contrast is taken to a paroxysm in the case of the London-based Indian press, since the opponent and censor targeted by the papers was the British government itself, in its colonial functions. This is especially striking after 1905 when, as Laursen shows, The Indian Sociologist started advocating ‘a violent overthrow of the British Empire’. This remarkable elocutory situation generated much discussion over the contrast between liberalism in Britain and authoritarianism in India, while illustrating the remarkable extent of freedom enjoyed by the press in London. Britain was not entirely exceptional as a hub of international publishing. France and the United States also had a tradition of asylum and assistance for exiles in the nineteenth century, resulting in a wealth of press activity. As early as 1808 Hispanic intellectuals went into exile in the United States and enjoyed its protected freedom of expression. New York, New Orleans and Philadelphia became the main publishing centres for Hispanic newspapers and for Cuban, Puerto Rican and even northern New Spain political movements.12 The German press was the largest ethnic press in the United States: in the 1880s, the 800 German-language newspapers accounted for about four-fifth of non-English publications, and by 1890 more than 1,000 German newspapers were being published in the United States.13 France hosted 500 foreignlanguage periodicals during the nineteenth century, often in close correlation with specific waves of migration. The country harboured many different communities, from well-off and intellectually minded British travellers and Russian aristocrats to German peasants; these, ‘whether large or small, poor or rich, published periodicals in their own language, sketching out, in this modernising France, a precocious, lasting but still discreetly global media landscape’.14 Polish papers sprang up after the failed 1830, 1848 and 1863–4 uprisings, German liberal publications around 1840, as well

4

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

as over forty different Russian periodicals covering a wide political spectrum.15 With regard to the Portuguese press, however, London had a clear advantage over Paris, and became the centre of printing in Portuguese between 1808 and 1822: only three periodicals were published in Paris, while over twenty-five periodicals were published in London in the same period. Legal differences must be considered here: in France, freedom of the press was constrained by a strong dose of police surveillance and an increasingly repressive approach as the century progressed and the tradition of liberal asylum vacillated.16 However, in the second half of the nineteenth century, continental cities like Geneva, Zurich, Leipzig and Paris surpassed London as centres for exile publishing. As Alston shows, Switzerland was a major centre for both organization and publishing in the Russian emigration, being home to Russian Social Democrats in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Other urban centres emerged as places of production and consumption for the foreign press, particularly on the American continent. As a result of Brazil’s subsidized immigration policy from 1870 onwards, São Paulo was home to many foreign papers. At beginning of the twentieth century, about a quarter of the city’s population was Italian and, according to João Gualberto de Oliveira, 182 journals published in São Paulo between 1875 and 1935 were in Italian. Many of these titles were linked to factory workers’, socialist, anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist movements, such as Avanti! (1900–9),17 one of the main socialist publications in Brazil and, according to Angelo Trento, ‘the only socialist daily to be published [in that period] throughout the Americas’.18 The focus on London and other metropolitan publishing capitals points to the close link between the expansion of the political press and urban centres as a place of production and consumption for the press; cities had ‘a vigorous and active local political culture whose participants demanded a steady source of news, information and debate’.19 This emphasis on the urban level also reflects the local or regional character of the press landscape for most of the period examined here.20 Nonetheless, the limitations of this London focus ought to be stressed as well, as the various chapters map out geographies of press activities which were in fact more complex – thus with the significant role of Plymouth as a secondary centre of migration for the Portuguese, Essex for the Russian groups, or Jersey for the French. Moreover, within the capital, journals tended to be attached to various immigrant areas – Somers Town for the Spanish Liberals, Clerkenwell and Soho for the Italians, Soho and Fitzrovia for the French, Tottenham Court Road and Fitzrovia for the Germans. Looking beyond Britain, most of these publications were integrated into complex transnational and global networks. Most journalists maintained their pre-departure networks, continuing their press-based activism in London after leaving the homeland. This is illustrated by the Correio da  Península ou Novo Telegrapho (1809–10), a periodical that Loureiro published with Pato Moniz. When the paper was banned in Portugal, Loureiro left for London, planning to publish another journal there. Initially called O Espelho Politico e Moral but soon afterwards re-baptized O Portuguez ou Mercúrio Político, Comercial e Literário (1814–26), Loureiro’s periodical was a great success, not only within London’s Portuguese community, but also in Portugal, where it had a clandestine presence. Another transnational scenario was the transfer of the publication place of some periodicals as journalists moved – quite often under constraint – between continental

Introduction

5

Europe and Britain; thus with the Russian publications Narodovolets (which moved from London to Geneva) and Rabochii Mir (which was relocated from Zurich to London). The German Der Sozialdemokrat also moved from London to Zurich in 1888, while Johann Most and his Freiheit left London for New York in 1882. In this last instance, even after the move, London remained a hub for the European distribution of the paper. The specific mechanisms of such cross-border press activity are examined below, shedding light on complex interplay between the local (the city) and the nearglobal (home and diaspora countries) within this foreign press.

The foreign political press: Diversity and unity The term ‘foreign political press’ is used here, as an alternative to the often-used (including in several chapters in the present volume) ‘exile press’, because of its wider scope. Like ‘exile’, neighbouring terms commonly used in the nineteenth century such as ‘refugee’21 and the French ‘proscrit’ refer to a judicial decision to banish an individual or a group.22 Discussing the French revolutionary press, Burrows (2000) speaks of ‘Emigré journalism’ (as do Alston and Muñoz Sempere in reference to the Russian and Spanish press respectively), a term which implies leaving one’s homeland by choice and, as highlighted by Muñoz Sempere, tends to be associated at least implicitly with the forced political displacements of the French revolutionary period and the subsequent exchanges of ideas. ‘Exile’ is very relevant to the present volume. Many of the editors and journalists involved in creating these publications – whether professional or not – were exiles, in the broad sense given by Loyer: ‘[Exile] movements are characterized by dramatic departures, an obsession with the motherland, and the intense and reactive human dynamics of an exiled community.’23 The first point of note is that ‘exile’ implies the absence of a choice in the departure and, by extension, a tense political situation which inevitably informs journalistic contents. The reference to this definition is valuable in pointing to the focus on ‘homeland’ politics characterizing much of the output examined in this volume. This homebound orientation is problematized and emphasized to varying degrees in the individual chapters, suggesting different distributions between the attention devoted to home affairs and, on the other hand, involvement in British politics and life in general. This leads to a partial revision of the traditional assumption that exile entails a complete ignorance of and lack of interest in British politics;24 indeed, Muñoz Sempere’s description of exile as ‘rather than a pause … a crucial moment in the development [of political activities]’ may be extrapolated to all the case studies presented here. However, while these considerations are highly relevant, in order to adopt a less restrictive definition and avoid interpretive bias, we have opted for the more general term ‘foreign political press’, which subsumes these various meanings and is intentionally broad, reflecting the heterogeneity of situations described here. The adjective ‘foreign’ has also been preferred to other contenders, in particular ‘international’, which brings to mind international editions of national papers, or papers produced for international readerships (The International Herald Tribune is the canonical example, and the eighteenth-century gazettes a clear precedent), therefore

6

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

denoting a lack of national affiliation and fundamental uprootedness which would not be relevant for the material examined here. Within the various chapters, ‘international’ and ‘transnational’ are often used interchangeably to describe a wide range of processes which bypass or override national or linguistic boundaries. In more specific cases, ‘transnational’ tends to be the term of choice to characterize informal as opposed to institutional links. ‘Cosmopolitan’ describes a collective or individual spirit of cultural openness, while ‘internationalism’ refers to the ideal of cross-border solidarity, usually with specific reference to Marxist-inspired ideologies after the mid-century. The journalistic outputs presented also cover a wide range of formats. ‘Newspaper’, ‘paper’ and ‘periodical’ are used as inclusive terms comprising ‘newspapers’, ‘magazines’ and ‘reviews’, although such generic distinctions are a point of discussion in some chapters, based on the publications’ frequency, contents and the possible presence of illustrations. Thus, the early Latin American, Portuguese and Spanish periodicals, such as the Correio Braziliense, O Investigador Portuguez, El Español, La Biblioteca Americana, sprang from the need to create a forum for the political, scientific and literary questions of the day; they resembled and were greatly influenced by the British essay periodicals and reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in their contents and frequency of appearance, occupying the large middle ground between the book and the newspaper.25 Like British reviews, they tended to be more political than literary, in comparison to continental European reviews. Some Spanish publications were close to women’s magazines, with accessible pieces on science, art and fashion illustrations, such as El Museo Universal de Ciencias y Artes. While the press is our prime focus, other publications such as books, brochures and pamphlets are mentioned and analysed, especially when press activities were part of a larger propaganda effort and print culture, as studied in detail by Racine and Alston regarding Spanish American and Russian endeavours respectively. The foreign political press may be described as a hybrid sharing features with both the British political press and the foreign, non-political immigrant or ethnic press – notably assuming the economic role of the latter within the community. These publications have thematic and formal characteristics in common, pointing to a degree of unity but also a great diversity of purpose, tone, ideology, format, and print run (with the usual caveat that such papers were especially likely to be subject to plural or multiple reading). The longevities of these publications also varied greatly: India appeared for over three decades and the Russian Kolokol existed for 10 years and 245 issues, while the average anarchist paper only appeared a handful of times. Their financial status also differed widely – some being profitable commercial ventures, while most were financially precarious and only lasted thanks to a tireless fundraising effort (an aspect in which they converged with most British socialist newspapers and periodicals26). The papers’ influence and political positioning also covered a very broad spectrum – from being an influential voice or an organizational node on a transcontinental scale, to presenting only a marginal, peripheral discourse. All these aspects depended on the publishing traditions and political movements in which they were inscribed, the local and international networks available to editors, which influenced form, funding and contents, as well as chronological differences across over a century marked by profound changes in publishing techniques and technology in general. Despite some

Introduction

7

formal and ideological intersections as well as personal connections between these operations, the foreign political press operated in the margins and performed roles which differed from those of the British press, with different dynamics with respect to professionalization, commercialization, political positioning, the balance between news and commentary, and the industry-redefining impact of mass literacy and New Journalism. Nor did the foreign press quite correspond to the theories which informed and reflected the British press in the period, despite some overlap.27 For instance, foreign political papers were often underpinned by a strong vision of their role – which might be educational, political, cultural, identity-related – although this was usually closely related to their exilic or extraterritorial status, rather than to the British context. Despite these profound differences, however, the foreign political press also partook in the development of the ‘publication of radical opinion’ described by Conboy as one of the main journalistic trends of the nineteenth century, targeting a workingclass readership and challenging the political status quo as part of a wider repertoire of protest in an age of newfound vigour in political controversy.28 However, it is also worth noting that the foreign press mostly eschewed the political and commercial incorporation of the British radical press and continued to showcase a plurality of dissident voices within a largely separate political arena. The complexities inherent in the notion of a ‘political’ press must also be stressed. ‘Politics’, as described here, might take the form of news or, more frequently, commentary on events. London’s foreign press reflected homeland traditions in this respect. Thus, Portuguese periodicals had a clearly defined political mission as early as the nineteenth century, as ‘a kind of pulpit for the new century’, while ‘journalists became forefront actors of the sociopolitical changes registered up to that time’ (Alves and Fernandes). The balance between news and commentary was also heavily determined by technological factors, such as access to information, the ability to reproduce and then disseminate it more or less quickly, and the overall financial situation of a given publication. However, the mid-century technological breakthroughs in communication, which had such deep impacts on the national press by accelerating news transmission, affected the foreign press less profoundly. It can be hypothesized that the extraterritorial status of this press, most certainly in the case of exile and forced displacement, tilted the contents towards commentary, so that it was largely an opinion press, which gave ‘an interpretation of events rather than a daily account of these’.29 This also resulted in emphasizing the educational role of this press: several chapters underline the importance devolved to cultural, artistic, literary scientific and medical developments as part of a political project, or alongside more strictly political contents. Analysing the Spanish American press, Racine shows that political contents tended to be disseminated through cultural pedagogy rather than current events – ‘whether it was using print as a way to establish the political legitimacy of the creole’s claim to self-rule, or the creation of a new literary canon to celebrate their victories, or a concerted effort at cross-cultural communication through translations’. This overall distribution of contents is one of the aspects in which the material examined in this book proves highly heterogeneous. Nonetheless, despite all these differences and the long period under consideration, the ‘foreign’ character of this press imposed several

8

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

constraints on the production, diffusion and consumption of these publications, and their very contents – all of which in turn brought a degree of unity. As suggested above, the readership of these publications was located primarily outside Britain, requiring the implementation of innovative modes of dissemination and a strong emphasis on transnational circulation. The papers were often sold through parallel circuits, even in Britain, relying on networks of vendors and distributors in the community from which they originated, in addition to self-vending at their printing presses and editorial offices. These networks extended across Europe and the Atlantic. The modes of distribution and the freedom with which this material circulated – or not – were another point of variation. The channels were more or less official, depending on how subversive the papers were: there is indeed little in common between El Español, distributed internationally via the Foreign Office and, decades later, the sophisticated smuggling of anti-Bonapartist or anarchist papers. Censorship was, of course, a prime determinant for the most radical publications. It emanated chiefly from home governments, which could control the press beyond their frontiers through the direct bribery of infiltrated journalists, general surveillance and the active censorship and banning of publications. This, in turn, required strategies to counter these steps. Aside from the 1881 trial of Johann Most, for incitation to murder in Die Freiheit, few instances of diplomatic friction or cooperation and overt or covert police cooperation to control these publications are reported here, although these have been examined in several studies, often in relation to the policing of exiles in general.30 In terms of personnel, diversity was the norm too, except for the fact that the world of the foreign political press was overwhelmingly male – in appearance at least, as women could also fulfil less visible roles, such as the international smuggling discussed above.31 It is also possible that significant forms of feminine input simply went unrecorded. In this respect, the Russian Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams is a notable exception. Journalists and editors might be professional journalists at the time they started their activities in London – a distinctive feature both with respect to the pre-revolutionary period, when émigré journalism was predominantly professional and commercial, and from the British press industry’s increased professionalization over the course of the nineteenth century.32 Some, like Hipólito da Costa in Brazil, Mier in Mexico, Miranda in Venezuela, and many of the French Republicans and communards, were very well connected and subsequently assumed important political roles in their home countries, gaining political influence and notoriety on a national or international scale, sometimes precisely as a result of their press activities. Dadabhai Naoroji pursued nationalist politics in Britain, as a co-founder of the Indian National Congress in 1885 and an (unsuccessful) Liberal parliamentary candidate the following year. For the more radical groups, such as anarchists, German and Russian revolutionaries, while participation in governmental politics was precluded by the very nature of their political ideas, press-based activism in London could be the starting point or continuation of great international influence and a lasting journalistic career. The biographical dictionary at the end of this volume highlights the great variety of individual itineraries mediated by these London publications, offering a biographical entry point into the history of this foreign political press.

Introduction

9

Positioning in British and international politics In terms of ideology, a common denominator – inherent in the notion of exile press – is the adoption and an oppositional, ‘counter-hegemonic’33 stance, making Britain and more specifically London a key ‘site of political contestation’, as formulated by Daniel Laqua. At the beginning of the century, anti-absolutism, liberalism and constitutionalism were a prime focus – although Alves and Fernandes mention the existence of absolutist papers in Portuguese in 1809 and 1821. In Portugal and Spain, the period was one of political turmoil, due to the French Revolution or developments such as the 1808 Cadiz Constitution, with echoes throughout the Hispanic world. Migration to London in this period resulted from the dynastic and political upheavals occurring across Europe and beyond. However, the political spectrum of these publications is very wide, ranging from different shades of monarchism, liberalism, radicalism, republicanism, socialism, to varieties of nationalism (see the chapters on Spanish America, Spain, India, but not Brazil, which Hipólito da Costa envisaged as the seat of the Portuguese government rather than an independent nation), and a radical critique of the very notion of political authority voiced by some of the French, Italian and Russian periodicals at the end of the century (Chapters 5, 6 and 8). While the long-term studies presented in this volume tend to evoke a pattern of growing press radicalization, which reflects the radicalization of the left and independence struggles in the long nineteenth century, various political tendencies also coexisted, as stressed for instance by Alston in reference to the émigré press in the 1890s, where there was activity from liberals, populists, anarchists and Marxists. Indeed, one of the roles of this press was coalition-building, as examined too by Laursen for the Indian press and its ambitions to connect India’s nationalist movement and Indian nationalist groups across the world, and to build links with other nationalist groups and radical anti-imperialists in Britain. As a direct result of their extraterritorial situation, many of these publications also entertained a complex relationship with nationalism. Some of the far-left anti-nationalist movements behind these papers, notably towards the end of the nineteenth century, were still informed by nostalgia for the homeland and revolutionary patriotism. In several cases, nationalism and nation-building were at the centre of their political discourse, for instance with the construction of pan-American identity examined by Racine, Hipólito da Costa’s vision of a Lusophone kingdom with its capital in Brazil, and the increasingly radical anti-imperialism manifested in Indian publications.

From the local to the global: The press and the creation of a transnational public sphere As cited in Hickerson and Gustafson, ‘media play an important role informing and performing community’.34 Indeed, most chapters emphasize that the press served and reflected the needs of the (overwhelmingly national) community surrounding it in London, with a strong local emphasis. This is another area where digitization has

10

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

brought great benefits, as a host of different online archival sources have made it easier to trace the papers’ elusive dissemination patterns, networks and spheres of influence and to document the lives of the individuals and groups which produced and consumed them, thereby addressing one of the main challenges faced by historians working on transnational contexts. The multiple uses and functions of the press – political, economic, cultural – were redefined through exile. The papers contributed to the material life of its community, for instance by advertising job opportunities, charity initiatives, services, cultural and militant events, and providing a space of discussion and analysis. Up to a point, this press functioned as a migrant press, serving as ‘a cultural and civic translator while facilitating national identity, and being an aid to assimilation’.35 Conversely, the German example illustrates the crucial role of community infrastructures, especially clubs such as the CABV and Autonomie Club, in enabling the appearance of newspapers. However, a major difference was that assimilation, which was a central theme in the immigrant press because of the scale, duration and integrative intent of migrations involved, was rarely a concern in the publications studied here. Muñoz Sempere thus shows that Spanish publications were ‘shaped to some extent by the experience of displacement among European and American metropolitan centres’, while Di Paola points to a comparatively ‘low level of integration’ of Italian anarchists into British society, compared with other big refuge cities. As indicated above, the foreign political press was mapped out onto complex geographies. In political terms, these publications testified and contributed to the development of a transnational public sphere over the nineteenth century. In this respect, they continued and democratized the tradition of the eighteenth-century gazettes printed and read across Europe, which have been described as a site of creation and expression of a European conscience, performing a role of linguistic mediation and unification among social, political and cultural elites.36 They also transferred to the international level the new status of the political press by the late nineteenth century, as the dominant medium for the expression of public opinion.37 In this perspective, these publications might be usefully compared with the imperial press, where the media played an organizing role and contributed to creating transnational political communities and public spheres and counter-spheres. Even in London, many papers were created and shared within the milieu of the city, which was an international public sphere on a metropolitan scale. At any given time, London harboured communities from across the world, with peaks in international activism during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, around 1830, after the defeat of the Springtime of the Peoples around 1848, and from the 1870s onwards. Some papers, such as Le Proscrit, L’Homme, La Grève Générale and The Torch, had an international London-based editorial board, including not only French but also German, Italian, Polish, Russian exiles as well as British contributors. El Español was written in an office on Duke Street which was shared with Jean-Gabriel Peltier, editor of the exile French periodical L’Ambigu (1802–18), and printed, like other periodicals of the London emigration, by Juigné at 17 Cavendish Square, where Francisco de Miranda’s El Colombiano (1810) was also being printed. Years later, Macintosh printed publications from different immigrant groups, as did other international

Introduction

11

printers across the city. In some cases, these publications were intended to serve as the official press organs of international organizations. Links could also be established by individuals acting as transnational mediators. In terms of contents, they often featured contributions, translations and reprints from publications from the homeland and neighbouring countries, and were intended primarily for an international readership. Muñoz Sempere thus notes the interest manifested by the British press and among British political circles for ‘Iberia’ as a space of resistance to Napoleonic ideas, while Jones and Bantman underline the engagement with British labour laws and Chartist circles by French socialists in the 1850s, as well as attempts to present French socialist ideas to British audiences while taking an active part in British debates surrounding the franchise and or the Crimean War. Laqua stresses wide-ranging tensions between German social revolutionaries and British labour circles. In all instances, nonetheless, the emphasis is on engagement in its various guises, rather than indifference. Such discussions and occasionally vocal debates also extended beyond British audiences. On an individual level, figures like Chaikovskii, Stepniak and Kropotkin provided links between Italian, Russian, British and French circles, which were also materialized by the anarchist periodical The Torch, and other international publications dotting the century, such as the ‘pan-exilic’ La Voix du proscrit (1850–1), L’Homme (1853–6) and the British – Russian Free Russia (1890–1914). Guy Aldred connected anarchists and Indian nationalists; Rudolf Rocker linked German and Yiddish anarchist groups. Looking beyond London and Britain, the foreign press helped create an international system of information and space of discussion, underpinned by correspondents, reprints, informal networks of contacts, links with foreign papers, etc. The papers were increasingly focused on global readerships and participated in cross-border political discussions which redefined the notion of political territory. Laqua highlights the importance of the London press as ‘a vital conduit’ for the German Left until 1890, when censorship in Germany made local political publishing virtually impossible. For the overwhelming majority of the publications considered here, target audiences were at least partly international, intended either for the home country or another diasporic destination: the free Portuguese press circulated through the empire, while El Español sent as many as 11,000 copies for global despatch and was read across South America. La Rivoluzione Sociale received subscriptions from South Africa, France, Brazil, Uruguay, Switzerland, Italy and the United States. The Indian Sociologist was intended to connect ‘the Indian nationalist diaspora living in South Africa, California, Mauritius, Hong Kong and England with one another and like-minded groups at home’, and had close links with activists in Berlin and Paris. This transnational diffusion on a variety of scales made the London press instrumental in fostering a sense of collective identity, occasionally stating this self-assigned role openly. This was the case with the first Spanish Liberals, who, in Muñoz Sempere’s terms, ‘thought of themselves in enlightened, cosmopolitan terms; a conception of a global struggle against tyranny’. After the mid-nineteenth century, the London press was central to global discussions on labour internationalism and antimilitarism, as shown by Jones, Bantman and Di Paola, as well as on political violence, as discussed by Laqua. It also played a central role in public opinion formation, especially in the New World. Lustosa and Suriani da Silva argue that the exile press was the precursor of a

12

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

free press in the Lusitanian world. It was owing to the papers published in London that an active public readership began to be established in Brazil and Portugal. The Spanish Americans’ London publications provide the most striking example of such processes. Racine describes this community as ‘a newsprint nation because it used the medium of print as a crucial component of the very public process of defining what their not-yet independent countries had been and what they were intended to become’ – a powerful reassessment of the pivotal role of print and communication in the emergence of national and emancipatory struggles, and of the foreign political press in London as a site of intense and effective political reflection.

Conclusion London continues to be one of the most multicultural cities in the world, where press from all over the world is produced, sold and read. However, as this historical status and the liberal environment making it possible are increasingly called into question because of contemporary anxieties over migration and the free movement of people, a reminder of the remarkable history of the foreign press in the nineteenth century is especially timely. It is hoped that this collection will be an early milestone for further works exploring the inevitable gaps left here, through studies on specific national groups and languages, challenging Eurocentric narratives and covering the inevitable gaps, such as London’s Jewish press, as well as key themes, notably discourses on antislavery, feminist/suffragist activism, war, decolonization, all of which are unevenly represented here. Moreover, as suggested here, this volume provides a slightly truncated view of a wide range of publishing activities, leaving out book and pamphlet production. Further studies on the creation of foreign presses and the wider concept of transnational print culture, especially in relation to political identities and materiality, are therefore needed, in the context of a wide international and interdisciplinary dialogue.

Notes 1 See, for instance, Sabine Freitag (ed.), Exiles from European Revolutions: Refugees in Mid-Victorian England (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003); Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists in London: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 2 For instance Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (eds), Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). 3 Joanne Shattock (ed.), Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). 4 Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton, ‘Introduction’, in The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers, ed. Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), 1–13, 4. See, in particular, Michelle Tusan, ‘Empire and the Periodical Press’, 153–62; Bob Nicholson,

Introduction

5 6

7

8 9 10 11

12 13

14

15 16 17

18 19 20

13

‘Transatlantic Connections’, 163–74 and Jane Chapman, ‘Transnational Connections’, 175–84. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (eds), DNCJ. Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism (Ghent: Academia Press, 2009). Marie Cronqvist and Christoph Hilgert, ‘Entangled Media Histories. The value of Transnational and Transmedial Approaches in Media Historiography’, Media History (2017). Marianne Van Remoortel, Kristin Ewins, Maaike Koffeman and Matthew Philpotts, ‘Joining Forces: European Periodical Studies as a New Research Field’, Journal of European Periodical Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 2016): ii. Transfopress, http://transfopresschcsc.wixsite.com/transfopress (accessed 25 November 2016). Simon Burrows, French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792–1814 (The Royal Historical Society: Boydell and Brewer, 2000). Hannah Barker, ‘England, 1760–1815’, in Press, Politics and the Public Sphere, 93–112. John Gardner, ‘Censorships and Trials’, in DNCJ, 103; Joel Howard Wiener, ‘Newspaper Taxes, Taxes on Knowledge, Stamp Taxes’, in DNCJ, 454; Martin Hewitt, The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, 1849–1869 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). Nicolás Kanellos, Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography (Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000). Carl Wittke, The German-Language Press in America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957), vi, 311; Sally M. Miller, ‘Distinctive Media. The European Ethnic Press in the United States’, in A History of the Book in America, Vol. 4, ‘Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880–1940’, eds Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A, Radway, 299–311. Diana Cooper-Richet, ‘La presse en langue étrangère publiée, en France, au xix° siècle’, accessed on academia.edu, 26 November 2016, 2; Diana Cooper-Richet, ‘Pour une étude de la presse de la presse d’exil, miroir des échanges transculturels (xix°-xx° siècle)’, in Exils et transferts culturels dans l’Europe moderne, ed. Judi Maár and Augustin Lefebvre, Cahiers de la Sorbonne nouvelle (Paris: l’Harmattan, 2015), 199–208. Diana Cooper-Richet, ‘La presse en langue étrangère publiée, en France, au xix° siècle’, 25–6. Delphine Diaz, Un Asile pour tous les peuples ? Exilés et réfugiés étrangers en France au cours du premier XIXe siècle (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014). João Gualberto Oliveira, Nascimento da imprensa paulista (São Paulo: Ed. Do Autor, 1978). For other surveys on the Italian press in São Paulo, see Affonso A. De Freitas, ‘A Imprensa periódica de São Paulo desde seus primórdios em 1823–1914’, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo 19 (São Paulo: Tipografia do Diário Oficial, 1915); Freitas Nobre, História da imprensa de São Paulo (São Paulo: Edições Leia, 1950); Lafayette De Toledo, ‘Imprensa Paulista’, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo 3 (1898): 303–521, 1898. Angelo Trento, Do outro lado do Atlântico: um século de imigração italiana no Brasil (São Paulo: Nobel/Istituto Italiano di Cultura di San Paolo, 1988), 187. Barker, Press, Politics and the Public Sphere, 104. Tom O’Malley, ‘Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory and the Late Victorian and Early Twentieth-Century Press’, Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 4 (2015): 591–606.

14

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

21 ‘Refugees’: ‘persons who are outside of their country of origin because they fear persecution’, Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier (eds), The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 877. 22 Sylvie Aprile and Stéphane Dufoix, Les mots de l’immigration (Paris: Belin, 2009), 300–1. 23 Emmanuelle Loyer, ‘Exile’, Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History, 368. 24 Sylvie Aprile, Le Siècle des exilés. Bannis et proscrits, de 1789 à la Commune (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2010), 7, 193. 25 Laurel Brake, Print in Transition (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), chap. 1. 26 Deian Hopkins, ‘Socialist Newspapers’, in DNCJ, 583; Mutch, Deborah, ‘Socialist Periodicals’, in DNCJ, 583–4. 27 Mark Hampton, ‘ “Understanding Media”: Theories of the Press in Britain, 1850–1914’, Media Culture & Society March 2001 23, no. 2 (2001): 213–31. 28 Martin Conboy, Journalism: A Critical History (London: Sage, 2004) chap. 5. 29 Christophe Charle, Le Siècle de la presse (1830–1939) (Paris: Seuil, 2004), 29. 30 John Sweeney, At Scotland Yard (London: Alexander Moring Ltd, 1905), 265–75; Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History 1878–1934 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Bantman, French anarchists, ch. 5; Pietro Di Paola, ‘The Spies Who Came in from the Heat: The International Surveillance of the Anarchists in London’, European History Quarterly 37, no. 2 (2007): 189–215; Paul Knepper, The Invention of International Crime: A Global Issue in the Making, 1881–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). 31 Bantman, French Anarchists, 88. 32 Burrows, French Exile Journalism; Mark Hampton, ‘Defining Journalists in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 2 (2005): 138–55. 33 Jane Chapman, ‘Counter Hegemony, Newspapers and the Origins of Anti-colonialism in French India’, International Journal of Social Economics 38, no. 2 (2011): 128–39. 34 Andrea Hickerson and Kristin L. Gustafson, ‘Revisiting the Immigrant Press’, Journalism (2014): 1–18, 2. 35 Hickerson and Gustafson, ‘Revisiting the Immigrant Press’, 1. See also Miller, ‘The European Ethnic Press in the United States’, 300–1. 36 ‘Projet Gazettes Européennes du 18e siècle’, http://www.gazettes18e.fr/projet, accessed 25 November 2016. 37 Aled Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996).

1

Newsprint Nations: Spanish American Publishing in London, 1808–1827 Karen Racine

Spanish American patriots living in London engaged in a sophisticated process of national identity formation in exile. While the wars of independence engulfed their homelands, a sizable community of closely knit patriots gathered in the British capital to lobby for recognition, commission soldiers, purchase arms, and recruit settlers and investors for their countries-in-the-making. They also undertook a significant and sustained publishing project to support all those ventures. Over the course of two decades, a fluid roster of men who had grown up in the shadow of the Spanish Inquisition lived in London, where they absorbed the powerful lessons of the vibrant British press and quickly learned to deploy the power of print for their own purposes. They were initially drawn to the city by Francisco de Miranda’s propagandistic publications that were widely, if clandestinely, distributed throughout Spanish America on the eve of the revolutions. While resident in London, these men lodged printed words as both weapons and patriotic textbooks against the legitimacy of the Spanish rule in America by attacking royalist claims with facts and figures drawn from their own direct experience. In time, the Spanish Americans in London turned to the English-language press to popularize their many schemes for economic and cultural regeneration. A few idealistic writers even embraced the British model of serialized literary reviews as part of an effort to elevate their future fellow-citizens, build a pan-American identity and convince their hosts that Spanish America boasted a civilized cosmopolitan culture worthy of participation on the world stage. Finally, a significant number made their living as contracted translators for British organizations, working not just in Spanish but also in indigenous languages like Quechua, Aymará, Otomí and Arawak. The Spanish American community in London can be described as a newsprint nation because it used the medium of print as a crucial component of the very public process of defining what their not-yetindependent countries had been and what they were intended to become. Their words targeted potential allies in London and also circulated in newspapers back in Spanish America, both of which had the effect of normalizing the existence of these new nations on the world stage.

16

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

In his influential study of nation-state formation, Benedict Anderson argued that the earliest definitions of a core national identity take place among ‘marginalized, vernacular-based coalitions of the educated’.1 Typically, these literate, urban intellectuals worked through the print medium to establish a dominant form of the language by giving it a new fixity in the form of grammar, syntax and orthography. Once this so-called unified field of communication had been set, the national project was diffused through printed texts that spanned high and low culture, including books, plays, government decrees and legal codes, newspapers, handbills and posters.2 Anderson linked the rapid expansion of this text-based national identity formation project to the parallel rise of print capitalism which, in turn, gained impetus from the growth of literacy among the popular classes. In essence, he argued that ‘printlanguage is what invents nationalism, not a particular language per se’.3 Because the independence of Spanish America occurred in the early nineteenth century, at the same time as both the emergence of the nation-state as a historical actor and the rapid expansion of government-sponsored primary education, Anderson used examples from that region as a major case study. The argument is convincing in many ways. It is true that virtually all new Spanish American regimes scrambled to acquire a printing press and understood the utility of creating favourable public opinion to undergird the authority of the post-colonial states. What that print technology meant for national identity formation, however, remains hotly debated.4 Jesús Díaz-Caballero disagrees that Spanish American nations were conceived as ‘a homogeneous, secular, lettered, and synchronous community’.5 John Itzigsohn and Matthias vom Hau argue that the Eurocentric concept of nationalism may not sit comfortably with Spanish American realities, principally because its elitefocused emphasis ‘ignored the agency of subaltern actors’.6 Eric Van Young says that ‘the only problem with Anderson’s analysis of the Spanish American independence process … is that he is wrong or, perhaps better said, only partially correct’. Anderson assumed that elite discourse was a ‘close proxy for subaltern’ voices in a revolutionary context yet the Mexican case, which Van Young sees as ‘an absence of imagined community’, may be the rare example of negative proof. Mexico – and perhaps all of Spanish American – instead had a ‘nationalist movement without nationalism’.7 Nevertheless, Anderson’s insights remain relevant for the experience of the Spanish Americans in London because they were a relatively compact, highly literate, mobilized and motivated community of exiled patriots who aimed to influence people and events not just in London itself, but faraway across the Atlantic Ocean. Books and newsprint could go where the men themselves could not.

The precursor and print Venezuelan military officer and inveterate traveller Francisco de Miranda was the great ‘Precursor’ of the Spanish American independence movements. Since 1789, he had made London his main residence and devoted his considerable talents and energies to the task of persuading the British government to support a liberating expedition to his homeland. After 1808, a circle of pamphleteers and propagandists gathered

Newsprint Nations: Spanish American Publishing in London, 1808–1827

17

Figure 1.1 G. Cooke, ‘Al Pueblo Americano’, Biblioteca Americana, o miscelánea de literatura, artes I ciencias. London: G. Marchant, 1823, Frontispiece. Courtesy of General Research Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

around Miranda which focused on consciousness-raising and movement-building. Its work was often subsidized by the British government, merchants or other prominent individuals operating in the context of the Napoleonic Wars and the desire to secure new commercial markets in the Americas. For example, a forceful writer by the name of William Burke collaborated with Miranda to publish two lengthy expositions of the arguments for Spanish American independence, both of which included extracts from patriot and royalist newspapers, and eventually were themselves discussed in back home: South American Independence; or the Emancipation of South America, the Glory and Interest of England (1807) and Additional Reasons for Our Immediately Emancipating Spanish America (1808).8 In both books, the implication is that the interests of Spanish America and Great Britain are entwined and that it would be to the latter’s credit and benefit to intervene. For his target audience of politicians, merchants and liberty-loving idealists, Burke explained that Spanish Americans and Britain friendship would bring ‘well-ordered liberty’ based on security and energy which would be released by ‘a free intercourse with the rest of the world’ and also lead to an increase in production.9 The BurkeMiranda line of argumentation invoked the long-held prejudices of the anti-Spanish

18

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Black Legend by describing their overseas empire as a decrepit, tyrannical regime that was collapsing under its own weight. A free association with Britain meant that Spanish Americans could look forward to a more dynamic, open, modern future in which peace, industry, wealth and prosperity, ‘aided by the diffusion of knowledge, and the spirit of improvement and of just and enlightened liberality’, would raise up all residents to a ‘more flourishing and happy prospect than [they] had before enjoyed’.10 The year 1810 brought a significant change in political conditions. Between the months of May and September, autonomist-minded patriots throughout Spanish America asserted control over their local governments and declared their constitutional right to rule during the absence of the legitimate central royal authority. The juntas [governing councils] that emerged in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Santiago de Chile, across New Granada – coupled with the shock of Miguel Hidalgo’s explosive peasant uprising in Mexico – gave renewed energy to Miranda and his London-based circle. In March 1810, Miranda and his frequent collaborators James Mill, Francis Gould Leckie, Dr Francisco Solano Constâncio and Manuel Cortes Campomanes began to issue a newspaper known as El Colombiano (1810). It was short-lived – just five biweekly numbers before events superseded and funds ran out – but it set the tone for publishing efforts of the Spanish American newsprint nation during the two decades that followed. The first article of the first issue declared that their mission was to be useful to those countries and to contribute to their happiness. This impulse leads us to communicate to the inhabitants of the Columbian Continent the news that we believe to be interesting in order to be able to guide them in that intricate complication of objects, and to put them in the state of being able to judge with correctness and work successfully on a project that interests them and which must be the origin of their future happiness.11

At the same time, Miranda told a friend confidentially that his house on Grafton Street ‘is and will always be the fixed point for the Independence and liberty of the Colombian Continent’.12 The officials at the Spanish Embassy were sufficiently alarmed to send a notice back to Madrid warning about this dangerous new publication; they recommended that agents in all Spanish and American ports be warned to be on the lookout for the seditious and ‘incendiary’ newspaper.13 In 1811, the viceroy of Peru José Abascal complained about the continued circulation of two malicious news organs that originated in London, Miranda’s El Colombiano (1810) and Spanish liberal José María Blanco White’s El Español (1810–14), both of which he characterized as ‘species that are subversive of all good order and that union which we are simply trying to save’.14 The viceroy was not wrong in his assessment. Under pressure from the Spanish Embassy, the British government stopped Miranda’s subsidy and the serial folded. When the news of the Spanish American juntas’ formation started arriving in London, a newly arrived Ecuadorean named José María de Antepara quickly assembled, translated and published a book that was intended to shore up Miranda’s claim to a leadership position, and to make the case that the British government should support these unprecedented developments. Titled South American Emancipation, it was a collection of decrees, proclamations, papers and statistics in English, French and

Newsprint Nations: Spanish American Publishing in London, 1808–1827

19

Figure 1.2 Francisco de Miranda, in J. M. Antepara, South American Emancipation.  London: J. Richardson; L. N. Pannier, 1810. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark: General Reference Collection DRT Digital Store 1446.h.4.

Spanish that tried to establish credibility through the purportedly neutral nature of the documentary genre.15 It was his goal to present these carefully selected documents at ‘this eventful moment’ to readers in the Americas as a project ‘of high utility for our countrymen to have before themselves and before the world’.16 In Antepara’s retelling, America would redeem ‘afflicted humanity’ in the face of the Napoleonic threat. He also made sure to emphasize the tremendous wealth waiting to be exploited across the Atlantic by a commercial people with the energy and talent to do so. After all, he said, the North Americans had shown what tremendous advances could be made in a short time, and a liberated Spanish America promised even greater results because of its population, internal navigation, the quality of its soil and the diversity of its climate.17 There can be little doubt that Miranda himself supervised the documentary collection. The materials included are ones that are found in his personal archival collection and that he regularly drafted into print service. Furthermore, funding for the book came from two sources linked to Miranda. The Marqués del Apartado, two Fagoaga brothers and their cousin Wenceslao Villaurrutia were members of a wealthy Mexican mining family who had been staying with the Precursor in London. He also got money from sympathetic members of the government’s opposition who hoped to use

20

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Miranda as a proxy to push the Parliament to support Spanish American independence as a way of opening access for British merchants and cutting off Napoleon’s access to the continent.18 The book made its way across the ocean where royalist officials vigorously condemned it wherever found. The Spanish colonial administration banned this book, like many others produced in London, and sent orders to seize and destroy all copies.19 The censorship did not work and the news printed abroad circulated among the notquite-yet nations. For example, the April 1811 edition of the Semanario Ministerial de Santa Fé de Bogotá (1811–15) contained a long extract from the book and Antepara himself later inserted articles into the Gazeta de Caracas (1810–12).

Words as weapons, documents as defence Francisco de Miranda returned to Venezuela in September 1810, leaving behind two Venezuelan associates who had come to the city as agents of the Caracas junta, Luis López Méndez and Andrés Bello. Over the next six years, a parade of Spanish Americans passed through London, some staying for weeks on a particular mission, while others became stranded indefinitely because of the changing fortunes of war at home. Because the 1810s was an extremely difficult decade marked by ongoing civil wars throughout Spanish America, the London community’s interested naturally tended to be concerned with securing material support for their friends at home and convincing the British audience of the righteousness of their cause. For that reason, their newsprint nation tended to take on a tone of urgency that very much reflected the precarious financial and political positions of the men themselves. Unlike other foreign-language communities resident in London later in the century, they did not have the personal experience operating in an environment where liberty of the press was available, nor did they have the financial resources or personal to publish newspapers. Instead, their work took a variety of print forms suited to the immediate task and conditions. In 1811, R. Juigné, a printer long associated with the Miranda circle, simultaneously released a slim 63-page volume of documents titled Discurso que puede servir de preliminar a las noticias de la última conspiración de Caracas/Discourse that may serve as a preliminary introduction to the news of the recent conspiracy at Caracas in both Spanish and English editions. Although the compiler of the documents is only identified as ‘a Spanish American who had occasion to direct and admire those papers’, the likeliest pair would be López Méndez and Bello who had recently come to London with credentials and evidence hoping to persuade the British government to recognize, or at least protect, the fledgling Caracas junta. Judging by the selection of documents included, one can see that the patriots were anxious to establish the constitutionality of their actions. The collection opens with a rhetorical epigraph asking the question ‘where can be found Reason in such a great wrong?’ – meaning the continued underrepresentation of millions of Americans within the imperial system.20 The first half of the book cleverly consists of a strongly worded defence of the actions of the Madrid patriots who rose against Napoleon on the infamous Dos de Mayo and then goes on to identify the Caracas junta as having been motivated by the same anti-French loyal

Newsprint Nations: Spanish American Publishing in London, 1808–1827

21

spirit. The second section is composed of a series of justificatory documents. In the first one, the Royal Order that established the procedure for the election of deputies to the Spanish Cortes, the editors made use of special type to stress that these men were to be chosen by virtue of their ‘well-known probity, talents, and education’.21 The next selection was an article from the Gaceta de Caracas (30 June 1809) that emphasized the intentions of the Caracas junta and their elected deputies as loyal subjects of Ferdinand to act in accordance with the spirit of the ancient Spanish constitution. Other documents included supporting letters from the town councils of Cumaná, Guayana, Barinas, Maracaibo and Nirgua all confirming their compliance with the constitution and congratulating the junta and Cortes on doing the work of Heaven during their King’s captivity. The minuscule Venezuelan lobby in London clearly wanted to shore up their legal status, although the decision to publish the volume both in Spanish and English certainly does underscore the dual vision of their intended audience as well as the cost of monetary investment in the project. As events in Spanish America deteriorated into violent armed conflict, many more patriots made their way to London. One of the most charismatic and articulate was a fugitive Mexican friar named Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra who had been eking out a living in Europe as a writer, translator, tutor and eventually a priest attached to some of the anti-Bonaparte forces in Spain.22 Once he decided that the peninsula was a lost cause, Mier fled to London where he almost immediately started to engage in a war of words with José María Blanco White. Although the two men were friends, Mier decided to counter the rejection of Spanish American independence that Blanco White had made in the pages of his influential journal El Español (15 July 1811). Under the pseudonym of ‘a Republican from Caracas’, Mier wrote two open letters to Blanco White in late 1811 and early 1812, both fiery polemics that have been described as ‘a compendium of practically all the principal arguments (historical, political, social and economic) that the Spanish Americans put forward in order to oppose the pretensions of the peninsular [Spaniards] on the plane of doctrine and ideology’.23 Along with the standard creole rejection of Spain’s claim to perpetual rule, Mier introduced a particularly Americanist element to the debate, namely the rights of castas and indigenous people to be taken seriously as citizens of the new nations. His nativist side felt strongly that creole, by virtue of their birth in the New World, were as truly American as the indigenous people themselves.24 The second open letter continued to build the argument that the constitutional system of Cádiz was flawed, that Americans’ interests were not well served within a tyrannical monarchy, that Americans shared a common vision, and that reconciliation with Spain was neither realistic nor desirable. Mier’s vitriolic style and well-documented logic made his arguments effective and looking back at the minor controversy, he probably did win the debate with Blanco White; in fact both men agreed that England represented a better model for emulation than did France and shared an awareness that the Spanish liberals’ actions were less liberal than they ought to have been.25 Mier’s pamphlets, like other print productions of the newsprint nation, circulated widely in Spanish America in the 1810s. The pamphlets were reproduced in Cartagena de Indias in 1813, for example, and extracts disseminated in the Mexican patriot resistance newspapers El Correo Americano del Sur (1813) and Semanario Patriótico Americano

22

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

(1812–13), and in the republican government-linked Aurora de Chile (1812–13) as well as within other pamphlets, speeches and personal correspondence. Mier made a more sustained and significant contribution to the Spanish Americans’ publishing project in London in the form of his magisterial history of the Mexican independence revolt to date, which he intentionally renamed to its pre-Columbian name in Historia de la revolución de Nueva España, antiguamente Anáhuac … [History of the Revolution in New Spain, anciently known as Anáhuac].26 The book is actually several books in one because it was written to satisfy several constituencies. On a practical level, Mier seems to have been patronized by the family of deposed Mexican viceroy José Iturrigaray and spends a good bit of the book defending his actions during events as honourable and patriotic. On a polemical level, it is clear that Mier took up the pen on behalf of his newsprint nation to refute the anti-creole, anti-American version of the Hidalgo revolt found in Spaniard Juan López Cancelada’s La Verdad sabida y Buena Fé guardada. Orígen de la espantosa revolución de Nueva España comenzada en 15 de Setiembre de 1810 [usually translated as The True and Faithfull Origin of the Revolution of New Spain]. As always, Mier’s writing was by turns inspired and furious, logical and overwhelming. He railed against the viciousness of the Spaniards’ activities in America, denouncing Viceroy Venegas in good eighteenth-century fashion as a ‘vizier’ and claiming that the only a tenuous sentimental attachment to the Crown bound Americans to Spain. Now that the link had been severed by Napoleon, Americans were free to take up their freedom, not as an innovation, but because it was their right from the start. It is hard to overstate the significance of Mier’s intellectual project in the Historia and its manifestation as a true collective effort of the Spanish American community in London. The representatives of Buenos Aires resident in London, Manuel Moreno and Tomás Guido, paid Mier’s bills, kept him out of debtor’s prison and subsidized the book’s print run via their local agent Fermín Tastet & Sons.27 As a mark of gratitude, Mier dedicated his monumental work to the ‘Undefeated Argentine people in their Sovereign Assembly of Buenos Ayres’. Future Mexican statesman and conservative historian Lucas Alamán had spent time in London and remembered Mier’s home as a hive of activity.28 An all-too-human example reveals that while laid up in bed with a broken arm during the winter of 1813, Mier relied on his Spanish American friends to act as amanuensis and to keep him fed and entertained. In the pages of his history, Mier invoked a wide variety of historical antecedents, but made it clear that he appreciated the constitutionalism of his host country, linking its air of freedom to its original charter and then finding a Spanish analogue in the Laws of the Indies, something he explicitly identified as ‘our Magna Carta’.29 The desire to establish legitimacy and legality was a broad concern of the Spanish Americans in London in the 1810s. Manuel Palacio Fajardo, a Venezuelan who had come to London in 1814 and remained there for three years, published a brief but important summary of the state of affairs in America which was done in English, and likely intended to complement the patriots’ recruitment efforts for Simón Bolívar’s armies currently taking place throughout Great Britain and Ireland. Titled Outline of the Revolution in Spanish America, the author was identified as ‘a South American’ eyewitness to events who stressed for the audience that he had confined himself ‘to

Newsprint Nations: Spanish American Publishing in London, 1808–1827

23

the simple relation of facts. … All that is contained in this book is to be found in official and other authentic documents.’30 Much like the earlier Discourse from 1811, the book comprised a long narrative outline of events, coupled with some supporting documentation at the end. The main difference with the earlier account generated by Venezuelans in London was that by July 1817, the exhaustion of war was becoming apparent. Palacio Fajardo, perhaps under the influence of the always-more-moderate Andrés Bello, tried to walk a fine line between extending a few nods towards the possibility of a reconciliation with Ferdinand while also revealing for a British audience just how viciously his commanders in northern South America were acting in his name.31 His own brother had been executed and he was currently floating the idea of petitioning for permission to return home.32 Palacio Fajardo appealed to good-hearted British liberals by hitting notes sure to arouse their outrage. He reminded them of the nefarious Inquisition that weighed like a dead hand on science and literature. He brought up the unpleasant memory of the

Figure 1.3 El evangelio de Jesu Christo segun San Lucas: en aymará y español/transl from the Latin Vulgate, into Aimará by V. Pazos-Kanki and into Spanish by P. Scio de San Miguel. London: [s.n.], 1829. © The British Library Board. Shelfmark: Document Supply W90/9519.

24

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

royalists from Mexico who described indigenous people as ‘a race of monkeys, filled with vice and ignorance’. And he appealed to their fairness by raising the standard patriot complaint that throughout the entire colonial period, until 1810, there had been 166 viceroys in the New World and 588 captains-general, governors and presidents; of these 754 positions, only 18 had been creole Americans. That was not the only jealous affront either; creoles were not permitted to visit Spain without going through an onerous procedure to get permissions (which were regularly refused).33 He described Bolívar as ‘one of the most exalted characters’ of the era, and stressed that all good Spanish American citizens ‘eagerly contributed both with their persons and property to assist the [patriot] government’.34 His efforts to rouse support for the very public recruitment campaigns were obvious. At the same time, Palacio Fajardo wanted to return home and met with U.S. Ambassador Richard Rush to try to rally them to Spanish America’s side. For his part, Rush was impressed, calling Palacio Fajardo ‘cool minded and intelligent, more so than other Spanish Americans’.35 It was a very popular and influential book, being translated and reprinted in Paris, New York and Hamburg, reviewed in The Quarterly Review, Monthly Review and Eclectic Review, and widely referenced and excerpted in the patriot press back in Spanish America. By 1820, the publisher’s accounts recorded that 196 of the 750 copies still remained.36 Matthew Brown has done a masterful job of describing the other major collective effort of the Spanish Americans in London during the 1810s, the aggressive campaign to recruit soldiers to fight on the patriots’ side in the American theatres of war.37 British newspapers like The Times, The Morning Chronicle, Carrick’s Morning Post and the Caledonian Mercury among dozens of others extensively covered these activities throughout the period 1816–20; there were also several longer books published that either rallied to the cause or represented the criticism of disillusioned soldiers upon return. Francis Maceroni, writing on behalf of the patriots of New Granada (today Colombia), produced An Appeal to the Nation on Behalf of the Struggling Independents of South America in 1818. Not surprisingly, the Spanish ambassador in London, the duke of San Carlos, took a very dim view of these activities and regularly lodged protests with the Foreign Office, citing their two countries’ alliance and the existence of official neutrality acts.38 Clearly, the newsprint campaigns were understood to be exactly what they were: the use of words as weapons.

Pan-Americanism on the printed page Probably the most renowned Spanish American publishing projects in London were the two high-quality journals founded by Juan García del Río and Andrés Bello. La Biblioteca Americana (1823) and El Repertorio Americano (1826–7) were high-quality reviews that encompassed a broad spectrum of analytical and creative fields: science, history, politics, book reviews, original poetry, modern philosophy and engraved images. Both enterprises focused on Spanish American subjects, were directed towards a Spanish American audience and were produced by a small collective of patriots resident in London who identified themselves as the Society of Americans.39 Its main energy seems to have come from García del Río and Bello, with contributions from

Newsprint Nations: Spanish American Publishing in London, 1808–1827

25

Venezuelan Luis López Méndez, Colombian Agustín Gutiérrez Moreno and someone with the initials P. C., likely a Swiss-German by the name of Pedro Creutzer.40 Colombian Juan García del Río was in London as one of the agents of the Peruvian patriot government. In a letter from the British capital dated 1822, Agustín Gutiérrez Moreno wrote to his friend Estanislao Vergara that his friends in London had concocted a plan to create a world-class journal ‘exclusively dedicated to the business of America, that will make known and immortalize the deeds of our revolution and the great men who figured in it’.41 To that end, they had ‘gathered an immense collection of everything – official and unofficial papers alike – emanating from Lima, Chile and Buenos Aires since 1808 … but we lack all the papers of Cundinamarca, Venezuela and Quito’. Vergara would provide them and the fatherland with a great patriotic service if he could procure reports, pamphlets, memoirs, gazettes and especially portraits of ‘our heroes in the military and political careers’. The group had already settled on an engraving of Christopher Columbus for their first number, the sixteenth-century Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas for their second and had waiting portraits of Argentine general José de San Martín, Chilean supreme director Bernardo O’Higgins, Argentine statesman Juan Manuel de Pueyrredón and the Peruvian admiral Manuel Blanco Encalada for subsequent issues, but, he lamented, ‘we lack those of Colombians’. They also invited Antonio José de Irisarri to participate; he was an erudite Guatemalan who was currently in London serving as the agent for the Chilean government and who had issued his own prospectus for a serial publication called El Censor Americano (1820) in London, although the newspaper itself had just four issues. On 16 April 1823, García del Río released the prospectus for their journal which was to be called La Biblioteca Americana (1823). By identifying it so clearly as ‘the American Library’, the editors clearly signalled their encyclopaedic vision and their seriousness about this cultural project. They were also devoted to the medium of print as the vehicle for public improvement in the emerging American countries. In the prospectus, García del Río and Bello blamed Spain for having kept Americans closed off from the rest of the world for three centuries and welcomed a new era in which they could share in the fruits of ingenuity and hard work. The editors promised their readers that they were desirous of co-operating to remove ignorance, which is the source of all enslavement and a perennial fount of degradation and misery, from America. We yearn to present to that people the intellectual wealth of their past centuries in order to prepare them for the future.42

Although there is a fairly and nationalist-inflected tedious debate surrounding the true motive force behind La Biblioteca Americana – Colombians claim it was García del Río while Chileans and Venezuelans praise Bello – in practice, it was a community effort with contributions by Americans from all regions and some funding from British sources. It is true, however, that the prospectus was signed with the initials G. R. alone and structure of the overall project closely mirrors a previous journal García del Río had operated in Peru called La Biblioteca Americana.43

26

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

The journal was clearly inspired by its authors’ extended residence in London and their deep familiarity with its political, philosophical and print cultures.44 By emphasizing values of utility, happiness and improvement in their prospectus and in their choice of subjects, the Society of Americans signalled their awareness of both utilitarianism and Whiggish notions of progress.45 Both La Biblioteca Americana and its later resurrection in El Repertorio Americano were intentionally designed as a collaborative and Pan-American educative cultural project to complement the Spanish-language textbook market that was flourishing in London under the business vision of Rudolph Ackermann and his Spanish liberal friends.46 La Biblioteca Americana was expensive to produce and survived for just two numbers. The first one had been dedicated to ‘The American People’ and the second to ‘The Government of Colombia’ which, at the time, was a term intended to encompass the entire continent. It was a lavish production with fine engravings and original works of science and literature. The most famous contribution that La Biblioteca Americana made to Spanish American literature was the publication of Andrés Bello’s poem ‘Alocución a la Poesía’ [Allocution to Poetry], which has been described as the place where the ‘desire for intellectual independence is first made explicit’.47 It is a long poem in the classic tradition in which the author not only eulogizes the great battles, but also pivots away from war towards national construction by invoking the need to incorporate the indigenous past and turn away from the fields of bloodshed and build workable civic societies. An inherently conservative man, Bello generously made room in his poem for the glories of the Spanish conquistadors as well. The poem caused such a stir back home that one literary scholar has suggested that it was the reason the Simón Bolívar demoted Bello from his post in London.48 La Biblioteca Americana offered an inherently Pan-American vision, not just in the personnel that collaborated on it, but also its projected audience and the content of its articles. Readers were treated to accounts of American palm trees, a new type of potato found in Colombia, schools for Indian chiefs in Peru, along with others of general interest including vaccine campaigns, orthography reform, the proper methods for teaching literature, a newly invented bread-making machine and the role of women in society. Although this first journal failed quickly for lack of subscribers, an Ecuadorean named Vicente Rocafuerte eventually agreed to use some of his funds as agent for Mexico to resurrect the Pan-American publishing project with a new title El Repertorio Americano. Visually and structurally, the journal was nearly identical to its predecessor and survived for a slightly longer time, four numbers from 1826 to 1827. The first volume was again dedicated with the same lithograph to ‘The American People’, and led with the second of Bello’s famous Americanist odes written in London, this one called ‘Silva Americana. La agricultura de la zona tórrida’ [‘American Strophe. The Agriculture of the Torrid Zone’].49 In it, Bello praised the natural wealth of the Americas, the fecundity of its territory serving as both a signal for commercial potential and a recognition that liberty would bloom when transplanted to that soil. He also warned readers of the dangers in too much innovation too quickly, and expressed some concern with the dangerous experiments taking place in the cities; better the American people should trust their traditional rural Catholic values and allow national life to evolve organically.50 Clearly Bello’s long residence in London left his natural moderation reinforced by a Burkean vision of change.

Newsprint Nations: Spanish American Publishing in London, 1808–1827

27

The Repertorio’s selection of articles was similar to that of La Biblioteca Americana as well. It included discussions of classical authors like Homer and Virgil, methods for elementary education, improvements in cotton and cochineal production, the latest trends in historical painting, waterfalls in Brazil, American ephemera, biography of Bartolomé de las Casas, and yet more emphasis on Christopher Columbus as a founding father, this time taking the form of an epic poem called ‘The Columbiad’. In this way, its didactic purpose as a textbook for the Pan-American market should be evident, as well as its shared hemispheric vision that grew out of real-life friendships formed in London. There was an optimistic belief in the power of words and education to lift up the masses and bring on a bright new future of happiness, prosperity and liberty. If words had been weapons in the past, then these tomes were intended as tools for the future. One of the occasional contributors to El Repertorio Americano was José Joaquín de Olmedo, a renowned Ecuadorean poet who had come to London as an agent of his government in the mid-1820s. He quickly became a close friend to Bello and published an edition of his own 1825 Americanist epic poem called ‘La Victoria de Junín. Canto a Bolívar’ [‘The Victory of Junín. Song to Bolívar’].51 Its message was similar to many of the other early literary manifestations of an emerging national identity: a philo-Indianism, a repudiation of war in favour of civilian rule and an intense devotion to a romanticized (and lucrative) American nature.52 Olmedo cast Bolívar, the great hero of the wars, as a proto-Inca figure with the intent of shoring up both his claim to political legitimacy and his deep American roots; for his part, Bolívar worried that his growing number of enemies could very easily take the portrayal and turn it against him as a proof that he was a deluded and egotistical presumptive monarch.53 He wrote to Olmedo: Were I less charitable or were you a lesser poet, I might choose to believe that you had intended to use the heroes of our poor comedy in order to make a parody of the Iliad. But no, that I do not believe. You are a poet, and you fully comprehend, as did Bonaparte, that from the heroic to the ridiculous it is but a step.54

His fears were prescient. The same Rocafuerte who subsidized El Repertorio Americano was also a vocal republican who later used Olmedo’s song as model for his parody of military strongman Antonio López de Santa Anna published in the Mexican newspaper El Fénix de la Libertad in 1832.55 Ever the good friend, Bello favourably reviewed Olmedo’s poem in the first number of the El Repertorio Americano, granting it ‘a distinguished place among the Americanist works that we propose to review in this periodical, first for its merits and second for the importance of the subject’.56 In the minds of London’s Spanish American community, literature and liberty were natural helpmates.

Translating the printed Patria Vicente Rocafuerte recruited these same collaborators to join something he called the Society for Spanish Translation, an informal group he affiliated with the British and Foreign Bible Society in order to expand its outreach to Spanish America. In 1812,

28

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

their Spanish- and English-language editions were circulating in Chile, Buenos Aires, Cartagena, Demerara, Suriname and Honduras, often being transported by British naval crews or merchants hoping to make business connections in a potentially lucrative region. In fact, the expansion of the Bible Society’s trade was so rapid and alarming that by 1817, Pope Pius VII issued a bull against their activities, calling them a ‘pestilence’ and a most crafty device ‘by which the very foundations of religion are undermined’.57 In 1820, the only available translation of the New Testament into an American indigenous language was done for the Mohawk and Delaware Indians in the United States by the American Bible Society. In London, Joseph Blanco White invited his Venezuelan friend Andrés Bello to collaborate on a new Spanish translation of Felipe Scío’s version of the Bible, which they published in 1821. It led to a minor religious controversy when conservative constituencies rejected this text because it included neither the Apocrypha nor the deuterocanonical books, elements considered to be canonical because they originated directly with God.58 Yet the work continued, and the ambition grew. In 1826, the Society noted in its Annual Report that it had sponsored an Aymará translation to be done by a native speaker from the region that is today known as Bolivia, journalist Vicente Pazos Kanki.59 He had experience translating religious texts already, having published a Spanish edition of French revolutionary Jacques Godin’s tract on religious toleration and the scourge of priestly celibacy.60 To help with their work, they also commended James Thomson for his donation of five grammars and dictionaries in the indigenous languages of Quechua (Peru), Mapuche (Chile) and Moxó (Mexico) that he had gathered during his travels. Two years later, they added Arawak (Caribbean) and Basque to the list of translations completed or in progress.61 Pazos Kanki’s translation of the Gospel of St. Luke was ready and 1,000 copies were printed in dual-column format in Spanish and Aymará in 1829.62 250 copies of the same Gospel were printed in Nahuatl, the indigenous language of Central Mexico in 1830, where they were quickly put into circulation.63 The Spanish Americans in London engaged in many other translation projects as well, partly in service to their own patriotic projects and partly as a practical way to earn a living. Bolívar’s stirring speech at the Angostura Congress was translated and printed in London to great fanfare in 1819. Colombian José María Vergara extracted and reviewed French jurist Charles Cottú’s work on the English jury system for The Pamphleteer in 1820. Guatemalans interested in attracting archaeological interest in their past published an account of their newly discovered Mayan ruins in English in 1822, the text of which was dedicated to Lord Holland with his permission.64 Disgraced Mexican Emperor Agustín de Iturbide published a justification of his brief rule while resident in London in 1824.65 There were, of course, many more books, articles, tracts, speeches and newspaper items published by London’s Spanish American community than can be described here. If, as one recent scholar observed, ‘writers feared that print capitalism could produce only a print-state’, that was not true of their publishing efforts in the British capital.66 While the wars for independence raged across the hemisphere, Londonbased writers used their time abroad to study their host country and its public culture very carefully. They drew strength from each other and built up a shared vision of

Newsprint Nations: Spanish American Publishing in London, 1808–1827

29

their future together. Truly theirs was a newsprint nation, one that first took shape in the many London-based publishing projects, diffused throughout the Americas and slowly planted itself in the minds of an increasingly literate generation. For them, the education of public opinion was both a method and a goal. Whether it was using print as a way to establish the political legitimacy of the creole’s claim to self-rule, or the creation of a new literary canon to celebrate their victories, or a concerted effort at cross-cultural communication through translations, London’s Spanish American community produced a body of work that had an impact disproportionate to their small number.

Notes 1 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 78. Emphasis in the original. 2 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 47. 3 Ibid., 122. 4 For summaries of the debates and specific national contexts, see Fernando Escalante Gonzalba, Ciudadanos imaginarios (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 1992); and the collection of articles in Beyond Imagined Communities: Reading and Writing the Nation in Nineteenth-Century Latin America, ed. Sara Castro-Klarén and John Charles Chasteen (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Centre Press and Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). 5 Jesús Díaz-Caballero, ‘El incaísmo como primera ficción orientadora el la formación de la nación criolla’, A contracorriente 3, no. 1 (2005): 72. 6 John Itzigsohn and Mattias vom Hau, ‘Unfinished Imagined Communities: States, Social Movements and Nationalism in Latin America’, Theory and Society 35, no. 2 (April 2006): 194. 7 Eric Van Young, ‘A Nationalist Movement without Nationalism: The Limits of Imagined Community in Mexico, 1810–1821’, in New World, First Nations: Native Peoples of Meso-America and the Andes under Colonial Rule, ed. David Cahill and Blanca Tovias (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2006), 221–2. 8 William Burke, South American Independence; or the Emancipation of South America, the Glory and Interest of England (London: J. Ridgway, 1807) and Additional Reasons for Our Immediately Emancipating Spanish America (London: J. Ridgway, 1808). A person using that name engaged in heated debates about religious toleration in the Gazeta de Caracas (1810–12) in Venezuela after Miranda had returned there. 9 Burke, Additional Reasons, 85. 10 Ibid.., 12. 11 The full text of the newspaper is reprinted in Pedro Grases and Caracciolo Parra Pérez (eds.), ‘El Colombiano’ de Francisco de Miranda, y dos documentos americanistas (Caracas: Instituto Nacional de Hipódromos, 1966), 8. 12 Miranda (London, 24 March 1810) quoted in J. L. Salcedo-Bastardo, Crucible of Americanism: Miranda’s London House (Caracas: Cuadernos Lagoven, 1981), 7. 13 Letters dated 27 and 28 March 1810. Archivo General de Simancas, Estado, legajo 8.173. 14 Abascal to the Intendant-Governor of Huancavelica (Lima, 17 January 1811), Indiana University, Lilly Library, Latin American Manuscripts, Peru, box 8.

30

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

15 J. M. Antepara, South American Emancipation. Documents Historical and Explanatory, shewing the designs which have been in progress, and the Exertions made by General Miranda for the South American Emancipation during the last Twenty-Five Years (London: R. Juigné, 1810). The prologue is dated September 1810. 16 Antepara, South American Emancipation, iv. 17 Ibid., 8. 18 Méndez Reyes, ‘La misteriosa estancia de los Fagoaga en Londres’, Relaciones 63/64 (Summer/Autumn 1995): 130; Mario Rodríguez, ‘William Burke’ and Francisco de Miranda: The Word and the Deed in Spanish America’s Emancipation (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 264. 19 Archivo General de las Indias, Santa Fe, legajo 754. 20 The quotation comes from a tract on the colonial agricultural trade by Spanish liberal economist and constitutionalist Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos. Discurso que puede servir de preliminar a las noticias de la última conspiración de Caracas (London: R. Juigné, 1811), title page. 21 Junta Suprema Central Gubernativa del Reyno, acting in the name of Central Ferdinand VII, ‘Real Orden sobre la elección de Diputados del Reyno y Provincias de América para la Junta Central,’ in Discurso que puede servir, 47. 22 A short summary of his life is found in Karen Racine, ‘Anáhuac’s Angry Apostle: Fray Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra (1765–1827)’, in The Human Tradition in Mexico, ed. Jeffrey M. Pilcher (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 2002). 23 Roberto Breña, ‘Pensamiento político e ideología en la emancipación americana. Fray Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra la independencia absoluta de la Nueva España’, in Relatos de nación: La construcción de las identidades nacionales en el mundo hispano, ed. Francisco Colón (Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuet, 2005), 80–1. 24 Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra, Carta de un Americano al Español, sobre su número XIX (London: W. Lewis, 1811) and Segunda carta de un Americano al Español (London: Guillermo Glindon, 1812). Copies at Archivo General de las Indias, Estado 6, Tomo 86 (various) 1 and 3. 25 Martin Murphy, Blanco White, Self-Banished Spaniard (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 80–1; Merle E. Simmons, ‘Una polémica sobre la independencia de hispanoamérica’, Boletín de la Academia Nacional de la Historia 30 (1947): 119. 26 The original was published by William Glindon in 1813. A recent critical edition with several scholarly essays has been made available as Mier, Historia de la revolución de Nueva España, ed. A. Saint-Lu and M-C. Bénassy-Berling (Paris: La Sorbonne, 1990). 27 Tastet to Moreno (Alderman’s Walk, London, 18 July 1812), Argentina, Archivo General de la Nación, Sala X, 1–1–2, f. 134. 28 Lucas Alamán, Semblanzas e ideario (México: Ediciones de la Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 1939), 43. 29 José Guerra, pseud. [Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra], Historia de la revolución de Nueva España, antiguamente Anáhuac … (Londres: Imprenta de Guillermo Glindon, 1813), xiii and the title page. 30 [Manuel Palacio Fajardo], Outline of the Revolution in Spanish America, or an Account of the Origin, Progress and Actual State of the War carried on between Spain and Spanish America, containing the principal facts which have marked the struggle (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown, 1817), v. It was not available in Spanish until 1956, although excerpts appeared in other books and newspapers. 31 José Abel Montil, Manuel Palacio Fajardo (Caracas: Tipografía Garrido, 1956), 79–80. 32 Spanish Embassy in London to Minister of Ultramar (London, 31 October 1817), Archivo General de Simancas, Estado, legajo 8.177.

Newsprint Nations: Spanish American Publishing in London, 1808–1827

31

33 [Palacio Fajardo], Outline of the Revolution in Spanish America, 21. 34 Ibid., 87, 125–6. 35 Rush to President James Monroe (London, 20 May 1818) in United States Library of Congress, Manuscripts Collection, Richard Rush Papers, microfilm 3347. 36 University of Reading, Special Collections, Longman manuscripts, 1393, A3, f. 51. 37 Matthew D. Brown, Adventuring through Spanish Colonies: Simón Bolívar, Foreign Mercenaries and the Birth of New Nations (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2006). 38 See, for example, the giant volumes of correspondence from San Carlos in National Archives of Great Britain, Foreign Office, 72/204A, 72/204B, 72/216 and 72/217 and 72/228 all dated in 1818 and 1819. 39 El Repertorio Americano did, however, include some contributions from members of the liberal Spanish exile like Pablo Mendíbil, Mariano La Gasca and Vicente Salvá. 40 Pedro Grases asserts that the initials P. C. were a pen name used by Manuel Cortes Campomanes, which seems unlikely, and notes that Bello’s student Miguel Luis Amunátegui identified the author as P. Cortés in Tiempo de Bello en Londres (Caracas: Biblioteca Venezolano de Cultura, 1962), 149, 162. María Teresa Berruezo León names Pedro Creutzer in La lucha de Hispanoamérica por su independencia en Londres (Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1989), 379. Oddly, Grases too names Creutzer as Bello’s frequent collaborator in Algunas temas de Bello (Caracas: Monte Ávila, 1978), 99. 41 Agustín Gutiérrez Moreno to Estanislao Vergara y Santamaría (London, 22 September 1822) in Guillermo Guitarte, ‘Juan García del Río y su “Biblioteca Columbiana” ’, Nueva Revista Filológica Hispánica 18, no. 1 (1965–6): 147–8. 42 [Juan García del Río], Prospecto de un periódico intitulada La Biblioteca Americana (London: Bossange, 1823), 1. It carries a date of 16 April 1823 – XIV (meaning year 14 of the revolution). Copy available at the Lilly Library, Indiana University - Bloomington. 43 Guillermo Guitarte, ‘Juan García del Río y su ‘Biblioteca Colombiana (Lima, 1821): Sobre las orígenes de La Biblioteca Americana (1823) y El Repertorio Americano (1826–-27) de Londres’, Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 18, no. 1 (1965–6): 95–8. 44 La Biblioteca Americana was printed in London jointly by G. Marchant, Bossange & Co., and J. W. Richardson. 45 See, for example, García del Río and Bello to Irisarri (London, April 1823) in Guillermo Feliú Cruz, ed. ‘Bello, Irisarri y Egaña en Londres,’ in Andrés Bello y la redacción de los documentos oficiales, administrativos, internacionales y lejislativos de Chile (Caracas: Biblioteca de Los Tribunales del Distrito Federal, 1957), 44–5. 46 See the excellent study in Eugenia Roldán-Vera, The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 47 Andrés Bello, ‘Alocución a la Poesía’, La Biblioteca Americana, no. 1 (1823): 3–16. Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Literary Currents of Hispanic America (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), 99. 48 Antonio Cussen, Bello and Bolívar: Poetry and Politics in the Spanish American Revolutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 141. 49 El Repertorio Americano, no. 1, October 1826, 7–18. 50 Juan Guillermo Gómez García, ‘Marginalia. The Literary Independence of Spanish America,’ Ideas y valores 144 (December 2010): 16. 51 José Joaquín de Olmedo, La Victoria de Junín. Canto a Bolívar (London: R. Ackermann, and Imprenta Española de M. Calero, 1826). 52 Augusto Tamayo Vargas, ‘Olmedo y su “Canto a la Victoria de Junín” ’, in La literatura hispanoamericana del siglo XIX, ed. Renato Rosaldo and Robert Anderson (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1974), 20–2.

32

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

53 Inke Gunia and Klaus Meyer-Minneman, ‘José Joaquín de Olmedo, La Victoria de Junín Canto a Bolívar (1825): Legitimación política y legitimidad poética’, in La literatura en la formación de los estados hispano-americanos, 1800–1860, ed. Dieter Janik (Frankfurt: Iberoamericana Vervuet, 1998), 224–6. 54 Bolívar to Olmedo (Cuzco, 27 June 1825) in ed. Vicente Lecuna, Selected Writings of Bolívar. Vol II (New York: The Colonial Press, 1951), 509–10. 55 Jorge Salvador Lara, ‘Bolívar y Rocafuerte: unitarismo y federalismo’, in Problemas del estado y de la nación en Hispanoamérica, ed. Inge Buisson (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 1984), 461. 56 ‘Noticia de La Victoria de Junín,’ El Repertorio Americano, no. 1, October 1826, 54. 57 The Complete Pocketbook for 1818, 9. The Bull was dated 29 June 1817. This yearly calendar and day planner can be seen at West Yorkshire Archive Service (Leeds), George Canning Papers, bundle 132. 58 Washington J. Padilla, ‘La actividad de las sociedades bíblicas en Ecuador durante el primer liberalismo’, in Protestantes, liberales y francmasones, ed. Jean-Pierre Bastian (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1990), 111. Pope Leon XII banned this vulgar edition in the Bull Ubi Primum (5 May 1824). 59 British and Foreign Bible Society Annual Report no. 22 (1826), xviii. 60 Jacques Gaudin [Vicente Pazos Kanki, translator], Inconvenientes del celibato eclesiástico (London: 1817). 61 British and Foreign Bible Society Annual Report no. 24 (1828), 180. At that point, there were translations available in and astonishing 143 global languages. 62 British and Foreign Bible Society Annual Report, no. 25 (1829), c. 63 El Evangelio de S. Lucas del latin al mexicano ó mejor Náhuatl (London: British and Foreign Bible Society/Bagster, 1833). Copy found in BFBS Archives, Mss 376. Lucas Alamán to Cabildo de esta Santa Yglesia Metropolitana (Mexico City, 11 September1830), Archivo General de la Nación, México, Bienes Nacionales, Vol. 406, exp. 72. 64 Antonio del Río and Pablo Félix Cabrera, Description of the Ruins of an Ancient City Discovered Near Palenque in the Kingdom of Guatemala in Spanish America (London’ H. Berthoud, 1822). 65 Agustín de Iturbide, A Statement of Some of the Principal Events in the Public Life of A. de Iturbide, written by himself (London: J. Murray, 1824). 66 Kit Nicholls, ‘ “All Abbotsford to an acre of Poyais”: Highlandry and the Revolutionary Atlantic’, European Romantic Review 26, no. 2 (2011): 729.

2

Cultural Identity and Political Dissidence: The Periodicals of the Spanish Liberal Exile in London (1810–41) Daniel Muñoz Sempere

Writing in 1878, Antonio Alcalá Galiano reflected in his memoirs upon the novelty of the word emigrado in Spanish at the time when, half a century before, it was used to account for his own political emigration in London. The term, Galiano wrote, in spite of denoting a reality that had existed throughout history, was incorporated into Spanish only after the mass displacements caused by the advent of revolutionary times, in particular by refugees from the French Revolution.1 One of the main consequences of the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian Peninsula and the rise of Liberalism as a revolutionary force was the displacement of political refugees across Europe and the Atlantic, a dispersion that facilitated the exchange of ideas and transatlantic agents crucial in the development of emancipatory movements across Europe and America. The dismantling of the ancient regime of absolute monarchy in Spain after 1808 heralded a new Liberal age in Spanish politics which coincided with the decadence of the Spanish and Portuguese empires and the independence of Latin America, a series of processes which were closely interlinked and which transformed societies in both shores of the Iberian Atlantic. London was by no means the only destination of exiles fleeing the Absolutist restorations of 1814 and 1823: out of the 20,000 or so refugees leaving Spanish shores in the latter, longer emigration of 1823, it is estimated that around a thousand families settled in London.2 France had been the primary choice, and many of those who had sought refuge in London moved there after the July Revolution in 1830, but the British exile was one that, as we will see, left behind a wealth of testimonies in the form of books, pamphlets and periodicals at a time when both nations were negotiating the intricacies of political reform in the post-Napoleonic world. The aim of this chapter is to provide an overview of the foreign political press published by the Spanish exiled community in London during the Liberal emigration, as well as to consider the new ideological divisions born in the context of the emigration. We will consider the main authors and titles as well as the circumstances in which they published, with emphasis on the political contents and, more generally,

34

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

on the way in which they intervened from a distance in the political commotions of the Iberian Peninsula. The reasons for this mass exile take us back to the crisis of the Bourbon monarchy under Carlos IV (1788–1808). The public prestige of the monarchy had been eroded due to a series of economic and military crises, such as the War of the Pyrenees against revolutionary France and the loss of the island of Hispaniola or the defeat of Trafalgar in 1805. This loss of prestige by the monarchs led to a growing sense of hope being focused on the person of the young prince Ferdinand, who was seen by many as an illustrious alternative to his father. Ferdinand, as expected, would regenerate the monarchy and put an end to the ills of the country. These hopes were partially fulfilled when, in 1808, Godoy decided to retreat from Madrid along with the Royal Family to flee from the advance of the French armies. The French had been allowed military access through the country with the pretext of invading Portugal but were, in fact, part of Napoleon’s plan to occupy Spain. The people of Madrid, however, rose in arms against the French army, thus starting the War of Independence against the Napoleonic invasion. The pivotal moment of 1808 was subjected to several interpretations by its contemporaries, from those who accepted the legitimacy of the new Bonaparte dynasty, to those who resisted it and conceived the war against the French as a sacred crusade for the restoration of the altar and the throne, the two main signs of identity for traditionalist Spaniards. The political ascendancy of the Spanish émigrés that arrived in London in 1814 and 1823 lay, however, in the group of patriots who, while waging war against Napoleon, began a process of constitutional reform that had tremendous consequences for Spanish political history. For those who began calling themselves liberales, national emancipation in both Spain and America needed to have deeper political implications beyond the immediate need to expel Napoleon from Spain: the people needed a constitution that would restore traditional Castilian liberties and ward off against the double dangers of foreign occupation and the corruption of power that had led to absolutist despotism. The Junta that had been organizing the resistance against Napoleon during the first years of the war was succeeded by an assembly or Cortes that met in the haven of Cádiz and, in 1812, ratified a political constitution that became known as the Cádiz Constitution. This text established a moderate constitutional government which acknowledged the role of the king while proclaiming national sovereignty and granting a series of universal rights for Spaniards of both hemispheres, inspired by an idealized model of the traditional system of limited monarchy and representative courts that existed in Medieval Castile before the advent of the Hapsburgs in the sixteenth century, but also by the recent revolutionary movements in France and America. As John Fisher has recently put it, the final document was influenced by Enlightenment principles, concepts stemming from the American and French Revolutions relating to the restriction of aristocratic and clerical privileges, and traditional features of Spanish law.3 The Constitution had an uneven implantation in Spain and the Americas. Although its original inspiration laid in late-eighteenth-century reformist thought, the Constitution and the debates leading up to it had the effect of creating a new space for political debate where concepts such as national sovereignty could be discussed and

Cultural Identity and Political Dissidence

35

some long-needed reforms could be enacted, such as the 1811 decree of freedom of the press or the abolition of the Inquisition in 1813. When Napoleon was defeated in 1814, however, the Constitution of Cádiz was seen by the returning king as an attack on his royal privilege. Rather than accepting to become a constitutional king (as the Liberals had hoped), he led a purge against them and restored absolutism, ordering that the decrees of the Cortes be abolished and the text itself erased from memory. After six years of absolutist rule, a period when many Liberals were incarcerated or forced to emigrate, the 1812 Constitution was restored thanks to the revolution led by Rafael de Riego, a young officer who gained the support of the expeditionary army waiting to be sent off to suppress the American independence movements in 1820. During the revolutionary period known as the Trienio Liberal (1820–3), the king was made to accept the Constitution and Spain became an international hub for revolutionary politics. After three years, Ferdinand gathered the support of the European Absolutist powers and a French force invaded Spain and restored Absolutism. The Liberals, once again, faced persecution, prison and exile until the death of the king in 1833, which facilitated a transition towards a constitutional monarchy. Despite its brief period of implementation, the 1812 Constitution had an immense repercussion throughout the political history of the nineteenth century: it was seen by further generations of Liberals – in Spain and Portugal, but also in many of the new American republics, Southern Europe and as far as India – as the model of a charter that articulated the collective will of the nation into a series of inalienable universal rights.4 The rise of Hispanic Liberalism, its doctrines and political practices, was therefore inevitably rooted in the debates surrounding the 1812 text and the many influential ideologies and backgrounds that converged at Cadiz: from monarchical Bourbon reformism to revolutionary ideas and the recovery of medieval constitutional thought, not to mention the large percentage of the population supportive of absolutism who saw all attempts at political reform with suspicion. Recent scholarship has emphasized the importance of Cadiz in the peculiar configuration of Hispanic Liberalism, a revolutionary movement whose features were broadly Catholic and monarchical. The origins of the 1808 uprising did not lay in a situation of social unrest nor in the contagion of French revolutionary ideas, but rather in the fight for an absent king, centred around a parliament who represented both the metropolis and its colonies, and whose main aim was the instauration of a moderate constitutional monarchy. As Roberto Breña has shown, the consideration of Cadiz as the point of origin of political Liberalism in the Hispanic world (and that of its debates as the main source of Hispanic Liberal political thought) should make us suspicious of sweeping claims of cause and effect or contagion among the Atlantic revolutions.5 After 1814, however, the fate of Liberalism became increasingly linked to the political emigrations in and out of Spain. As we will see, the periodicals written by the London exiles were in many cases still embedded in the struggles for political reform and emancipation that had been raging since 1808, but they were also shaped to some extent by the experience of displacement among European and American metropolitan centres. The experience of this exile was, rather than a pause in their political activities, a crucial moment in the development of the Liberal revolution.

36

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Javier Fernández Sebastián has recently pointed out that the political upheaval triggered by the 1808 invasion took place in a global stage, and that early Iberian Liberal ideology was cosmopolitan, and articulated by agents who acted across both sides of the Atlantic. In spite of the nationalist element present in the 1808 uprising, the first Spanish Liberals still thought of themselves in enlightened, cosmopolitan terms; a conception of a global struggle against tyranny that was in no contradiction with the medievalism that infused their constitutionalist ideology.6

Politics from a distance: El Español The mass emigration of 1823 to London sheltered a group that included among its numbers a considerable proportion of writers, politicians and other men of letters who had been leading actors in the two constitutional periods, now forced into an emigration to a metropolis of such strategic significance as London. The social composition of the émigrés was diverse, with a preponderance of professionals and middle classes. According to Llorens, military officers made up the largest group among the exiles, followed by lawyers, priests, merchants, writers, doctors as well as revolutionaries from lower social strata, including at least a shoemaker and a bullfighter.7 The émigrés were concentrated demographically around Somers Town in north London, and many restarted their literary and political activities after their arrival, opening Spanishlanguage prints and bookshops and embarking upon new literary endeavours. How can we characterize the propagandistic thrust of an emigration committed to the continuation of the struggles of 1814 and 1823, while being shaped by the experience of the emigration itself as well as by an increasingly international readership? In other words, did these periodical writers look back in time and space towards the land they were expelled from, or did the experience of exile compel them to find new readerships and explore new ideological horizons? Were they simply part of a strategy to circumnavigate the strict censorship imposed in Peninsular Spain after the absolutist restorations, or can we explain their conception and diffusion in more internationalist terms, as a product of the experience of exile itself? The strategic position of London helped to strengthen some of the pre-existing global connections of the first revolutionary decade. At the same time, the influence of English constitutional thought – already an important element during the deliberations that led to the Cortes – became even more influential during the 1820s and operated in Liberals such as Blanco White or Alcalá Galiano as a crucial force in their turn towards a more moderate form of Liberalism.8 But the Liberal exile has also been characterized as a movement of resistance, one that tried to counter the temporal and spatial discontinuity of exile with a sustained campaign of propaganda aimed primarily at the Peninsula.9 An early precedent to the Spanish periodicals published by the political refugees of 1814 and 1823 was El Español (1810–14), the first and perhaps more important Spanish political periodical published in London at the time. El Español was the brainchild of José Blanco White, a famous émigré who had settled in London before the arrival of the two waves of Spanish exiles in 1814 and 1823. His emigration predated the arrival of the Liberal refugees. The reasons for his self-imposed exile were of a personal nature:

Cultural Identity and Political Dissidence

37

a crisis of religious conscience that led him to convert to Anglicanism first and, later in his life, to Unitarianism.10 Blanco had been, before his exile, the editor responsible for the political contents of the Semanario Patriótico (1808–12) when, in 1809, it was relocated to Seville from Madrid once the capital had fallen to the Napoleonic army. The Semanario was one of the most important periodicals to emerge from the 1808 crisis. It was an early popularizer of ideas of national sovereignty and constitutionalism and counted among its writers with some of the most prominent Spanish liberales. The Semanario provided Blanco with a privileged platform from which to intervene in the discussions leading to the summoning of the Cortes in 1810 and the drafting of the 1812 Constitution, although his interventions were not always welcomed by the National Assembly gathered at Cadiz. The project of writing a Spanish-language political periodical was apparently floated shortly after his arrival in London, and was prompted or encouraged by Lord and Lady Holland, who had been following the affairs of Spain since earlier in the century. Lord Holland saw in the Spanish crisis the opportunity to break with Bourbon absolutism and adopt an unwritten constitution along British lines, balancing the interest of the Monarch, Lords and Commons. Lord Holland’s views were shared by some prominent reformers such as Melchor

Figure 2.1  First page of the prospectus of Josep Blanco’s El Español, 30 April 1810. © The British Library Board.

38

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Gaspar de Jovellanos, who advocated – as he did – a political system grounded in historical precedent.11 Lord Holland and the doctor and historian John Allen – who accompanied him on his trips to Spain – were to have a continuous influence on El Español, and Blanco would seek their opinion in order to form his own views of how should the Cortes constitute themselves in the absence of the king.12 When Blanco started publishing El Español in London the ‘Spanish theme’ was already in vogue. The image of Iberia as a land of mythical resistance against Napoleon converged with the interest in its constitutional experiments by Lord Holland, Jeremy Bentham and others to create a surge of interest in Spain and the Americas. The English press followed with interest the deliberations that led to the proclamation of the Constitution, and the text itself was translated and reproduced in several periodicals including the one directed by the prominent radical William Cobbett.13 The war itself provided the subject for poetic compositions inspired by the brave defence of the Spaniards against Napoleon, a genre that also permeated the periodicals of the time.14 Blanco would have a long career in Britain as a writer, literary critic and theologian, and embarked in further journalistic enterprises with periodicals such as the London Review (1829) or Variedades (1823–5). It is precisely his relative position as a canonical writer and well-connected figure in both Spain and Britain that makes El Español an exceptionally well-known periodical and one through which we can gain a privileged insight into questions of production and circulation. Published monthly (with the exception of the issues between January and June 1811, of bimonthly publication), it was jointly owned between Blanco White and the printer René Juigné until 1812, when Blanco became the sole proprietor. Blanco wrote El Español single-handedly, in an office in Duke Street (close to the Foreign Office) shared with Jean-Gabriel Peltier, editor of L’Ambigu (1802–18), a French-language periodical opposed to Napoleon. The printer was also shared with other periodicals of the London emigration: it was initially printed by Juigné at 17 Cavendish Square, where Francisco de Miranda’s El Colombiano (1810) was also being produced. In 1825 it started being printed by C. Wood at Poppins Court, Fleet Street. El Español was priced in London at 2 shelling and 6 pence during its monthly run, and later, when it became a bimonthly review, at 3 shelling and 6 pence. André Pons estimates that the average run was about 1500 issues, and brings forward testimonies of its popularity in London, Cádiz and the Americas (including the Spanish and English-speaking Caribbean). As many as 11,000 issues were reprinted for the Spanish American market in 1810, and in 1825 it was still being read in American capitals. As in the case of later foreign political press, its circulation was stalled by censorship, particularly in Peninsular Spain; less so in South America, where it circulated even in Peru, which at the time was still a bastion of Absolutism. Its circulation was aided by trade depots in places such as Coruña or Caracas, sometimes transported by the merchant navy and even the Foreign Office, who sent around 100 issues to Cadiz via diplomatic bag. Distribution also took place via trading houses such as the multinational Gordon and Murphy.15 In the first issue, published on 30 April 1810, the editor presented himself as a middleman between Spain and Britain. Blanco could also vindicate his role in the revolutionary events in the Peninsula invoking his credentials as one of the former

Cultural Identity and Political Dissidence

39

editors of the Semanario Patriótico. In this same text, Blanco already appeals to the American readers (those who inhabit the free Spain, relatively but not entirely safe from Bonapartist ambition) and portrays his task as that of providing a warning as well as an illustration of the perils at hand in the revolution against Bonaparte.16 From 1813 onwards El Español started appearing on a bimonthly basis, and it deviated its attention somewhat from the matters of the Spanish uprising against Napoleon in parallel with Blanco’s dissatisfaction with the 1812 Constitution and how it safeguarded Catholicism as the only permissible religion of the Estate. El Español has also attracted considerable critical attention due to its influential role in the early debates about the independence of America. Although Blanco did not use his review to advocate for the full independence of the Latin American viceroyalties of the Spanish monarchy, he provided one of the earliest accounts of the Venezuelan revolution of 1810. Later he presented it as the result of valid grievances that could be solved by endowing the American subjects with a fuller set of rights – including full representation in the newly inaugurated national assembly at Cádiz – rather than by the use of force.17 This position created a number of enemies for Blanco on both sides of the debate since, in spite of his initial sympathy towards independence, he later showed his disappointment towards the unilateral declaration of independence issued by the Venezuelan congress in 1811. Blanco argued that the universal principles of popular sovereignty could not be applied in practice due to the historical circumstances of the American creoles, a position that took him on a collision course with voices more supportive of political independence in the modern sense, such as that of Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra. The latter took issue with Blanco’s appraisal of the Venezuelan declaration of independence, and portrayed this event as a first manifestation of a rightful desire for emancipation shared across all of Spanish America.18 Ultimately, as Roberto Breña points out, Blanco’s early sympathetic appreciations of the Venezuelan uprising had the effect of providing moral justification for the emancipatory process. Not unlike Bolívar, Blanco also saw the revolution as a historically premature gesture where the creole elites failed in their mission; a historical failure in what could have been resolved by a negotiated process of reform, and one in which part of the responsibility laid in the moral dissipation of the same elites.19 El Español published documents of capital importance for the study of the way in which the independence of the American republics was unfolding. Similarly, the compilation of recent historical documents served as an early repository of news and original texts in relation to the Spanish revolution. As well as original contents in the form of essays on matters such as the process of independence, the abolition of slavery, freedom of the press, the Inquisition, constitutional matters, etc., El Español included a wealth of original documents for the history of the Cortes, the Napoleonic invasion and the American emancipation, such as Jovellanos’ address to the Junta Central, John Allen’s review of Humboldt’s influential Essai politique sur le Royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne, or Bolívar report on the revolt of Caracas in April 1810. El Español was the product of a personal project facilitated by an individual emigration prior to the arrival of the refugees of 1814 and 1823. Its last issue coincided with the fall of the constitutional government inaugurated by the Cadiz assembly, a demise which in turn forced a first generation of Spanish Liberals to flee from the

40

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

absolutist persecution. The reception of El Español in Cádiz was mixed, and Blanco’s criticism of the Cortes was not always welcomed. It did, however, pave the way for future Spanish-language periodicals to be published in London after the emigration.

Liberal resistance and the first constitutional exile: El Español Constitucional With the mass exile of 1814, London saw the birth of new Spanish-language journalistic projects. El Español Constitucional was a monthly review that started its life in 1818, and was published during two separate periods: 1818–20 and, after the brief restoration of constitutional government in Spain known as the Liberal Triennium, in 1824–5. The first four volumes were published by Henry Bryer, a printer based in Blackfriars with experience in publishing books in Spanish and Portuguese.20 As with other exile periodicals, the first numbers appeared clustered around the same publishers – perhaps those who could accommodate foreign typesetting – before finding other suitable ones. The first issue appeared in September 1818. A bilingual Prospectus presented it as a monthly review divided in three sections: Politics, Arts and Sciences and a miscellaneous section focused on Spanish literature and bibliography. The first section is the one whose contents are subject to a lengthier explanation: The Intelligence of all the principal events occurring in Europe, accompanied with appropriate reflections. 2nd. The most interesting documents of the Spanish Revolution, from the period of the publication of the Manifesto of Charles IV in consequence of the Arrest of the Prince of Asturias up to the present time; with the repeated efforts of the Spanish People for the recovery of their Liberty, after the return of the King, Ferdinand VII. 3rd. The origin and progress of the American Revolution, to shake off the Inquisitorial Despotism by which the Mother Country is oppressed. 4th. An impartial judgment on the Political Conduct of the different Patriotic Governments of Spain.21

The Introduction to the first issue (I, September 1818, pp. 1–15) explains the rationale of the publication in terms comparable to those of Blanco’s El Español: to write a history of the Spanish revolution which would give an account of the sacrifices and struggles that the fight for liberty entailed, but also one that would act as an indictment on the restoration of despotism embodied by Ferdinand VII. The remaining contents (arts, sciences) came under the epigraph ‘Variedades’. According to the editor, the seed of science could only give fruits where it grew under the warmth of liberty, and the revival of tyranny in Spain had not only stifled political freedoms but also scientific and artistic geniality. El Español Constitucional was therefore, and unlike the periodicals by Blanco White or the more ambitious titles that came about from the collaboration between Jose Joaquín de Mora and Rudolf Ackermann, an extension of the political activities of the emigrados still focused on the land of departure, an exiled voice that kept on fighting the same battles as in 1812 or 1820, and one that, according to inquisitorial reports, had a certain circulation in Spain.22

Cultural Identity and Political Dissidence

41

The publishers were Pascasio Fernandez Sardino, Manuel Acevedo and the economist and historian Alvaro Florez Estrada, the latter being pointed out, alongside the Duke of Toreno, as one of the sponsors of the enterprise.23 The orientation of the review veered towards the more radical or exaltado wing of Spanish Liberalism. In its appraisal of the events of 1820–3, the editors of El Español Constitucional felt that the moderados were to blame for the fall of the Constitutional Government. Fernández Sardino had previous journalistic experience with El Robespierre Español, Amigo de las Leyes (1811–82), which he redacted during the Cortes de Cádiz, and which led him to be arrested due to the radical and sometimes injurious tone of the newspaper. As pointed out by Llorens, many of the émigrés who collaborated in the Español Constitucional did so using pseudonyms (such as Acevedo, who published his articles under the pen name El Momo) or initials (such as Alvaro Florez Estrada himself). Llorens also highlights the notoriety reached by some articles from El Español Constitucional, such as Acevedo’s call for a democratic revolution and the extermination of the Spanish royal family and the clergy.24 What transpires in these pages in one of the earliest salvos in the schism that was taking place within Spanish Liberalism: the Constitutionalism defended by the rival Ocios de Españoles Emigrados (1824–7) was the ideology whose ultimate expression had been the 1812 Constitution and the Teoria de las Cortes, by Martinez Marina, based on a restoration of traditional Castilian liberties in the face of Bonapartist tyranny, and one that should count with the support of the King. The Español Constitucional defended the exaltado position that would become more prominent after the 1820 uprising: in the face of the Royals’ lack of willingness, the revolution should count with the popular element and perform a radical break with the Altar and the Throne. The promised political contents, although not the exclusive remit of the publication, appear as the main raison d’être of the magazine. In a similar vein to Blanco’s El Español, its declared intention was to provide an impartial account of the revolutionary process unfolding on both shores of the Atlantic, including original documents, although it also contains sections on matters which are more diverse if still relevant to Liberal ideology, such as papal history, the relation between civil freedoms and public mores or religious tolerance (numbers IX and X). Its first issue included one of the most important political texts from the first Liberal emigration: Florez Estrada’s Representación a Fernando VII, which was presented both as a vindictive account of the revolution and as an inspiring example for other European nations. This text was also published as a separate pamphlet both in Spanish and in English, and it is one of the most important documents for the study of early Spanish Liberalism.25 The Representación was a direct indictment on the behaviour of the king during the crisis unleashed in 1808 with the Napoleonic invasion, as well as a programme for political reform along the bases of exalted Liberalism. Flores portrays Fernando as a flawed monarch who surrounded himself with poor advisors and abandoned the nation when it needed him most. The focus on the king and his loss of authority is carried on after Flores’ representation ends: in the subsequent issue (III, November 1818) the first article is a political examination of the rights of Fernando to the throne of Spain. This campaign against the figure of the monarch, although often indirect and wary of attacks on the person of the king (often the targets are his circle of advisers or the legal basis for his restoration as an absolute

42

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

King), was relatively novel in an early Spanish Liberalism that was, in general, rather cautious in its attitude towards the king. The much-debated question of the composition of the parliament in one or two chambers, a central point of contention in early Liberal debates, was addressed in issue III, and framed as a question opened to the sages of Spain and Europe. Although Sardino offered a prize (a gold medal of the goddess Diana) to the writer who could provide the most eloquent answer to this question, his call might have not been entirely successful (or perhaps he did not receive the answers that he sought) and Sardino himself answered the question in a lengthy article in issue VI (410–16), where he argued in favour of a single chamber of representatives. This deviation from the historical Liberalism supported by Jovellanos and Lord Holland became more explicit in the second period of publication of El Español Constitucional, from November 1824 to June 1825. After the second Liberal emigration, the magazine had become more involved in the radical exaltado Liberalism in vogue during parts of the 1820–3 Revolutionary period. The divisions among the Liberals were more accentuated than before, and in the post-1824 Español Constitucional there is less space for abstract political theory and more for personal attacks and criticism of political adversaries, such as the polemics between Álvaro Flórez Estrada and José María Calatrava. Both Flórez and Calatrava had been prime ministers during the last months of the Liberal Triennium, when the French troops of the Duke of Angouleme had invaded the kingdom in order to restore Fernando as absolute king. Flórez was in charge for little more than a month, and his place was taken by Calatrava during the flight of the government from Madrid to Seville. As Llorens has observed, these polemics went beyond the personal animosity between Calatrava and Flórez: Flórez represented the opinion that the fall of the 1820–3 Constitutional regime could have been averted had the Liberals tried to negotiate with Angouleme and reform the Constitution, whereas Calatrava defended a position of intransigence and the continuation of the war against the Holy Alliance. As the prominent exile Alcalá Galiano observed from the pages of The Times, it was naïve to assume that the Constitution could survive the pressures of Restoration France and the absolutist tendencies of Fernando, who had never shown any real dispositions to renounce his absolute prerogative in order to become a Constitutional king.26 During 1819 and 1820, the political articles became shorter and more fragmentary, with more copies of documents, letters and speeches, as well as more translations of English works, for example, Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. Issue XVIII (February 1820) includes a ‘Proclama a la Invicta nación española’ where the uprising of the expeditionary army at Las Cabezas de San Juan is praised both as the beginning of a new period of freedom and as the end of the wars against the American republics (155). The attitude of the Español Constitucional towards the Independence of America was one that intertwined a certain sympathy towards the struggle for emancipation with an attempt to defend the reputation of Spain as an Imperial nation, often comparing favourably the treatment of indigenous Americans with the natives of regions occupied by the British Empire (Llorens, 295). The scientific contents were recurrent, and the exposition and divulgation of medical advances is often intersected with personal observations by Sardino himself. From the

Cultural Identity and Political Dissidence

43

first issue onwards there were short contributions on sciences as disparate as anatomy, obstetrics, physiology, chemistry, etc. New scientific and technological advances (the extraction of gas for lighting, a new surgical procedure, etc.) were the core of this section, which was quite alert to recent developments, in particular those taking place in London. Such were the articles sent in by the surgeon Tomás López, describing new surgical procedures either from direct observation or from the translation of the works of British doctors such as Sir Astley Cooper. The literature section contains works by poets such as Bartolome Gallardo, Sanchez Barbero or Angel Saavedra, future Duque de Rivas, as well as many anonymous compositions. These are often patriotic poems praising the revolution and the antiNapoleonic struggle as well as condemning the Inquisition, such as the ‘Himno Patriótico’ in issue VII, where the words Inquisición and Constitución are contraposed in a not very subtle rhyme.

The post-1823 émigrés and the Spanish press in London The counterpoint to the political radicalism of El Español Constitucional was Ocios de Españoles Emigrados, published monthly between April 1824 and October 1826, and tri-monthly from January to October 1827. Until December 1825, it was being printed by A. Macintosh and later by Marcelino Calero, an important name in the printing and selling of Spanish books in London. If the later move towards Calero was probably due to the way in which Spanish printing and bookselling in London thrived during the late 1820s, the initial collaboration with Macintosh could have been motivated by the interests in church history of its main editors, the brothers Villanueva: Macintosh was close to the London Jews Society – a missionary congregation whose aim was to preach the gospel among Jews – and much of his production was of a scriptural nature, including works requiring foreign typesets such as classical Hebrew, Yiddish or Portuguese.27 The title carried within itself a form of justification for the review, which was explained at length in the foreword to the first volume: to occupy the imagination and the energies amid the forced state of idleness brought upon the exiled Spaniards. The miscellaneous review format was, according to the editors, testament to the popularity of the press, a genre with credentials of modernity whose popularity made it a key tool for public instruction.28 From an ideological point of view, Ocios was the publication that more consistently encapsulated the doceañista form of historical Liberalism, inspired by the resurrection of traditional Castilian liberties against absolutist tyranny. Opposed to the radicalism of El Español Constitucional, the Ocios emphasized the medieval sources of current political thought, and offered a rather more conciliatory view of recent events. The brothers Jaime and Lorenzo Villanueva were in charge of the literary section (including History, Economics, Literature, etc.). Canga Argüelles, who had been minister of finance during part of the 1820–3 Liberal regime, had responsibility for the political sections. As Llorens observed, the section devoted to recent political history was supported by a wealth of documents, which included transcriptions of the diplomatic exchanges leading to the French-aided restoration of Ferdinand VII,

44

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

public speeches and parliamentary debates and interventions. Llorens also singles out the letters published by, supposedly, a Spanish Liberal living in the Peninsula as a remarkable image of the current situation under the Fernandine restoration, including the persecution to which the Liberals were subjected as well as the class element in the social strife (the confrontation between the middle and wealthy classes and the poor and the church, who were predominantly supportive of Absolutism).29 According to Ignacio Fernández Sarasola, the historicism of Ocios led it to advocate an anglophile political system purged of the radical tendencies found in the original thrust of the Cádiz Constitution, including a revision of the founding concept of national sovereignty wherein a more conciliatory constitutional charter could be written by the king itself, and enacted in the context of a bicameral system.30 The series of letters published between July and September 1826 by Canga Argüelles entitled ‘Desengaños políticos’ are often quoted as the best example of the ideological line followed by the Ocios. These ‘political disillusionments’ amount to a serialized post-mortem examination of the 1812 Constitution and the current reasons for its inapplicability, such as its brief implantation during the first Constitutional period or the hostile environment fostered by all the major European powers against revolutionary experiments.31 If Argüelles was the main author of the political contents, the Villanueva brothers were in charge of the more erudite articles such as archaeology, bibliography, Bible

Figure 2.2 First issue of Ocios de Españoles Emigrados, April 1824. © The British Library Board.

Cultural Identity and Political Dissidence

45

studies and, particularly in the case of Joaquin Lorenzo, etymology and grammar. From December 1824, Pablo Mendibil oversaw the literary section, with a series of literary reviews and survey articles on Spanish Literature. Mendibil was the first professor of Spanish at King’s College in London, and his interest in Spanish literature arose partly from his engagement with the teaching of the discipline to what he called the ‘estudiosa juventud’. In his ‘Rasgo apologético sobre nuestra literatura Española’ (III, 1825, 146–52) Mendíbil drew a panoramic picture of the literature of Spain as an essential emanation from its people and its soil. Mendíbil adopted an apologetic tone while developing some of the better-known Romantic topics about the Spanish character and its literary expression (knightly spirit, the influence of the climate, the mixed cultural heritage, etc.). This, however, has the effect of making the Spanish character more susceptible than others to political commotions.32 The Ocios also included several poems and literary prose by Spanish and American authors (including the ‘El desterrado’, by Angel Saavedra, which became a popular poem during the migration) as well as translations of poets such as Coleridge. In general terms, the contents were, in the words of Llorens, halfway between the trimonthly critical review and the weekly journal of miscellaneous contents, including scientific articles, news and literature. The Ecuadorian diplomat Vicente Rocafuerte had a significant influence upon the way in which the Ocios started to shift their attention towards the Americas around 1824. Vicente Rocafuerte was one of those global Iberian figures whose life illustrates the transatlantic character of early Spanish Liberalism: born in Guayaquil, he travelled extensively across Europe and lived in several places across the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas, as well as in London. A deputy during the Cortes de Cádiz and, later, president of Ecuador, Rocafuerte translated Thomas Paine and the American Constitution and was committed to the cause of republicanism and the independence of America. The early issues of the Ocios had sought its readership among the émigrés themselves as well as among a sizeable number of English readers with an interest in Spanish history and literature. From 1824 onwards, however, the influence of Rocafuerte upon Canga Argüelles, as well as the subscription of 200 issues ordered by the Mexican diplomatic mission in London, increased the reach of the Ocios in the Americas, as well as the attention that the periodical itself diverted towards the independence process. The end of Rocafuerte’s sponsorship of the periodical signalled the decadence of the Ocios, which began to be published every three months and written almost exclusively by Canga Argüelles and Pablo Mendibil once a new Mexican envoy cancelled the subscription at the end of 1826.33 The Ocios was the medium for the most aristocratic faction of the Liberal exile, one that was opposed to revolutionary upheaval and whose activities in exile were somewhat removed from the conspiratorial enterprises of other émigrés.34 Of a less political character was El Emigrado Observador, a periodical aimed at the exile community which was printed by Marcelino Calero from July 1828 to June 1829 and which, according to its title, counted with the collaboration of exiles based in England and France.35 The ‘Prospecto’ laments the dispersion brought on by the emigration, while defending the benefit for the arts and sciences brought forward by the activities of the émigrés, who managed to make the most of their situation by expanding their

46

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Figure 2.3 First issue of El Emigrado Observador, July 1828. © Biblioteca Nacional de España.

intellectual horizons and those of the country that welcomed them (‘sacando un partido muy recomendable de su desgracia’).36 The interest in highlighting the cultural and scientific production of the exile is evident in the first issue, where, after an article on the treatment received by the Spaniards in Latin America, a review of a 1827 Paris edition of Don Quijote is preceded by a survey of the literary and scientific achievements of émigrés in areas such as poetry, geography, botanic, chemistry, law, etc.37 The format of El Emigrado Observador is comparable to the reviews previously considered: central articles on the American question, the French-aided restoration of Absolutism, religious intolerance and other capital themes of the emigration are complemented by literary reviews, scientific articles and miscellaneous news and historical sections, if perhaps with a stronger emphasis on the emigration itself and the life and activities of the exiles. The achievements of some of the émigrés (doctoral degrees, successful music performances, and so on) are paraded as a vindication of the refugees and their merits, although this section slowly becomes a place for émigrés to offer their services as Spanish teachers, guitar instructors, painters, etc. The positive spin on the character and abilities of the émigrés was, moreover, a way to give support to one of the ideas that became more persistent in the periodical: the harmless nature of the emigrados and their lack of inclination towards upheaval or mutiny. The political evolution of the periodical (from a line similar to the moderados to a full-on defection

Cultural Identity and Political Dissidence

47

to absolutism which materializes in the final number in June 1829) indicates a wider strategy, probably present since the early issues, aimed at ingratiating the editors with Fernandine authorities as a means to pave the way for the defection.38 In the final page of the magazine, Calero announced the end of the publication and promised a continuation in the form of a periodical of a more technical nature: the Semanario de Agricultura y Artes, whose publication began in July 1829 and was continued in Seville in 1832. A separate mention is owed to the two periodicals published by Rudolph Ackermann in collaboration with some of the émigrés. Although the nature of these was less political and their main audience was the Spanish American middle classes, they were to an extent a product of the Spanish exile as well as part of a transatlantic network that ran in several directions.39 Ackermann enlisted Blanco White for the publication of the tri-monthly Variedades (January 1823 to Octber1825). Originally intended as a Hispanic adaptation of his own Repository of Arts (1809–29), Blanco managed to leave a personal imprint in a magazine which was intended as a vehicle for lighter contents such as arts and fashion, but which achieved a certain reputation thanks to a solid literary section and the translations, criticism and original works by Blanco. After working with Blanco, Ackermann collaborated with the émigré José Joaquin de Mora in two magazines: El Museo Universal de Ciencias y Artes and the Correo Político y Literario de Londres. The Museo (July 1824 to October 1826) was primarily a journal of scientific divulgation, together with occasional pieces of short fiction and an illustrated fashion section, as well as philosophical contents. The Correo Político y Literario de Londres ran monthly, with only four issues published between January and October 1826. Aimed primarily at an American readership, it was closer to the ladies’ magazine genre, with a preponderance of illustrations and articles on taste, morals, fashion, etc., but also with a political dimension. Its editor, José Joaquin de Mora, was a Liberal who, however, did not align himself strictly with the radical or moderate lines represented by the Español Constitucional and the Ocios, being more preoccupied with the Americas as a new political arena that represented political freedom and hopes for the future.40 Something else that distinguished Mora among other editors of the emigration was, precisely, his role in the history of journalism in Spain. His Crónica Científica y Literaria (1817–20) had pioneered a new model of magazine with miscellaneous contents that paved the way for the emergence of modern journalism in Spain, as a bridge of sorts between the eighteenth-century conception of the magazine as a collection of literary and scientific essays or moral discourses, the political journalism that emerged in 1808 and the new wave of Romantic magazines such as Andres Borrego’s El Español (1835–7; 1845–8). Ackermann’s legacy of printing Spanish-speaking periodicals was continued by his sons with El Instructor o Repertorio de historia, bellas letras y artes (1834–41), by José María Jiménez de Alcalá, who was chair of Spanish at King’s College London, and La Colmena, (1842–5), a tri-monthly periodical published by Ángel de Villalobos. These were primarily literary periodicals written during less convoluted times and far removed from the propagandistic thrust of El Español Constitucional or Ocios, but whose origins can be traced back to the vogue of Spanish printing in London fostered by the emigration of the 1820s.

48

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London Table 2.1 List of Spanish periodicals published in London (1810–45) Title

Date of Publication

El Español El Español Constitucional Oios de Españoles Emigrados El Emigrado Observador Variedades El Museo Universal de Ciencias y Artes Correo Político y Literario de Londres El Instructor o Repertorio de historia, bellas letras y artes La Colmena

1810–1814 1818–1820, 1824–1825 1824–1827 1828–1829 1824–1825 1824–1826 1826 1834–1841 1842–1845

After the need for a sustained campaign of anti-absolutist propaganda was over, London printers continued to produce Spanish-language periodicals aimed at the Americas and the Iberian Peninsula. It would be a mistake, however, to look at the  origins of British Hispanism as an interest that only started to flourish once the political combat was over: the miscellaneous contents that started to appear in the earlier political periodicals of the emigration were often intersected by the same discourses about freedom and independence that emanated from the political sections. The struggles of the guerrillas, the fate of the exiles and the revolutionary fighting were often considered under the same terms deployed for the appraisal of Castilian medieval ballads. The periodical writing of the Spanish émigrés in London, both as a continuation of the fights unleashed after 1808 and as a learning experience that helped shape Spanish Liberalism itself, was therefore a key element in the configuration of discourses on Modern Spain and its projection on the European stage.

Notes 1 Recuerdos de un anciano (Madrid: Librería de Perlado, Páez & Co., 1913), 454. 2 Unlike in France, where the emigration was distributed among southern cities such as Bordeaux, Perpignan or Marseille as well as Paris, the immense majority of Liberals who embarked to England were concentrated in London. The estimate of families arriving in the city provided by the classic study on the emigration by Vicente Llorens: Liberales y románticos. Una emigración Española en Inglaterra (Mexico: El Colegio de Méjico, 1954),  23. The figure of total émigrés is taken from Henry Kamen, The Disinherited: The Exiles Who Created Spanish Culture (London and New York: Allen Lane, 2007), 189. 3 ‘Absolutism and Liberalism in the Hispanic World, 1808–1814: The Background and significance of the 1812 Constitution of Cadiz’, in 1812 Echoes: The Cádiz Constitution in Hispanic History, Culture and Politics, ed. Stephen Roberts and Adam Sharman (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 27. 4 See Scott Eastman, ‘Introduction: The Sacred Mantle of the Constitution of 1812’, in The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World. The Impact of the Cadiz Constitution of 1812, ed. Scott Eastman and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015), 5.

Cultural Identity and Political Dissidence

49

5 Roberto Breña, ‘Liberalism in the Spanish-American World, 1808–1825’, in State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Republics of the Possible (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 271–81. 6 Javier Fernández Sebastián, ‘Liberales sin fronteras. Cádiz y el primer constitucionalismo hispánico’, in Cadice e oltre: Costituzione, Nazione e Libertà, ed. Fernando García Sanz, Vittorio Scotti Douglas, Romano Ugolini, José Ramón Urquijo Goitia (Roma: Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, 2015), 465–90. 7 Llorens, 23–42. 8 For Galiano’s ideological journey towards moderantismo during his exile see Raquel Sánchez García, ‘El primer exilio de Antonio Alcalá Galiano’, Investigaciones históricas, 19 (1999): 143–57. 9 Irene Castells Oliván, ‘La resistencia liberal contra el absolutismo fernandiano (1814–1833)’, Ayer, no. 41 (2001): 43–62. 10 See Martin Murphy, Blanco White: Self-Banished Spaniard (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989). 11 Martin Murphy, ‘Critics of the 1812 Constitution: Lord Holland and Blanco White’, in 1812 Echoes: The Cádiz Constitution in Hispanic History, Culture and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 20. 12 Murphy, Blanco White, 51; Anton io Garnica, ‘Introducción’, in El Español, números 4, 5 y 6. Obras completas de José Blanco White, vol. III, ed. A. Garnica, L. M. Portillo and J. Vallejo (Granada: Almed, 2009), XVI–XVII. 13 See Catherine Davies, ‘The Contemporary Response of the British Press to the 1812 Constitution’, in 1812 Echoes: The Cádiz Constitution in Hispanic History, Culture and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013), 103–18; Ignacio Fernández Sarasola, ‘La Constitución de Cádiz en Inglaterra’, Historia Constitucional, no. 13 (2012): 1–21. 14 For the importance of Iberia in the English Romantics see the seminal study by Diego Saglia, Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia (Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodolpi, 2000). For a recent survey on the presence of the Peninsular war in the poetry appeared in British periodicals see the bilingual anthology by Agustín Coletes Blanco and Alicia Laspra Rodríguez (eds.), Libertad frente a tiranía. Poesía inglesa de la Guerra de la Independencia (1808–1814) (Madrid: Fundación Dos de Mayo; Espasa, 2013). 15 This part relies heavily on the work by André Pons, who studied the publishing history of El Español in Blanco White y España (Oviedo: Instituto Feijoo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII, 2002), 111–202. 16 El Español I (30/4/1810), 1–27. 17 El Español III (30/7/1810), 323–5. 18 See Karen Racine, ‘Newsprint Nations’, in this volume. 19 Roberto Breña, ‘José María ‘Blanco White y la Independencia de América: ¿Una postura pro-americana?’, Historia Constitucional 3 (2002): 1–17. 20 Ráselas, príncipe de Abisínia: romance traducido del inglés del Doctor Johnson, por el Rev. Felipe Fernández (Londres: Impreso por Henrique Bryer, 1813); Felipe Fernández, A dictionary of the Spanish and English languages (London: H. Bryer, 1817); Vicente Pedro Nolasco Da Cunha, O Incendio de Moskow, ou a Queda de Napoleon: Poema hexametrico (London: H. Bryer, 1813); Bernardo José Abrantes e Castro, Memoria sobre a conducta do Dr. B. J. D’Abrantes e Castro, desde a retirada de sua Alteza Real o Principe Regente nosso Senhor para a America (London: H Bryer, 1810), among others. 21 No. I. of the Constitutional Spaniard, or, Miscellany of Politics, Arts and Sciences, Literature. A Monthly Publication (London: H. Bryer, 1818).

50

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

22 María Rosa Saurín de la Iglesia (ed.), Cancionero liberal contra Fernando VII (Fasano: Schena Editore, 1998), 13. 23 Saurín de la Iglesia, 8. 24 El Español Constitucional IV, August 1825, 5–525. 25 Representation to H.C.M. Ferdinand VII, King of Spain: In Defence of the Cortes (London, 1819). 26 Llorens, 196–8. 27 E. C. Bigmore and C. W. H. Wyman, A Bibliography of Printing, Compiled by… II (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1884), 3. 28 Ocios de Españoles Emigrados (April, 1824), I, 2. 29 Llorens, 304–5. 30 Fernánez Sarasola, ‘La Constitución’, 9. 31 ‘Desengaños politicos: Carta 9’, VI (1826): 125–6. For an examination of the ‘Desengaños politicos’ and more on the ideology of the Ocios see Joaquín Varela Suanzes, ‘El pensamiento constitucional español en el exilio: el abandono del modelo doceañista’, Revista de Estudios Políticos, 88 (abril-junio 1995), 63–90. 32 Llorens, whose study of the Liberal emigration is underscored by an investigation into the origins of Spanish Romanticism, reminds us that the context for Mendibil’s writings about literature is that of the critical articles published in 1824 in London by the emigres Blanco and José Joaquín de Mora, and the wider picture of the emergence of romantic aesthetic thought and literary history and the mixed reactions that it provoked among Spanish neo-classicists (319). See also, E. Allison Peers, ‘The Literary Activities of the Spanish Emigrados in England (1814–1834)’, The Modern Language Review, 19, no. 4 (October 1924): 445–47. 33 The cancellation of this large subscription was framed by a wider context of criticisms towards the Ocios de to the article ‘Ojeada sobre la República de Colombia’ (II, 1824, 209 [309]-221); see also Emilio Soler Pascual, ‘Ocios de Españoles Emigrados: una revista del exilio londinense’, in Disidencias y exilios en la España Moderna, ed. Antonio Mestre and Enrique Giménez López (Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1997), 842–3. 34 An anonymous contemporary document, apparently produced by an agent of the Spanish government, identified the several political factions of the London exile, starting with the ‘aristocratic’ one centred around the Ocios; see Rajael Sánche Mantero, ‘Exilio liberal e intrigas políticas’, Ayer, no. 47, ‘Los exilios en la España contemporánea’ (2002), 24–6. 35 El Emigrado Observador, periódico mensual por una sociedad de españoles refugiados en Inglaterra y Francia. 2 vols (Londres: M. Calero, 1828). 36 El Emigrado Observador, I, 3. 37 Ibid., I, 25. 38 Articles calling for moderation and the avoidance of excesses in the name of liberty start appearing earlier in the same year, such as the long leading article in the tenth issue (April 1829, II, 121–36)). The transition from moderate Liberalism towards a defence of the policies for Ferdinand the VII has been addressed by Llorens (336–7). 39 See Carol Tully ‘Ackermann, Mora and the transnational context: cultural transfer in the Old World and the New’, in D. Muñoz Sempere and G. Alonso García eds., Londres y el liberalismo hispánico (Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2010), 153–64. 40 Llorens, 329.

3

Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense and the Dissemination of the Enlightenment in Brazil Isabel Lustosa and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva

Introduction This chapter covers the career and journalist activities of Hipólito José da Costa Furtado de Mendonça, commonly known as Hipólito da Costa (1774–1823).1 Like many other characters included in this book, Hipólito da Costa fled from Lisbon to London between 1805 and 1806 to escape political persecution and devoted himself to journalism thanks to the ‘reasonably free’ press in London and to British liberalism.2 Hipólito was far away from Brazil, then a colony of Portugal, when he was sentenced by the Inquisition due to his involvement in Masonic activities. His close relations with influential Freemasons, more precisely with the Duke of Sussex, made his adjustment to life in London easier. The two Freemasons had become closely acquainted as a result of the Duke’s support for the progress of Portuguese Freemasonry during the years he lived in Lisbon (1800–3).3 Thereafter, both Freemasonry and Hipólito’s friendship with the Duke of Sussex played a decisive role in the life of the journalist until his death. During the fourteen years of his exile, Hipólito published the Correio Braziliense ou  Armazém Literário (1808–22), adapting, as we shall see in this chapter, the format of the English review to found the Brazilian political press. With the Correio Braziliense (henceforth Correio), he constructed and disseminated his political ideas, contributing to the formation of a Lusophone political community in London, to the rise of a periodical press in the Portuguese language, to the Latin American Independence debate and to the consolidation of London as the hub of transnational politics in the early nineteenth century.

Rio de Janeiro at the time of the king It is interesting to note the start and end date of the publication of this first Brazilian periodical. The Correio appeared at a fundamental moment of the history of Brazil,

52

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

when the then Portuguese colony was shaken by a wave of culture and progress brought about by the transfer of the Portuguese king and his court to Rio de Janeiro (1808), and ceased to exist in the year of the Independence of Brazil (1822). When the Portuguese royal family disembarked in Rio de Janeiro in 1808, the colony boasted 2.4 million inhabitants within its territory, of which one million were slaves and 800,000 were native Brazilians. Rio de Janeiro was a modest colonial village, described as a chaotic, badly planned, dirty and stinking place of approximately 60,000 people, that would experience new routines with the arrival of the court and soon witness rapid changes in its urban, political and cultural landscape.4 Throughout the colonial period, censorship had been very strict and the Portuguese authorities had kept close control over the production and circulation of any printed matter in Brazil. Whereas Spain allowed its Latin American colonies to establish printing houses and universities from the very beginning of the colonial period, Portugal forbade any printed activity in its most important colony, and so Brazil’s intellectual elite went to study in Coimbra, like Hipólito himself: he studied Law at the University of Coimbra.5 With the opening of trade to ‘friendly nations’, such as the United Kingdom, the Portuguese monopoly was broken and Brazil saw trade flourish. Portugal’s isolation with the French presence in its European territory forced the government to invest in the creation of iron, gunpowder and glass factories in its American colony. With the help of a French mission that was specially commissioned by Dom João VI to plan buildings and urban equipment, a new town came into existence, with the creation of a Botanical Garden, a National Library, a Military Academy and a School of Medicine. In 1815 Brazil’s political status was elevated to a kingdom as part of the  United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves. Furthermore, the colony was suddenly and rapidly integrated into the transnational literary and political print culture, thanks to the diligent and interested efforts of merchants and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic.6 There was also a need to have the government’s acts printed and to release interesting news to the crown. Hence, soon after the arrival of the king, the press was implanted in Rio de Janeiro, more precisely the Royal Press, which retained the monopoly over all printed matter in Brazil until 1821. It printed the Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro, the first newspaper to be published in Brazil. It was pro-government and shutdown after the Independence. A free press in Brazilian territory would only exist after 1821, when censorship was abolished. The first political pamphlets and periodicals printed in Brazilian territory appeared at the end of 1821, in support of the Independence movement led by the Prince Regent.7 The Correio was Hipólito’s main legacy. It helped advance the creation of a liberal political culture in the Portuguese Americas before a free press existed in Brazil and it was fundamental to the diffusion in Latin America of the ideals of liberalism and the advantages a Constitution-based system of government. Furthermore, it gave rise to the London-based Portuguese press scrutinized in Chapter 4 of this book. The Correio should nevertheless be understood as part of a larger range of activities, as Hipólito’s work took on a variety of print forms – particularly in the first years of his residence in London – and he engaged in other activities that broadened his social networks and helped him to make a living.

Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense

53

It was in the pages of the Correio that Hipólito would give expression to the plans that he had for Brazil, inspired by the political, social and even cultural model of his host country. Having been educated in the tradition of enlightened reformism that characterized the Regency and the reign of Dom João VI, Hipólito was a British-style constitutional monarchist and completely opposed to the democratic trends that emerged from the Declaration of Independence of the United States and the principles of the French Revolution. He strongly criticized the colonial system in the pages of the Correio, arguing in favour of greater autonomy for Brazil. For fourteen years, therefore, a Brazilian who was born in Uruguay and educated in Portugal, knew the United States better than any other Brazilian of his time, and yet he lived most of his life in England, dedicating his life in exile to publishing a review for Brazil.

The professional path of Hipólito da Costa and the London-based Lusophone political community Hipólito was born on 25 March 1774 in the colony of Sacramento in Cisplatina (now Uruguay), a region that, during the period of colonial rule, was the subject of constant disputes between Portugal and Spain. After the Treaty of San Idelfonso (1777) the region was returned to Spanish rule and people of Portuguese origin were forced to emigrate, including Hipólito’s family. After a short stay in Buenos Aires, the family settled in Rio Grande do Sul, where Hipólito lived until he was seventeen years old. He was educated by his maternal uncle Pedro Pereira Fernandes de Mesquita, who was a priest and prepared him for entry to the University of Coimbra in 1792. Hipólito, who was regarded as a brilliant student, obtained a degree in Law and became a doctor of philosophy in 1797. The influence of his uncle, Hipólito’s academic achievements, his relations with the Prince Regent and the prime minister, D. Rodrigo de Sousa Coutinho, led the Portuguese government to send him on a scientific mission to the United States. He stayed there for two years and, in his Diário de Minha Viagem a Filadélfia, recorded the sort of insights on North American society that already demonstrated the critical spirit and power of observation of the journalist he would later become in London.8 The journey to the United States left an indelible impression on Hipólito; it helped plant the seeds of his vision of the world and provided him with a set of values in which freedom and the rights of man always played a central role. Carlos Rizzini has drawn attention to the fact that the entries of Diário de Minha Viagem para Filadélfia stopped on 27 December 1799, roughly one year before Hipólito returned to Portugal in September or October 1800.9 His diary does not mention his affiliation with Freemasonry. From the seventeenth century, Freemasonry had become a widespread underground force for propagating the ideas of the Enlightenment and bringing together liberals of various denominations, including both French encyclopaedists and English liberals.10 It spread to the former American colonies and Australia, where it was taken up by English merchants and traders. Its importance for the politics of the English crown had become so obvious that it reached the throne: the three sons of King George III were all Freemasons.

54

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Figure 3.1 Hipólito da Costa, drawing by H. R. Cook, printed by G. H. Lewis, published in A Narrative of the Persecution of Hippolyto Joseph da Costa Pereira Furtado de Mendonça, first edition, London: W. Lewis, 1811. © National Library of Rio de Janeiro

Upon his return to Lisbon in 1800, Hipólito became part of the group of Brazilians who worked in the printing house Arco do Cego, where he carried out translation work. Arco do Cego closed down and its collection was integrated with the Royal Press. Hipólito, along with Mariano da Conceição Vellozo, the celebrated naturalist friar and author of Florae Fluminensis, became members of the Board of the Royal Press.11 Hipólito published two works based on his trip to the United States: Descripção de huma maquina para tocar a bomba a bordo dos navios sem o trabalho de homens: offerecida a Real Marinha Portuguesa and Descripçaõ da arvore assucareira, e da sua utilidade, both printed by Typographia Chalcographica e Litteraria do Arco do Cego, the original name of the Royal Press.12 He also devoted himself to the translation of English scientific books into Portuguese, such as A Memoir Concerning the Disease of Goitre, as it Prevails in Different Parts of North-America by Benjamin Smith Barton; this was also published by the same printing house, whose name had changed to Typographia Chalcographica, Typoplastica, e Litteraria do Arco do Cego.13 His growing interest in economic history and the liberal economic model must have been the incentives for translating A Concise and Authentic History of the Bank of England by E. F. Thomas Fortune.14 Along the same line of interest is the publication in Portuguese,

Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense

55

in two volumes, of Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical by Sir Benjamin Thompson in 1801–2.15 Hipólito returned from the United States in 1800 and determined to work for the growth and progress of Freemasonry in Portugal.16 His clandestine activity as a Freemason during 1800 and 1802 is thought to have been the secret cause of his first trip to London in April 1802. The official purpose of this trip was to purchase books and printing machines for the Royal Press, but, in fact, he had been sent on a secret mission to seek protection from English Freemasonry so that Portuguese Freemasons could carry out their activities without relentless persecution from the police and the Portuguese Inquisition. Hipólito remained in England for three months and visited several places in continental Europe. Upon his return to Portugal, he was imprisoned by order of the magistrate Pina Manique. While the formal charge was that he had travelled without a passport, there is much to suggest that the underlying cause was his involvement with the Freemasons.17 In A Narrative of the Persecution, Hipólito narrates in great detail the circumstances of his arrest and the lengthy interrogations and suffering he underwent. Written to denounce how the inquisitorial system functioned, it became the most vivid account of the Inquisition ever written in Portuguese. It is a valuable source for research on rhetoric as an argumentative tool, on Portuguese Freemasonry, as well as on Hipólito’s biography and ideas. The principles of freedom of association and expression, religious and political tolerance of Freemasonry, which he defended during his interrogations, were revolutionary in Portugal, which in the nineteenth century was still subject to Inquisition. Portugal was absolutist and still oblivious to the changes that France and England had undergone in the eighteenth century, despite being geographically close to these two countries. Coupled with his life experience in the United States, the harsh years that the young Hipólito spent in prison and the defence of the liberal values he sustained under interrogation prepared him for the eighteen years he would spend in England. In 1805, with the aid of Freemasons, he managed to escape from prison. He lived clandestinely in Portugal for some time until he found an opportunity to embark undercover for England. The exact date of his arrival in London is still unknown. During his first years of exile he depended on the protection and friendship of the Duke of Sussex; he gave lessons and translated commercial documents, journalistic articles and literary works into Portuguese. Before launching the Correio in 1808, Hipólito published some works in London, such as Cartas sobre a Framaçonaria. In the following years, he worked on the English and Portuguese editions of A Narrative of the Persecution and contributed to a new edition of História de Portugal.18 He also worked on the Nova Grammatica Portuguesa e Inglesa, and in 1820 he published the leaflet Sketch for the History of Dionysian Artificers.19 Hipólito’s skill for writing and dealing with figures, as well as his wide circle of contacts in English society – which stemmed from his close links with the Freemasons – made him a valuable go-between in negotiations involving Brazilian and Portuguese trading houses with representatives in London. After the Portuguese court settled in Rio de Janeiro in 1808, the Portuguese traders living in (or those who often made trips

56

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

to) England formed a club that met on a regular basis in the City of London tavern on Bishopsgate Street.20 Hipólito became an active supporter of the interests of this group. In the pages of Correio he protested against the seizure of Portuguese merchant vessels in English ports during the short period – October to November 1807 – when Portugal, under pressure from Napoleon, broke off diplomatic relations with England.21 This defence was so unrelenting that it led to a breakdown in the relations between Hipólito and the Ambassador of Portugal, D. Domingos de Sousa Coutinho, Count of Funchal, whom he accused of favouring the interests of England over those of the Portuguese crown subjects. Moreover, Hipólito’s writings sparked off a campaign, led by the Count of Funchal with the support of English authorities, aimed at expelling the Brazilian journalist from England or at least at closing down his review in 1810. At the same time, D. Rodrigo, who was the brother of D. Domingos and a powerful minister of D. João VI, promulgated decrees preventing the circulation of the Correio in Brazil and ordered the seizure of the copies that arrived in the Brazilian ports in 1809. Hipólito’s relationship with his former protector D. Rodrigo had suffered by the latter’s ambiguous position during the series of events that had led to Hipólito’s arrest in 1802. The journalist’s campaign against the Count of Funchal would also reach his brother. According to Roderick Barman, the extent of the Correio’s influence can be gleaned from the comments on his articles in letters exchanged by his contemporaries, as well as the steps taken against it by the Portuguese crown, which included offering financial support to new, opposing journalistic ventures. This gave rise to the London-based Portugal political press. In 1810, several pamphlets published in Lisbon refuted the arguments put forward by the articles published in the Correio.22 As discussed in greater detail in Chapter 4 of this book, D. Domingos de Sousa Coutinho sponsored the creation of the periodical O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra (henceforth O Investigador) to combat Hipólito’s ideas more systematically.23 O Investigador was published from 1811 until 1819, when the Portuguese authorities ceased to sponsor it. Thereafter, the new Portuguese ambassador in London and future Marquis of Palmela, D. Pedro de Sousa Holstein, went on to sponsor O Padre Amaro ou Sovela, Política, Histórica e Literária (1820–9), a periodical which voiced the most scathing and personal criticism of the Correio. The main editor of O Investigador was a one-time companion of Hipólito in Portuguese Freemasonry, the former friar José Liberato Freire de Carvalho. Although he was one of those who had given shelter to the Brazilian journalist soon after he had managed to escape from prison, José Liberato did not welcome his former companion when he arrived in London. This was despite the fact that José Liberato himself had undergone political persecution in Portugal – for having allegedly collaborated with the French invaders – and fled to London. In the years that followed, the two journalists parried constantly with their pens with brief intervals of reconciliation, all encouraged by the members of the Portuguese commercial club, who invested in both journals.24 As well as the Correio and Investigador, the Portuguese press set up in London was enhanced by João Bernardo Rocha Loureiro’s move to London. Loureiro was given a warm welcome by Hipólito when he arrived in London in 1812, having escaped the persecution directed at liberal journalists after the expulsion of the French, in 1810. The liberal press, which had been useful in the campaign of defence of Portugal against

Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense

57

the Napoleonic troops, became unnecessary and dangerous for the restoration of the absolutist order conducted by the Regency. The Correio da Península ou Novo Telegrapho (1809–10), a periodical that Loureiro published together with Pato Moniz, was banned from circulation in Portugal and Loureiro left for London, where he wanted to publish another journal. Initially called O Espelho Político e Moral,  but soon afterwards renamed O Portuguez ou Mercúrio Político, Comercial e Literário (1814–26), Loureiro’s periodical was a great success, not only in the heart of the Portuguese community living in London, but also in Portugal, where it maintained a clandestine presence.25 However, the friendship between Hipólito and Loureiro was shaken by their divergent opinions over whether the Portuguese court should remain in Rio de Janeiro or move back to Lisbon. The debate, which began in a civilized way, took a more radical turn following the decision of D. João VI to elevate Brazil to the status of a kingdom in 1815 and his evident intention of remaining in Brazil or at least putting off his return for as long as possible. The keynote of Loureiro’s articles consisted of attacks against the King, Brazil and Brazilians. The political disputes that took place in the exile Luso-Brazilian press bore heavily on Brazil’s pro-Independence agitation. Their debates played a decisive role in stirring up the anti-absolutist feelings of the Portuguese and driving them to carry out a constitutionalist revolution in Porto on 24 August 1820. The Liberal Revolution of 1820 resulted in the return in 1821 of the Portuguese court to Portugal from Brazil, where it had fled during the Peninsular War. At first it was celebrated by the Brazilian liberals and by Hipólito himself, but eventually led to the Independence of Brazil, following a series of constitutional debates which clearly highlighted the incompatibility of the plans and interests of the two kingdoms. Hipólito liked to lead a peaceful life and his strongest feelings were always bound with questions of a political nature. In 1817 he married an Englishwoman, Mary Ann Glenie, the daughter of a wealthy family, who helped to provide him with greater financial stability. Hipólito also worked as the Duke of Sussex’s secretary. The money he possessed in a Scottish bank as well as his relations with the Duke – which, inter alia, resulted in him being granted the title of Esquire – allowed him to acquire denizenship status.26 This spared him several attempts by the Portuguese monarchy to censor his review or even have him expelled from England. Hipólito died in 1823, one year after the Independence of Brazil, while he was negotiating with the Brazilian government his appointment as the consul of Brazil in London. At first, he strove to maintain the unity between Brazil and Portugal, but eventually came to support Independence as the only way to prevent the Portuguese deputies from making Brazil retrograde to a colonial status. Given the depth of his dissatisfaction, all that remained for Hipólito was to abandon his former dream of seeing the establishment of a Luso-Brazilian empire with its headquarters in America, and instead accept his Brazilian identity. After changing his position, he devoted himself to staunch support of the interests of Brazil against Portugal. In the course of a long correspondence with José Bonifácio de Andrada, the most important minister of D. Pedro I, he put forward the bold proposal of setting up a Brazilian courier service, which in his view would be a key factor in bringing unity and progress to the country.

58

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

The Correio Braziliense, a Brazilian review With the opening up of the Brazilian ports, the Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1810, and the decline of British influence in the North Atlantic following the American War of Independence, London became, in the words of José Tengarrinha, ‘the key vertical point in its triangular relationship with Lisbon and Rio de Janeiro’.27 London had a clear advantage over Lisbon with regard to the circulation of the press: British ships were not subject to inspection by the Portuguese authorities, which made it easier to send periodicals to Brazil via England. José Tengarrinha believes that these factors explain why London, rather than Paris, became the centre for Portuguese-language publishing between 1808 and 1822. Moreover, the strict censorship imposed by the dictatorship of Napoleon and the Bourbon monarchy from 1815 onwards made it difficult to reverse Napoleon’s legislation and allow a free press. According to Tengarrinha, only three periodicals written in Portuguese were published in Paris in this period: O Observador Lusitano em Paris ou Colecção Literária, Política e Commercial (January to April 1815), Annaes das Sciencias, das Artes e das Letras (1818–22) and O Contemporâneo Político e Literário (January to September 1820), while over 25 periodicals were published in London in the same period.28 The complete collection of the fourteen-year run of the Correio comprises 29 bound volumes and includes 175 issues of 72–140 pages, each in an octavo format and printed by W. Lewis, Wych Street.29 The periodical is divided into four large sections. The section ‘Política’ (Politics) includes transcriptions of official documents about national and foreign business transactions; ‘Comércio e Artes’ (Commerce and the Arts) published news regarding national and international trade; ‘Literatura e Ciências’ (Literature and the Sciences) contained information about new publications that had appeared in England and Portugal as well as news regarding scientific and technological innovations. Most of these articles are long commentaries on books about history, economics and politics. The bulk of the pages deal with official documents received from Portugal and Brazil and with the reproduction of the most important news coming from American and European periodicals. This was the most up-to-date news bulletin that could reach Brazilians and, without doubt, this window on the world helped to advance the creation of a liberal political culture in the Portuguese America. The section ‘Miscelânea’ (Miscellaneous) is subdivided into two parts: ‘Correspondência’ (Correspondence) with letters sent from readers and ‘Reflexões sobre as novidades do mês’ (Reflections on the novelties of the month), containing Hipólito’s commentaries on the main events. It was in this section that he set out his plans and policies for Brazil in the most systematic and consistent manner, although marginal comments and observations fleetingly occur in other articles. He supported a number of causes: freedom of the press, the end of the Inquisition in Portugal and freedom of religion in general, the transfer of the Brazilian capital to the interior of the country, the immigration of European nationals to Brazil, the gradual abolition of slavery and the permanent settlement of the Portuguese government in Brazil. The political views of Hipólito located him on the London-based Latin American political spectrum and made him a key player in transnational anti-colonialist and nationalist debates. He was the first Brazilian intellectual to write about the need

Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense

59

to abolish slavery in Brazil. It seemed to him a contradiction in terms that a nation seeking to be free should maintain an internal regime of slavery: ‘How is it possible for a white human being to express his or her desires having a black slave next to him or her?’ However, he also thought that ‘it would be the desperate measure of a madman’ to abolish slavery at once, since ‘it is linked to the current social system and constitutes part of the country’s prosperity’.30 For Hipólito, the process of replacing slave labour by free labour should be gradual and based on the immigration of skilled European workers from poor or war-impoverished countries. Hipólito was always a liberal champion of free trade, freedom of opinion and the parliamentary system. He loathed absolutism and revolution. His willingness to see the English liberal model adopted in Brazil made Hipólito a great promoter of the English Constitution and of works on this subject. He nevertheless defended the sovereignty of Portugal and Brazil. He criticized the fact that the Royal Charter appointed Marshal Beresford as president of the War Council in Portugal. The Portuguese had foreigners working in their government whereas the English had no Portuguese working in offices of trust in their government.31 Hipólito also commented on the treaty signed with England in 1810, not only for humiliating Portuguese dignity, but for placing the Brazilians, in their own country, in a position inferior to the English. The so-called Extraterritoriality Clause, Article 10 of the treaty, guaranteed the British the right to appoint their compatriots in Brazil to the position of judge, creating a special forum for English citizens living in Brazil. Hipólito considered the privileges granted to England to be exaggerated when the Portuguese who resided in the English territories did not have the same rights. He would also denounce ‘the efforts of the defenders of that treaty to persuade the people of Brazil that they should not have factories, recalling that in England, on the contrary, an order in Council had been republished in the previous month, prescribing the measures to be applied against those who take from England “machines or artists” ’.32 A man of the Enlightenment and confident in the role that men espousing liberal values should have, from the very first issue of his review, Hipólito declared the missionary zeal with which he devoted himself to his journalistic enterprise. The first duty of the human being in society is to be useful to its members; and each one should act in accordance with her or his physical and moral strength to improve society through the knowledge or talents with which she or he has been endowed by nature, art, or education. The individual who espouses the general good of society becomes its most distinguished member; the light which she or he casts releases from darkness or illusion those whom ignorance has plunged in a labyrinth of apathy, incompetence, and error.33

The format of the Correio was inspired by the journalistic model of the great English and Scottish reviews, which were described by Derek Roper as providing ‘instalments of a continuous encyclopaedia, recording the advance of knowledge in every field of enterprise’.34 These were non-specialist publications aimed at readers who were thirsty for information about a wide range of topics. The model arose in the eighteenth century with periodicals such as The Monthly Review (1749–1845),

60

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

The Critical Review (1756–1763), the English Review (1783–1796), and the Analytical Review (1788–1798). They were monthly publications and each edition included a series of articles and essays on current literature and related topics. The Correio was launched six years after the appearance of the Edinburgh Review (1802–1929), which, together with the Quarterly Review (1809–1967), established the model for reviews which prevailed throughout the nineteenth century. With regard to the range of subjects covered, the subtitle ‘Armazém Literário’ (Literary Storehouse) is proof of the close alignment of Hipólito’s objectives with the editorial model of the English and Scottish reviews of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In that period, the word ‘literature’ covered every area of knowledge from mathematics, physics and theology to what is strictly speaking literature. However, this was not the case with the Correio, which mainly featured articles on political, economic or scientific issues. The decision to publish monthly rather than quarterly issues brought the Correio closer to the reviews of the eighteenth century, which allowed its periodicity to coincide with the average time of the crossing by steamboat to and fro between Latin America and Europe. Moreover, a quarterly periodical would probably not have had the same repercussion as a monthly review: its contemporary flavour would have been diluted because of its inability to follow the course of daily politics quite as closely. Between the two coexisting models of the reviews – that of the eighteenth century and that consolidated in the Edinburgh Review – Hipólito selected the features that seemed best suited to a Brazilian political paper published overseas. Whereas British reviews depended on contributions from several writers who published their articles anonymously, even when they were famous and distinguished authors such as Walter Scott, Thomas Carlyle and William Hazlitt, the Correio appears to have been written mostly by Hipólito himself, who acted as editor, writer and translator, as he made clear in 1819: Now it is essential to our argument to declare here that all the relentless work of writing, editing, correspondence, etc., of this periodical has fallen upon one individual, who is also laden with several other occupations, which are necessary for him to seek the means of subsistence, which one cannot achieve with the meagre profits from the literary production of this journal, and to maintain his position in the public circle, in which circumstances compel him to live.35

After some time, the Correio began to include other contributions, mainly in the form of letters, but always in a random manner and without any change to its format. The main similarity between the Correio and the Edinburgh and Quarterly Review is that all three express opinions from a well-defined political standpoint. In the nineteenth century, the model for a review evolved from a descriptive and comprehensive monthly periodical to a more selective and critical quarterly, which was ‘unashamedly partisan in its politics’.36 Although it promoted Whig politics, the Edinburgh Review was not, strictly speaking, the organ of a political party. As for the

Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense

61

conservative Quarterly Review, although it supported the Tories, it did not adopt a political position that was servile to the party. Both distinguished clearly between the discussion of political ideas and party political agendas. According to Joanne Shattock, this was one of the factors that separated the reviews from the newspapers, with their ‘attendant evils of subservient political affiliation, paid employment and the ungentlemanly aroma of trade, or more precisely profit’.37 As some early-nineteenth-century Latin American periodicals examined in Chapters 1 and 2 of this book, the Correio was a book-like publication. It adopted a continuous page numbering system throughout the issues of the same volume, indicating that they were connected and formed a single work. It was also sold in the same places as books. It did not feature the lightweight, disposable format and content that the newspaper would acquire later on. According to Maria Pallares-Burke, in London in the eighteenth century, the book and the periodical were not considered as two distinct cultural objects. Since periodicals were produced by book publishers, they were actually seen as ‘fragments of books’. Pallares-Burke adds that a typical phenomenon of the time was the binding of individual sheets of periodicals into one volume. Individual issues were initially sold separately or by subscription, according to their frequency of publication (daily, weekly, biweekly, monthly, etc.), but they could also be made available in bound volumes later, which undoubtedly conferred greater respectability and durability to the new medium.38 The Correio inherited its periodic frequency from the eighteenth-century reviews, although for entirely different reasons, as well as the practice of summarizing or providing the translation of long passages from important works. Nevertheless, like the Edinburgh Review and Quarterly Review, as well as offering its readers – in this case the cultural and political Luso-Brazilian and Latin American elites – a broad view of various areas of knowledge, the Correio sought to enhance the debate about the leading political questions of the day, which extended beyond the Luso-Brazilian horizon. It therefore adopted the tendency of contemporary reviews, such as the Quarterly Review, to intervene in the realm of political debate, with the aim of forming, informing and influencing opinion. In addition, Hipólito developed a clear and objective way of writing that may have been inspired by the lightness of touch and colloquial style of the English newspapers and reviews. According to Antonio Candido, the journalist brought ‘a vitality and seemly decorum’ to Brazilian prose, which contrasted with the ‘grandiloquence’ of the sacred orators predominant at that time. Hipólito was the first Brazilian to employ a modern, clear, vibrant, and concise prose style that was full of ideas. It was so stripped of excessive detail that it came to us in a form that was intact, fresh and delightful, more modern than most of what was bequeathed to us in the nineteenth century and the first quarter of this century. He was the greatest journalist that Brazil has ever had and the only one whose work is read today with interest and profit. He was a writer and a thinker who, better than anyone else, expressed the central concerns of our age of enlightenment.39

62

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

A new capital for a new Brazil What inspired the creation of the Correio was the decision made by the Prince Regent and future king D. João VI to move to Brazil in 1808. Hipólito saw the transfer of the Portuguese court to Brazil as an opportunity for progress and development for Portuguese America. In contrast to those who wanted the separation of Brazil from Portugal, Hipólito argued strongly in favour of keeping the court in Rio de Janeiro permanently, thereby ensuring the supremacy of Brazil over the Portuguese kingdom. From the very first issues of the Correio, he insisted that Rio de Janeiro, as the new fortress of the Portuguese monarchy, should play a leading role in consolidating the Portuguese domains in Brazil once and for all. In his view, this was an opportunity to ensure the progress and unification of Brazil. His plan was to preserve and strengthen the unity of the two parts of the Portuguese kingdom across the Atlantic, but to give the leading role to the American side. To make this scheme viable, Hipólito thought that it was essential to establish a central administrative authority so that all regions could comply with the same laws. The concentration of power in the hands of the governors of the Brazilian captaincies, that is to say, the administrative divisions  and  hereditary fiefs  of Portugal in Brazil, and the lack of a unified system for controlling financial expenditure tended to derail the unity of the country and to weaken the power of Rio de Janeiro. Hipólito argued that, given the size of the territory, it was necessary to plan the expansion of Brazilian finances and bring the treasury under a central administrative authority established in the court. The central administration would be linked to the various regions of the country through correspondence with all the public tax collectors in the different captaincies. Hipólito strenuously criticized the fact that the Portuguese government in Rio de Janeiro had been restricted to replicating the same institutions that had been in force in Portugal, therefore allowing the continuation of the administrative mismanagement which had caused the ruin of that kingdom. He believed that what Brazil really needed for its development was a detailed study of its rivers to determine whether it was possible to navigate them, as well as to set up a mining committee, a survey for the opening up of roads and a map-design service. Throughout the period when the Correio was published, Hipólito fiercely attacked the Portuguese government’s traditional practice of granting monopolies, always bearing in mind that the United States did not have any kind of monopoly system. There is not any sort of monopoly in the United States: of diamonds, Brazil wood, playing cards. No one holds any type of privilege nor any rights to export either. On the contrary, there is a difference in the rights of weighting for American and foreign ships, which gives the national ones an advantage.40

In April 1818, he criticized the fact that the courier service between Rio Grande (today Rio Grande do Sul) and São Paulo had been allocated to an individual in the form of a monopoly. He regarded it as ‘unwise to grant a particular enjoyment of a monopoly over which the Government should have the administrative control’.41 In his view, the essential public services should be under the control of the state and he added: ‘It

Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense

63

is thus necessary to include the courier system among the number of those public services, which can only be exercised by the Government.’42 He kept returning to the need for rules and regulations that could persuade the ‘world’ that the political institutions of Brazil were favourable. In December 1810, he stated that it was necessary to ensure personal freedom and the property rights of immigrants, through laws that were ‘fixed and permanent, and not decrees and charters that a secretary of state makes in the morning and another secretary of state exempts from by a written note in the afternoon of the same day’.43 He always cited the United States as an example of a country with a successful immigration policy, because it had managed to attract large numbers of Europeans. He reminded his readers that immigrants preferred the United States to Brazil because of the absence of such rights. Hipólito insisted on the importance of training elite cadres able to serve the state. In July 1814, he stated that ‘the growth of the national character could be achieved through measures such as the founding of a university in Brazil, the introduction of schools to teach reading and writing and the widespread circulation of national and foreign periodicals’44 – these were measures that would provide men with the qualifications needed to govern. He looked at education from an economic perspective and always stressed the need ‘to spread useful instruction in Brazil’45 through a rise in the number of periodicals. The example of England as a country that trained good professionals for public service is cited in July 1810, when he states that ‘all its nobility are devoted to studies and a large number go to universities and afterwards compete to fill the most important posts’.46 Hipólito’s project of a Luso-Brazilian nation pivots on the relocation of the capital of Brazil from the coast to the interior of Brazil. It was one of the projects on which Hipólito insisted time and again in his review. With a view to persuading the government and the public of the importance of bringing the various parts of the country together, in March 1813, he invoked the patriotic spirit of the Portuguese: If the Portuguese have any patriotism and really want to express their gratitude to Brazil for welcoming them, they should settle in a central region, in the interior near the cradle of the great rivers. They should build a new city there and open up roadways that lead to all the ports on the coast and clear away any obstacles that might prevent the rivers from being navigable. In this way, they could lay the foundations for the most extensive, interlinked, well defended, and powerful empire that existed on the surface of the globe, in the present state of the nations that populate it.47

Hipólito da Costa and the Libertadores Hipólito actively pursued the liberation of the Spanish colonies, as an intermediary in the negotiations to purchase ships and armaments for use in the wars of Independence in America. Furthermore, the support that the Correio gave to Francisco de Miranda before and during his brief government in Venezuela was prolonged through its defence of the Independence struggle later led by Simón Bolívar.48 Hipólito allocated an entire

64

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

section of his review to events unfolding in the Latin American Spanish colonies. In the pages of the Correio, he disclosed documentary material about the progress of the Independence movement – without always being warmly sympathetic to it, since he regarded it as the natural consequence of the colonial policies of the Spanish monarchy. Hipólito’s attitude towards the Revolution of Pernambuco of 1817 (Revolução Pernambucana) was nevertheless very different. It was an emancipatory movement that broke out on 6 March 1817, during the then captaincy of Pernambuco, in the northeast of Brazil. He had personal ties with one of the leaders of the Revolution the Brazilian merchant Domingos Martins, with whom he had been in contact in London and travelled to Paris and whose business he had helped to set up, including by publishing favourable news about his enterprise. Despite those personal ties, Hipólito strongly condemned the way that the revolution was conducted, and the fact that its aim was to establish a republic in Brazil. He considered it purely fortuitous, ‘the result of a thoughtless, non-consensual plan’. In 1817 he wrote: From the latest news from Lisbon, it is known that the Revolution of Pernambuco has been completely suppressed. The troops that marched from Bahia towards the rebels defeated them in the vicinities of Pernambuco. At the same time, some people who had disembarked from the squadron of the blockage, together with those of the land, took possession of the city on 20 or 21 May, the Provisional Government having lasted 74 days. After the defeat, the leaders of the insurgents fled to the interior, with 200 or 300 henchmen. No other end was to be expected from an insurrection, which, although it may have had ancient elements, was the work of the moment, the result of a thoughtless, non-consensual plan: for all it shows is not only the precipitation, errors, and injustice of its leaders, but also their total ignorance in matters of government, administration, and conduct of public affairs. In a word, they showed no other desirable quality, except energy, which is the daughter of the enthusiast, in all cases of revolutions.49

For Hipólito, the Independence movements in the Spanish Americas were carried out against a monarchy facing a constitutional crisis. Carlos IV (the father of Carlota Joaquina, a queen consort of Portugal as wife of D. João VI) attempted a reconciliation policy with Napoleon Bonaparte, who had kidnapped him and forced him to abdicate. The heir to the throne, his son Fernando VII, also ended up a prisoner of Bonaparte, was forced to abdicate, and was replaced by Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s older brother. Hipólito would always condemn absolutism and the Inquisition that prevailed in Spain as well as its submission to the successive French governments after 1789. The attitude of reactionary Spain to revolutionary France was always, in his view, one of compromise and submissiveness. The alliance between the two countries merged the two forms of extremism that Hipólito loathed: absolutism and revolution complementing each other, almost as a means of revealing their close kinship. He supported the constitutionalization of Spain by the courts in the port of Cadiz in 1812.50 It was the constitutionalist government of Cadiz that led resistance to the French, which allowed the return of Fernando VII to the throne. Nevertheless, the return of the king also meant a return to

Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense

65

absolutism and the Inquisition. It was with a real sense of horror that Hipólito referred to the violence that characterized the reign of Fernando VII between 1814 and 1820. Fernando VII annulled the measures of the court, persecuted, arrested, tortured and killed many of his deputies. In the face of this, Hipólito regarded the men of civilization and modernity to be Francisco de Miranda, Simón Bolívar, Bernardo O’Higgins and José de San Martín. These figures laid the foundation of liberal ideas in their countries and produced the first Spanish American Constitution. By tearing up the first liberal constitution, Fernando VII was, in the journalist’s view, acting in a primitive way. Hipólito was not a revolutionary. His arguments against revolution can be found in almost all the issues of the Correio. The English and Spanish Americas waged wars of Independence because they felt they were outsiders who were not included in the Spanish state. In his view, Brazil was already an independent country, given that D. João VI had established himself in Rio de Janeiro. A reform of the state, based on the British parliamentary system and ruled by a monarch as erudite and tolerant as D. João VI, fulfilled the journalist’s dream for Brazil. Furthermore, the opportunity was there: it was a case of taking the opportunity provided by the seat of government being relocated from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro to ensure that the Portuguese monarchy would adapt to the political reality of modern times and be, from then on, essentially constitutional. Hipólito was not anti-monarchist and at no time expressed any opposition to D. João VI in his periodical. As he made clear when castigating the Pernambuco revolutionaries in 1817, he was in truth an intransigent critic of the ministers and their corrupt activities, which undermined the Portuguese state and were already beginning to cripple the newly fledged Kingdom of Brazil. The king and the monarchy should be maintained; what needed to be changed was the administration and its policies. The political, social and even cultural model that he put forward was the English one: his host country, with its free press and a government that allowed opposition parties to confront each other without undermining the system. In his view, it was a place of tolerance, culture and respect, where the government and judicial system were characterized by decisive action and transparency. Nonetheless, it was a place where the king still retained some authority and could make use of his share of power. Hipólito was able to witness George III change Parliament to prevent the passing of laws in favour of the Catholics, but also advised the Duke of Sussex on his speech in support of their rights. In the Diário de Minha Viagem à Filadélfia Hipólito drew attention to the human qualities of the North American people and the way they organized their institutions: their natural friendliness and enterprising spirit; the unostentatious and austere beauty of American women; the order and hygienic conditions of the prisons run by the Quakers; the electoral system; the freedom of the press, trade, industry, etc. However, his admiration for the United States did not make him a democrat. A degree of formality and a hierarchical system were congenial to him, as was also a political system similar to that which he witnessed in Northern American society, yet not coinciding with the federal republican model. Hipólito shared the anti-revolutionary feelings of most English people of the time, which the philosophical work and especially the parliamentary action of Edmund

66

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Burke managed to spread in the country. The long war against France led to feelings amounting to xenophobia, which are translated in references to the ‘volubility of the French character’ in contrast to the rigour and coherence of the English.51 According to the journalist – in an analysis tinged with prejudice and national rivalry – Napoleon and ‘his co-revolutionists’ had retained power ‘by offering every year some novelty to the French in order to amuse them. When the source of the novelties dried up’, Hipólito continued, ‘Bonaparte had nothing more to display except defeats; the monotony dissatisfied the French and led them to cry “Long live the Bourbons” .’52 His contempt for France is made clear at the end of the article: ‘It doesn’t matter if the French form a perpetual committee for drawing up a new Constitution every week, so long as they do not interfere with other nations.’53

Conclusion One of the few pages of the Correio devoted to describing a large dinner party in London was published in January 1813, in volume 10, section ‘Miscelânia’, in an article called ‘Festividade dos Framassões em obséquio de Lorde Moira’. It was a masonic festivity held on 27 January 1813 in homage to Francis Rawdon-Hastings, the Earl of Moira, who effectively acted as the masonic Grand Master for twenty-five years, while the Prince of Wales, the future King George IV, was the official Grand Master. The opening proceedings were presided over by the Duke of Sussex, who was accompanied by his brothers the Dukes of York, Clarence, Kent and Cumberland, the sons of George III. In the Freemasons’ Hall in Great Queen Street, about 600 guests could be accommodated for dinner without any discomfort. Hipólito noted the elegance of the ladies in attendance and the excellence of the music provided by the Duke of Kent’s renowned orchestra and some of the singers. Dinner was followed by toasts and an exchange of tributes. In his speech, the Duke of Sussex paid homage to the Earl of Moira by outlining significant aspects of his political and social career and recapitulating his services to the Order. He concluded by presenting Earl of Moira with ‘a magnificent jewel’.54 After this tribute to the Earl of Moira, the banquet itself got underway and whatever else happened, wrote Hipólito, is best consigned to silence.55 What is surprising in this record is the enthusiasm displayed by the Brazilian journalist, who, in general, was quite restrained with regard to the mundane aspects of life. Hipólito clearly describes the dinner party in which he took part, in terms that are brimming with enthusiasm, both because it was a masonic feast and because of the central role played by his friend, Prince Augustus Frederick, the Duke of Sussex. In December of that year, the Duke of Sussex became the new Grand Master of the English Freemasons. In the 1950s, Carlos Rizzini discovered that the descendants of Hipólito in London possessed some objects that had been presented to him by the Duke of Sussex – a silver coffeepot and a gold clock. He also discovered that they had a portrait of the journalist, which decorated one of the walls of Kensington Palace, where the Duke of Sussex used to live. After his death, the portrait was offered to Hipólito’s widow. In addition to this, Rizzini discovered a letter from the Duke to an

Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense

67

old friend, in which the Duke excused himself for not having been able to attend a dinner given earlier, on the grounds that he was devastated by the news of the death of Hipólito seven days earlier.56 After the death of his friend, the Duke attempted to obtain a pension for his godson, Augusto Frederico Hipólito da Costa, whom he also assisted by enabling him to pursue a military career.57 The following epitaph, attributed the Duke of Sussex by The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1839, is engraved under the Lioz marble grave of the Brazilian Hipólito José da Costa, at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Hurley, in Berkshire: Sacred to the memory of Le Commandeur Hyppolyto Joseph da Costa, who died on the XII day of September MDCCCXXIII, aged XLVI years.58 A man no less distinguished by the vigour of his intellect, and his proficiency in science and literature, than by the integrity of his manners and character. He was descended from a noble family in Brazil. In this country he resided for the last XVIII years, and from hence by his numerous and valuable writings diffused among the inhabitants of that extensive empire a taste for useful knowledge, for the arts which embellish life, and a love of constitutional liberty, founded in obedience to wholesome laws, and in the principles of mutual benevolence and good will. A friend who knew and admired his virtues has thus recorded them for the benefit of posterity.59

This epitaph sums up the feelings of someone saying farewell to a friend but also reveals the qualities which even his most hard-hearted adversaries could not fail to see in the Brazilian journalist. In effect, from 1808 onwards, with the publication of the Correio, Hipólito was devoted to bestowing on Brazilians ‘a taste for useful knowledge’, but mainly ‘the love of constitutional liberty, founded in obedience to wholesome laws and the principles of mutual benevolence and good will’.60 This was his life mission and it can be said that he was successful. According to Barman, ‘the Correio’s most important achievement was inculcating its readers with a common vocabulary, shared symbols, and familiar ideas which the public in turn incorporated into its thought and speech. Such a common outlook and vocabulary was an indispensable step towards the creation of an independent political community’.61 Barman also states that the Correio worked upon the guiding assumption that ‘its readers possessed the right to be informed of, to discuss, and even criticise their government’s policies and actions’.62 It was owing to the Correio that an active public readership began to be established, desirous of information but also of being permitted to express opinions of their own. Barman argues that this was how a public opinion was formed, albeit only among a small section of society, and this gave rise to views being expressed among all the dominant classes in the Portuguese America. Hipólito was fully conscious of his mission and proud to be the precursor of a free press in the Lusophone world. However, his main objective was to ensure that Brazil could make progress by having a free parliament and a government that was accountable for its finances and could guarantee freedom of the press. It was not part of his plans to die in a foreign land, as we learn from a letter sent to his brother in 1821, in which the emigrant journalist expressed his wish to settle down in Serro de Santana, in Pelotas, on the land inherited from his father, after ‘20 years lingering in foreign lands’.

68

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

If that land had already been sold, he would ask his brother Saturnino to make inquiries about whether it was possible to recover it, because ‘as soon as I can sort out my family affairs and collect what I have here, I am going to settle down in Brazil, because there is nowhere in the world I like better than Rio Grande’. On that day it would be possible for the journalist to set up the school for poor boys in Rio Grande do Sul about which he had always dreamed since the age of twenty-four.63 This was the grand scheme of his life: to return one day and see the beautiful landscape of Rio Grande again, which he had never forgotten, and help Brazil to improve and progress under a system of government like that of Britain. Despite having only lived in Brazil during his childhood and adolescence, Hipólito was certainly, among the men of his generation, the one who wrote the most about Brazil. Not only did he write about Brazil; through his writings, he also became involved in campaigns aiming for its political, economic and social progress. The extent to which he was committed to supporting Brazil is the greatest proof that the homeland is much more than simply a geographical space. Despite considering himself Portuguese until the Independence of Brazil, he formed his dream of a faraway place and called his review Correio Braziliense, because Brazil was what embodied for him the beloved homeland in the poetry of the time. It was for this and because he believed in the power of the written word that he ventured forth on this mad undertaking of writing from the other side of the Atlantic for improbable readers who, in addition to being a tiny minority, lived under the strictest form of censorship.

Notes 1 Hipólito da Costa is very often referred to only as Hipólito in academic publications, including in this chapter hereafter. 2 O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra, May 1816: 339. See chapter 4 for more on O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra. 3 David Francis, Portugal 1715–1808: Joanine, Pombaline and Rococo Portugal as Seen by British Diplomats and Traders (London: Tamesis, 1985), 256. 4 Jurandir Malerba, A Corte no Exílio. Civilização e Poder no Brasil às Vésperas da Independência (1808 a 1821) (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000), 126. 5 José Murilo de Carvalho, Construção da Ordem e Teatro das Sombras (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2003). 6 More recent research has shown that more books and periodicals were available in colonial Brazil than previously thought. They were found in private collections and many had been smuggled into the country to circumvent official bans. See, for example, Márcia Abreu, Os Caminhos dos Livros (Campinas: ALB/Mercado de Letras; São Paulo: FAPESP, 2003); Luiz Carlos Villalta, ‘O que se fala e o que se lê: língua, instrução e leitura’, in História da Vida Privada no Brasil, ed. Laura de Mello Souza, 3 vols. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997), v. 1, 331–85; and Sandra Vasconcelos and Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva (eds), Books and Periodicals in Brazil 1768–1930: A Transatlantic Perspective, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures (Oxford: Legenda, 2014). 7 For a list of early Brazilian periodicals and pamphlets published in Rio de Janeiro from 1808 and 1824, see Isabel Lustosa, Imprensa se Escreve com I de Independência:

Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense

8

9 10

11

12

13

14

15

16 17

69

os Primeiros Jornais Brasileiros (São Paulo: Jorge Zahar, 2003). See also Cybelle and Marcelo Ipanema, ‘Imprensa na Regência: Observações Estatísticas e de Opinião Pública’. Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro, v. 307, 1976; Carlos Eduardo França de Oliveira, ‘Tipógrafos, Redatores e Leitores: Aspectos da imprensa Periódica no Primeiro Reinado’. Revista Brasileira de História & Ciências Sociais. 2, no. 3, July 2010 (www.rbhcs.com, 02 April 2017); and Lucia Maria Bastos Pereira das Neves, Corcundas, Constitucionais e Pés-de-chumbo: a Cultura Política da Independência, 1820–1822 (Rio de Janeiro: FAPERJ: Revan, 2003). Hipólito da Costa, Diário de Minha Viagem para Filadélfia (1798–1799) (Brasília: Senado Federal, 2004, http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/download/texto/sf000034. pdf, 20 October 2016). Carlos Rizzini, Hipólito da Costa e o Correio Braziliense (São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1957), 5. See also, Hipólito da Costa, Diário de Minha Viagem, 155. Mădălina Calance, ‘Reason, Liberty and Science. The Contribution of Freemasonry to the Enlightenment’ (https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/hssr.2014.3.issue-2/ hssr-2013-0033/hssr-2013-0033.xml, 20 October 2016). José Mariano da Conceição Vellozo, Florae fluminensis, seu, Descriptionum plantarum praefectura fluminensi sponte nascentium... (Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Nacional, 1825). Hipólito da Costa, Descripção de huma maquina para tocar a bomba a bordo dos navios sem o trabalho de homens: offerecida a Real Marinha Portuguesa (Lisbon: Typographia Chalcographica e Litteraria do Arco do Cego, 1800), and Descripçaõ da arvore assucareira, e da sua utilidade e cultura (Lisbon: Typographia Chalcographica e Litteraria do Arco do Cego, 1800). Benjamin Smith Barton, A Memoir Concerning the Disease of Goitre, as it Prevails in Different Parts of North-America (Philadelphia: The Author, 1800), published as Memoria sobre a bronchocelle, ou papo da America Septentrional (Lisbon: Typographia Chalcographica, Typoplastica, e Litteraria do Arco do Cego, 1801). The name of Hipólito da Costa appears as the translator on the book cover of these books. E. F. Thomas Fortune, A Concise and Authentic History of the Bank of England. With Dissertations on Metals and Coin, Banknotes, and Bills of Exchange (London, 1797), published as Historia breve e authentica do Banco de Inglaterra, com dissertações sobre os metaes, moeda, e letras de cambio, e a carta de incorporação (Lisbon: Typographia Chalcographica, e Litteraria do Arco do Cego, 1801). Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical (Dublin: W. Porter; J. Archer, 1796), published as Ensayos politicos, economicos, e philosophicos, ‘traduzido em vulgar por Hippolyto José da Costa Pereira’ [‘translated in vulgar language by Hipólito da Costa], volume I (Lisbon: Typographia Chalcographica, Typoplastica, e Litteraria do Arco do Cego, 1801), volume 2 (Lisbon: Regia Officina Typografica, 1802). António Henrique de Oliveira Marques, História da Maçonaria em Portugal (Lisbon: Editoral Presença, volume 1, 1990, volume 2, 1996, volume 3, 1997), 79. Hipólito da Costa, A Narrative of the Persecution of Hippolyto Joseph da Costa Pereira Furtado de Mendonça ... imprisoned and tried in Lisbon, by the Inquisition, for the pretended crime of free-masonry. To which are added, the bye-laws of the Inquisition of Lisbon, both ancient and modern ... taken from the originals in one of the Royal Libraries in London (London: W. Lewis, 1811). Also published in Portuguese in the same year: Narrativa de perseguiçaõ de Hippolyto Joseph da Costa Pereira Furtado de Mendonça ... Prezo, e processado em Lisboa pelo pretenso crime de framaçon ou pedreiro livre (London: W. Lewis, 1811).

70

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

18 Hipólito da Costa, ‘Cartas sobre a Framaçonaria’, in Obras Maçônicas de Hipólito José da Costa, ed. João Nery Guimarães (Brasília: Grande Oriente do Brasil, 2000); Historia de Portugal. Composta em inglez por uma sociedade de literatos, trasladada em vulgar com as notas da edição franceza, e do traductor portuguez, Antonio Moraes de Silva; e continuada até os nossos tempos: em nova edição (London: Offic. de F. Wingrave, T. Boosey, Dulau e Co., and Lackington, Allen e Co., 1809). 19 Nova Grammatica Portuguesa e Inglesa, Nova Edição. Revista e consideravelmente aumentada, por H. J. da Costa (London: Off. Typograf. de F. Wingrave, Strand, 1818). On this grammar, see Pablo Antonio Iglesias Magalhães, ‘A Palavra e o Império: Manoel de Freitas Brazilierio e a Nova Grammatica Ingleza e Portugueza’ (http:// www.revista.ufpe.br/revistaclio/index.php/revista/article/viewFile/283/184, 1 October 2016); Hipólito da Costa, Sketch for the History of Dyonisian Artificers: A Fragment (Red. J. b. hare, London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones; Paternoster-Row, 1820). 20 See Luis Francisco Munaro, ‘Fofocas, Boatos e Rumores: os Portugueses em Londres (1808–1822)’, Mosaico IV, no. 7 (2014) (http://cpdoc.fgv.br/mosaico/?q=artigo/ fofocas-boatos-e-rumores-os-portugueses-em-londres-1808-1822, 20 October 2016), and ‘A Taverna City of London e o Jornalismos Luso-Portuguez (1808-1822) (https:// www.academia.edu/7488341/A_taverna_City_of_London_e_o_jornalismo_lusobrasileiro_1808-1822, 20 October 2016). 21 See, in particular, Correio Braziliense 1 (1808): 384–92, where this issue is analysed in detail. All translations of original quotes are by the authors. 22 Roderick Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798–1852 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 23 For a list of Portuguese periodicals published in London, see chapter 4. 24 See José Tengarrinha, ‘Os Comerciantes e a Imprensa Portuguesa da Primeira Emigraçao’ (http://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/fi cheiros/5037.pdf, 20 October 2016),1080, and Luís Munaro, O Jornalismo Português em Londres (1808–1822), PhD thesis (http://www.historia.uff .br/stricto/td/1634.pdf, 20 October 2016), 317. The book reference is O Jornalismo Português em Londres (1808–1822): Retrato de um Tempo e uma Profissão (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Publit, 2014). 25 See José Tengarrinha, ‘Jornalismo de Convergências e de Confrontos’ (http:// observatoriodaimprensa.com.br/primeiras-edicoes/jornalismo-de-convergncias-e-deconfrontos-2/, 20 October 2016). 26 Mecenas Dourado, Hipólito da Costa e o Correio Braziliense (Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca do Exército Editora, 1957), t. 1, 241. 27 José Tengarrinha, ‘Os Comerciantes e a Imprensa Portuguesa da Primeira Emigração’, 1072. 28 See chapter 4 of this book and José Tengarrinha, ‘Os Comerciantes e a Imprensa Portuguesa da Primeira Emigração’, 1072. 29 For a list of the printing houses used by the Portuguese papers published in London, see Luís Munaro, O Jornalismo Portuguez em Londres, 83. 30 Correio Braziliense 29 (1822): 574–5. 31 Correio Braziliense 8 (1812): 550. 32 Correio Braziliense 9 (1812): 668. 33 Correio Braziliense 1 (1808): 3. 34 Derek Roper, Reviewing before the ‘Edinburgh’, 1788–1802 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978), 36–7. 35 Correio Braziliense 23 (1819): 174–5.

Hipólito da Costa, the Correio Braziliense

71

36 Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age (Leicester and New York: Leicester University Press and St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 4. 37 Joanne Shattock, Politics and Reviewers, 6. 38 Maria Lúcia G. Pallares-Burke, The Spectator, o Teatro das Luzes: Diálogo e Imprensa no Século XVIII (São Paulo: Hucitec, 1995), 14. 39 Antonio Candido, Formação da Literatura Brasileira (Momentos Decisivos) (São Paulo: Martins, 1962), 254. 40 Correio Braziliense 14 (1809): 49. 41 Correio Braziliense 20 (1818): 425. 42 Ibid. 43 Correio Braziliense 5 (1810): 653. 44 Correio Braziliense 13 (1814): 95. 45 Correio Braziliense 12 (1819): 318. 46 Correio Braziliense 5 (1810): 566. 47 Correio Braziliense 10 (1813): 374. 48 On the relationship between Hipólito da Costa and Francisco de Miranda, see Thais Helena dos Santos Buvalovas, ‘Hipólito da Costa em Londres: Libertadores, Whiggs e Radicais no Discurso Político do Correio Braziliense (1808–1812)’, PhD thesis (http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-30042013-102854/pt-br.php, 28 August 2017). We thank Karen Racine for drawing to our attention a number of documents proving that Hipólito da Costa and Francisco de Miranda were connected. 49 Correio Braziliense 19 (1817): 105. 50 See chapter 2 on this process. 51 Correio Braziliense 12 (1814): 466. 52 Ibid., 467. 53 Ibid., 467. 54 Correio Braziliense 10 (1813): 99. 55 Ibid., 101. 56 Carlos Rizzini, Hipólito da Costa e o Correio Brazilense, 18. 57 Carlos Rizzini, Hipólito da Costa e o Correio Braziliense, 22. 58 Hipólito da Costa was born on 25 March 1774 and was in fact was 49 years old when he died. 59 The Gentleman’s Magazine 12, New Series (July to December 1839), London: William Pickering; John Bower Nichols and Son, 1839, 139–40. 60 Alexandre José Barbosa Lima Sobrinho, Hipólito da Costa, Pioneiro da Independência do Brasil (Brasília, Fundação Assis Chateaubriand, 1996), 121. 61 Roderick Barman, Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 52–3. 62 Ibid., 52. 63 Letter by Hipólito da Costa quoted by Alcebíades Furtado, in ‘Biographia de Hippolito José da Costa Pereira Furtado de Mendonça’, Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo 17 (1912).

4

The Press as a Reflection of the Divisions among the Portuguese Political Exiles (1808–1832) Daniel Alves and Paulo Jorge Fernandes

Introduction Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, public opinion had played a vital role in Portuguese society, particularly during the French Invasions (1807–11) when it was supported by the emergence of a new kind of journalism – underground and highly critical of the situation that the kingdom was in.1 The turmoil subsequent to 1807 contributed to the increasing politicization of literate society and the emergence of a social space where discussion was initiated, together with the learning process of citizenship. An awareness had emerged that the solution to the problems of the kingdom lay in changing the political regime, a process similar to what would indeed take place in Spain in January 1820. Nevertheless, the origins of the politicization of the public sphere in Portugal took place in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.2 Public opinion, expressed in the papers but also supported in other social venues such as cafés and clubs, appeared as a reference in the individual political struggle, where the periodical became a kind of pulpit for the new century and the journalists became forefront actors of the socio-political changes registered up to that time.3 In the eyes of the country’s elites, contributors had a direct influence on public events. Between the beginning of the Peninsular War (1807) and the Liberal Revolution (1820), the maintenance of the royal family in Brazil, the economic crisis, the sidelining of the metropolis and growing British influence in Portugal spurred protest and demands for change in Portuguese society. During these years, to escape arrest and political persecution many Portuguese went into exile to the British capital and beyond. Through the publication of periodicals abroad, especially in London, they defended liberalism and constitutionalism. Hope for reform was revived by the Liberal Revolution, the first parliamentary experience and the adoption of the Constitution of 1822. However, this was reversed between 1823 and the death of Dom João VI in 1826, the year in which Dom Pedro granted the Constitutional Charter (the second Portuguese Constitution). This second life of liberal constitutionalism was interrupted

74

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

again between 1828 and 1834, during the absolutist government of Dom Miguel, when Portugal witnessed a second wave of political exile and a considerable number of Portuguese liberals settled again in Britain, between London and Plymouth. In addition to a geographical separation, the two groups of exiles became opponents owing to political and ideological reasons. They differed profoundly over the interpretation of political and military events that took place in Portugal, the material conditions of exile, and over the potential role of Dom Pedro IV in mobilizing the liberals against the absolutist government of Dom Miguel. The foreign press emerged from in this context. During these two exile periods (1808–20 and 1828–32), one of the key vehicles for the dissemination and discussion of these ideas, plans and differences was the press published in London, but also Plymouth and even Paris. This chapter will start by showing how this Portuguese liberal public sphere was formed in London. Then, a rereading of the political discourse of these Portuguese periodicals will be sought, to highlight the differences between the political exiles that were responsible for editing and to understand the main external influences exerted on the Portuguese liberal movement. In part, the political discourse of the Portuguese London press may help to explain the peculiarities of the two periods of exile, one until the outbreak of the Liberal Revolution of 1820 and the other during the Civil War (1832–4).

The creation of a ‘reasonably free’ press in London The phrase ‘reasonably free’ is found in the pages of one of the periodicals published by Portuguese liberal exiles in London, the Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra, one of the most influential Portuguese-language periodicals published in that city prior to the Liberal Revolution of 1820.4 The phrase is relevant in two respects: on one hand, it conveys the importance of being in London and having access to the city’s cosmopolitan and liberal way of life, making it possible to adopt a critical stance towards the events and national crisis experienced from 1807 onwards. On the other hand, it suggests that even away from the Portuguese authorities’ censorship and persecutory intervention, this same press was never quite free and independent from the various powers and interests involved. This section surveys the formation of this liberal and Portuguese public sphere in London. These periodicals turned out to be both a consequence of the political climate and a stimulus for the development of new ideas. Ultimately, they contributed to the ideological framework of the Portuguese Liberal Revolution of 1820, inspired by the French revolutionary example or by the English liberal model. As stated by a Portuguese historian of the nineteenth century, Simão José da Luz Soriano, it is believed that ‘the press or Portuguese journalism in London [would have been] the one that by that time began to openly disseminate among us, to all classes of the nation, liberal ideas calling more particularly for the attention of the learned men of the country to the French Revolution of 1789’.5 As early as 1829 the British press – retrospectively recognizing the importance that the Portuguese periodicals published in London had in the dawn of the Liberal Revolution in Portugal – obviously gave more prominence to what

The Press as a Reflection of the Divisions among the Portuguese Exiles

75

they considered to be a ‘positive contamination exercised by the freedom of the press existing in Britain’, which had proved crucial to the events of 1820.6 As we shall see, this double influence, which is visible in the discourse of the periodicals, was beginning to play its role even before 1807. At the time, Portuguese society and political circles had already been divided in reaction to the deep unrest affecting Europe since 1789. While the first news from Versailles in the year of the revolution was met with a mixture of amazement and curiosity, censorship and silence then settled from October 1789, in response to the revolutionary events.7 The Continental Blockade decreed by Napoleon and the Crown’s belief that the salvation of the monarchy, independence and empire would only be ensured with English support, determined to a large extent the departure of the monarchs and the Court for Brazil in 1807. Portugal was invaded by the French General Junot, and tougher conditions were imposed on the population through the collection of new taxes and agricultural requests. As of June 1808, a series of upheavals burst forth and by August resistance was aided by the arrival of British troops; later in that month, the first French Invasion came to an end. At the same time, Portugal experienced a period of relative freedom of the press, with the circulation of thousands of pamphlets, some periodicals and books. These were mostly critical and fiercely combative towards the French, and ushered in a period of unprecedented freedom of speech and writing in Portuguese society. The absence of a strong central power to counter the relaxation of censorship, coupled with the usefulness that the Regency saw in being able to count on the help of an aggressive public opinion against the invader, both explain to a large extent this uplifting time for Portuguese journalism.8 In March 1809 the French armies entered Portuguese territory once again. However, the people’s guerrillas and the collaboration between British and Portuguese troops defeated the invasion led by Soult. There was also a third invasion, led by Massena between July 1810 and March 1811, which was sustained by defensive lines that had been built north of Lisbon. As soon as the military situation started to be controlled, the Regency authorities began to reverse the freedom that had been granted to the press and the circulation of information. Government started considering the danger of the free flow of information, and soon limitations to the press were brought back. Those who had already initiated the process of establishing a public sphere of debate on the economic, social and political conditions of the country had no other solution than to continue that task abroad. The persecution of those suspected of following French political ideas or the dissemination of liberal or revolutionary ideas was initiated sporadically in 1808 and systematically from March 1809 onwards, with legislation published on 20 March 1809 and reinforced on 6 September 1910. That same month, an action that later became known as the Setembrizada occurred, on the night of the 10th to the 11th, when dozens of arrests were made, increasing the flow of exiles that had begun two years earlier. A portion of them headed to France, but most found refuge in the Portuguese traders’ community based in London and in the Masonic connections that succeeded in settling there.9 It was within this community that a fighting press was born – one that disseminated political views about society, economy and politics in Portugal. This press was born

76

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

out of a double movement. It was a response to the critical conditions that the country was facing and to the need to point out economic and political solutions to that crisis. In 1816, for example, the O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra (henceforth Investigador), one of the periodicals founded in London, defended its criticism addressed to the Portuguese government with regard to ‘public and general discontent, repeated unattended complaints from the people, the breakdown of public revenues, the lack of national credit’.10 It was also a press generated by the growing difficulties of distribution, censorship and persecution for readers and journalists/editors. The Portuguese journalists did not see this happening in Britain. For example, Hipólito José da Costa criticized the state of affairs in Portugal in the Brazilian periodical Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário (henceforth Correio), a monthly newspaper, by saying that ‘public opinion no longer accepts absolute government or government based on the ignorance of the people’.11 In London it was possible to continue the journey initiated in Portugal during the small window of openness afforded by the French invasions, and to ‘achieve the desired purpose to make the Nation prosper in agriculture, commerce, industry, arms and literature’.12 As the main hub of commercial and Atlantic interests at the time, as the place of residence and work of a strong community of Portuguese businessmen, and as the political headquarters of an empire with a long practice of freedom of the press, London – rather than other cities, say Paris – was the obvious choice. There, Portuguese journalists had much easier access to the means for the diffusion of news and thus reach an audience. There they could count on the crucial financial support to carry forward their enterprise and were given the necessary freedom for the dissemination of new ideas. The first to choose this path was the Correio written by Hipólito José da Costa and published between June 1808 and December 1822. Portuguese papers at that time, such as Microscópio de Verdades ou Óculo Singular, acknowledged this by referring to the Correio as the ‘first one that taught us the path wherein we should march’.13 As of 1811, Correio, which was critical of the actions of the authorities in Portugal, and especially in Brazil, began to have competition from the Investigador. This periodical was sponsored by the government in order to fight the opinions of the Correio and the attacks that the Correio frequently addressed to personalities linked to power. The Investigador was published, also on a monthly basis, between June 1811 and February 1819. Until 1814 its editors were Bernardo José de Abrantes e Castro, Vicente Pedro Nolasco da Cunha and Miguel Caetano de Castro. From January 1814 onwards José Liberato Freire de Carvalho14 was the main collaborator and the periodical became progressively more independent from the Portuguese authorities. In late 1818, the incompatibility between the growing independence of José Liberato and the strengthening of censorship led him to abandon the project. In July 1819 he founded O Campeão Portuguez ou o Amigo do Rei e do Povo (henceforth Campeão Portuguez), which was published until June 1821. The third major Portuguese monthly periodical in London was O Portuguez ou Mercúrio Político, Comercial e Literário (henceforth Portuguez) founded in April 1814 and edited by João Bernardo da Rocha Loureiro and published until 1822 (and then again between 1823 and 1826). It was the most radical of the three periodicals, and was therefore affected more often by bans from

The Press as a Reflection of the Divisions among the Portuguese Exiles

77

Figure 4.1 First page of the periodical O Investigador Portuguez. Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra, 1812. © University of Coimbra General Library.

the Portuguese authorities. Its editor had been responsible for another Portuguese paper published in London between May 1813 and February 1814 – O Espelho Político e Moral. Equally short-lived was the Microscópio de Verdades ou Óculo Singular para o Povo Portuguez ver puras e singelas verdades despidas dos caprichos e paixões particulares e outras expostas à brilhante luz do patriotismo (henceforth Microscópio) under the responsibility of Francisco de Alpoim e Meneses, of which only eight issues were published between 1814 and 1815. Finally, towards the onset of the Portuguese Liberal Revolution, Joaquim Ferreira de Freitas started publishing O Padre Amaro ou Sovela, Política, Histórica e Literária, which lasted from January 1820 to August 1829, with several ideological alignments throughout.15 All these periodicals represented various trends of Portuguese liberalism between the French Invasions and the 1820 Revolution. In this first phase (1808–20) two other papers of opposite political tendencies were published in London. They were both absolutist and did not last for a very long time: the Argus Lusitano ou Cartas Analíticas, 1809, with only four issues; O Zurrague Político das Cortes Novas published in March 1821. Both were edited by José Anselmo Correia Henriques.16 The establishment of this ‘reasonably free’ press in London was due to the fights and political persecutions in Portugal, and its papers were only able to survive and endure because of the financial support that the journalists managed to obtain from the community of Portuguese traders, who were their main source of funding.17 The

78

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Table 4.1 List of Portuguese periodicals published in London (1808–1834) Title

Dates of Publication

Correio Braziliense Ou Armazém Literário O Investigador Portuguez Em Inglaterra

June 1808 to December 1822 June 1811 to February 1819

O Campeão Portuguez Ou O Amigo Do Rei E Do Povo O Portuguez Ou Mercúrio Político, Comercial E Literário O Padre Amaro Ou Sovela, Política, Histórica E Literária O Zurrague Político Das Cortes Novas Microscópio De Verdades Ou Óculo Singular O Espelho Político E Moral

July 1819 to June 1821 April 1814 to 1822 and 1823–6 January 1820 to August 1829 March 1821 1814–15

Argus Lusitano Ou Cartas Analíticas O Popular O Correio Interceptado O Cruzeiro Ou Estrela Constitucional dos Portugueses O Censor O Portuguez Emigrado Ou Realista Constitucional O Padre Malagrida Ou A Tezoira Paquete De Portugal

May 1813 to February 1814 1809 1824–6 1825–6 1826–7 1827 1828–9 1828–9 1829–31

O Fulminante O Chaveco Liberal

1829 1829

O Palinuro O Perguntador A Aurora Correios dos Portugueses Emigrados O Precursor O Portuguez Constitucional Em Londres O Inominado

1830 1832–4 1831–2 1831 1831 1832 1832

Editor(s) Hipólito José da Costa Bernardo José de Abrantes e Castro, Vicente Pedro Nolasco da Cunha, Miguel Caetano de Castro and José Liberato Freire de Carvalho José Liberato Freire de Carvalho João Bernardo da Rocha Loureiro Joaquim Ferreira de Freitas José Anselmo Correia Henriques Francisco de Alpoim e Meneses João Bernardo da Rocha Loureiro José Anselmo Correia Henriques Francisco Simões Margiochi José Ferreira Borges

Marcos Pinto Soares Vaz Preto José Pinto Rebelo Carvalho Rodrigo da Fonseca Magalhães, Marcos Pinto Soares Vaz Preto, José Liberato Freire de Carvalho José Ferreira Borges, Almeida Garrett, Paulo Midosi José Ferreira Borges Rodrigo da Fonseca Magalhães

Paulo Midosi

editors themselves accepted the privileged links with the business milieu which partly conditioned their discourse or the choice of the subjects addressed. In 1814, the debutant Microscópio stated that through London ‘the trade body of Lisbon had the means to use the media to make public the diligences it carried out to help it thrive’.18 Nonetheless, the survival of the press, at least until 1817–18, also owed – paradoxical though this may seem – to the Portuguese authorities. On one hand, a free press, able to

The Press as a Reflection of the Divisions among the Portuguese Exiles

79

circulate through the various parts of the Portuguese empire and written by individuals committed to liberal ideas, was a threat to the conservative government. On the other, the authorities had contributed to the success of the London papers in two ways: first, through what appears to be a certain incompetence in enforcing the censorship imposed by the royal law in the aftermath of the French Invasions; secondly, through a more or less discreet financial support to some periodicals, including the Correio and the Investigador, in order to influence and moderate their positions, in particular between 1808 and 1816.19 In a controversy related to the freedom of the press, the Correio referred to the fact that the Regency supported the Investigador so that it would, ‘with no restraint nor limits’, fight the Correio’s ideas. Controversially the Investigador’s editor was from mid-1814 onwards the above-mentioned José Liberato, who was a more independent journalist. In a reference to the Portuguese authorities’ support, the Correio expressed its appreciation, ironically, in seeing its rival ‘preach against the friar, despite the Roevidica tip which nourishes it’.20 The Investigador did not hide this support and in December 1814 explicitly mentioned it by saying, also ironically, that when it denounced ‘public flaws and mistakes’ from the government it was because it aimed at ‘serving well the Prince Regent by that means, from whom we receive very distinct protection’.21 The fact that these periodicals were not truly independent may have caused some hesitation and ambiguity in the way their editors and collaborators positioned themselves ideologically or in the way that they advocated certain stands. The newspapers themselves dealt with this ambiguity using irony. In 1814, to defend itself against the accusation of being an ‘atrocious revolutionary’, the editor of the Correio published a correspondence in which the newspaper was, on the contrary, criticized for its ‘excessive restraint’.22 Nevertheless, the data allow us to state that in the run up to 1820 and the Liberal Revolution, this independence, which the authorities called ‘daring’, seemed to have grown. This is very clear in the Portuguez, Campeão Portuguez and to a lesser extent in the Correio. These were the three most important papers in terms of readership when the movement of 24 August 1820 occurred in Porto.23

A press defending the ‘lights and mores of this century’ (1808–20) The periodicals published in London were an expression of the experience of liberals and their ideological stance during the pre-revolutionary period. From the Investigador’s speech defending the ‘lights and mores of this century’,24 one can identify the different trends of Portuguese liberalism in exile, although these only defined themselves more clearly and even antagonistically in the following period, from 1826–8 to 1834. First, there was a French-tendency moderate group, to which O Investigador belonged, clearly committed to the need for reforms in the political, economic and administrative functioning of the monarchy, which, because of this need, did not set aside the possibility of a revolution. Second, there was a more radical group, represented by the Portuguez, highly critical of the current monarchy and engaged in a deeper and more abrupt shift that would be carried out through a revolution. Finally, the third

80

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

group, represented by the Correio, was closer to the English liberal model and was also the most moderate of the three. The Correio was committed to, and even satisfied with the new political and economic situation resulting from the transfer of the royal family to Brazil in 1807, although it still longed for greater openness to reforms. This same division was inclusively suggested in the controversies that gradually occurred between the various papers. In 1817, for example, the Investigador acknowledged in the Portuguez a much more radical and impatient voice than in the Correio, which it labelled as ‘much more moderate’.25 With this in mind, a reading of the discourse of these periodicals, including their stands regarding the likelihood of reform or revolution as a way to resolve the crisis, reflects different political alignments within a general liberal trend. In the field of liberal ideas, the various periodicals, particularly the Correio, the Investigador, the Portuguez and the Campeão Portuguez, vehemently defended individual freedoms – which obviously included the freedom of the press – and nationalism, the limitation or even the end of the influence of the church on politics, and a greater political participation of new social groups, while understanding despotism as the main aspect to be combated and the leading cause of a hypothetical revolution. Still, this view on what should be the broadening of the public sphere of the kingdom was relatively moderate, ruling out any idea that might be more democratic, radical or republican, and highlighting the leadership role that should be attributed to the educated and competent people of the country, that is, the elite. This last aspect is very clear throughout the discourse of these periodicals, either before or after the revolutionary events of 1817. In 1816, using a very personal historical reading of the situation, the Investigador compared the excesses of the French Revolution with what had happened in the restoration of the independence of Portugal in 1640. In its view, a revolution without the intervention of the people could produce good results, namely a constitutional monarchy and a moderate government of landowners. The Investigador therefore gave the example of Portuguese history by stating that the ‘Revolution of 1640’ had been ‘wonderful’ because ‘it was a revolution made by the educated and most respectable men of the nation’.26 Already after the 1817 events, the Correio, commenting on the case of Pernambuco, warned that rather than chase the revolutionaries, the government should attack ‘the root causes of the revolutions’ and that it was essential to ignore the ‘demagogues’ and follow the opinion of the ‘good and illustrated men of the nation’.27 Everyone seemed to agree that the way towards a moderate constitutionalism, sometimes inspired by the English model, sometimes by the French model, could be the ideal reform path for solving the problems that had been diagnosed for the country. Nonetheless, not all defended a similar way to accomplish this. The Correio believed more in the value of policy reforms undertaken or guided by a monarch who was able to surround himself with men inspired by the ‘lights of the century’. In the end, the changes would be limited but necessary to regenerate Portugal, to promote the ‘happiness of the people’ and ‘the improvements to the country’.28 For the Investigador, the need for a Parliament, even in the traditional way, was aimed at stimulating a greater disruption and the drafting of a Constitution by the people’s representatives. In this periodical, the French revolutionary ideas were more present because, even

The Press as a Reflection of the Divisions among the Portuguese Exiles

81

though it criticized excesses embodied by Robespierre or Napoleon, the periodical understood that the convening of Parliament would, as in the French example, be the opportunity to set in motion forces as transformative as the ones that had shaken France between 1789 and 1791. For the Investigador, all revolutions ‘produce great evils’ but also ‘produce many goods and some of them of great value’. Therefore, one should ‘keep the good’ that the revolution had brought with it and ‘quietly eradicate’ the evils.29 Nevertheless, this paper’s sometimes ambiguous and still relatively moderate position, perhaps influenced by the official support, led it to criticize the more radical way of the Portuguez, which openly advocated the revolutionary way and the people’s sovereignty when it claimed to have ‘a holy respect for all revolutions of nature and also for those of politics when they are made by the people’.30 The Portuguese periodicals in London did not always agree on the ways to face the country’s problems and overcome the crisis experienced since 1807. Yet they did not have any divergences as far as what they considered to be a major cause of these problems and even the inevitability of revolution. All without exception pointed to ‘despotism’ as the root of all evils.31 Whether defending the interests of traders, criticizing the actions of the Portuguese government, or advising the Portuguese monarch, commenting on the current international situation, or elaborating on other historical periods, all these reasons, themes and times acted to draw attention to ‘despotism’ and its consequences. To the Correio, the ‘acts of absolute despotism’ could only have negative consequences for both ‘public credit’ and trade.32 For the Investigador, despotism prevented ‘progress’ and generated ‘abuse’ and was only acceptable ‘for soldiers: nations cannot nor should not rule like an army’.33 From the perspective of these journalists, it was certainly no coincidence that the current French and Spanish political situations were often commented on and criticized by the worst that was brought out by the Restoration. When in May 1814 Fernando VII of Spain repudiated the Constitution of Cadiz, the Correio saw it as a sign of the return to ‘despotism’, a destruction of the ‘improvements introduced by Parliament’.34 The paper reinforced this argument in August 1816, when the Spanish monarch ordered the arrest of the ‘People’s Members of Parliament’ of Navarra, which, according to Hipólito da Costa, consisted of an assembly where traditionally ‘all laws and royal orders’ were submitted and approved.35 In the case of France and Louis XVIII, in 1814 the Investigador accused the monarch of being responsible for Napoleon’s return from Elba. It is true that it had criticized Bonaparte, but for José Liberato the fact that the French monarch had dissolved the previous assemblies had given strength to the ‘Jacobins led by regicides’.36 The idea that the rulers of the new century could not simply ignore what had happened after the French Revolution underpinned these criticisms, which were primarily intended to both alert the Portuguese monarch and educate readers. O Investigador stated that the monarchs were now ‘leaders of people, but not their masters’.37 The more radical tendency of the Investigador, as evidenced in this phrase, was counterbalanced by a moderate liberal reform path advocated by the Correio. From this newspaper’s perspective, reforms should come to a compromise: they should not incorporate suggestions ‘aimed at increasing despotism’ but there was also no

82

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

justification for those reforms that ‘tried to introduce the republican format into the Portuguese monarchy’.38 Nevertheless, it was necessary to do something and after 1817 the line between the need for reform and the threat of revolution was becoming very thin. Responding to criticisms that were directed to the growing radicalism of Portuguese journalists in London, the Investigador refuted that the ‘ideas of the philosophers’ (basically, the ideas of these journalists) were the cause of revolutions. Referring to the history of the French monarchy, the paper believed that the real cause of revolutions was rather the fact that thinkers drew the attention of a more observant and alert population to ‘the disorders of state’s finances, heavy taxation, public corruption of the Royal Court, the insults against individual liberty, … religious intolerance … and despotisms’.39 This role of educating and warning the population, the governments and the monarch was now the responsibility of the press, which since 1808 had found in London a fertile ground. Portuguese historiography summarizes the beginning of the first liberal exile and the establishment of this Portuguese press through an almost direct link between the political events in Portugal and the founding of papers in Britain. ‘The departure of the King and the Royal Court to Brazil gave birth in London to O Correio Braziliense in 1808. The defeat of Massena and Beresford’s consulate, supported by the governors, gave birth to O Portuguez’ in 1814.40 The final stage of this first exile can be thought of in a similar way as the 1817 events, and the way the authorities reacted to them gave impetus to a greater radicalism, expressed first in the pages of the Investigador (1817–18) and then in the

Figure 4.2 José Liberato Freire de Carvalho, editor of O Campeão Portuguez ou o Amigo do Rei e do Povo, 1822. © National Library of Portugal.

The Press as a Reflection of the Divisions among the Portuguese Exiles

83

Campeão Portuguez (1819). The Liberal Revolution of 1820, allowing for the right of the people to parliamentary representation, in turn, brought a political openness and freedom of expression that seemed to render unnecessary the continuation of this London press. Symbolically, in 1822, the paper of José Liberato – O Campeão Portuguez em Inglaterra – became O Campeão Portuguez em Lisboa, thus reflecting the geographic change, but also the new regime’s openness. More significantly, the paper’s subtitle had been changed as well: in exile it was Amigo do Rei e do Povo (Friend of the King and the People), and in Portugal it became Amigo do Povo e do Rei Constitucional (Friend of the People and the Constitutional King). The change in the order of the political actors in the paper’s title expressed the changes that were being implemented regarding the definition of the legitimate origin of sovereign power. Still, this freedom was only felt for three years because in May 1823 a military uprising led by the Royal Prince Dom Miguel put an end to the first Portuguese liberal experience, initiating a new exile of journalists abroad that would transform into an expressive political exile from 1828 onwards.

Rebels with several causes: The Portuguese liberal movement in London (1828–32) The second liberal experience revived the national movement of periodicals (1826–8), materializing in an explosion of new titles comparable to those of 1821. Freedom of the press was once again put back into the actual text of the fundamental law (Article 145, §3, of the Constitutional Charter of 1826, the second Portuguese Constitution granted from Rio de Janeiro by Dom Pedro IV). Yet in practice, moderate Chartism took charge of curtailing the constitutional provisions when limited press freedom. In 1828, immediately after the acclamation of Dom Miguel, there was once again a return to the pre-1820 situation, with State control – through the Mesa do Desembargo do Paço, one of the royal courts – of everything that was published in the country. In 1826, 48 new periodicals had appeared, only to fall into a state of apathy after the seizure of power by Dom Miguel. Meanwhile, the decrees of 23 September 1826, 20 June 1827, 17 August 1827 and 13 September 1827 had already set up censorship commissions, limited printing rights and dismissing the less stringent censors. Due to the persecutions that targeted liberal journalists in 1830, only nine titles were printed in the entire kingdom.41 After 1828, for the second time in a few years, there was a flourishing of journalism written from abroad. Unlike the previous generation, the second wave of liberal journalism assumed a closer relationship with the different spheres of government action, from which it can be concluded that the pages of the papers were one of the key political and social fields of intervention by the former outcasts of the miguelismo.42 This political press would again be heard and read, as a matter of practicality, from Britain, especially from London but also Plymouth, which had been the favourite destination of the Portuguese political refugees since the beginning of the century. This was a more intense social and political movement than all the previous ones because it was in England that the liberalist proto-partisan groups would form.43

84

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Over a few years, numerous titles appeared in London, such as Paquete de Portugal (1829–31), O Fulminante (1829), O Chaveco Liberal (1829), O Palinuro (1830), O  Correio dos Açores (1830), Correio dos Portugueses Emigrados (1831), A Aurora (1831–2), O Precursor (1831), O Portuguez Constitucional em Londres (1832) and the Inominado (1832). Apart from the titles printed in the British capital, the following titles were published from Plymouth during these years: O Portuguez Emigrado ou Realista Constitucional (1828–9) and O Padre Malagrida ou a Tezoira (1828–9). Ideologically, the exiles from the second generation in Britain were divided into two groups. The first group was formed by the uncompromising supporters of the nation’s sovereignty and followers of the 1822 Constitution. The supporters of this group, led by the Passos brothers (José and Manuel) and known as democrats or radicals, recognized that all power was derived from a popular mandate. This group was led by the Passos brothers (José and Manuel). The Chartists were in the second group. They supported the 1826 Constitutional Charter, inspired by the 1814 French Charter and the 1824 Brazilian Constitution. The Chartist model, advocated by the entourage of Palmela, ambassador in London until 1828, proposed a sovereignty shared between the King and the Nation, but through the introduction of a fourth power. This fourth power, the Moderator, attributed to the monarch, turned the latter into the main arbitrator of domestic politics. This constitutional solution, significantly more conservative, proposed to reconcile the principles of monarchical legitimacy with revolutionary democratic freedom, a transposition to the Portuguese context of the juste milieu theorized by Royer-Collard and Benjamin Constant. In the British capital and in the south, exiles were also divided over what status to grant Dom Pedro. Was he the ‘guardian’ or ‘protector’ of his daughter as future queen of Portugal for whom he had abdicated in 1826, as claimed by the democrats who only recognized in him as Duke of Bragança, his family title? Or could he present himself as the future Regent while Princess Maria was under age? In 1828, with Dom Pedro still as emperor of Brazil, Paulo Midosi44 published in London an anonymous pamphlet defending the validity of the Constitutional Charter donor’s claim in relation to the throne. In Portugal, the miguelista government mistakenly attributed the authorship to Almeida Garrett. In London the controversy surrounding the authorship of the pamphlet served to call the attention to the ‘Portuguese issue’ and the fate of thousands of exiles. Midosi’s text had the power to start a real ‘war of the pamphlets’ that had at its core the discussion of the role to be given to Dom Pedro, an issue which further separated the enthusiasts of national sovereignty from the admirers of royal legitimacy. The document was even translated into French and English, which increased its international impact. In January 1831, Rodrigo Pinto Pizarro published another pamphlet with the title Norma das regências aplicada à menoridade de D. Maria II in Paris, where the most assertive legal and political argumentation against any future regency by Dom Pedro took place. This earned its author a ban from the liberal army and prison by order of the same Dom Pedro when he returned to Lisbon in 1834. The ‘war of the pamphlets’ passed to the periodicals, as would be expected, making it one of the stages of the division between palmelistas45 and saldanhistas.46 Also in

The Press as a Reflection of the Divisions among the Portuguese Exiles

85

October 1828, in Plymouth, O Portuguez Emigrado ou Realista Constitucional was published, which was a bilingual periodical sponsored by Cândido José Xavier. It was not coincidental that the fortnightly O Padre Malagrida ou a Tesoura: Periódico Político e Literário was launched one month later in Plymouth. It was a short-lived title that had some influence within the local exile community. The main idea that these periodicals generated was to try and keep the spirit of the refugees and seek the unity of the liberal movement, a task virtually impossible to ensure. It was nonetheless in London that the bulk of Portuguese press were concentrated. After the publication of a small paper, O Fulminante, in 1829, there came to light the Paquete de Portugal, one of the most important titles of this foreign newspapers. Its editorial board counted with some heavyweight figures, such as Rodrigo da Fonseca Magalhães,47 Marcos Vaz Preto and José Liberato Freire de Carvalho. This periodical openly endorsed the dynastic pretensions of Princess Maria da Glória and her father. It was considered that the Emperor [Dom Pedro] is bound by nature, politics, and his honour, to which he will certainly not fail, to maintain the rights of his Venerable daughter in her person and in his descendants. His daughter is the only legitimate person for the succession of Portuguese throne. He is also bound by the Constitutional Charter, which is entirely his work and he gave to the Portuguese Nation, as the legitimate King he was, by virtue of his generosity and sound ruling.48

Figure 4.3  First page of the periodical Chaveco Liberal. O Chaveco Liberal, 1829. © National Library of Portugal.

86

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

This uncompromising defence of the Chartist stance resulted shortly afterwards in the departure of José Liberato, in conflict with the policy orientations of the publication. Another impactful publication was O Chaveco Liberal, also published in London from September to December 1829. Its purpose was to unite the exiled liberal group, ideologically divided. This paper shone through the literary quality of its editors – José Ferreira Borges, Almeida Garrett and Paulo Midosi – but also their extreme fidelity to the future queen, to Dom Pedro and to the Constitution. It was openly stated that ‘because of Lady Maria II we departed in combat against all her enemies and advocating the constitutional freedom that we defend with as much heart and desire as we defend the Sovereign, who came for us, and for her and with her shall reign’.49 Like the majority of titles published in the London exile, this periodical also reported on relevant events occurring in Portugal during the government of Dom Miguel, warning about the climate of fear, the persecutions and the widespread disorganization that the country was undergoing, since ‘the system of terror that reigns in Portugal every day assumes a more serious, more intense and more horrific attitude …, from the last lists of existing processes one can see that the number of prisoners goes up to twenty thousand …, the army was disbanded, some say for lack of money, others for fear of an insurrection’.50 The Palinuro, whose editor was José Ferreira Borges, was published following this same moderate line in 1830 in London. Another periodical that came out in 1830, in the month of June, was the Correio dos Açores, which established itself as a deeply liberal title. By this time the liberal regency had established itself in Angra on the Terceira Island in the Azores. Religious tolerance and freedom of conscience were advocated in its pages, ‘that is to say, the solid establishment of fair, true and salutary principles that facilitate the spread of the lights, the progress of civilization and the prosperity of nations on the ruins of a false, absurd and pernicious principle, which for so long had perverted reason, outlawed the truth, and bullied the thought’.51 This periodical also proposed to publish the acts of the regency in the Azores, defending the royal legitimacy of Dom Pedro but insisting that the 1826 Constitution could only be revised in exact accordance with the terms foreseen in it, with no special privileges being granted in this area to the former king, who thus lost his constituent entitlement.52 A Aurora Boreal, a publication initiated in November 1831 and defined by its informative content to the exile community in the British capital, was more neutral from a political point of view. O Pelourinho, also published in London, expressed nonetheless more radical positions against Dom Pedro and Chartism. To combat the influence of the latter title, Almeida Garrett returned to pen to publish O Precursor. During the year 1831, other periodicals were published in London. The Correio dos Portugueses Emigrados had few issues published. The first issue of Aurora was also published near the end of the year. It was founded by Rodrigo da Fonseca Magalhães and had among its collaborators Cândido José Xavier. Its pages served once again to make the uncompromising and exalted advocacy of the role of Dom Pedro and Chartism, because ‘when the constitutional charter came into being, the faction dropped the post in which it was sitting as a queen. The nation seemed to revive, the fire of patriotism and gratitude enflamed in every heart. Which of us can forget the scenes that the whole kingdom witnessed?’53

The Press as a Reflection of the Divisions among the Portuguese Exiles

87

O Portuguez Constitucional em Londres was published in March 1832, by Paulo Midosi who now opposed the papers that supported Dom Pedro and took the liberal regency as a violation of the Constitutional Charter. It advocated that ‘Dom Pedro can be the Regent of Portugal because there is no absolute impediment for him to be so, and because the blood in his veins is Portuguese. But according to the written law, according to the political law that he himself signed, he cannot regain a title that the Charter does not grant him.’54 O Perguntador (1832), which was published anonymously in London, attacked Chartism and Dom Pedro even more violently. Other titles were also published in both London and Plymouth after 1832, but began to lose significance because in July 1832 the liberal army gathered in Angra, Azores, landed on the continent to initiate the military operations of civil war. Liberal exiles now had the long-awaited opportunity to overthrow the government of the ‘usurper’ and fight for the ideas that they defended.55

Conclusion In the first decades of the nineteenth century, London had a rather ambiguous influence on Portuguese history and policy, particularly on the affirmation of Liberalism in Portugal. On the one hand, the commercial, political and military role of the British was crucial to maintain the independence and survival of the monarchy at one stage, and to the victory of the liberals in the civil war. It was also a cause of discontent and of the developments leading to profound political change and the breakdown of part of the Portuguese Empire. On the other hand, the cosmopolitan and liberal character of Britain’s political and journalistic milieu helped significantly shape the Portuguese press, which, twice in a span of about 30 years, was forced to take refuge there. During the first exile, between 1808 and 1820, the Portuguese created a few periodicals in London, some being successful enough to have an impact on the establishment of a liberal public opinion in Portugal. Overall, this press was concerned with the country’s commercial, economic and even cultural affairs, but it was the political and governance issues that stimulated its critical discourse against the crisis that Portugal faced. From this period remains the idea of a liberal movement still being established, although with a common and clearly defined target – despotism and all the negativity it entailed. However, these London periodicals and the discourse of their writers already showed some divergences, nuances concerning the suggested solutions to the crisis and regarding the external influences that the movement was suffering over time. They also illustrate a greater or lesser adherence to two models of society and government: a more conservative English-inspired model and a more radical French-inspired model. The periodicals published in London were decisive – because of the reforms they proposed and due to a certain image of moderate revolution that they progressively established – for the training and formatting of that liberal opinion who initiated the Liberal Revolution. The divisions that could be sensed before 1820 were accentuated during the second exile; the press published in London soon after 1828 became the ideal instrument

88

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

to rehearse the presentation of the ideological proposals of the various groups that formed the liberal political family. The divisions perceived after 1834, which led the country to permanent political instability and a second civil war in 1846–1847, were already present in the migration periodicals in Britain, divided between an elite who supported the claims of Dom Pedro to present himself as regent of the kingdom and those who recognized in him nothing more than the title of Duke of Bragança. Everyone knew what was at stake. Dom Pedro had granted the Constitutional Charter which placed the king as arbitrator of national politics, a claim that collided with those from the champions of the people’s sovereignty and democracy. The military victory of the forces under the command of Dom Pedro would mean not only the defeat of Dom Miguel but also the defeat of radicalism and subsequent restoration of the Chartist order, which was understandably unacceptable to those who had risked so much during the war years. The conditions under which both factions faced exile in London and Plymouth helped explain these disagreements. The debate opened by these papers in the British capital had the effect of clarifying the guidelines for confrontation and for drawing the attention of the local political and periodicals milieus to the existence of a ‘Portuguese issue’. On one side were the followers of moderate liberalism, reflecting the influences of French and Brazilian Chartism, but also the British constitutional model. On the other side were the advocates of the revolutionary perspectives debated in France in 1789 by Sieyès, among others, who defended the existence of a power inherent to the nation, whose legitimacy would provide the basis for the rise of the Third Estate to power. The pages of this political press published by exiles in London made a decisive contribution to this whole story.

Notes 1 Maria Helena Carvalho dos Santos, ‘Imprensa periódica clandestina no século XIX: “O Portuguez” e a Constituição’, Análise Social XVI, no. 61–2 (1980): 429–45. 2 José Tengarrinha, Da liberdade mitificada à liberdade subvertida: uma exploração no interior da repressão à imprensa periódica de 1820 a 1828 (Lisboa: Colibri, 1993), 12; José Augusto dos Santos Alves, A Opinião Pública em Portugal (1780–1820) (Lisboa: Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, 2000); Ana Cristina Araújo, A Cultura das Luzes em Portugal. Temas e Problemas (Lisboa: Livros Horizonte, 2003), 66–103. 3 Niklas Luhman, Political Theory in the Welfare State (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1989); Maria Alexandre Lousada, ‘Espaços de sociabilidade em Lisboa: finais do século XVIII a 1834’ (PhD thesis, Universidade de Lisboa, 1995). 4 O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra 1816, May: 339. 5 Simão José da Luz Soriano, História da Guerra Civil e do Estabelecimento do Governo Parlamentar em Portugal. Segunda época, vol. II (Lisboa: Imprensa Nacional, 1871), 455. 6 Fernando José Egídio Reis, ‘Os periódicos portugueses de emigração (1808–1822)’ (Doutoramento: Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2007), 133. 7 Luís Reis Torgal, ed., O Liberalismo, vol. V, História de Portugal (Lisboa: Estampa, 1993), 19. 8 José Miguel Sardica, A Europa Napoleónica e Portugal: Messianismo Revolucionário, Política, Guerra e Opinião Pública (Parede: Tribuna da História, 2011), 210;

The Press as a Reflection of the Divisions among the Portuguese Exiles

9 10 11 12 13 14 15

16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

89

José Tengarrinha, Nova história da imprensa portuguesa das origens a 1865 (Lisboa: Temas e Debates, 2013), 185. Tengarrinha, Nova história da imprensa portuguesa das origens a 1865, 186–8. O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra 1816, March: 119. Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário 1814, July: 103. Microscópio de verdades ou Oculo Singular 1814, no. 1: v. Ibid., ix. See biography at the end of the text. Reis, ‘Os periódicos portugueses de emigração (1808–1822)’, 63; Tengarrinha, Nova história da imprensa portuguesa das origens a 1865, 188; Luís Francisco Munaro, ‘“O sol da liberdade pura aqui reluz contínuo”: a construção da imprensa lusófona na Inglaterra (1808–1822)’, Idéias-Revista do Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da UNICAMP 5, no. 8 (2014): 243–4. Tengarrinha, Nova história da imprensa portuguesa das origens a 1865, 214. Ibid., 198–202. Microscópio de verdades ou Oculo Singular 1814, no. 1: vi. Adelaide Maria Muralha Vieira Machado, ‘A importância de se chamar portuguez: José Liberato Freire de Carvalho na direcção do Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra, 1814–1819’ (PhD thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2011), 229–31; Tengarrinha, Nova história da imprensa portuguesa das origens a 1865, 198–202. Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário 1814, July: 107. O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra 1814, December: 336. Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário 1814, January: 149. Jorge Pedreira and Fernando Dores Costa, D. João VI (Lisboa: Círculo de Leitores, 2006), 336–37. O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra 1815, August: 251. O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra 1817, July: 129. O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra 1816, March: 122. Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário 1817, July: 107. Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário 1816, September: 372–3. O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra 1816, February: 537. Ibid., 556. João Pedro Rosa Ferreira, O jornalismo na emigração: ideologia e política no Correio brazilience 1808–1822 (Lisboa: Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica, 1992), 61; José Augusto dos Santos Alves, Ideologia e política na imprensa do exílio: O Portuguez (1814–1826) (Lisboa: Impr. Nacional – Casa da Moeda, 2005), 36; Machado, ‘A importância de se chamar portuguez’, 218; Tengarrinha, Nova história da imprensa portuguesa das origens a 1865, 208. Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário 1814, January: 142. O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra 1816, March: 102–5. Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário 1814, June: 922. Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário 1816, August: 247. O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra 1815, April: 427. Ibid., 421. Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário 1816, September: 373. O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra 1817, November: 112. Santos, ‘Imprensa periódica clandestina no século XIX’, 430. Luís Alberto Marques Alves, Subsídios para a História da Imprensa em Portugal (Porto: Centro de Estudos Humanísticos, 1983), 9–10; Tengarrinha, História da imprensa periódica portuguesa, 139–41.

90

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

42 José Manuel Motta de Sousa and Lúcia Maria Mariano Veloso, História da Imprensa Periódica Portuguesa: Subsídios para uma Bibliografia (Coimbra: Biblioteca Geral da Universidade, 1987), 32. 43 Torgal, O Liberalismo, V:80. 44 See biography at the end of the text. 45 Supporters of the Marquis of Palmela. 46 Supporters of the Count of Saldanha. 47 See biography at the end of the text. 48 Paquete de Portugal 1829, August: 27–8. 49 Chaveco Liberal 1829, September: 1–2. 50 Chaveco Liberal 1829, September: 32. 51 Correio dos Açores 1830, June: 17. 52 Ibid., 36–7. 53 A Aurora 1831, December: 3. 54 O Portuguez Constitucional em Londres 1832, March: 3. 55 Tengarrinha, Nova história da imprensa portuguesa das origens a 1865, 451–7.

5

From Republicanism to Anarchism: 50 Years of French Exilic Newspaper Publishing Thomas C. Jones and Constance Bantman

1848–1905: London as an outpost of French politics This chapter offers a long-term assessment of French exile journalism in the second half of the nineteenth century, revealing continuities often ignored by a historiography largely focused on distinct and chronologically separate political communities. London’s role as an outpost of French politics and publishing long predated this period, most notably with the Huguenot refuge and French Revolution émigrés,1 but the second half of the nineteenth century perpetuated and reinvented well-established cultures of exile, in which radical journalism played a prominent role. After 1848, and especially from the winter of 1851–2, the growing French exile presence in Britain was mostly concentrated in London. While strongly disliked by many French exiles, London also had much to offer: the discretion afforded by a sprawling metropolis, geographic proximity to France, an established French-speaking community with dense support networks and above all a lack of repressive legislation against foreign exiles. This last factor was especially relevant in the 1850s and 1890s, periods in which political radicals faced intense repression on the continent. London’s relatively liberal atmosphere proved a boon as revolutionary upheavals, reactionary backlashes, war and the development and repression of new schools of revolutionary thought sent a succession of radical republicans, socialists, democrats and anarchists to London. This assortment of exiles reflected the full diversity of France’s revolutionary tradition, standing in marked contrast to the monarchical and aristocratic exiles of earlier eras of French migration to London. Yet the ideological profile of the typical refugee also changed significantly over this period, principally because of the founding and survival of the Third Republic in the 1870s. Thus, although most French exiles across 1848–1905 were positioned on the left of French politics, those proscribed primarily for their republicanism in the 1850s-1870s would no longer be found in the exile populations of the 1880s and 1890s. This period was also defined by increasing collaboration between London’s varied national exile communities and by the parallel and consequent rise of internationalist ideologies on the revolutionary left. These continuities and ruptures in French politics were reflected

92

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

in exile newspapers, themselves microcosms and refractions of the communities which created and consumed them. The press also reveals the degree to which exile was marked by political stagnation and acrimony bred by defeat and expulsion from the patrie, but also by the opportunity thus created for political reinvention. Such complexity is often ignored in the historiography of exile, which focuses on animosity and divisions between exiles and an assumed culture of enervating ‘disillusion and despair’.2 An investigation of the press highlights a sense of the exiles’ cultural and political community – at once London based, French and transnational – and the positive and productive work undertaken through their lively political discussions and multifaceted cultural activities.

The French exiles and their publications: A chronology With London remaining a safe harbour without immigration restrictions, press censorship or serious political repression of refugee groups, the evolution of its French exile population largely reflected the turbulent course of politics in France. Its composition changed as individuals and groups fell out of favour, were expelled, and, often, eventually amnestied, and it is therefore possible to identify several stages of exile that shed some light on continuities and ruptures in the refugee press. The Second Republic of 1848–51 represented the first such stage. As French politics bitterly polarized following the February revolution of 1848 and conservative antirepublicans scored significant electoral successes, many leading republicans fled to London. Crackdowns following the failed ‘June Days’ insurrection of 1848 and protests against President Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion of Rome in 1849 saw the voluntary or forced exile of politicians like Louis Blanc, Marc Caussidière, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Jean-Baptiste Boichot and Félix Pyat as well as major journalists, including Jean-Philibert Berjeau, Charles Delescluze and Charles Ribeyrolles. There was therefore a visible French republican refugee community in London before the end of the Second Republic. These exiles hoped to save the republic, and maintained contact with republicans still in France. The simultaneous collapse of revolution in the rest of Europe meant that London received refugees from Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere, groups that the French collaborated with in efforts to rejuvenate 1848’s ‘springtime of the peoples’. The French exile newspapers of this period echoed this array of concerns, often being jointly produced with republicans in France or with other European refugees in London. Blanc’s Le Nouveau Monde (1849–51) was therefore published in Paris and, for several months in 1849, appeared in English as Louis Blanc’s Monthly Review, published in London by Thomas Newby. More famous was La Voix du proscrit, successor to the short-lived Le Proscrit, founded by Ledru-Rollin and Delescluze, with an international editorial board in London including Martin Bernard, Berjeau, Ribeyrolles, the Italian refugee Giuseppe Mazzini, the Poles Albert Darasz and Stanisław Worcell, and the German Arnold Ruge. It served as the organ for the Comité central démocratique européen, an internationalist republican organization led by Ledru-Rollin, Mazzini, Darasz and Ruge. A weekly paper, it ran from 27 October 1850 to 6 September 1851,

50 Years of French Exilic Publishing

93

maintaining offices in London, Paris and Saint-Amand (Nord department), where it was published. The late years of the Second Republic saw increasingly harsh repression of the exile press, with Blanc’s journal ‘slowly strangled’ by censorship.3 La Voix du proscrit eventually suffered a similar fate, before one final resurrection as Le Peuple, printed in Troyes (Aube department), debuting less than a week before Bonaparte’s coup d’état.4 The second phase of exilic publishing spanned the early, authoritarian phase of the Second Empire, from Napoleon III’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851 to the general amnesty of his political opponents in August 1859. The coup led to the official proscription and voluntary flight of thousands in the republican démocrate-socialiste party, with perhaps 4,500 reaching Britain by 1852.5 This population quickly shrank as many returned to France, surreptitiously or by pardon and amnesty, moved to the United States, or died, but perhaps 400 of the empire’s most inveterate enemies remained in London in 1859.6 During these years, the exile press denounced Bonapartism, predicted and advocated renewed revolution, and constantly criticized the domestic and foreign policies of the Second Empire. Wholly banned by the Empire, exile publications were now produced entirely on British soil and had to be smuggled into France. This arguably more complete form of exile, combined with the larger number of refugees in London and growing realization that the Second Empire’s collapse was not imminent, led exile newspapers to shift attention away from France, focusing increasingly on

Figure 5.1 Front page of the first issue of La Voix du proscrit, 27 October 1850. © Private Collection.

94

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

reporting, advertising and promoting exile community life. The continuing presence of other European refugee communities in Britain and the reign of reaction across Europe in the 1850s meant that exile newspapers remained highly international in their composition and outlook. The most famous was L’Homme, which ran weekly for most of the period, 30 November 1853–23 August 1856. Edited and largely written by Ribeyrolles, it was a strikingly transnational endeavour, printed by the Polish socialist Zeno Świętosławski’s Imprimerie universelle, which published texts by exiles of every nationality, and financed by the Italian exile Luigi Pianciani. Most contributors were French, including Ribeyrolles himself and the veteran journalists Prosper BonnetDuverdier, Joseph Cahaigne and Philippe Faure, but it also featured contributions by European exiles like Alexander Herzen, Lajos Kossuth, Mazzini, Pianciani and Worcell. For most of L’Homme’s run, it was edited from and printed in Saint-Helier, Jersey, with offices and correspondents in London, where it fully relocated in November 1855. Much of L’Homme’s personnel and ideological outlook reappeared in June 1857 in the monthly Bulletin de l’Association Internationale. The Bulletin served as the official journal of the International Association (IA), an alliance of French, German and Polish socialist exiles in London and internationalist Chartists led by Ernest Jones. It was edited by the French exile Alfred Talandier, who had contributed to L’Homme, and printed by Świętosławski in French, English, German and Polish. Limited funds forced the Bulletin’s closure after one year.7

Figure 5.2 Front page of L’Homme, 30 November 1853. © Private Collection.

50 Years of French Exilic Publishing

95

During the Second Empire’s ‘liberal’ period, roughly stretching from the amnesty of 1859 to the Franco-Prussian war and proclamation of the Third Republic in 1870, the French refugee population in London waned, diminished by deaths and continued migration to France and America, with no fresh waves of refugees replenishing lost numbers. Nevertheless, those most intransigently opposed to Napoleon III, including Blanc, Ledru-Rollin, Pyat and Talandier, remained in voluntary exile. After many years in London, this smaller exile community no longer expected the imminent renewal of revolution and was therefore far more muted than in the 1850s. They also became more integrated into their host society, and many individually published their reflections on Britain in the British and French press.8 This increasing engagement with British affairs was mirrored in the few exile newspapers of the decade, published by Joseph-Charles Collet. Collet’s Working Man was an enthusiastic supporter of the British cooperative movement, which many French socialists viewed as a spontaneous, labour-led attainment of the socialist ideals of equitable and collaborative forms of work.9 The paper, however, did not present itself as a French observer of British social phenomena, but as a ‘political and social advocate of the rights of labour’ within Britain, and was published entirely in English. Collet maintained ties to the Chartist Bronterre O’Brien’s National Reform League, with some League members sitting on the Working Man’s management board. The paper first appeared in June 1861 as a weekly, switching to monthly production from October 1861 to May 1863. Collet then resuscitated and folded the paper several times, both as a monthly and a weekly, between January 1866 and August 1867.10 Even more complicated was Collet’s International Courier or Le Courrier International. This paper dedicated itself to the promotion of international, and especially Franco-British, peace, communication, cooperation, commerce and ‘good-will’.11 Opening as a monthly journal in November 1864, it became semi-monthly in June 1865 before shutting down in December 1865. It was then relaunched in January 1867, this time as a weekly, before finally closing in July that year. Throughout its run, the Courier appeared in both English and French, first with content in each language contained in the same issue, but from May 1865 printing separate, wholly English- and French-language issues. It was published by Frederick Farrah, a British secularist, and printed for most of its run by the French exile François Tafery. Both the Working Man and Courier served as semi-official organs of the International Working Men’s Association (IWMA). The Courier displayed a similar interest in the International League for Peace and Liberty, which appeared shortly before the paper’s collapse. The years 1870–1 saw a significant generational shift in the French exile community. With the destruction of the Second Empire and proclamation of the Third Republic in September 1870, most of the remaining refugees returned to France to defend the patrie against Prussian armies and ensure the survival of republican institutions. Yet from May 1871 they were quickly replaced by a new group of exiles fleeing the destruction of the Paris Commune. Though many found asylum in Belgium or Switzerland, London remained an epicentre of the communard exile community, with an estimated 3,300 spending at least some of the period 1871–80 there.12 There were important overlaps between this community and refugees of the Second Republic and Second Empire. A few of the earlier exiles, such as Berjeau and Jeanne Deroin, had not returned to

96

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

France in 1870 and provided essential assistance to the new arrivals. Moreover, some of those exiled in 1849 or 1851, including Pyat and Pierre Vésinier, became involved in the Commune and found themselves in exile in London for a second time after 1871. Yet there were important differences defining this new phase of exile. Unlike in 1848, 1871 had not seen a European-wide wave of revolution, and the French communards did not have a comparable international cohort of exiles to the quarante-huitards’. One result of this was that communard newspapers were generally less interested in fulfilling the internationalist republican dreams of the 1850s and 1860s and more fully consumed by events in France. They condemned France’s surrender to Prussia and the persecution of Paris, and campaigned for amnesty from the republican politicians who increasingly dominated France after 1876. Much of the communard press was highly ephemeral, with papers lasting only a few issues coming in and out of existence, like Table 5.1 List of French papers published in London 1848–1905 Title

Date of Publication

Editor(s)

Louis Blanc’s Monthly Review Le Nouveau Monde Le Proscrit: Journal de la république universelle

1849 1849–51 1850

La Voix du proscrit: Organe de la république universelle

1850–1

L’Homme: Journal de la démocratie universelle Le Bulletin de l’Association Internationale The International Courier/ Le Courrier International Qui vive! Vermersch-Journal L’Union démocratique L’Avenir La Fédération Le Courrier révolutionnaire La Guerre Sociale

1853–6

Louis Blanc and F. R. Trehonnais Louis Blanc Martin Bernard, Jean-Philibert Berjeau, Albert Darasz, Charles Delescluze, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Giuseppe Mazzini, Charles Ribeyrolles, Arnold Ruge and Stanisław Worcell Martin Bernard, Jean-Philibert Berjeau, Albert Darasz, Charles Delescluze, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, Giuseppe Mazzini, Charles Ribeyrolles, Arnold Ruge and Stanisław Worcell Charles Ribeyrolles

1857–8

Alfred Talandier

1864–67

Joseph-Charles Collet

1871 1871 1872 1872 1872–5 1876 1878

Eugène Vermersch Eugène Vermersch Eugène Vermersch Nicolas France Pierre Vésinier Félix Pyat J.-B. Clément, Jules Joffrin and Tito Zanardelli J. Olivon J. Prudhomme Fils J. Olivon L. Nikitine; Ch. Malato Emile Pouget Henri Cuisinier; Louis Depoilly

L’International Le Rothschild La Tribune Libre Le Tocsin Le Père Peinard, série londonienne La Grève Générale (Il Sciopero Generale)

1890 1891 1891–2 1892–4 1894–5 1902

50 Years of French Exilic Publishing

97

L’Avenir (1872), L’Impartial (1873), Pyat’s Le Courrier révolutionnaire (1876) and the Guerre Sociale (1878). An exception to this was a string of daily newspapers which spanned 1871–2, largely run by Eugène Vermersch, including Qui vive!, VermerschJournal and L’Union démocratique. The anarchist period of exile, starting in the early 1880s and peaking in the 1890s, was characterized by heightened censorship, multifaceted repression, bitter political divisions, but also a strong sense of internationalism and relatively intense journalistic activity, given that there were only about 500 French-speaking anarchist ‘companions’ in Britain.13 There was a brief overlap between the communard refugees and the anarchists who appeared in London in the very early 1880s, driven out of France by stark repression, such as the ‘Wicked Laws’ of December 1893 which authorized the preventive seizure of writings and arrests related to anarchism. These measures, reinforced in July 1894, dislocated the movement, driving most active anarchists into jail, inactivity or exile. Among those who headed to London, journalists were very well represented, as reflected in the exilic community’s journalistic output, producing no less than five papers in the London area between 1890 and 1895, as well as an intense pamphleteering production. This anarchist press was largely of anarchist-communist leanings, and moderate regarding the hotly debated topic of political violence as a revolutionary strategy. The notable exceptions to this were L’International (nine issues from May 1890) and its successor, La Tribune Libre (15 November 1890 to 15 July 1891), which were very advanced and incendiary in their tone, probably because they were funded by the police.14 The same period saw the anonymously published Le Rothschild, which only had three issues (June – July 1891) and was only four pages long. The most influential and regular paper of this period was the ‘London series’ of Emile Pouget’s Le Père Peinard (September 1894–January 1895), which continued the Paris paper of the same name, in a smaller format (it was a brochure of 30 and then 16 pages), but with the same biting tone and working-class slang, and was one of the initiators of the transition to trade union-based militancy among the anarchists. Charles Malato set up a relatively long-lasting paper, Le Tocsin (nine issues in December 1892 – September 1894), which despite its violent and very sarcastic style was also influential in advocating trade-union permeation among the anarchists.15 After the peak of the anarchist exile period, in 1902, La Grève Générale was a Franco-BritishItalian undertaking which promoted the general strike and labour internationalism.

The social context of the exile press This section examines the exile press’s role in shaping refugee society. Papers were businesses reflecting the economic life of the refugee communities and relying on wide networks for funding and distribution. But they were also discussion fora, sources of information on exile sociability and economic opportunities for exiles. They thus provided essential space for the construction of shared refugee political and social identities. At the centre of such efforts were the papers’ chief editors and staff. These were often small, with some of the best-known papers identified with single key figures, as with

98

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Ribeyrolles and L’Homme or Pouget and Le Père Peinard. Some publications serviced specific political movements, as with La Fédération’s support for Pierre Vésinier’s breakaway faction of the IWMA or the anarchist ‘Autonomie’ group. In one instance at least (L’International), it is clear that the editors were in fact in the pay of the police. Most editors had acquired journalistic experience prior to their arrival in London; indeed, legal trouble stemming from that experience was often the direct cause of their exile. Journalism was therefore a political commitment rather than merely a profession. The papers’ economic lives were always precarious, and they employed a variety of strategies to remain solvent. Papers with wealthy editors often relied on their patron’s personal financial commitment, as with Ledru-Rollin and La Voix du proscrit.16 Advertisements provided a staple source of revenue, with most or all of the back pages of L’Homme and of Vermersch’s journals given over to advertisements, while the International Courier was lined by advertisement columns on many of its pages. The content of these advertisements reflected the exile community itself. L’Homme announced forthcoming books authored by major exile figures, placed notices from exiles offering services as language instructors and alerted readers to businesses either run by or of interest to the refugees, notably restaurants and hotels. VermerschJournal and L’Union démocratique concluded every issue with a large advertisement for the French Pharmacy in 18 Rathbone Place. The Courier, true to its mission of Franco-British understanding, published lists of anglophonic hotels, restaurants and other points of interest on the continent in its English-language section and a similar list in its French section of francophonic institutions in Britain. Subscription prices varied, and L’Homme, which struggled to find readers outside the exile community, increased its annual fees from 8s. to 12s.17 Similar advertising contents appeared in anarchist papers – Le Tocsin’s first issue showcased Pateau’s ‘boulangerie parisienne’ on Tottenham Street, alongside Louis Bertgues’s electrician services on Carburton Street, among others18 – but without any advertising fee being publicized; it is likely that these ads appeared for free. Funding came from newspaper sales, patronage and sometimes funds raised across anarchist groups, in London and abroad. As was frequently the case in anarchist publications, comrades were invited to support La Grève Générale ‘materially and morally’, providing it with ‘material to print, and especially precise facts’.19 Other, more creative measures could be taken to lessen financial burdens. The Working Man slowed its pace of production from weekly to monthly when faced with stiff competition for British readers.20 After its fourth issue, La Voix du proscrit dropped from sixteen pages to fourteen and the International Courier, which had begun its run by printing eight pages each in English and French, drastically altered its size upon its re-emergence in 1867, printing only on the front and back of a single sheet for each language. Beyond self-vending at their printing presses or editorial offices, many journals had networks of sellers and agents. La Voix du proscrit maintained points of sale at the rue Montmartre in Paris, 13 Regent Street in London, in Saint-Amand and temporarily in Geneva and Lausanne. For most of its existence, L’Homme’s home bureau was at the premises of the Imprimerie universelle at 19 Dorset Street in Saint-Helier, and it kept administrative offices at 2 Inverness Place, Bayswater and then 50 Acacia Road, St John’s Wood after its expulsion to London. It also had subscription offices and vendors in

50 Years of French Exilic Publishing

99

London, Geneva, Brussels, Madrid, Liverpool, Neuchâtel, New Orleans, Mexico City, New York and Birmingham. In addition to informal distribution channels, anarchist papers were most easily found at the international ‘Autonomie Club’ on Charlotte and later Windmill Street, in Armand Lapie’s ‘Librairie Internationale’ on Goodge Street, and after 1895, at Pelletier’s shop on Charlotte Street, in the heart of London’s French and international anarchist quarter.21 By the end of the century, the papers were clearly integrated into international press networks, and were advertised in Englishlanguage papers such as Freedom, Liberty and The Torch, as well as in the anarchist press published outside both France and Britain. Censorship required ingenuous strategies for the papers to be sent from London to Paris. For instance, in November 1890 L’International was banned in France, although it still circulated clandestinely, and the anarchist Breuil was sentenced to two years in jail for selling it.22 Overall, however, the volumes of material which were sent to France were quite impressive, given the very makeshift conditions in which they were produced and smuggled. In September 1894, a spy reported that 200 copies of Le Tocsin had been sent to Paris (one of these copies was sent directly to police authorities by himself).23 Inventive ploys were designed to distract police authorities. Le Père Peinard was printed in a small format, and sent via Belgium.24 L’International published one of its issues as a supplement to the mainstream London-based publication Le Courrier de Londres et de l’Europe. Le Rothschild used antiphrasis (as evidenced by its very title), for instance with the opening lines of its first issue, which claimed to espouse political opinions diametrically opposed to their own: ‘The Social Revolution, here is the enemy! … Try as we may to accumulate trials and persecutions, we cannot halt the wave threatening us. On the contrary!’25 Rather than warmly recommending other anarchist publications as was customary, they inventoried these readings under the heading ‘Papiers à brûler’ (publications which ought to be burnt), which included La Révolte, Le Père Peinard, L’Endehors and L’Homme Libre (Belgium).26 The papers reported, with varying degrees of caution, on the social, political and cultural activities of refugee London. La Grève Générale advertised ‘soirées artistiques’ and ‘cercle théâtral’ taking place at 55 Charlotte Street every Sunday, and also its library and conferences.27 Mixing political and social coverage, the August 1890 issue of L’International reported (in a rather hostile and oppositional manner) on meetings held at the more moderate Socialist League and the anarchist Autonomie Club, discussing the possibility to create an organization to unify revolutionary propaganda, centralize resources and create an international committee to distribute revolutionary works.28 Le Père Peinard once included an article about the ‘side-splitting’ coverage in the British press of the unmasking and alleged torture of exposed spy Cotin.29 These publications also sustained key socio-economic support networks. This was especially true in the raising of charity for indigent refugees. Extreme poverty was a pervasive problem in the exile community, as many refugees arrived in London with few resources and struggled to transplant their skills across the linguistic and cultural barriers that now confronted them. La Voix du proscrit therefore happily announced the formation of the Société fraternelle des démocrates-socialistes, a body dedicated to providing relief and locating work for exiles in need, and regularly announced new donations to the society’s subscription.30

100

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Relatedly, the exile press gave shape to refugee political life and constituted a crucial part of wider exilic sociability. The political calendar in the exile communities tended to revolve around the commemoration of key dates, such as the proclamation of the Second Republic on 24 February 1848, the birth of the Commune on 18 March 1871, the commemoration of the execution of anarchists in Chicago on 11 November 1887 and May Day after 1890. Near the anniversaries of these dates, papers often reflected at length on their historical significances and held them up as calls for future action.31 Anniversary celebrations, from meetings to banquets, were reported, often with toasts and speeches by prominent exiles recorded verbatim.32 A more morose, but still essential form of political sociability was funerals. As the number of refugee deaths accrued over time, funerals took on a familiar and ritualized form, with lengthy processions and eulogies that doubled as political speeches and expressions of exile solidarity and were unfailingly reprinted in the exile press.33 The papers also chronicled the existence and activities of exile political associations. We have seen examples of this with Collet’s papers and La Fédération with the IWMA, all of which printed the association’s proclamations and reports of its meetings and congresses. L’Homme similarly often inserted documents of Pyat’s Commune révolutionnaire and enthusiastically welcomed the formation of the International Committee, a precursor to the IA to which the Bulletin was later attached.34 This political role remained in times of low activity. Thus, in March 1902, La Grève Générale called on ‘All the comrades within the group’ to maintain their activism and resist the ‘prevailing apathy and indifference’.35

Figure 5.3 Front page of Le Père Peinard, London Series, 16–31 October 1894. © International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

50 Years of French Exilic Publishing

101

The justified fear of spies, particularly among the anarchists, motivated discretion. The editorial information provided by the papers might be as detailed as normal, as in Le Père Peinard, ‘Printed and published by Emile Pouget, 23 Kind Edward St, Islington’, La Tribune Libre, ‘Admin: 26 Warren St, Fitzroy Sq, London; Manager: Olivon’ and La Grève Générale, ‘published by Louis Depoilly, Imp. Internationale, 33, Gresse St. (Rathbone Place)’. However, it was usually quite terse: La Tribune Libre’s articles were unsigned, and Le Rothschild claimed to be ‘reproduced by an anarchist’, the only named contact being one ‘J. Prudhomme’ – most likely a pseudonym. The contents provided very little detail regarding life in London. By the end of the century, there was also a sense that exiles ought to behave and not jeopardize their tenuous asylum, with occasional hints at the self-censorship operating within these publications. In 1894, when a bomb was left at the house of Judge Hawkins, who had recently sentenced some international anarchists in London, Pouget promptly stressed that anarchists ought to remain discreet and refrain from any political involvement in order to preserve their precarious cross-Channel asylum.36 Nonetheless, the London community was refracted in periodicals printed elsewhere, chiefly in France: for instance, the Parisbased L’Intransigeant (1880–1940), Le Libertaire (1895–1914) and La Révolte (1887– 94)/ Les Temps Nouveaux (1895–1914) document the life of these French groups in considerable detail.

Internationalism in the exile press Through most of the period 1848–1914, French exile communities were part of wider, international political movements. While this was less obviously the case with the communards of the 1870s, it was an especially important facet of refugee political life after the failed European revolutions of 1848 and at the height of European anarchist activism. Internationalism was an ideology, a writing practice and a networking strategy, and the refugee press reflected this in several ways. The newspapers announced their internationalist ethos in their titles and subtitles. This was obvious in the cases of the Bulletin de l’Association Internationale and the International Courier/Courrier International, but Le Proscrit identified itself as the ‘Journal de la république universelle’, La Voix du proscrit was an ‘Organe de la république universelle’, Le Peuple branded itself as the ‘Journal des proscrits et de la république universelle’, and L’Homme was subtitled the ‘journal de la démocratie universelle’. A more limited internationalism was signalled by La Fédération’s self-styling as a ‘journal révolutionnaire socialiste français-anglais’. La Tribune Libre defined itself as an ‘organe international, socialiste, révolutionnaire anarchiste’. More substantively, internationalism was announced as a raison d’être in the opening editorials of several papers. La Voix du proscrit’s first issue opened with an announcement ‘Aux peuples!’ by the Comité central démocratique européen, calling for ‘European democracy to manifest its existence, to organize itself ’. Borrowing from Mazzini, it argued that international cooperation was essential to secure a just future for humanity, and distinguished between chauvinistic nationalisme and the healthy and natural sentiment of nationalité that was compatible with cosmopolitanism.37 Ribeyrolles declared in L’Homme that

102

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

a lack of international coordination had doomed the revolutions of 1848 and that this failure could only be overcome by ‘revolutionary solidarity’ leading to a world of ‘united peoples, each free and sovereign in their own spheres’.38 These sentiments were reciprocated by non-French radicals, and L’Homme was sold at the ‘Librairie polonaise’, run by the Polish refugees Erasmus Zmichowsk and Stanisław Tchorzewski at 10 Greek Street, the ‘Pharmacie française’ at 28 Greek Street, and the British radical George Jacob Holyoake’s famous Fleet Street House. The International Courier committed itself to ‘the good work of pursuing that [international] reconciliation, which our generation proudly claims as its task’ and which the journal would facilitate by acting ‘as a kind of permanent congress of nations, where each and all, will have the right to be heard’.39 Internationalism was a central anarchist tenet, reflected in the universalizing tone and addresses of the London papers. For most of the anarchist-communist papers, labour internationalism and the promotion of the general strike (in its fullest, international sense) were central themes, which manifested themselves in sections reporting on the progress of international labour movements. After the aborted project of a trilingual (French-Spanish-Italian) anarchist paper called Germinal, La Grève Générale was launched in 1902, by the ‘Groupe ouvrier international’, 55 Charlotte Street, in the heart of the Fitzrovia. It was a multilingual endeavour, appearing in French and Italian, integrated in a vast network of publications from London, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, France, Italy and the international anarchist hub Paterson in the United States.40 It published news from France, Britain, Italy, Spain and Cuba,41 and had a very broad international outlook. Despite its brief existence, this publication symbolized the internationalization of exile groups in London and their politics, with a clear sense of shared interests and the need for a joint propaganda and revolutionary strategy. The content of the papers fulfilled these ambitions in several ways. Many maintained international subscription and vending networks, included internationalist content in their advertisements, and were edited and published by international teams. The editorial and reading communities of the papers were often transnational, and much of their material was sent from abroad, featured dedicated ‘News from abroad’ sections and press resale, making the papers anything but parochially French. News reportage and commentary often covered events occurring elsewhere in Europe. Louis Blanc’s papers covered Hungary’s struggle for independence, as well as including foreign affairs in a recurring ‘Political Review of the Month’.42 La Voix du proscrit featured a regular Chronique de l’Etranger. In papers like Le Proscrit, La Voix du proscrit, Le Peuple and L’Homme, exiles of diverse nationalities assessed the political situations in their home countries, including Darasz for Poland,43 Herzen for Russia,44 Mazzini for Italy45 and Ruge for Germany.46 Just as the refugee press celebrated and commemorated anniversaries in the French revolutionary calendar, foreign dates of significance were honoured, including that of the Polish uprising of 1830, the founding of the Roman Republic of 1849, and the anarchist executions in Chicago of 1887.47 The organizations of other nationalities also received support and coverage in the press.48 And, more widely, French exile newspapers maintained official and semi-official connections with internationalist political organizations, including those between the Comité central démocratique européen and La Voix du proscrit, between the IA and its Bulletin, and between the IWMA and the Working Man, International Courier and various

50 Years of French Exilic Publishing

103

communard publications. Looser connections also existed, as when Ribeyrolles enthusiastically devoted columns in L’Homme to the ‘triumvirate’ of Kossuth, LedruRollin and Mazzini who in 1855 hoped to use the crisis of the Crimean war to establish a pan-European republican resistance, proposing themselves as its leaders.49 Even a fairly precarious endeavour such as Le Père Peinard advertised international publications such as La Caserne (Brussels), L’Ami des ouvriers (Hastings, United States) and La Questione Sociale (Buenos Ayres). A single issue might report in a detailed way on Italian political developments and acknowledge financial support received from London and Cincinnati.50

The exile press and French politics Despite such internationalism, France remained at the heart of the exiles’ concerns, and much of the papers’ contents were addressed to French readers. As they weighed in on national discussion, these publications contributed to oppositional and, often, advanced politics. During the period 1848–51, the exile press hoped to stem the rising tide of reaction by commenting on national affairs and counselling action to save the flagging republic. Most of the papers had regular columns on the latest political news in France, including Blanc’s ‘Political Review of the Month’ and La Voix du proscrit’s Chronique de l’intérieur. Blanc inveighed against the French invasion and destruction of the Roman Republic in 1849,51 attacked the closet royalists now running France,52 and predicted and warned against President Bonaparte’s imperial pretentions.53 La Voix du proscrit, meanwhile, came into publication after the conservative majority in France’s Legislative Assembly had abrogated universal suffrage in the spring of 1850, disenfranchising 3,000,000 voters through restrictive tax and residency requirements. The paper vociferously denounced this as a violation of the republic’s constitution.54 It also criticized the opposition within France for failing to adequately protect the republic,55 advocated abstaining from now-compromised elections,56 and looked forward to 1852, when civil disobedience through mass turnout in the scheduled presidential and legislative elections could deliver republican salvation.57 After the coup, censorship, proscription, repression and the lack of an active opposition within France all hindered the press’s ability to engage so directly in French politics. Rather than contributing to live political debates, the priority shifted to simply overthrowing the existing regime. Nevertheless, L’Homme was in contact with several anonymous correspondents in Paris who summarized the country’s political news, and maintained an editorial line highly critical of Bonapartist policy. During the 1860s, this type of involvement with France’s politics declined further. The Working Man was largely British in its preoccupations, and the International Courier’s interest in French affairs was primarily to promote international understanding by enlightening its English readers, rather than mobilizing its French audience. The communard press, by contrast, followed French politics closely. In the early years of their exile, the continuing persecution of communards, the repression of Paris, the bitter aftermath of France’s defeat at Prussia’s hands, and the precarious survival of republican institutions were all issues of great concern for the refugees.

104

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

The daily newspapers of 1871–2 carried regular bulletins summarizing the political news from France, variously titled ‘Echoes et nouvelles’, ‘Dernières dépêches’ and ‘Faits divers’. L’Union démocratique also regularly reported on discussions in the French legislature in a column simply called ‘Assemblée Nationale’. In the latter years of their exile, as republicans gained firm control of France’s legislature and presidency, the communards began a vigorous campaign, in their own press and in the increasingly uncensored papers of France, to attain amnesty from the Third Republic.58 The papers also engaged in more theoretical debates. Several refugees commented that exile provided an excellent opportunity to ‘study’ political questions and engage in intellectual reflection.59 In the earlier period, much debate centred on how to save the Second Republic, or, after Bonaparte’s coup, how to prevent a similar disaster from occurring again. As early as 1849, Blanc worried about the power invested in the Second Republic’s directly elected presidency, which he feared might prove a tempting platform for demagoguery. For La Voix du proscrit, the legislative assembly’s had discredited itself by abrogating universal suffrage, and only a system of direct democracy with elected delegates submitting legislation for popular referenda could truly safeguard popular sovereignty. Blanc criticized this argument as flattering, rather than genuinely serving, the people, and a lengthy dispute over the issue appeared through the pages of La Voix du proscrit.60 Several intellectual clashes between republicans in the 1850s unfolded in the pages of L’Homme, which gave column-space to a diverse array of opinion, ranging from mainstream republicanism to the feminism of Jeanne Deroin and the anarchism of Ernest Cœurderoy. In April 1854, Cœurderoy wrote to L’Homme to complain that it had given inadequate coverage to his recent pamphlets, in which he denounced all established states, accused the French revolutionary tradition of nationalistic chauvinism, and argued that revolutionary rebirth could only be instigated by a Cossack invasion of the west. In response, Ribeyrolles dropped his usual conciliatoriness: ‘when it is a question of resolving the problems of the last enfranchisement, you make a call to bestial ignorance and servitude! ... you blaspheme science, you blaspheme, la patrie, you blaspheme the Revolution!’61 The Bulletin de l’Association Internationale meanwhile carried republican anti-Bonapartism to its logical conclusion with a defence of ‘tyrannicide’, printed after Felice Orsini’s failed attempt on Napoleon III’s life, that argued that Bonaparte had made himself a legitimate target for attack with his own violent seizure of power.62 More speculatively, L’Homme endorsed the republicanized positivism of the ‘learned and clear works’ of Emile Littré.63 Taking the motto ‘science et solidarité’, the paper hoped to help build a new social order built upon ‘positive’ knowledge of the natural and social sciences supplanting the ‘metaphysical’ dogmas of previous eras. The crowning achievement of this endeavour would be the formulation of ‘a special science which understands the general laws of production and distribution, and which has received the name of social science or socialism’.64 Yet for all this debate, the exile press also served as a space for the reaffirmation of the political consensuses that held together the refugee communities. In the 1850s this meant not only veneration of the revolution of 1848 and opposition to Bonapartism, but also support for the republican alliance of démocrates-socialistes which had formed in late 1848 and early 1849 and thereafter constituted France’s main republican

50 Years of French Exilic Publishing

105

party. The démocrates-socialistes brought together previously disparate elements of the French left unified behind republican institutions, democratic organization and, where possible, legalistic activism in the name of popular sovereignty. But the republic was to take extensive social reform and the alleviation of poverty as one of its highest priorities. Democratic republicanism and socialism were held to be not just compatible, but inseparable, as no republic could survive with an electorate too immiserated to intelligently participate in public life, while the support of anti-socialist forces for anti-republican politics proved that only a republic could safeguard the interests of the poor. This synthesis was shot through Blanc’s writings, in and out of the press, and received endorsements in La Voix du proscrit,65 L’Homme,66 and the Bulletin’s IA.67 Many of these ideas continued to find favour with the communards, who claimed that their goal was a république démocratique et sociale.68 Anarchist publications from London similarly blended internationalism with a close focus on home politics. In these respects, they were characteristic French anarchist publications and their extraterritorial status did not really set them aside, either in contents or style. Alongside general pieces about anarchist history and revolutionary strategy,69 they reported on French parliamentary life with customary verve and sarcasm,70 detailed labour struggles in France, and also took part in the movement’s strategic debates over repression, the eight-hour workday and propaganda by the deed.71 They were also engaged in occasionally bitter in-fighting about domestic political matters. Links with France were so close that Le Tocsin advertised both Parisbased anarchist publications and, more unusually, businesses, shops and restaurants.72

The exile press and its host society Engagement with British issues and audiences varied greatly over our period. In 1848–51, the most sustained attempt by an exile journal to enmesh itself in a British context was Louis Blanc’s Monthly Review. Although much of its content was simply translated from the Nouveau monde, Blanc’s translator and editor, with his collaboration, attempted to introduce Blanc’s ideas to a British audience, equating his socialism with Britain’s own tradition of reformist liberalism, even asking: ‘Is not Free Trade a Socialist measure? Yes! the Anti-Corn Law League was a Socialist league, because its object was to destroy Agricultural privileges and monopolies principally levied from the substance of the people, comparatively for the benefit of a few’.73 After 1851, this kind of engagement increased in the exile press. As we have seen, L’Homme focused heavily on the Crimean war, and some of its criticism of that conflict was directed against Britain, particularly for aligning itself with the hated Napoleon III.74 The paper also took a close interest in Britain’s domestic politics, employing Philippe Faure as a regular London correspondent and initiating a column entitled ‘Meetings’ which closely covered the world of London’s popular and associational politics. Ribeyrolles also occasionally weighed in on domestic controversies, as when he blamed the 1855 Sunday Trading Riots on the incompleteness of earlier British political reforms.75 This was compatible with the criticism of Britain’s own radicals, some of whom, like George Julian Harney and William Linton, wrote letters printed in the paper. Even more

106

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

strikingly, Collet’s papers were essentially bound up in the world of British radicalism. This was particularly true for the Working Man, which made no mention of Collet’s French origins, referred to Britain as ‘this country’ and the British as ‘we’ and ‘us’, and was deeply involved in the British cooperative movement and the agitation preceding to the Reform Act of 1867. This level of engagement no doubt stemmed in part from the realization that what occurred in Britain would greatly matter to the exiles, since the duration of their stay was now indefinite. But there was also an interesting sense of gratitude at work. Exile references to the glory of Britain maintaining an open asylum even as reaction swept across the continent were commonplace in the 1850s. But while this at times prompted the exile press to promise to interfere ‘rarely in the debates of England’,76 it was also declared that it was the exiles’ duty to constructively engage in British discourse, taking on the role of honest and frank friends, willing to criticize when necessary, as a ‘debt’ to be repaid for their hosts’ own good.77 The exile press was partly sustained by a network of British sympathizers in London. Alongside the activities of British publishers and vendors like Holyoake or Frederick Farrah, much of the late Chartist press after 1848 directly cited and translated material from French exile newspapers in their efforts to raise domestic interest in foreign affairs and to generate local support for the refugees. Harney’s Democratic Review, which ran in 1849–50, was set up with the assistance of Blanc and Caussidière,78 translated a large amount of Blanc’s work and carried messages from figures Bernard, BonnetDuverdier, Ledru-Rollin, Ribeyrolles and others thanking the ‘English democrats’ for their sympathy.79 Harney’s later papers, the Red Republican and Friend of the People, were also translated from Le Proscrit and La Voix du proscrit.80 The British journal perhaps most deeply invested in the refugee community and its press was Linton’s English Republic. Linton, who was close to Mazzini, billed his journal as the English organ of the Comité central démocratique européen.81 The English Republic lasted from 1851 to 1855 and so bridged the gap between La Voix du proscrit and L’Homme. Its early volumes were therefore full of translations of the Comité’s pronouncements,82 and Linton translated and editorialized on much of La Voix du proscrit’s content, including the controversy over ‘direct government’.83 Linton also used his journal to launch a ‘Subscription for European Freedom’, asking its readers to contribute to the ‘Cause of Humanity’, or more precisely to the coffers of the Comité.84 When L’Homme appeared, Linton gave his support by translating several of Ribeyrolles’s editorials.85 Some of the exiles also individually contributed to the wider British press, with Blanc’s writing appearing in journals like the Athenæum, the Examiner and the Leader. For the communards, however, widespread distaste at the violence that had occurred in Paris in the spring of 1871 led to a more ambivalent reception in British radical circles, with prominent figures like Charles Bradlaugh disavowing the Commune,86 though bodies like the International Democratic Association and Universal Republican League were much more supportive.87 Early in our period, the British state’s interference with the refugee press was minimal. The Metropolitan Police did maintain observation of the French and other European refugees after 1848, primarily through the formation of an impromptu ‘foreign branch’. The main agent assigned to the French refugee community was John Sanders, whose fluency in French led to his infiltrating refugee circles in London

50 Years of French Exilic Publishing

107

and Jersey. Sanders’s impressions of the exiles, however, were benign, and he stressed their harmlessness to Britain and the general plaintive hopelessness of their causes and lives.88 After Orsini’s attempt on Napoleon III’s life, the British government did prosecute one of his alleged French co-conspirators, Simon Bernard. Bernard, however, was acquitted by a jury roused by the defence to protect British liberty against a foreign tyrant. This embarrassment caused the British government to drop pending trials against material published in favour of ‘tyrannicide’, and the Bulletin de l’Association Internationale, which carried such material, was never prosecuted. The main exception to this light touch was the expulsion of thirty-nine refugees from Jersey, including the editor, publisher, vendor and main proprietors of L’Homme. The immediate cause of these expulsions was the reprinting in L’Homme of a speech given by Pyat in London containing salacious innuendo regarding Queen Victoria’s relationship with Napoleon III.89 However, Jersey’s lieutenant-governor, Sir James Frederick Love, had long feared that the exiles would contaminate the locals with socialistic views or prompt an invasion by a wrathful French government. Love wrote to London frequently, occasionally sending copies of L’Homme as proof of the exiles’ perniciousness.90 After Love expelled Ribeyrolles, Pianciani and L’Homme’s vendor Alexandre Thomas, Hugo wrote a declaration co-signed by thirty-five others denouncing Britain as a mere appendage of Napoleon III’s empire and daring the government to expel him. Infuriated, the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, directly ordered Love to do just that.91 Yet, as we have seen, the ultimate outcome of this expulsion was the simple relocation of L’Homme to London, where the British government lacked the summary powers of expulsion enjoyed by Love as the ruler of a crown dependency not fully integrated into the United Kingdom. The anarchists’ print-based engagement with their hosts was manifold. Anarchist publications were mostly described in the mainstream press as crank publications posing a potential threat to the nation and the public’s safety (as did their writers). Occasionally, however, some well-connected individuals managed to make their voices heard in non-anarchist publications in a non-derogatory manner; for instance, Charles Malato lauded French anarchist terrorists such as Vaillant and Ravachol in a piece entitled ‘Anarchist portraits’, published in The Fortnightly Review.92 Some of the London French anarchists also contributed to British anarchist publications, such as The Torch (1891–6), Freedom (1886–2014) and Liberty (1894–6). The London publications of the French anarchists were especially influential insofar as they were an important voice in a transnational discussion on terrorism, syndicalism and labour strategies, in particular through Pouget’s call for anarchists to model British workers and join trade unions en masse.93 This was a rare instance in which anarchists discussed British politics.

Conclusion In addition to the considerable number of French-language papers published in London in the second half of the nineteenth century and their ideological diversity, a long-term assessment of London’s French political press highlights a growing internationalization and fruitful collaborations, within the papers, with their immediate and broader

108

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

communities in London, Britain and the wider world through transnational diffusion. They were generally not financially profitable – or even viable – and did not always get their message heard. However, some of them had a significant legacy, in terms of ideological development and dissemination, but also network-building and community-organizing. Inventive strategies were implemented to ensure their publication, survival and distribution. Their roles went beyond the strictly political, fostering shared identities and communities of fate in exile, and in this respect some of them were very successful. These various dimensions testify to the specificities of exile as an important site of political activism, and the remarkable continuity in London’s status as an extraterritorial outpost for French radical politics.

Notes 1 Bernard Cottret, Terre d’asile. L’Angleterre et ses réfugiés, XVI-XVIIe siècles (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1985). 2 Sylvie Aprile, Le Siècle des exilés. Bannis et proscrits de 1789 à la Commune (Paris: CNRS Editions, 2010). Paul Martinez, ‘Paris Communard Refugees in Britain, 1871–1880’ (PhD Diss., University of Sussex, 1981), 205. 3 Leo A. Loubère, Louis Blanc: His Life and Contribution to the Rise of French JacobinSocialism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961), 144. 4 Marcel Dessal, Un Révolutionnaire jacobin: Charles Delescluze, 1809–1871 (Paris: Rivière, 1952), ch. 7. 5 Police reports of 4 March and 14 October 1852, MEPO 2/43. 6 Alvin R. Calman, Ledru-Rollin après 1848 et les proscrits français en Angleterre (Paris: F. Rieder, 1921), 135. 7 A. Müller Lehning, ‘The International Association (1855–1859)’, International Review for Social History 3 (1938): 185–284, 227–8. 8 For example, Louis Blanc, Dix ans de l’histoire d’Angleterre, 10 vols (Paris: Lévy, 1879–81); Alphonse Esquiros’s series ‘L’Angleterre et la vie anglaise’ in Revue des deux mondes; Théodore Karcher, Études sur les institutions politiques et sociales de l’Angleterre (Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1867); Victor Schœlcher, Sunday Rest (London: Austen, 1870). 9 See Talandier’s letter in Working Man, August, 1862, 219–21. 10 Stephen Coltham, ‘English Working-Class Newspapers in 1867’, Victorian Studies, 13 (1969), 159–80 (164). 11 ‘The International Courier’, International Courier, November 1864, 8–12. 12 Martinez, ‘Paris Communard Refugees’, 109. 13 Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914. Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 14 René Bianco, ‘La Tribune Libre’ and ‘L’International’, in 100 ans de presse anarchiste (PhD diss., Université d’Aix-Marseille, 1987), no page. Available at http://bianco.ficedl. info/, last accessed 10 June 2016. 15 Le Tocsin, ‘L’un et l’autre’, 23 September 1894, 1–2. 16 Calman, Ledru-Rollin après, 37–9. 17 On subscriptions, see Charles Hugo, Les Hommes de l’exil (Paris: Lemerre, 1875), 68. 18 Le Tocsin, n.1, 31 December 1892, 2. 19 La Grève Générale, I, 1, 18 March 1902, footnote on 2.

50 Years of French Exilic Publishing 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

32

33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45 46 47 48 49

50 51 52

109

Coltham, 164. Bantman, French Anarchists, 90. Le Père Peinard, 19 April 1891, III, 109, ‘Au Palais d’Injustice’, 3. Préfecture de Police de Paris (APP), Box BA1509, London, report by Jarvis dated September 1894. APP BA1509, 27 February 1894. Le Rothschild, I, 1; 15–30 June 1890, 1. Le Rothschild I, 3; 15–31 July 1891, 4. La Grève Générale I, 1, 18 March 1902, 2. ‘Mouvement en Angleterre’, L’International, no. 5. August 1890. Le Père Peinard, ‘Debacle bourgeoise’, January 1895, 10–12. Charles Delescluze ‘Société fraternelle des Proscrits de Londres’, La Voix du proscrit, 24 November 1850, 69–71. Comité central démocratique européen, ‘Le 24 Février’, La Voix du proscrit, 23 February 1851, 247–8; Charles Ribeyrolles, ‘Le 24 Février 1848’, L’Homme, 28 February 1855, 1; ‘18 Mars 1871, Nous te saluons !’, La Fédération, 18 March 1875, 1–2. Ribeyrolles, ‘L’Anniversaire du 24 Février 1848, à Londres’, La Voix du proscrit, 2 March 1851, 267–9; ‘Révolution de 1848. Anniversaire du 24 Février’, L’Homme, 1 March 1854, 1–2; ‘Commémoration de la révolution de 1848’, Bulletin de l’Association Internationale, 1 March 1858, 1. For example Victor Hugo’s eulogy for Félix Bony, supplement to L’Homme, 4 October 1854. ‘Adresse du Comité international’, L’Homme, 18 July 1855, 3. La Grève Générale, I, 2, 15 April 1902, 2. Le Père Peinard, L’ABCD de la Révolution, n. 4, November 1894, ‘Angleterre’, 26. Comité central démocratique européen, ‘Aux Peuples!’, La Voix du proscrit, 27 October 1850, 1–3. Ribeyrolles, ‘Solidarité’, L’Homme, 30 November 1853, 1. Joseph Collet, ‘The International Courier’, International Courier, November 1864, 8–12. La Grève Générale I, 1, 18 March 1902, L’Action’, 1. La Grève Générale, I, 2, 15 April 1902, ‘Solidarité internationale’, 2. Louis Blanc, ‘Hungary’, Louis Blanc’s Monthly Review, August 1849, 63–74. Albert Darasz, ‘La Pologne en 1848’, La Voix du proscrit, 3 November 1850, 23–7. Alexander Herzen, ‘Amnistie et Alliance. Aux Frères Russes!’, ‘Du Servage en Russie’ and ‘La Commune Russe’, L’Homme, 28 December 1853, 3–4, 18 and 25 January, 4 and 2–3, respectively. Giuseppe Mazzini, ‘Les Partis en Italie’, Le Peuple, 29 November 1851, 6–9. Albert Ruge, ‘L’Allemagne et la Révolution’, Le Proscrit, August 1850, 62–5. ‘Anniversaire de la révolution italienne’, L’Homme, 8 March 1854, 3–4; ‘Meetings’, L’Homme, 7 December 1855, 3. Charles Tausenau, ‘Société allemande d’agitation à Londres’, La Voix du proscrit, 30 August 1851, 278–9. Lajos Kossuth, Alexandre Ledru-Rollin and Giuseppe Mazzini, ‘Aux Républicains’, L’Homme, 26 September 1855, 1–2; Ribeyrolles, untitled column, L’Homme, 3 October 1855, 2. Le Père Peinard, ‘Un Vaillant… en 1836’, October 1894, 28–9. Blanc, ‘Rome’, Louis Blanc’s Monthly Review, July 1849, 37–8. Blanc, ‘A Speech of M. Thiers’, Louis Blanc’s Monthly Review, August 1849, 54–8; ‘Le Suffrage universel ou la guerre civile, il faut choisir!’, Nouveau monde, 15 April 1850, 435–62.

110

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

53 Blanc, ‘The Empire and the Emperor. Letter to Louis Bonaparte’, Louis Blanc’s Monthly Review, August 1849, 41–54. 54 Charles Delescluze, ‘Le Suffrage restreint’, La Voix du proscrit, 30 August 1851, 274–5. 55 Delescluze, ‘Aide-toi, le ciel t’aidera’, La Voix du proscrit, 27 October 1850, 5–8 and ‘Rentrée de l’Assemblée Nationale, Message du Président’, La Voix du proscrit, 17 November 1850, 53–7. 56 Alexandre Ledru-Rollin, ‘L’Abstention’, La Voix du proscrit, 27 October 1850, 3–5 and 12 January 1851, 163–5. 57 Langeron, ‘Échec à l’Empereur!’, La Voix du proscrit, 17 November 1850, 57–9 and 24 November 1850, 65–6; Ribeyrolles, ‘1852’, La Voix du proscrit, 26 January 1851, 193–5; Delescluze, ‘1852’, La Voix du proscrit, 2 August 1851, 213–14 and 16 August 1851, 245–9. 58 Martinez, ‘Paris Communard Refugees’, 311–26. 59 Louis Blanc, L’Homme, 28 December 1853, 3. 60 Calman, Ledru-Rollin après, ch. 5; Dessal, Un Révolutionnaire jacobin, ch. 7. 61 Ernest Cœurderoy and Ribeyrolles, L’Homme, 26 April 1854, 2. 62 For the English translation, see Félix Pyat, Besson and A. Talandier, Letter to the Parliament and the Press (London: Holyoake, 1858). 63 Prosper Bonnet-Duverdier, ‘Science et socialisme’, L’Homme, 18 January 1854, 2. 64 Bonnet-Duverdier, ‘Le Gouvernement de la science’, L’Homme, 8 March 1856, 3–4. 65 Théodore Karcher, ‘Point de démocratie sans socialisme! Point de socialisme sans révolution!’, La Voix du proscrit, 3 May 1851, 22–6; Gustave Naquet, ‘Le Socialisme républicain’, La Voix du proscrit, 16 August 1851, 249–51. 66 ‘Révolution de 1848. Anniversaire du 24 février’, L’Homme, March 1854, 1; Ribeyrolles, ‘Le Février 1848’, L’Homme, 28 February 1855, 1; Bonnet-Duverdier, ‘Politique de l’exil’, L’Homme, 19 September 1855, 2. 67 J. Nash, L. Oborski, Talandier, ‘International Association Statutes’, August 1856, in Lehning, 263–6. 68 Robert Tombs, The Paris Commune 1871 (London: Longman, 1999). 69 Le Père Peinard, ‘L’A.B.C.D. de la révolution’, November 1894, 1–20; Le Toscin, ‘Où nous en sommes’, n. 1, December 1892, 3–5. 70  See for instance Le Père Peinard, ‘L’Abattoir patriotique’, December 1894, on the French military expedition in Madagascar, 1–2. 71 These themes are discussed most notably, but not exclusively, in Le Père Peinard, ‘A Roublard, roublard ½’, October 1894, 1–16; for a critique of the 8-hour workday – ‘the finest idea of this century’ – see Le Rothschild, I, 1, 15 June 1891, ‘Les bienfaits de la journée de huit heures’, 1–2. The same issue also contains a satirical poem on the then-budding tradition of May Day, ‘Le Premier Mai’, ibid., 3. 72 Le Tocsin, n. 1, December 1892, 15–16; and n. 2, January 1893, 15–16. 73 F. R. Trehonnais, ‘Public Opinion and Socialism’, Louis Blanc’s Monthly Review, November 1849, 134. 74 Ribeyrolles, L’Homme, 25 January 1854, 1–2; Victor Schœlcher, ‘La Puissance des idées révolutionnaires et l’Angleterre’, L’Homme, 15 February 1854, 2–3; Lajos Kossuth, ‘Discours de Louis Kossuth’, supplement to L’Homme, 6 December, 1854. 75 Ribeyrolles, ‘Troubles à Londres’, L’Homme, 18 July 1855, 2. 76 L’Homme, 22 November 1854, 1. 77 Ribeyrolles, ‘Une Nouvelle étape’, L’Homme, 17 November 1855, 1. 78 Margot Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 121.

50 Years of French Exilic Publishing

111

79 ‘The French Exiles of the “13th of June” at Present Residing in London, to the Fraternal Democrats of England’, Democratic Review, January 1850, 289–90. 80 ‘Ledru Rollin to the French People’, Red Republican, 27 July 1850, 41–2; ‘State of Parties in France’, Friend of the People, 7 December 1850, 4–5. 81 For Linton’s understanding of the committee’s principles, see English Republic, 1851, 10–34. 82 English Republic, 1851, 46–54. 83 William Linton, ‘Direct Sovereignty of the People’, English Republic, 1851, 233–42. 84 ‘A Subscription for European Freedom’, English Republic, 1852, 25–7. 85 ‘Solidarity. By Charles Ribeyrolles’, ‘The Three Capitals: By Charles Ribeyrolles’, ‘Armand Barbès, English Republic, 1854, 93–7, 298–300, 413–14. 86 Edward Royle, Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 1866–1915 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 200-1; Antony Taylor, ‘Down with the Crown’: British anti-Monarchism and Debates about Royalty since 1790 (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 87–91. 87 Martinez, ‘Paris Communard Refugees’, 25–6, 30, 35, 491. 88 Police reports of: 1 November 1851, HO 45/3518; 13 February 1852, HO 45/4302; 5 March and 8 November 1853 HO 45/4816. 89 Félix Pyat, ‘Lettre à la reine d’Angleterre’, L’Homme, 10 October 1855, 2–4. 90 Love’s messages appear in HO 45/4547A, 45/4816 and 45/6188. 91 Viscount Palmerston to Sir George Grey, 23 October 1855, HO, 45/6188. 92 Charles Malato, ‘Some Anarchist Portraits’, Fortnightly Review 333, new series, September 1894, 327–8. 93 Le Père Peinard, ‘A roublard, roublard ½’, October 1894, 3–16.

6

The Italian Anarchist Press in London: A Lens for Investigating a Transnational Movement Pietro Di Paola

Introduction Italian history has a long-standing tradition of political exile. Since the beginning of the struggle for national unification in the 1820s, political exiles found shelter in other countries, from which new bases they continued to promote their political goals. From abroad, Risorgimento exiles contributed to the creation of a national identity not only in Italy but also among the communities of Italian economic migrants.1 Britain, thanks to its long tradition of free asylum, became an important destination in this political migration. Written propaganda played a significant part in exiles’ activities. For instance, during his long stay in Britain, Giuseppe Mazzini edited L’Apostolato Popolare (1841–3). In Jersey, a group of Italians joined a cosmopolitan community of refugees who gathered around L’Homme: Journal de la démocratie universelle between 1853 and 1854.2 In London the internationalist Tito Zanardelli edited four issues of the bilingual La Guerre Sociale/La Guerra Sociale (1878) which had a print run of 500 copies and was sold in Brussels, Liège and Geneva. Two years later, Zanardelli was involved with French and Russian refugees in the publication of Le Travail: Bulletin Mensuel du Club International d’études sociales de Londres (1880). After Italian unification was achieved, in 1861, the political struggle moved from the national to the social question and the emerging anarchist movement challenged the legitimacy of the new state. Heavily persecuted by governments, Italian anarchists were recurrently forced to take the path of exile. When Italian anarchists reached Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century, they settled in pre-existing exile communities dating from the Risorgimento period. The settlement of Italian anarchists in London was, nevertheless, part of a broader phenomenon – the establishment of an anarchist transnational network across continents. Newspapers played a vital role in the construction and reinforcement of this network. They were a powerful means for forging organization, disseminating propaganda, sharing information, promoting ideological debates, producing culture and shaping a common identity within the anarchist colonies. It was the anarchist press that made it possible to ‘sense a semblance of organization that appears only in it,

114

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

and that seems to be the only instrument of rapport and coalition, the only visible link between groups scattered all over Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australia’.3 A great number of newspapers were produced by Italian anarchist refugees abroad. The predominant use of the native language and the newspapers’ content indicate that the refugees gave absolute priority to political action in the motherland. Not surprisingly, from the 1890s, an ‘impressive quantity of anarchist newspapers in Italy arrived from anarchist circles abroad’.4 These publications ensured the continuation of an anarchist press during waves of harsh repression in Italy. However, physical distance, long periods away from Italy and the absence of a continuous flow of up-to-date information meant that it was often problematic for the editors to attain a proper understanding of topical political and social developments at home. Moreover, newspapers published abroad had serious limitations as means of mass propaganda. Exiles were well aware of this issue and often their main aims were to encourage ideological debates or to elaborate and disseminate strategic plans of action. The editors of L’Associazione (Nice-London, 1889–90) made this point very clear in a warning to contributors that empty rhetorical writing would not be published because ‘a periodical such as ours, particularly when published abroad, is not suitable for propaganda among the masses, rather it should be used to foster understanding between the propagandists and to provide them with a means to debate and share ideas, suggestions, and information’.5 Therefore, the periodicals produced and circulated by the anarchist refugees are a powerful means for investigating the transnational features of the anarchist movement. This chapter focuses on the newspapers published by Italian anarchists in London, a principal anarchist hub from the second half of the nineteenth century up to the First World War. This analysis unveils some of the mechanisms through which the anarchists built and maintained their transnational network. It illuminates the development of ideological and strategic debates in the movement and provides an insight into the relevance of contributions from anarchist refugees abroad – and their limits. Moreover, this investigation raises a number of questions about the relationships between the community of anarchist refugees, the host country and the homeland.

Newspapers as medium of theoretical development: L’Associazione Most of the newspapers published in London by Italian anarchists appeared at critical junctures and indicated new strategies and courses of action to the movement. This was the case with L’Associazione, established in France in the autumn of 1889 by Errico Malatesta, a leading figure of the anarchist movement, on his return from Argentina. The first four issues of L’Associazione appeared in Nice but the printing press was subsequently moved to London, a safer location. The planning and establishment of the newspaper and the involvement of comrades previously linked with Malatesta make it a fruitful example of how anarchist transnationalism operated.6 Malatesta, who had fled to Argentina in 1885, planned his return to Europe in August 1889, ‘sustained by a dense and steady web of militant contacts cast across the Atlantic Ocean’.7 Malatesta’s initial destination was London, where he had lived between 1881

The Italian Anarchist Press in London

115

and 1882 and where another leading Italian anarchist figure, the lawyer Francesco Saverio Merlino, was at the time. Meanwhile in Nice a group of militants (Giovanni Talchi, Giuseppe Cioci, Giuseppe Consorti), who had previously collaborated with Malatesta on the publication of La Questione Sociale in Florence (1883–4), were planning a new anarchist organ. As underlined by Turcato, there was a ‘clear continuity between Talchi’s and Malatesta’s projects’.8 Malatesta, Merlino and Francesco Pezzi – who had returned from Argentina with Malatesta – joined the enterprise and in early September moved to Nice, a good location for smuggling an anarchist newspaper into Italy. The forthcoming launch of L’Associazione was announced in September 1889 by a manifesto and a circular summarizing its programme. These were printed in French in the Paris-based La Révolte (1887–94) and in Spanish in El Productor (1887–93) and La Revolución Sociale, both published in Barcelona.9 L’Associazione called for the constitution of an international revolutionary anarchist-socialist party with a general programme which ‘would unite us all under one banner, bringing unity of action to what we may do now and during the revolution’.10 El Productor described the manifesto as ‘beautiful, vigorous and profound’ and the circular as a ‘most remarkable document for the clarity and precision of the revolutionary strategy’.11 It exhorted all comrades to discuss the documents. The first issue of L’Associazione appeared on 6 October but was pre-dated to 6 September, most likely ‘to divert police attention’.12

Figure 6.1 Front page of the first issue of L’Associazione, 6 September 1889. © International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

116

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

However, the majority of copies sent to Italy were intercepted by the police. Spies regularly informed the minister of the interior about deliveries of anarchist publications which were then stopped at Italian post offices.13 The anarchists adopted a number of stratagems to avoid the seizure of their publications – changing the covers, for example. Militants employed in railway or shipping companies were in charge of distribution. Emidio Recchioni, before moving to London in 1899, was a rail company employee who could easily travel across central Italy.14 Carl Peters was the so-called ‘anarchist postman’ who, the New York Press reported, was ‘an employee on one of the steamship lines’, and ‘nearly all of the Anarchist literature that has been spread [and] broadcast in America in the last four years has been printed in London and is said to have been carried over under the supervision of this man’.15 Although listed as a weekly, L’Associazione came out quite irregularly. The majority of issues appeared with three- to four-week gaps between them. Irregularity and a short lifespan were common features of anarchist publications. In most cases this was due to financial difficulties or disruptive internal disputes. L’Associazione had a transnational readership: subscriptions were received from Barcelona, Boston, Cardiff and various French localities. L’Associazione’s main goal was to reverse the decline of an atomized movement. In the 1880s, parliamentary socialism had gained popularity, leading to the foundation of the Italian Socialist Party in 1892, while the anarchist movement, battered by governmental repression and unable to revise its strategies, had lost its influence and was progressively marginalized. To accomplish its aim, the newspaper investigated crucial theoretical and practical questions, revised past errors and advanced new strategies.16 As a means of theoretical elaboration, L’Associazione was of particular significance, representing a turning point in the development of Malatesta’s thought.17 In Malatesta’s analysis, anarchists had focused their efforts mainly on insurrectionary attempts but had been unsuccessful and, as a consequence, had entrusted their revolutionary hopes ultimately to take advantage of events outside their control such as wars or political upheavals.18 L’Associazione urged militants to return to the people and be involved in the daily struggles of the working class.19 To support its arguments, L’Associazione informed its readers of international events such as the great Dock Strikes in London and Rotterdam. Malatesta was strongly impressed by the combativity of the London dockers and the widespread solidarity they received. According to Malatesta, if labour leaders had encouraged the London dock strikers to progress to a general strike, a revolutionary uprising would have been possible.20 He consequently endorsed strikes as a means of action. In his view, anarchists had neglected them because they considered strikes to be merely economic weapons. Instead, as proved by the experiences of London and Rotterdam, the strike could be a powerful tool for guiding workers towards revolution, ‘as masses are led to big demands by way of small requests and small revolts’.21 Therefore anarchists should involve themselves as a vanguard in labour disputes and try to raise the level of struggle. According to Turcato, ‘Malatesta set a double task for anarchists, as an autonomous conscious minority, they should fully advocate their ideas; as a segment of the masses they should aim to be as flexible as possible in order to steer collective action in an emancipatory direction.’22

The Italian Anarchist Press in London

117

L’Associazione ended abruptly. In 1890, the administrator Cioci absconded with the newspaper’s funds, estimated at 5,000 francs, forcing its closure.23 Despite this setback, the anarchists in London continued their activities. In August 1890, a circular endorsing the programme of the defunct newspaper announced a series of bulletins called the Biblioteca dell’Associazione.24 Influential pamphlets were printed, including new editions of two of Malatesta’s most prominent works. Between Peasants appeared in 1890.25 In April 1891, an Italian police informer reported that Malatesta’s L’Anarchia had been issued and several thousand copies were due to be posted.26 The decision of L’Associazione’s former editors to focus on this format is not surprising: pamphlets were a substantial addendum to newspapers for the dissemination of libertarian ideas and there was a close interplay between the two forms of media. Some influential pamphlets were collections of articles that had previously appeared in newspapers. This was true of Kropotkin’s An Appeal to the Young – a collection of four articles published in Le Révolté (Geneva 1879–85) in 1880 – that the editors of L’Associazione reprinted as a pamphlet and sold for five centesimos.27 Conversely, prestigious pamphlets were often reprinted in newspapers in installments. New translations and reprints of pamphlets were regularly advertised in all anarchist newspapers worldwide. Pamphlets allowed room for a systematic analysis of specific ideas, while periodicals were more fruitful as tools for opening and developing debates. This distinction was used as an explanation for the closure of La Questione Sociale (Buenos Aires, 1885), its editors deciding to shift their efforts to pamphlet publication.28 Despite its brief lifespan, L’Associazione is a good example of the interplay between exile and homeland. Malatesta elaborated and disseminated through the paper new political strategies which he tried to implement in Italy during the following decade. L’Associazione highlights the impact of the British experience on anarchist refugees and the development of their political ideas. In particular, the emergence of New Unionism and the development of a movement based on unskilled workers positively influenced the anarchist exiles’ views on trade unionism, and these ideas were disseminated from London to Italy and to the other centres of the transnational anarchist networks. Moreover, L’Associazione played a significant part in planting the seeds for a remarkable event in the Italian anarchist history: the foundation of the Partito Socialista Anarchico Rivoluzionario at the congress of Capolago in January 1891 which ‘represented the highest point the movement had reached since the heyday of the International’.29

Risorgimento legacies and transnational collaboration: The Torch Five years after the ending of L’Associazione, Italian anarchist exiles played a significant role in the production of The Torch. Published between 1891 and 1896, The Torch was an original enterprise: on the one hand it exemplified the legacy of Italian Risorgimento exiles in London; on the other hand The Torch was a cosmopolitan publication that enjoyed a close relation with the artistic world.30 Over the years, the newspaper received contributions from poets and painters such as Louise Sarah Bevington and Lucien

118

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Pissarro. Moreover, The Torch was one of the very few examples in the panorama of the anarchist press in which women played a leading role. The Torch was founded by the young Olivia (16 years old), Helen (12) and Gabriel Arthur Rossetti (14), the children of William Michael Rossetti, co-founder of the PreRaphaelite movement and the grandchildren of the Risorgimento exile Gabriele Rossetti. The establishment of the newspaper was prompted by a reading of Kropotkin’s An Appeal to the Young which had left the young Rossettis ‘fired with enthusiasm’.31 The first issues, handwritten and printed by hectograph, advocated ‘international revolutionary socialism’.32 Initially, the circulation was very limited. According to Gabriel Arthur Rossetti, they printed no more than they could dispose of: only three copies of the first issue were produced.33 At the beginning, The Torch had close connections with Russian political refugees, in particular Feliks Volkhovskii, Sergei Mikhaylovich StepniakKravchinskii and Peter Kropotkin.34 In spring 1894, the link between The Torch and the Italian anarchists became more evident, particularly with the involvement of Antonio Agresti, ‘a young man, dark, short & slight, with an unhealthy complexion, & dressed in black like a poor clerk’.35 Agresti, expelled from Belgium, reached London in May 1892.36 It was probably in summer 1894 that Olivia Rossetti and Agresti fell in love.37 Agresti’s first contributions appeared in August 1894, besides those of prominent anarchists: Louise Michel, Émile Pouget, Charles Malato and Malatesta.38 In October The Torch embarked ‘on a new and wider sphere of propaganda’. From promoting international socialism, it moved to declaring itself to be ‘anarchist’, ‘communist’ and ‘revolutionist’, to believe ‘in anarchists entering workmen’s organisations’ and to be interested in the labour movement ‘as much as the revolutionary movement, for the triumph of the latter depends on the former’.39 Agresti’s growing role in the newspaper is revealed by the fact that his address was provided for the delivery of correspondence and money.40 Moreover, he was one of its most assiduous contributors. Agresti discussed a variety of themes in his numerous articles in The Torch: the role of sabotage during strikes, the use of violence, extensive confutations of Lombroso’s studies on the anarchists, the meaning of patriotism, the role of property in society. He continued contributing to The Torch during his brief sojourn in the United States in 1895, where he went on Malatesta’s behalf; Agresti was appointed editor of La Questione Sociale (Paterson, New Jersey 1895–1908), in October.41 The Torch published articles by other prominent figures in the Italian anarchist movement. In 1895 Pietro Gori contributed a long commemorative piece on Sante Caserio, the anarchist who had killed the president of the French Republic, Sadi Carnot, the previous year.42 Gori, accused of being Caserio’s accomplice, had taken refuge in Lugano in autumn 1894, but the Swiss authorities had arrested and expelled him and another 18 political refugees in January 1895. After an exhausting journey Gori and his comrades reached London and found hospitality at the new offices of The Torch.43 The Torch had moved to 127 Ossulston Street in December 1894 and there Malatesta assembled ‘a big and old Wharfdale printing machine which required three people to operate’ it.44 According to Max Nettlau, during 1895 The Torch’s print run oscillated between 1,500 and 3,000 copies.45 In the July issue, seven London distributors were listed inside the front cover. Louise Bevington noted that ‘many thousands of copies of each edition of The Torch sold out every time’.46 The Torch devoted a considerable amount of space to

The Italian Anarchist Press in London

119

Figure 6.2 Headquarters of Freedom Press in Inner Court, 127 Ossulston Street, 1927. © International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

engagement with ideas. For example, a debate initiated by the pacifist Quaker TH Bell on the role of violence in anarchism ran for several issues with replies from Gabriel Arthur Rossetti, FS Paul and Malatesta.47 This discussion took place in the midst of the ‘era of the attempts’, when individual terrorist deeds became a divisive theme within the anarchist movement. At the beginning of 1896, the Rossettis gradually detached themselves from The Torch. Agresti returned from the United States in February 1896 and moved to Italy a year later. He was followed by Olivia and the two married. The Torch, which had been heavily dependent on Rossetti’s financial support, went into crisis and, despite several appeals for funds from its editors, ceased publication in June. The printing press was bought by Max Nettlau and Bernhard Kampffmeyer ‘for the benefit of the movement’ and Ossulston Street became the headquarters of Freedom, the most enduring anarchist newspapers in England.48

Debate on violence and individual deeds: L’Anarchia and Cause ed Effetti L’Anarchia According to Masini, L’Anarchia ‘marked a significant turning point in the history of anarchism’.49 This one-off publication came out in August 1896, in a period of great challenges for anarchists. Individual attempts on the lives of heads of states and

120

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

rulers, the consequent widespread reaction and the promulgation of special repressive laws had once more isolated the anarchists from the masses. Moreover, the socialist parties were exerting a growing influence on the labour movement, and the London International Socialist Workers and Trade Union Congress in 1896 sanctioned the definitive exclusion of anarchists from the Second International. The use of terror and its justification caused profound disagreement in the movement. In those years, Malatesta, Merlino and other anarchists were involved in harsh polemics with the anti-organizationalists, in particular the group La Libera Iniziativa active in Paris and London which openly supported violent individual acts.50 Through L’Anarchia, a group of London militants ‘worried for the critical status of the movement’ intended ‘to examine its causes and suggest possible remedies’ and to put an end to the polemics that weakened the movement.51 Several months earlier, Malatesta had complained that internal disagreements were paralysing the movement and that the only solution was to ‘split and then to reunite only those who agreed on a common course of action’.52 Most of the articles in L’Anarchia reiterated the necessity of a definitive breach between organizationalists and anti-organizationalists, the latter of whom ‘draw from the very same theoretical concept practical consequences opposite to the ones we draw’.53 For Agresti, separation was the best option for everyone: ‘Place ourselves in two different camps and each go his own way’.54 Malatesta’s contribution, ‘Errors and remedies’, provides a sharp analysis of the issue. One of the main differences dividing the two camps was the concept of morality. Malatesta underlined how ‘rebelling against any rule imposed by force does not actually mean a rejection of all moral restraint and any sense of obligation towards others’. The other substantial divergence related to the theory of violence. Changing established social institutions by means of peaceful reforms was impossible, and the brutality with which the bourgeoisie reacted to demands from the proletariat made a violent revolution inevitable. However, People have a tendency to mistake the means for the end; and violence, which we see as being – and so it must stay – a harsh necessity, has for many turned into virtually the sole purpose of the struggle. History is awash with examples of men who […] have, in the heat of battle, lost the run of themselves and lost sight of their purpose and turned into ferocious butchers. And, as recent events have shown, many anarchists have not avoided this terrifying danger in violent struggle […] And, like the bourgeois, they have described such vengeance and hatred as justice.

However, for Malatesta, anarchists were not avengers but liberators: ‘We do not shrink from the harsh necessity and ready ourselves to employ [violence] successfully. But let us have no unnecessary victims, not even in the enemy camp.’55 Malatesta’s article was republished in several newspapers over the years.56 According to another contributor, those who praised and theorized the use of indiscriminate violence were ‘the most loyal allies and the most effective auxiliaries of the dominant bourgeoisie’.57 L’Anarchia stimulated the debate within the Italian-speaking anarchist movement. In the United States, La Questione Sociale signalled that the alarm raised by the

The Italian Anarchist Press in London

121

Figure 6.3 Front page of the single issue Cause ed Effetti, 1898–1900, September 1900. © International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

London anarchists had had a powerful echo.58 In Italy, the single issue L’Uomo Libero (Imola, 1896) supported the arguments advanced by the London anarchists.59 This debate helped Malatesta, once back in Italy in 1897, to publish L’Agitazione (Ancona, 1897–8), one of the most influential Italian anarchist newspapers of the nineteenth century. Through L’Agitazione, Malatesta persisted in promoting ‘the organisation of an anarchist-socialist party, the development of close ties between the movement and the masses, the formation of workers’ leagues of resistance, and strike action’.60

Cause ed Effetti, 1898–1900 On 29 July 1900, the anarchist Gaetano Bresci killed the king of Italy, Umberto I.61 At his trial Bresci justified his action as revenge for the massacre of dozens of civilians by soldiers on the orders of General Bava Beccaria – who was later decorated by the king for his services – during the bread riots in Milan in May 1898. All political groups, including socialists and republicans, condemned Bresci’s deed. Suspicions and rumours of widespread anarchist plots circulated in the Italian and foreign press. Sensationalist titles fingered Malatesta as the mastermind behind these conspiracies: ‘Malatesta, the

122

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

arch-plotter. When he moves, sovereigns’ lives are endangered.’62 Umberto I’s killing disoriented the anarchists. Several groups in Italy dissociated themselves from Bresci’s action in the aftermath of the event.63 This disorientation was influenced not only by the repressive atmosphere after the regicide but also by the fact that the movement in Italy was going through a transitional period of strategic reassessment. The anarchists were trying to find new ways of engaging with the working class as an emerging active political force and to counter the increasing influence of socialist and reformist parties.64 It was the militants from abroad who offered a more articulate reading of the killing in an attempt to counteract the attacks on the movement. They stressed the causal relation between the violence of the state and the regicide. Felice Vezzani in Il Risveglio urged anarchists to refrain from joining bourgeois reactionary condemnations of the killing. In the United States, Pedro Esteve defended Bresci’s action as a justified response to all the crimes committed in Italy in the name of the king.65 In the weeks following the attempt, Malatesta was hounded by journalists in search of sensational scoops. In interviews he held Italy’s rulers responsible for fomenting violence.66 He emphasized the responsibilities of King Umberto ‘who had always backed up the reactionaries’, ‘had always been the enemy of progress’, ‘was responsible for all that was done by the military against the people, and had permitted the systematic massacre of Italian working men’.67 In September the London anarchists published the single issue Cause ed Effetti, 1898–1900 to ‘reaffirm their ideals, to claim their moral responsibility in the struggle between oppressed and oppressors and in its sad episodes’.68 The dates in the title highlighted the causal link between the regicide and the repression of the bread riots in Milan. A note urged readers to get as many copies as possible into Italy. In his articles Malatesta rebutted the misrepresentations of the anarchist movement in the press and challenged the equation of anarchy with violence. Anarchy, Malatesta claimed, was the negation of violence because it aimed at the creation of a society without the imposition of one man over another. However, the use of violence was often the only possible defence against violence, ‘but it is not the one who defends himself who is violent, but the one who forces the other to resort to it’.69 Malatesta offered an extensive reflection on the regicide and its causes. Without repudiating Bresci, he declared that the anarchists could not be held responsible for the regicide. Thousands of daily deaths caused by poverty, illnesses, starvation, workplace accidents and repression had not stimulated the same uproar because they were considered natural in a system based on exploitation and violence. In Italy there was no freedom of speech, press or association. Imprisonment and domicilio coatto (house arrest) were used against those who tried to improve their social condition. This made violence seem the only possible solution. Only by granting freedom of propaganda and organization, and allowing the oppressed to fight for their emancipation, would authorities reduce outbursts of vindictive violence. As long as oppressors and exploiters ‘insist on profiting from the existing situation and defending it with force […] we are obliged, we have a duty, to oppose force with force’.70However, for Malatesta, individual acts of violence when the masses were not properly prepared were counterproductive: We know that what is essential and undoubtedly useful is not just to kill a king, the man, but to kill all kings – those of the Courts, of parliaments and of factories –

The Italian Anarchist Press in London

123

in the hearts and minds of the people, that is, to uproot faith in the principle of authority to which most people owe allegiance.71

The position outlined by the London anarchists in Cause ed Effetti was shared by other anarchist newspapers abroad. Attestation and dissemination of this apologetic view was possible because anarchist exiles generally enjoyed a greater freedom of expression than those in Italy. However, according to Ortalli, this was equally a sign of the detachment of the anarchists abroad from the motherland and their inability to read and adapt to social and political developments.72 This problematic emerged clearly in the newspapers published by the London anarchists in the first years of the twentieth century. The turn of the century brought considerable political change to Italy. In 1901 the Zanardelli-Giolitti government initiated the so-called ‘Giolittian’ era. In a famous speech to parliament, Giolitti underlined the urgency of recognizing the legitimacy of trade unions and workers’ organizations. Respect for constitutional rights and relative tolerance allowed anarchist groups in Italy to reorganize and relaunch their activities. A plurality of groups and tendencies emerged, alongside the necessity for revising tactics and programmes, particularly in relation to the emerging labour movement and trade unionism.73

Newspapers as a mean of political debate: Anarchosyndicalism and the general strike L’Internazionale On the last page of Cause ed Effetti, the editors expressed their willingness to embark on the production of a newspaper in London to compensate for the lack of an anarchist press in Italy.74 They asked for the support of all anarchist communities abroad. Two months later, in November 1900, the aims of the new publication, L’Internazionale, were stated in a circular signed by 31 anarchist refugees.75 The circular noted that a wave of reaction was threatening basic civil rights in all European countries. Clericalism, authoritarianism and militarism were regaining influence in Italy, France, England and the United States. This demonstrated the uselessness of gaining political freedom without a simultaneous economic emancipation. Despite this, social-democratic parties were pursuing a merely defensive strategy, abdicating the class struggle and forming alliances with sections of the bourgeoisie to gain votes and parliamentary seats. The anarchists remained the last defenders of socialist intransigence for the complete emancipation of the working class. The promoters of L’Internazionale stated that, although they could have delivered much more effective propaganda if they were in Italy, they nevertheless intended to contribute to the cause by publishing an Italianlanguage periodical despite many foreseeable difficulties: ‘Because the existence of many periodicals, even if they struggle to survive, produces more propaganda, activities and initiatives than one or a few publications, even in flourishing conditions, can do.’76 Silvio Corio, the main figure behind the newspaper, reached London after his expulsion from Paris in autumn 1900.77 He was in charge of the typesetting and

124

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

delivery of the newspaper to its sellers.78 He remarked in his articles that the anarchist press in Italy was silenced by censorship and continuous seizures: ‘Therefore, as our voice is taken away, we will speak from abroad.’89 The promoters wanted to be beneficial to the movement in Italy where ‘the propaganda is not as effective and coordinated as it should be’.80 L’Internazionale was the first of three relatively short-lived newspapers published by the Italian anarchists in London between 1901 and 1903. It was printed in the Freedom offices in Ossulton Street. The first of four issues of L’Internazionale appeared on 12 January 1901. Several subscriptions were received from abroad: Patterson, Barre and Baltimore in the United States; Canada, Paris, Buenos Aires and Brussels. L’Internazionale was sold at the editorial offices of L’Aurora (Spring Valley, Illinois, 1899–1901), of La Questione Sociale in Paterson and at the Libreria Sociologica in Buenos Aires. A section dedicated to the exchange of information (Piccola Posta) reveals some of the mechanisms of transnational communication; comments, appeals or reminders for contributions, requests for addresses (for instance from Sydney, Alexandria, Buenos Aires, Zurich and many Italian towns); and requests for swapping copies of other newspapers appeared in this section. The newspapers’ aims were to fight against all prejudices about the state, family and property; to denounce the damage of parliamentarianism; to provide a forum where the various tendencies of the anarchist movement could debate; and to equip the anarchist movement ‘with coherent and well-discussed criteria because the time for revolutionary action is approaching’.81 The outcome was a heterogeneous publication. Corio, who signed his articles with the penname Crastinus, covered a broad variety of themes: internationalism, despotism in Russia, suppression of freedom of the press in Italy, translations of Kropotkin’s and Tolstoy’s works. Several members of the international colony of anarchists in London contributed to L’Internazionale: the French Louise Michel, the Spaniard Tàrrida del Marmol, the Russian Cherkezov. L’Internazionale devoted particular relevance to the labour movement. It reported the attempt to organize Italian workers in London’s catering sector and supplied information on industrial disputes and strikes in Europe and the Americas.82 This transnational flavour was emphasized by news of the persecutions and abuse of militants in various parts of the world.83 The newspapers welcomed the initiative launched by Les Temps Nouveaux (Paris, 1895–1914) for the establishment of an international solidarity group to support political prisoners and to denounce cases of violence and injustice.84 One theme that emerged in L’Internationale was the discussion of the general strike as a revolutionary tool, an issue that was becoming topical in the international labour movement. Tàrrida del Marmol argued that the general strike was the most powerful weapon in the hands of the workers, but that it had to be organized before technological progress in industry would make capitalists less dependent on the labour force.85 The editors added a brief note pointing out the necessity of giving the general strike a revolutionary character through the expropriation of the means of production. In a reply to del Marmol, Antonio Bacherini recognized the relevance of trade unionism and workers’ economic disputes, but warned that revolution would be of necessity the final act of the struggle for social emancipation and that it was crucial for anarchists to prepare the masses for this.86

The Italian Anarchist Press in London

125

L’Internazionale soon faced serious financial difficulties. The third issue reported a deficit of £22.00.87 A soirée to raise funds was organized with speeches from anarchists of different nationalities (Malatesta, the American Harry Kelly and Louise Michel), a representation of the theatrical play Senza Patria (without a country) by Pietro Gori, a play in verse Mais quelqu’un troubla la fête by Louis Marsolleau and a Spanish revolutionary chorus.88 The soirée was well attended by Italian, Spanish, German and French anarchists.89 To revive the newspaper, Corio tried and failed to persuade Malatesta to join the editorial committee. The almost certain hostility Malatesta would have faced from the anti-organizationalist anarchists and the eclectic nature of the newspaper made his involvement impossible: A newspaper under my editorship would have a precise line in which opinions different from mine would find space only as pieces of information or to be refuted. This cannot be the case for L’Internazionale which is not my own organ, neither one of a homogeneous group, the organ of people who share the same political programme. L’Internazionale is an organ open to all varieties and subvarieties of anarchism and as a consequence it can only be an organ of generic propaganda […] In such an organ I would represent a weakness rather than a strength.90

The last issue of L’Internationale appeared in May 1901. Malatesta’s answer to Corio’s request is indicative of contrasting views on the role of newspapers either as a means of propaganda or theoretical debate and the impact that ideological divisions had in the communities of anarchist refugees in London. However, L’Internazionale introduced themes of debate that were to become central in the anarchist movement, particularly in relation to the revolutionary syndicalism emerging in France and in Italy.

Lo Sciopero Generale The debate on the general strike as a revolutionary means was the core theme of a joint initiative by the London anarchists who published Lo Sciopero Generale in Italian, La Grève Générale in French and The General Strike in English. These publications engaged with the significant debate taking place in the movement on the role of trade unions and the emergence of revolutionary syndicalism; they were a manifestation of ‘the diffusion of proto-syndicalist propaganda among exiles’.91 The first issue in Italian was published on the anniversary of the Paris Commune, 18 March 1902. Comrades in Italy were asked to facilitate the editors’ work by sending addresses of potential readers and providing distribution of the newspaper not just in anarchist circles but especially in working and educational associations. Lo Sciopero Generale was printed in the offices at 33 Gresse Street of Società Internazionale, which had just been established by a cosmopolitan group of anarchist refugees in London to provide groups and individuals the means for propagating progressive ideas and publishing journals and brochures in all languages. To fund the enterprise shares were sold at 5 shillings per share.92

126

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Lo Sciopero Generale maintained a less vigorous stance on the general strike as a revolutionary tactic than the French version. While La Grève Générale called on all the major anarchist newspapers in Europe and the United States to endorse and promote the formation of general strike committees,93 Lo Sciopero Generale underlined the necessity of imbuing the general strike with a revolutionary character and, consequently, of preparing for a violent clash with the bourgeoisie. Although it did not deny the importance of economic strikes and preparation for the general strike, the newspaper warned about confusing the ends with the means. Propaganda for the general strike was positive because it showed workers an effective means of emancipation, undermined faith in parliamentary methods and allowed revolutionaries to involve the masses in the social struggle. However, Malatesta argued, ‘it has given rise to a grave danger that threatens the very cause it promotes’ by giving the illusion that a revolution could be achieved almost peaceably, by folding one’s arms and refusing to work for the bosses.94 Thus, the general strike was viewed not as a means of drawing the masses towards insurrection but as a substitute for insurrection, a way of starving the bourgeoisie and obliging it to capitulate without a blow being struck. This was a lethal mistake. People needed to understand that, faced with a general strike, the bourgeoisie would always resort to violence and call out the army.95 Therefore, a general strike should always be accompanied by preparations for armed resistance. Malatesta concluded: ‘Long live the general strike, but let it be an ARMED STRIKE.’96 Antimilitarism, which was becoming a key area of action in the international labour movement, was another theme featured in the newspaper. Militarism was ‘the most powerful and direct impediment to the rise of new, free, egalitarian forms of social relations’.97 Capitalists used the army as the last defence against popular claims. Through the army, the bourgeoisie were able to keep alive patriotic values and a sense of submission in the masses. Therefore, political activity among soldiers was the most effective way to affect the apparatus employed by the state to repress workers’ protests. Anarchists should approach young people in workers’ associations before the call-up and educate them in class solidarity. In this way, Corio argued, ‘by keeping firm the natural bonds between the proletarian-soldier and the proletarian-producer’,98 conscripts might be induced to sympathize with protesters and ‘the fratricidal weapon the government handed to our brothers to massacre us during strikes will turn and open fire on the commanders’.99 Besides the main articles, small advertisements provide an insight into the life of the anarchist community: for example, the call for a meeting to organize a Università Popolare or reports of debates and conferences. A warning on the activities of the Italian police and the exposure of Gennaro Rubino as an informer was published, a common practice in the anarchist movement, in the last number of the newspaper.100 A short note also alerted against sending material to Gaetano Scolari, wrongly accused of being an informer, a hint of the polemic among the anarchist community.101 Lo Sciopero Generale ended abruptly after three issues. The fact that only a few months later the anarchists were able to publish another newspaper seems to indicate that the closure was not due to financial reasons. It is likely that its collapse was due to the quarrels that frayed the anarchist community after the unmasking Rubino.

The Italian Anarchist Press in London

127

La Rivoluzione Sociale, Periodico Socialista Anarchico When the arguments died down, Malatesta and his comrades in London announced a new periodical: La Rivoluzione Sociale, Periodico Socialista Anarchico.102 Its programme also appeared in the United States in La Questione Sociale and in Brazil in Germinal (São Paulo). The newspaper promoted a strategic shift on the crucial issue of anarchist involvement in labour organizations as highlighted in the title by the choice of the words ‘social revolution’ instead of ‘general strike’. The circular launching the new enterprise argued that in the past anarchists’ contempt towards daily struggles in favour of an all-encompassing commitment to moral and material preparation for revolution had made their message unintelligible and had alienated the masses, without whom a revolution was impossible. Participation in workers’ associations had allowed the movement to break out of its isolation. However, in so doing the anarchists had fallen into the opposite trap of overestimating the significance of labour associations, and had confused the means with the end. We believe that it is necessary to take part in the workers’ movement but without being absorbed into it, without compromising on its conservative and reactionary features and by keeping in mind that it is only a means for propaganda and for assembling forces for the revolution.103

Although labour associations were useful tools for spreading anarchist ideas and recruiting new members, ultimately only a revolution could overturn the system of oppression and the anarchists had neglected to proselytize for and prepare for it – if not in theory, definitively in their practice. La Rivoluzione Sociale was the most enduring newspaper published by the Italian anarchists in London: nine four-page issues came out from October 1902 to April 1903. Subscriptions were received from a range of countries: South Africa, France, Brazil, Uruguay, Switzerland and Italy. However, the highest portion of funds came from the United States, which an Italian government spy defined as ‘la mecca degli anarchici’.104 The typographer Carlo Frigerio was in charge of composition, while Antonio Galassini was editor-in-chief. However, the prime mover of the newspaper was Malatesta, who disseminated through the newspaper his strong reservations on anarchists’ mounting hopes in trade unions and syndicalism. One of the main purposes of the La Rivoluzione Sociale was to make militants aware of the inescapable necessity of social revolution.105 La Rivoluzione Sociale was, therefore, mainly internal to the Italian anarchist movement and contributed to the international debate on most pressing current issues. Participation in trade unions and workers’ associations, the role of economic struggles and debates on the general strike, and relations with Socialist and Republican parties represented most of the topics covered. The ways these questions were discussed, focusing on political affairs in Italy and abroad, shows the paper’s transnational political involvement. The wave of strikes and violent government repression in Italy and other European countries led Malatesta to believe that a revolutionary juncture was approaching.106 As a consequence, the newspaper criticized parliamentarianism and reformism and

128

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

fiercely attacked the Italian Socialist Party and the policy of its leader Filippo Turati, who supported the liberal Zanardelli-Giolitti cabinet and voted for the minister who ‘handcuffs, shoots, replaces strikers with soldiers’ in support of alleged social reforms.107 La Rivoluzione Sociale denounced the ‘ineffective and corrupting’ reforms supported or proposed by the socialists: for example, compulsory arbitration in labour disputes or the proposal of a bill on divorce that was defined as ‘a totally useless conquest for the proletariat’, since it was ‘only through economic emancipation the new and true family could emerge’.108 England was used as an example to demonstrate the ineffectiveness of palliative reforms. Despite the existence of strong workers’ associations and philanthropic charities, 10 per cent of the population suffered hunger and cold, while three quarters of the land lay uncultivated.109 ‘Charity, philanthropy, political reforms, workers’ organisations, even science’ were powerless. The problem was too big to be solved by superficial reforms; sharing the means of production was the only solution. Malatesta, according to a spy’s report, thought that anarchist involvement in campaigning for even seemingly beneficial reforms was a dissipation of their energies.110 Similarly, other major and minor events were highlighted to define strategic aims and indicate tactical direction. For instance, the introductory paragraph of a piece on a strike wave shaking the United States, Switzerland and Spain underlined that the article’s main purpose was not to provide a chronicle of these struggles, which militants should carefully follow in the daily press, but to draw attention to the lessons to be learnt from them.111 In a note reporting on rumours that the Ancona anarchists had not published an abstentionist manifesto on the occasion of local elections so not to displease the Republicans, their allies in the local Chamber of Labour on the eve of elections for its executive committee, La Rivoluzione Sociale emphasized the dangers for anarchist militants of holding office in workers’ organizations and urged them to avoid assimilation into a hierarchical and authoritarian system.112 These reservations on trade unionism were part of the broader debate on revolutionary syndicalism. Malatesta was alarmed that syndicalism was weakening rather than strengthening combativeness among militants and was concerned that pugnacious militants ‘became inactive and settled comfortably in positions of responsibility and direction in syndicalist organisations’.113 The British experience was an example of the dangers of syndicalism’s reactionary features and the transformation of unions into bureaucratic structures led by professional officers. British trade unions had become corporative organizations that did not challenge capitalism and bosses. Their acceptance of capitalism and its legal system had led to the death of unionism, as exemplified by the 1901 Taff Vale case that made unions liable to employers for loss of profits caused by strikes.114 According to La Rivoluzione Sociale, Chambers of Labour should remain politically neutral and open to all workers, regardless of their political or religious affiliations. The duty of anarchists in these organizations was to strengthen the revolutionary consciousness of other members, infuse them with anarchist ideas and practices and stop the socialists manipulating them for their own political gains.115 La Rivoluzione Sociale also criticized those anarchists who claimed that engagement in partial economic struggles distracted from the organization of Chambers of Labour and preparation for the general strike. In fact, economic strikes reinforced

The Italian Anarchist Press in London

129

class consciousness, broke passivity, made workers aware of their strength and kept the revolutionary spirit alive more effectively through action than mere propaganda could. Massive labour disputes in the Unites States, France, Belgium and Spain had demonstrated the increasing significance of strikes in political and social life and the consequent urgency for anarchists to take a leading role within them and to imbue strikes with a revolutionary character. Vanguard minorities regained a prominent role in Malatesta’s strategy, as outlined in La Rivoluzione Sociale: Part of the work can and must be done by the masses: some can be accomplished only by small groups previously organised and prepared […] to arm themselves, put their battle plan into practice, trained in the use of weapons and explosives.116

Malatesta’s distinction between conscious vanguard minorities and the masses, and the prominence attributed to armed insurrection while dismissing social reforms or other forms of political struggle represented a regressive step in his political ideas.117 Berti argues that this regression was caused by a misunderstanding of the social and political conditions in Italy. La Rivoluzione Sociale failed to win support for these views. According to an informer, Malatesta regretted that La Rivoluzione Sociale was unsuccessful in changing Italian anarchists’ course of action.118 At the beginning of 1903 the editors announced the newspaper’s precarious financial state.119 The average cost of a single issue was £5.00. Its main revenue was subsidies from the editors (£11.00), subscriptions (£23.00), the profits of a soirée (£5.00) and sales in London at 10 centesimi (£1.00) to a total of £42.00. However, expenses for typesetting and printing (£31.00), correspondence and delivery (£14.00) and other minor payments left a deficit of £6.00.120 Editors were also disappointed by the inadequate number of contributions received from anarchists abroad. Despite appeals, the financial situation did not improve and La Rivoluzione Sociale ceased publication. Since La Rivoluzione Sociale can be considered Malatesta’s mouthpiece, the fact that his views did not find a favourable audience leads to wonder to what extent this factor contributed to the ending of the newspaper.

Opposing nationalism and colonialism: La Guerra Tripolina In 1911, Italian anarchists in London joined the transnational protest against the Italian invasion of Libya and published the single issue La Guerra Tripolina in April 1912.121 Five thousand copies were printed and sent to Italy and anarchist communities abroad; Frigerio received 500 of them in Paris, which he distributed at a meeting of the Italian anarchist group.122 The invasion raised several questions about the value of nationalism among anarchists who supported the right of Arabs to independence. The leading article written by Malatesta has been republished many times over the years. He criticized and challenged the moral arguments used to support the colonial enterprise: civilization and patriotism. Civilization’s mission was ‘to bring all peoples together as brothers in

130

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

the fight for common good’. Instead, Italy was bringing ‘carnage and looting, and in the vile endeavour to reduce a foreign population to slavery she makes a brute and slave of herself ’. Anarchists abhorred war and envisaged social revolution. However, if a ‘clash were to erupt between one people and another’, anarchists ‘stand with the people who are defending their independence’ and, ‘For the sake of Italy’s honour, we hope that the Italian people, having come to its senses, will force a withdrawal from Africa upon its government: if not, we hope that the Arabs succeed in driving it out.’123 In most of the contributions, the invasion of Libya was juxtaposed to the positive struggle for national independence; colonialism betrayed the ideals of the Risorgimento. Corio, in his article, unmasked the financial interests behind the war. He argued that the intervention was being used to divert attention from domestic problems. Anticolonialism would be a central interest of Corio and his companion Sylvia Pankhurst in subsequent years. La Guerra Tripolina was the last issue the Italian anarchists published before the First World War. The military expedition in Libya revealed to them the growing influence in society of nationalist feelings and the difficulties of countering them: national allegiances showed their power at the outbreak of the global conflict when the harsh divisions between pro-war and anti-war factions dismantled the cosmopolitan community of anarchist refugees in London.

Conclusions Anarchist newspapers in London played a significant part both in the history of the political press in Britain and in the history of the anarchist movement. They are a powerful means of the connections that anarchist communities abroad maintained with Italy and across the world. Analysis of newspapers like L’Associazione, L’Anarchia and La Rivoluzione Sociale allows us to follow the development of ideological debates and changing political strategies over the years, and to evaluate the extent to which anarchist exiles influenced them or reacted. Information about specific events, advertisements, meeting reports and soirées provide glimpses into the daily life of the anarchist community. Analysis of Italian anarchist newspapers reveals some specificities and problematic issues, particularly when compared with the experiences of anarchist communities in other countries. The first is the predominant use of Italian. Language represented one of the main barriers between anarchist communities and the host country. Newspapers aimed mainly at readers in the motherland and at Italian-speaking communities. Apart from the brief experience of Lo Sciopero Generale and La Grève Générale (which remained two distinct publications), there were no attempts to publish multilingual newspapers. This was not the case in other parts of the world, particularly in South America, where Italian anarchists published bilingual or multilingual newspapers or edited them in collaboration with other refugees. This signals a dissimilar level of integration with the host country: in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century, anarchist exiles published newspapers using their mother tongue (Italian, Spanish, German); 20 years later, with the second generation of migrants, the anarchist press in Italian or Spanish almost disappeared and newspapers were all

The Italian Anarchist Press in London

131

Table 6.1 List of Italian anarchist papers published in London between 1878 and 1912 (not exhaustive) Title

Date of Publication

Editor(s)

La Guerre Sociale/La Guerra Sociale L’Associazione

October–November 1878

Robert Warwick Giacomo Faraut

The Torch

October 1889–September 1890 1891–6

L’Anarchia Cause ed Effetti L’Internazionale Lo Sciopero Generale

August 1896 September 1900 1901–2 March–June 1902

La Rivoluzione Sociale

October 1902–April 1903

La Guerra Tripolina

April 1912

Olivia, Helen, Arthur Rossetti Antonio Galassini Silvio Corio, Carlo Frigerio Arturo Campagnoli, Carlo Frigerio Carlo Frigerio, Antonio Galassini Pietro Gualducci

printed in Portuguese.124 Despite a low level of integration in British society and the British anarchist movement, the legacy of Italian anarchists survived. For almost 20 years, Corio edited New Times and Ethiopia News with Sylvia Pankhurst (1936–56), established following the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia in 1936. In 1945 the sons of two Italian anarchist exiles, Marie Louise Berneri and Vernon Richards (Vero Recchioni), played a leading role in resurrecting Freedom, the most significant and enduring anarchist newspaper in England.

Notes 1 2 3 4

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Gabaccia, Donna, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London: UCL Press, 2000). Bistarelli, Agostino, Gli esuli del Risorgimento (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011), 255–62. Flor O’Squarr, Les Coulisses de l’Anarchie (Paris: Albert Savine, 1892), 66. Fiori Antonio, Archivio Centrale dello Stato. Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza. La stampa italiana nella serie F1 (1894–1926). Inventario (Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1995), 11. ‘Ai nostri corrispondenti’, L’Associazione, 16 October 1889. Turcato, Davide, Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889–1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 36–70. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 40. ‘Partito Socialista-Anarchico-Rivoluzionario’, L’Associazione, 16 October 1889; ‘Voici le programme de L’Associazione’, La Révolte, 12–18 October 1889. ‘Il nostro programma’, L’Associazione, 6 September 1889. ‘Manifesto Anarquista’, El Productor, 2 October 1889. Turcato, Making Sense, 40. Brunello, Piero, Storie di anarchici e di spie (Rome: Donzelli, 2009), XIV.

132

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

14 Recchioni’s biographical record, Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), Casellario Politico Centrale (CPC), b. 4260. 15 ‘Here is a photograph that may prove important’, New York Press, 13 October 1901. 16 ‘Il nostro programma’, L’Associazione, 6 September 1896. 17 Pernicone, Nunzio, Italian Anarchism 1864–1892 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 246. 18 Malatesta, Errico, ‘A proposito di uno sciopero’, L’Associazione, 6 September 1889. 19 ‘La propaganda a fatti’, L’Associazione, 16 October 1889. 20 Malatesta, Errico, ‘A proposito di uno sciopero’, L’Associazione, 6 September 1889. 21 Ibid. 22 Turcato, Making Sense, 61. 23 ‘Dichiarazione’, L’Associazione, 21 December 1889; Italian ambassador to Crispi, 20 January 1890, Archivio Storico Diplomatico Ministero Affari Esteri (ASDMAE), Polizia Internazionale, b. 39, f. 1890. 24 Ministry of Interior to the Italian ambassador, 27 August 1890, ASDMAE, Pol. Int., b. 39, f. 1890. 25 Malatesta, Errico, Fra Contadini (London, 1890); L’Anarchia (London, 1891), Biblioteca dell’Associazione. 26 Calvo’s report, 25 April 1891, ACS, CPC, b. 2949 , f. Malatesta Errico. 27 L’Associazione, 6 September 1889. ’Aux Jeunes Gens’, Le Révolté 25 June, 10 July, 7 and 21 August 1880. 28 ‘Avviso’, La Questione Sociale, 29 November 1885. 29 Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 257. 30 Johnson, Barry, ‘The Rossettis and The Torch. A History: 1891–96’, in Olive & Stepniak. The Bloomsbury Diary of Olive Garnett 1893–1895, ed. Barry Johnson (Birmingham: Bartletts Press, 1993), 245–71. 31 Agresti, Olivia Rossetti, The Anecdotage of an Interpreter. Reminiscences, 1958, Manuscript Collection, Columbia University in New York. 32 ‘Statement of principles’, The Torch, 15 October 1891. 33 Gabriel Arthur Rossetti to Nettlau, 9 November 1893, International Institute of Social History (IISH), Nettlau papers, mf 1055. 34 Agresti, Olivia Rossetti, The Anecdotage. 35 Johnson, B., Olive & Stepniak, 125. 36 Assistant Commissioner of Police to Under Secretary of State, Home Office, 19 May 1892, National Archive, HO144/587/B2840C/7. 37 Agresti, Olivia Rossetti, The Anecdotage. 38 Agresti, Antonio, ‘Caserio’s Execution’, The Torch, August 1894, n. 3. 39 ‘Our Principles’, The Torch, October 1894, n. 4. 40 ‘Editorial’, The Torch, October 1894, n. 4. 41 Zimmer, Kenyon, Immigrants Against the State. Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015), 57. 42 Gori, Pietro, ‘Sante Caserio’, The Torch, 18 June 1895. 43 Meredith, Isabel, A Girl Among the Anarchists (London: Duckworth & Co., 1903), 42. 44 Nettlau, Max, Errico Malatesta. Vita e pensieri (New York: Casa Editrice Il Martello, 1922), 235. 45 Nettlau’s diaries, IISH, Nettlau Papers, mf 28, 2043. 46 LS Bevington’s letter to Ethel Rolt-Wheeler, 16 July 1895, British Library Manuscript Archive, RP9332. 47 ‘Hear all sides’, The Torch, from October 1894 to April 1895.

The Italian Anarchist Press in London

133

48 HB, NB, ‘Freedom People and Places’, in Freedom/A Hundred Years (London: Freedom Press, 1986). 49 Masini, Pier Carlo, Storia degli anarchici italiani nell’epoca degli attentati (Milan: Rizzoli, 1981), 82. 50 Di Paola, Pietro, The Knights-Errant of Anarchy. London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora 1880–1917 (Liverpool: LUP, 2013). 51 Il gruppo editore, ‘Avviso’, L’Anarchia, August 1896. 52 Errico Malatesta to Niccolò Converti, 10 March 1896, in Errico Malatesta. Epistolario 1873–1932, ed. Bertolucci, R. (Avenza: Centro Studi Sociali, 1984), 74–75. 53 Malatesta Errico, ‘Errori e rimedi’, L’Anarchia. 54 Agresti Antonio, ‘L’Individualismo’, L’Anarchia. 55 Malatesta, ‘Errori e rimedi’. 56 Fabbri, Luigi, Malatesta. L’uomo e il pensiero (Naples: Edizioni RL, 1951), 279. 57 Cini, ‘Praticità nell’ideale’, L’ Anarchia. 58 Borghi, Armando, Errico Malatesta (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1947), 116. La Questione Sociale, 30 December 1896. 59 Masini, Gli anarchici, 85. 60 Pernicone, Italian Anarchism, 289. 61 On Bresci’s attempt: Ortalli, Massimo Gaetano Bresci. Tessitore anarchico e uccisore di re (Rome: Nova Delphi, 2011); Diemoz, Erika, A morte il tiranno. Anarchia e violenza da Crispi a Mussolini (Turin: Einaudi, 2011). 62 ‘Malatesta the arch plotter. When he moves sovereigns’ lives are endangered’, the Republic, 3 August 1900. 63 L’Avvenire Sociale in Messina, L’Agitazione in Ancona, Il Combattiamo in Genoa. 64 Ortalli, Gaetano Bresci, 102. 65 ‘Jersey Anarchists Glad’, New York Tribune, 1 August 1900. 66 ‘Foes to all rulers’, Omaha Sunday Bee, 5 August 1900. 67 ‘The Gospel of Anarchy’, Daily News, 3 September 1900. 68 Cause ed Effetti. 1898–1900, London, September 1900. 69 ‘Che cosa è l’anarchia’, Cause ed Effetti. 70 Errico Malatesta, ‘La tragedia di Monza’, Cause ed Effetti. 71 Ibid. 72 Ortalli, Gaetano Bresci, 110–12. 73 Giulietti, Fabrizio, Storia degli anarchici italiani in età giolittiana (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012). 74 ‘Un’iniziativa’, Cause ed Effetti. 75 Circolare ‘L’Internazionale, Periodico Socialista Anarchico’, IISH, Fabbri Archive, b. 29. 76 Ibid. 77 XY’s report, 3 October 1900, ACS, CPC, b. 1474, f. Corio Silvio 78 ‘Bornibus’ report to French Police, 6 January 1901, Archives de la Prefecture de Police, Paris, BA1510, f. 350.000-18-A, Anarchistes en Angleterre, 1897 à 1911. 79 Crastinus, ‘La libertà di stampa’, L’Internazionale, 26 January 1901. 80 Crastinus, ‘Quattro parole ai compagni’, ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 ‘Cronaca’; ‘Cronaca Londinese’ ‘Movimento Sociale’, L’Internazionale, 12 and 26 January 1901. 83 ‘Pro Innocenti’, L’Internazionale, ibid. 84 ‘Iniziative’, L’Internazionale, 26 January 1901. 85 Tàrrida del Marmol, ‘L’urgenza dello sciopero generale’, ibid.

134

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

86 87 88 89 90 91

Bacherini Antonio, ‘Gli anarchici e il movimento operaio’, ibid. ‘Amministrazione’, L’Internazionale, 15 March 1901. ‘Festa Libertaria’, leaflet. ACS, CPC, b. 2949, f. Errico Malatesta. Bornibus’s report. Malatesta’s letter (to Silvio Corio), no date, ACS, CPC, b. 2949, f. Malatesta Errico. Bantman, Constance, The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914. Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalization (Liverpool: LUP, 2013), 167–76. ‘Société d’Edition d’Oeuvres Internationales Londres’, June 1902’, IISH, Nettlau papers, mf. 415. ‘L’Action’, Là Grève Générale, 18 March 1902. ‘Lo sciopero armato’, Lo Sciopero Generale, 2 June 1902. ‘Dopo la sconfitta’, Lo Sciopero Generale, 18 March 1902. ‘Lo Sciopero Armato’ Lo Sciopero Generale, 2 June 1902. ‘L’ultimo riparo’, ibid. ‘Sullo sciopero generale’, Lo Sciopero Generale, 18 March 1902. ‘L’ultimo riparo’, Lo Sciopero Generale, 2 June 1902. ‘In guardia’, ibid. On Rubino: Di Paola, The Knights-Errants, 135–44. ‘Agli anarchici di lingua italiana’, London, September 1902; IISH, Fabbri papers, b. 29. Ibid. Turcato, Davide, ‘Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement 1885–1915’, International Review of Social History, 52 (2007): 407–44. Errico Malatesta, ‘I nostri propositi’, La Rivoluzione Sociale, 20 February 1903. Virgilio’s reports to Ministry of Interior, 7 and 17 June 1903. ACS, CPC, b. 2949, f. Malatesta Errico. ‘Dopo un congresso’, La Rivoluzione Sociale, 4 October 1902. Io, ‘Il divorzio’, La Rivoluzione Sociale, 20 February 1903. ‘Società condannata’, La Rivoluzione Sociale, 29 December 1903. Virgilio’s report, 7 June 1903. ACS, CPC, b. 2949, f. Malatesta Errico. ‘A proposito di scioperi’, La Rivoluzione Sociale, 18 October 1902. ‘Fatti e Opinioni’, La Rivoluzione Sociale, 5 April 1903. Fabbri, Luigi, La Vida de Malatesta (Barcelona: Guilda de Amigos del Libro, 1936), 81. ‘La morte dell’unionismo classico’, La Rivoluzione Sociale, 29 December 1902; ‘La guerra contro i lavoratori stranieri’, 27 January 1903. ‘Gli anarchici nelle società operaie’, La Rivoluzione Sociale, 1 November 1902. ‘L’insurrezione armata’, La Rivoluzione Sociale, 5 April 1903. Masini, Gli anarchici italiani, 211–15; Berti, Giampietro, Errico Malatesta e il movimento anarchico italiano e internazionale (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2003), 323–31. Virgilio’s reports, 17 April and 7 June 1903. ACS, CPC, b. 2949, f. Malatesta Errico. ‘Ai Compagni!’, La Rivoluzione Sociale, 27 January 1903. ‘Sottoscrizione per La Rivoluzione Sociale’, La Rivoluzione Sociale, 5 April 1903. La Guerra Tripolina, London, April1912. Italian Ambassador in Paris to Ministry of Interior, 30 April 1912, ACS, DGPS 1912, b. 36. Malatesta Errico, ‘La guerra e gli anarchici’, La Guerra Tripolina. Brunello, Giulia, ‘La storiografia sull’anarchismo in Brasile: temi e prospettive di ricerca’, in L’Anarchismo Italiano. Storia e Storiografia, ed. Carlo De Maria and Giampietro Berti (Milan: Biblion Edizioni, 2016), 351–68.

92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124

7

Political Contestation and Internal Strife: Socialist and Anarchist German Newspapers in London, 1878–1910 Daniel Laqua

In 1910, Theodore Rothstein – a socialist émigré from Tsarist Russia – traced the ‘long and glorious history’ of the German political press in London.1 Fittingly, his survey appeared in the Londoner Volks-Zeitung – a weekly founded in 1909 ‘to form a connecting link between the working-class movements of both sides of the North Sea’.2 Summarizing nearly a century of publishing ventures, Rothstein portrayed the Londoner Volks-Zeitung as the ‘heiress of a beautiful bequest’.3 Like many of its forerunners, the paper itself was short-lived, lasting for only nine months. Nonetheless, the existence of such publications illustrates the political dynamism of London’s German community. Britain’s role as a site for activists from different countries was linked to its openness towards refugees: the country’s liberal asylum policy only changed with the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905. As Bernard Porter has noted, ‘between 1823 and 1906 no refugee who came to Britain was ever denied entry, or expelled’.4 Germans formed a sizeable part of Britain’s foreign-born residents. Panikos Panayi has pointed out that, between 1861 and 1891, they constituted the largest grouping from continental Europe.5 Evidently, not all of them had come to Britain for political reasons. Moreover, in terms of class and ideological background, they certainly formed a heterogeneous community.6 It is clear, however, that political repression on the continent generated upturns in migration to Britain. With regard to the period before 1914, Panayi has identified three major waves of political immigration from Germany: the first during the Vormärz period of the 1830s and 1840s; the second after the defeat of the German 1848 revolution; and the third in the era of Bismarck’s AntiSocialist Laws (1878–90).7 While Rosemary Ashton and Christine Lattek have skilfully surveyed the exile communities of the first two periods, the third phase requires further investigation.8 Indeed, soon after the passing of the Anti-Socialist Laws, many activists made their way abroad. As early as December 1878, the Prussian political police commented on Britain’s role as that ‘old meeting ground of political refugees and the representatives of the most extreme tendencies from all kinds of countries’.9 In 1881, it noted the ‘numerous foreign elements who abuse the unlimited freedom that is

136

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

being granted to them in England and who are the point of origin for the revolutionary movement of all of Europe’.10 This chapter considers Britain as a site of transnational contestation. It does so by focusing on socialist and anarchist German papers published in London – the city that hosted around half of Britain’s German-born population.11 Most of these periodicals appeared as weeklies, with their length usually amounting to four and sometimes to eight pages. The time period covered in this chapter ranges from the introduction of the Anti-Socialist Laws in 1878 to the demise of the Londoner Volks-Zeitung in 1910. Publishing activities abroad were particularly important until 1890, as German policies made it virtually impossible to print socialist newspapers at home. The exile press thus became a vital conduit for the German left. Der Sozialdemokrat was a key example. Launched in Zurich in 1879, the paper served as an unofficial organ of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany (SAP; known as Social Democratic Party of Germany/SPD from 1890 onwards). By 1886, its circulation amounted to an estimated 10,000 copies, most of which were sent to Germany.12 In April 1888, however, the Swiss authorities expelled its editors Eduard Bernstein, Julius Motteler, Hermann Schlüter and Leonhard Tauscher. Therefore, from October onwards, Der Sozialdemokrat was published from London.13 Motteler later said that the British capital had provided the paper with a ‘new and even more storm-proof operational basis’.14 Yet, SAP leaders were far from the only ones to use London for their activities. Repression in Germany meant a weakening of central party control, and various dissenting voices within the left made themselves heard in exile. The London-based Freiheit was the most prominent example. The controversial former SAP Reichstag deputy Johann Most had launched this weekly in January 1879, predating Der Sozialdemokrat by over nine months. The paper soon embraced a revolutionary stance and ultimately ‘became the first anarchist paper published in England’.15 Both Most and Freiheit moved to New York in December 1882, yet London continued to be a hub for its European distribution. A Prussian police report from 1885 estimated that of 5,000 copies printed in the United States, 4,500 made it across the Atlantic.16 Moreover, Freiheit was not the sole German anarchist paper with roots in London. In 1886, the Austrian anarchist Josef Peukert launched Die Autonomie in the British capital.17 The emergence of Freiheit and Die Autonomie epitomizes a wider issue: London’s importance as a centre for international anarchism during the 1880s and 1890s.18 Seen within this broader context, the foreign political press in London sheds light on important episodes in the history of German socialism and anarchism. The chapter starts by mapping the wider milieu connected to these publishing activities. It subsequently shows how the history of these papers reflected three kinds of tension: between social democrats and anarchists; within the anarchist camp; and between the German exiles and their host society.

The settings of the radical German press in London The creation of socialist and anarchist newspapers in London was intrinsically connected to the associational life of London’s German community. In this respect, the

Political Contestation and Internal Strife

137

significance of the Communistischer Arbeiter-Bildungsverein (Communist Workers’ Educational Association, CABV) can hardly be overstated. The CABV was founded in 1840, initially known as ‘Deutscher Bildungsverein für Arbeiter’ (German Educational Association for Workers). As Christine Lattek notes, it ‘not only became an important focal point of Vormärz radicalism, but was also home to many leading socialists fleeing reaction after the defeat of the 1848–1849 revolution’.19 In the following decades, the club experienced manifold divisions – yet it survived until the Great War, with most of its incarnations attracting at least two hundred members. Moreover, the CABV was never just a German venue: it hosted revolutionary refugees and national sections from several countries.20 It is therefore hardly surprising that the CABV has been described as a ‘model’ for other clubs founded by political exiles.21 The period of the Anti-Socialist Laws coincided with major changes in the CABV. In 1878–9, the club split into three sections: the First Section maintained premises in Rose Street (present-day Manette Street) in London’s West End; the Second Section had its quarters in nearby Tottenham Street; and the Third Section catered for German ‘East Enders’ through its club house in Whitechapel.22 The political developments in Germany meant that in all sections, older members were joined by activists who had fled Bismarckian repression. Johann Most was one such arrival. Having reached London in December 1878, he published Freiheit’s inaugural issue in January 1879, using the CABV’s First Section as his base.23 As early as December 1879, police reports noted the paper’s growing distribution in Germany.24 Most’s willingness to steer a radical course soon became obvious. His embrace of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ culminated in an article that celebrated the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.25 The British authorities’ firm response marked a shift from earlier practice. Whereas they had shown little concern about the publishing activities of political exiles during the preceding two decades, they decided to prosecute Most. Bernard Porter has explained the different reasons that led the British government to deviate from its past policy – notably that the threat posed by Fenian terrorism resulted in a firmer line against advocacy for violent action.26 Freiheit’s subsequent fate illustrates the importance of its local support structures: during the sixteen months of Most’s imprisonment, CABV members such as John (Johann) Neve ensured the paper’s survival. Matters were complicated when Freiheit described the Phoenix Park murders – the killing of Lord Cavendish and Thomas Henry Burke by Irish nationalists – as ‘the unavoidable result of English tyranny in Ireland’ and expressed its solidarity with the terrorists.27 Another prosecution was the result. For a few months, the paper was therefore printed in Switzerland until the newly released Most moved to New York. Although Freiheit retained some support in London, by March 1884, the Prussian police believed that direct links between the CABV and the publication had ended.28 In contrast to the First and Third Sections’ support for the radical Freiheit, the Second Section of the CABV remained within the social democratic fold. Heinrich Rackow was the dominant figure of the latter CABV branch. Until 1878, he had been active in the Berlin SAP and had run the party’s publishing cooperative in the German capital. Following the passing of the Anti-Socialist Laws, he was arrested and expelled from the city, moving to London in the wake of these events.29 In

138

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

November 1886, Rackow and the Second Section launched their own weekly, the Londoner Arbeiter-Zeitung. Unlike Freiheit, Der Sozialdemokrat or Die Autonomie, it primarily targeted the German community in Britain. This focus helps to explain why its distribution in Germany itself remained limited.30 The newspaper’s association with the Second Section did encounter challenges: in autumn 1887, the club members voted to end its publication ‘for financial reasons’.31 In response, activists founded a publishing cooperative and continued the paper under a different name: Londoner Freie Presse. These changes were not detrimental in every respect: after the re-launch, the paper’s content grew from four to eight pages. Nor was there a rupture with the Second Section. For example, in January 1888, the Londoner Freie Presse carried Rackow’s CABV New Year’s speech on its front page.32 Later on in 1888, the Second Section proved important for another reason: when Der Sozialdemokrat moved its operation to Britain, the Second Section was the German club with the closed political proximity to its editors. Indeed, even after the paper had ceased to exist, Eduard Bernstein continued to lecture at the club ‘from time to time’.33 That said, the publishing house of Der Sozialdemokrat was not based at the Second Section’s quarters in Tottenham Street, but at a cooperative in Kentish Town. Bernstein later explained that this location was partly chosen because the editors ‘did not wish to go very far afield from that part of town in which Engels was living’.34 Bernstein’s memoirs mention his attendance of social gatherings at Engels’s place in Primrose Hill, mingling with German exiles and British activists.35 Both Londoner Freie Presse and Der Sozialdemokrat ceased publication in 1890: the former for financial reasons, the latter because the end of the Anti-Socialist Laws meant that the SAP no longer required an exile paper.36 The CABV did, however, provide the setting for one more newspaper, namely the Londoner Volks-Zeitung. The latter was launched in 1909, at a time when only one CABV club – located on Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia – was consistently active. The newspaper’s founder Józef Sachse pointed out that this periodical was a CABV paper although, for legal reasons, it presented itself as an independent venture.37 Along with Sachse, some of its authors came from AustriaHungary, for instance Karl Steinhardt, who later co-founded the Austrian Communist Party.38 The Prussian political police described the publication as ‘well-written’ and observed that it seemed to be well distributed.39 One year later, however, its report noted that the CABV had been unable to sustain the publication, despite the club’s ‘rather active life’.40 The examples of Freiheit, the Londoner Arbeiter-Zeitung/Londoner Freie Presse and the Londoner Volks-Zeitung show that the CABV provided the soil from which newspapers could spring. Die Autonomie is a somewhat different case as its creation was entwined with the formation of a new club. Its founders Josef Peukert and Otto Rinke were initially active in the First Section of the CABV and sporadically published the anarchist periodical Der Rebell. Because of divisions that shall be discussed in due course, they established a separate group, entitled ‘Autonomie’, in May 1885. In November 1886, they launched the group’s paper Die Autonomie, while also raising funds for their own club house. The plans for their venue soon attracted interest beyond German circles: according to Peukert, ‘the French, Italian and Slavic groups waited impatiently for its completion so as to make it their home’.41 The Club Autonomie

Political Contestation and Internal Strife

139

did indeed emerge as a meeting ground for anarchists from different countries.42 The Prussian police later noted that London had been ‘the centre of international anarchist agitation’ during the club’s lifetime.43 Yet, international links were also a factor in the demise of this venture. In 1894, the police raided the Club Autonomie after Martial Bourdin, a French visitor, had carried out a failed bomb attack on Greenwich Observatory.44 Shortly afterwards, the club premises were destroyed in an unresolved case of arson. After this episode, German anarchists in London never managed to re-establish quarters of a comparable impact. This is not to say that every socialist or anarchist paper was firmly rooted in a political club. From 1895 to 1899, Conrad Fröhlich, a Swiss typesetter, issued a series of publications – including a Londoner Arbeiter-Zeitung that, somewhat confusingly, was unrelated to the earlier CABV periodical of the same name. Fröhlich’s papers were less significant than the other publications that are being discussed in this chapter. Police reports described them as ‘full of ribaldry and foul-mouthed vituperation’; they also 45

Table 7.1 Major German socialist and anarchist periodicals published in London, 1878 to 191045 Publication Title

When?

Key Figure(s)

Freiheit

in London: October 1878– Johann Most, John December 1882 [then Neve published in USA until 1910] Der in London: October 1888–90 Eduard Bernstein, Sozialdemokrat [previously from 1879–1888 in Julius Motteler, Switzerland] Hermann Schlüter, Leonhard Tauscher Der Rebell in London: June1884–October Josef Peukert, Otto 1886 [sporadic publication Rinke from Dec. 1881 in various and not always clearly identifiable places] Die Autonomie November 1886–April 1893 Josef Peukert, Otto Rinke Londoner November 1886–October 1887 Ferdinand Gilles, Arbeiter-Zeitung Heinrich Rackow Londoner Freie October 1887 to June 1890 Ferdinand Gilles Zeitung

Londoner VolksZeitung

October 1909–July 1910

Józef Sachse, Theodore Rothstein

Institutional Base First Section, CABV (Rose Street) Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany; Second Section, CABV (Tottenham Street); circle around Friedrich Engels one faction of First Section, CABV (Rose Street); formation of Autonomie group in May 1885 Club Autonomie (Windmill Street) Second Section, CABV (Tottenham Street) some members of Second Section, CABV (Tottenham Street); separate publishers cooperative CABV (Charlotte Street)

140

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

noted that most activists viewed Fröhlich and his associates as ‘politically unreliable’.46 While such claims need to be approached with caution, Max Nettlau – an anarchist contemporary and chronicler of the movement – reached similar conclusions. Nettlau portrayed Fröhlich as an opportunist: someone who moved from printing radical invectives to becoming ‘the model of a respectable witness’ in the 1901 trial against Italian anarchist Luigi Parmeggiani.47 As previously noted, the associational settings for the German political press – the CABV and the Club Autonomie – were international in character. Moreover, the periodicals themselves looked far beyond Germany and Britain, dedicating considerable space to developments abroad and translating material that had been published in other radical papers. Connections to the Yiddish press were one manifestation of such transnational ties. For instance, in 1885, the Second Section of the CABV hosted a fundraising concert for the newly founded Arbeter Fraint (Workers’ Friend) – a weekly that became the leading radical periodical in Yiddish.48 These links were strengthened through the activities of German anarchist Rudolf Rocker. Rocker arrived in London in 1895 and initially joined the CABV. However, he soon concluded that the Jewish population in the city’s East End bore the greatest potential for revolutionary action. Despite being a gentile who had to teach himself Yiddish, Rocker became the Arbeter Fraint’s editor, performing this role from 1899 until the paper’s ban in 1914.49 In 1900, he also established a second journal, Germinal, which initially appeared as a fortnightly before becoming a monthly.50 Rocker later wrote the first major biography of Johann Most, testifying to the ideological and personal intersections within radical circles.51

Social-revolutionary and anarchist challenges to social democracy Freiheit did not start out as a champion of anarchism. Yet, from the outset, its ‘forceful’ tone proved attractive to many SAP followers while being unwelcome to the party leadership.52 As early as December 1879, police reports noted that Freiheit ‘ridiculed the maxims of the current party leaders’, inciting revolution and urging socialists to ‘copy the activities of the Russian Nihilists’.53 The foundation of Der Sozialdemokrat in October 1879 can partly be viewed as an attempt to counter Freiheit’s radical voice.54 Over the following years, an intense rivalry between the radical London-based Freiheit and the moderate Sozialdemokrat in Zurich ensued. This conflict was stoked by Freiheit’s ideological journey. As Max Nettlau noted, the periodical moved into a ‘social revolutionary direction’ in 1879 and began to feature anarchist contributions from 1880.55 In August 1880, the SAP reacted to this development by expelling Most from the party.56 These divisions did not simply pitch exiles in Switzerland and Britain against one another: they also account for the existence of two separate CABV sections in the West End of London. In contrast to the First and Third Sections, the Second Section was critical of Most’s aims and methods.57 Unlike Most, Heinrich Rackow ‘defended the importance of election campaigns to bring socialists into power’.58 Prussian police reports even alleged that Rackow responded to Most’s imprisonment in 1881 with

Political Contestation and Internal Strife

141

glee.59 It would be wrong, however, to assume a permanent state of antagonism. In the course of the 1880s, the Second Section became more open to radical perspectives.60 This shift became evident in the association’s paper, the Londoner Arbeiter-Zeitung. Despite his anarchist convictions, Peukert found warm words for the publication, lauding its ‘opposition to the autocratic leadership’ of the SAP. He noted that social democratic leaders had unsuccessfully sought to take over the Londoner ArbeiterZeitung and ‘steer heretical London back towards the course of the only true social democratic church’.61 His apparent appreciation of the paper is striking as its editor Ferdinand Gilles remained hostile to anarchism.62 Peukert’s comments highlight the possibility of a dialogue between radical social democrats in the Second Section and the anarchist circle surrounding Die Autonomie. Indeed, in 1887, parts of the Second Section criticized the anti-anarchist resolutions that had been passed at a party congress in St. Gallen, Switzerland.63 Half a year later, members of the Club Autonomie and the Second Section met to debate anarchism. After three hours, the participants agreed that, following the revolution, a transitional phase would be required before a genuinely free society could be established.64 In its turn, Die Autonomie encouraged German workers of a ‘more moderate disposition’ to join the revolutionary struggle.65 Occasional dialogue, however, should not obscure the underlying ideological differences. The latter can be traced through the coverage accorded to key events in the history of the socialist movement. The contrasting responses to the formation of the Second International in 1889 are a good example. Both Der Sozialdemokrat and Londoner Freie Presse praised the meetings that led to its creation as the making of a ‘workers parliament’ and a ‘turning point’.66 Die Autonomie was less impressed and dismissed it as ‘international humbug’.67 These divergences were hardly new. The First International had initially included followers of both Karl Marx and Mikhail Bakunin, but famously expelled the latter camp in 1872. It soon became apparent that the Second International would not accept anarchists back into the fold. In 1891, Die Autonomie extensively covered the exclusion of anarchists from the Brussels congress of the Second International, denouncing the ‘charlatans of Brussels’ as ‘part-monkeys’.68 It also suggested that the debates in Brussels demonstrated the corrupting effects of power.69 When anarchists organized a breakaway meeting in Brussels, Otto Rinke of Die Autonomie attended the event and, according to one police report, gave ‘bloodthirsty speeches’.70 One of the Second International’s earliest decisions was to adopt May Day as an international day of labour, using the latter to push for key demands such as the eighthour working day. Accordingly, Der Sozialdemokrat praised 1 May 1890 as a ‘festive day of labour’ and concluded that the activities had successfully put the congress decision of 1889 to the test.71 Kevin Callahan has stressed May Day’s emergence as the ‘most important international working-class ritual’ while noting the contrasting views on May Day strategy within the Second International.72 For anarchists, the issue was complex, too. On the one hand, May Day held symbolic value for the movement because of its association with the Haymarket Affair of 1886. On the other hand, anarchists criticized what they regarded as a non-revolutionary agenda. Die Autonomie, for example, dismissed the May Day campaign as ‘essentially conservative, anti-revolutionary because the root cause of social evil remains untouched’.73

142

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Nonetheless, the paper argued that anarchists should not stand aside: after all, May Day strike action might offer possibilities for revolutionary agitation. In March 1891, an international anarchist meeting at the Club Autonomie confirmed this view, suggesting that anarchists should exploit the circumstances of Labour Day as much as possible.74 Such examples ultimately show that May Day could be framed in different ways. An article from the Londoner Volks-Zeitung offers yet a another perspective: in 1910, the paper responded to rising Anglo-German activism and partly cast May Day as a demonstration for peace, based on the notion that ‘capitalism … unleashes the horrors of modern war’.75

The anarchists’ ‘fateful fraternal war’ The most acrimonious rift within London’s exile community involved people from a relatively similar ideological background: in the 1880s, the anarchist and socialrevolutionary camp was torn apart by a ‘fateful fraternal war’.76 According to Rudolf Rocker, this conflict ‘inflicted more damage upon the anarchist and revolutionary movement in Germany and Austria than even the most egregious persecution of the reaction could cause’.77 The German political press played a key role in this dispute, which saw Josef Peukert challenge the dominance of Most and his Freiheit. Peukert arrived in London in 1884, having narrowly avoided arrest in Austria. His role in reinvigorating the work of First and Third Section of the CABV was soon noted by the Prussian political police.78 Yet, Peukert clashed with Most who – despite publishing his paper from New York – still had a substantial following in London. In his memoirs, Peukert noted that Freiheit had refused to print pieces that contradicted Most’s position. To him, these editorial decisions reflected Most’s ‘vain, self-righteous, despotic nature’.79 Such remarks indicate that the dispute was partly a clash of personalities. Indeed, historian Tom Goyens has noted the ‘deeply personal enmity between Peukert and Most that dated back to 1880’.80 Furthermore, according to Rudolf Rocker, the contemporaries of Peukert and Most acknowledged the role of ‘personal ambition’ and ‘bruised vanity’ in the dispute.81 This is not to say that ideological distinctions were irrelevant: Peukert pursued a vision of anarchist communism under the influence of Peter Kropotkin’s writings, whereas at the time Most still adhered to collectivist anarchism. The initial challenge to Freiheit arose when Peukert and Rinke began to publish Der Rebell in London. This anarchist paper had previously appeared sporadically, with Switzerland as the most likely place of publication.82 Its print run was relatively low, amounting to around 800 copies.83 Despite its limited distribution, Peukert claimed that Most perceived Der Rebell as ‘an inconvenient fellow’.84 Most was not the only one to view the periodical critically. There were also ‘unmistakable misgivings among the active comrades’ who deemed the existence of Freiheit to be entirely sufficient.85 One factor was the competition for access to secret distribution networks. Peukert and Rinke succeeded in recruiting Gustav Knauerhase – who had the list of European Freiheit subscribers – for their rival publication.86 The rising antagonism meant that by 1885, the Prussian political police described the anarchist circles in London as being divided into warring ‘cliques’.87

Political Contestation and Internal Strife

143

Even after its move to London, Der Rebell did not appear regularly and, in Rocker’s views, it remained a ‘poorly edited paper’.88 However, it did provide the launching pad for Die Autonomie. In November 1886, Peukert’s inaugural editorial for the new periodical stressed that it would promote ‘the ideas of anarchist communism with energy and consequence’. In an implicit criticism of Freiheit and its editor, he argued that a publication coming ‘from distant parts of the world’ could not fulfil such a mission; moreover, he promised that his paper would remain ‘completely independent from individual figures’.89 Similar comments featured in later editions, for instance when denouncing ‘cults of personality’ among the left.90 In the subsequent battle between the two periodicals, Die Autonomie seemed to have the upper hand until its eventual demise in 1893. In this period, as Max Nettlau put it, Freiheit ‘lost its European friends nearly entirely’ and became more or less ‘cut off, something that even the harshest persecution of the years 1879 to 1886 had never managed to do’.91 With Most himself being overseas, Peukert’s most prominent local antagonist was the Belgian anarchist Victor Dave, who has been described as Most’s ‘closest friend and mentor in London’.92 Peukert sought to counter Dave’s criticisms and diminish his role in German circles by publishing an anonymous brochure, portraying Dave as a threat to the anarchist movement.93 The growing divide between the camps became unbridgeable after the arrest of John Neve – a German anarchist who served on Freiheit’s press committee and had edited the paper during Most’s imprisonment of 1881–2.94 Neve commanded the respect of the rival factions, having maintained links to both Dave and Peukert. On New Year’s Day 1887, Peukert and Neve met in Liège. Yet, Peukert had not travelled to Belgium by himself: he was joined by Charles Theodor Reuß, a police spy who had infiltrated London’s anarchist circles. Soon afterwards, the Belgian police arrested Neve and extradited him to Germany, where he was sentenced to fifteen years of prison. Peukert’s adversaries blamed him for Neve’s fate – at worst, labelling him a police spy; at the very least, accusing him of carelessness that had revealed Neve’s identity to the police.95 The exile press became a major forum for mutual recriminations after Neve’s arrest. In Zurich, Der Sozialdemokrat joined the debate, accusing Peukert of being a spy and using the case for a general critique of the anarchist movement.96 Likewise, Freiheit was convinced of Peukert’s culpability.97 In response, Die Autonomie claimed that Der Sozialdemokrat had begun to open the ‘floodgates of pungent spite not only against P. [Peukert], but against the anarchists as a whole’.98 It argued that Der Sozialdemokrat had used the case to ‘throw excrement upon a long-detested enemy’.99 In mounting a counteraccusation, it suggested that Dave had secretly pulled the strings in the affair. These claims were not without consequence. Despite not officially taking sides, the Londoner Arbeiter-Zeitung cast suspicions on Dave’s role.100 In light of the blows to Peukert’s reputation, Die Autonomie subsequently distanced itself from its founder, stating that he was not editing the paper.101 Even after Peukert’s fall from grace, the periodical survived for several years. Prussian police reports noted that it had the ‘first rank among anarchists’, describing its editor Rinke as ‘a fanatic of the first order’.102 On the whole, it is clear that the Neve case further polarized the anarchist community in London. These tremors were also felt on the other side of the Atlantic. After all – as Tom Goyens has pointed out – Most was ‘a major figure in American anarchism’ and ‘the

144

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Figure 7.1 John Neve in prison, Pierre Ramus Collection. © International Institute of Social History (Amsterdam).

public voice for German revolutionary anarchism in the Atlantic world during the last two decades of the nineteenth century’.103 Yet, as early as 1884, Peukert had US-based followers, too.104 Furthermore, having left London in the wake of the Neve Affair, he ultimately reached New York in June 1890.105 The London conflicts were thus bound to affect anarchist politics in North America. One example shall serve to illustrate these impacts. In 1890, Emma Goldman – who soon emerged as a key figure in American anarchism – came across Die Autonomie in New York. To her, ‘its tenets were much closer to what anarchism had come to mean to me than those of the Freiheit’.106 Her positive assessment of the publication was delicate because, at the time, she maintained close relations with Most. Most’s response was predictable: he denounced Die Autonomie as the paper of ‘the spy Peukert, who betrayed John Neve, one of our best German comrades, into the hands of the police’.107 Both Goldman and her close ally Alexander Berkman tried to mediate between the two camps in the United States. For Berkman, this had the consequence that Most broke with him, proclaiming that ‘[y]ou have chosen my enemies as your friends’.108 The severity of these rifts raises challenges for historians, as much of the existing source material is highly partisan. Peukert used his posthumously published memoirs to defend his actions.109 Rocker later criticized Peukert’s portrayal of Most and Dave as ‘truly distorted’, arguing that Peukert’s account could only be used ‘with the greatest caution’.110 Max Nettlau was similarly critical of Peukert’s memoirs and, in discussing the events of the 1880s, denounced ‘the efforts of Peukert, Rinke and their fanaticized

Political Contestation and Internal Strife

145

followers to destroy Most and Dave’.111 In his biography of Most, Rocker sought to acknowledge flaws on both sides – but his sympathies for Most were obvious. Rocker argued that the rise of Die Autonomie had not been a positive development as it was no match to Freiheit.112 In his view, the struggle had turned the ‘magnificent German movement, which under Most’s mighty power of agitation flourished in London and elsewhere, into a barren debris field’, giving rise to ‘mean-spirited sectarianism’.113 Both Freiheit and Die Autonomie continued to appear after the rupture of 1887, yet they had certainly contributed to the fragmentation of the exile community.

Anglo-German relations The German political press in London did not only reflect and amplify the divisions within exile circles: it also served as a mirror for the complex relationship between refugees and their host society. For most of the period, exiles had a significant scope for political action. In the decade after the 1848 revolutions, the British government had experienced diplomatic pressure to act against potentially subversive foreigners – yet in the aftermath of the Orsini Affair of 1858, the appetite for systematic action against exile groups decreased significantly. Bernard Porter has suggested that by 1878 ‘it appears that police surveillance of refugees had subsided almost to nothing’.114 There were occasional exceptions – notably the Most trial of 1881 and British diplomats’ involvement in international anti-terrorist efforts during the 1890s.115 Yet, by and large, socialists and anarchists continued to perceive their host society as relatively tolerant. For instance, having seen its editors expelled from Switzerland, Der Sozialdemokrat praised Britain’s commitment to the freedom of the press.116 After visiting the country in 1899, Emma Goldman described it as a ‘haven for refugees from all lands’ and suggested that exiles were able to pursue their agenda ‘without hindrance’.117 This is not to say that Britain was welcoming in every respect. Bernard Porter has suggested that refugees ‘were never greatly liked in Britain’, and Panikos Panayi has noted ‘various strands of socio-economic hostility’ towards the Germans.118 German newspapers in London were certainly sensitive to negative attitudes. In December 1887, the Londoner Freie Presse lambasted the Berliner Voksblatt for its overly positive coverage of Britain, arguing that it had glossed over the existing anti-German sentiment.119 The Londoner Freie Presse’s own reports discussed examples of the latter. For instance, only two months earlier, Reynolds’s Newspaper – a radical publication with a working-class readership – had blamed unemployment on German migrants who had pushed aside ‘honest English labour’, arguing that it was ‘about time we began in this country to do what the Americans did in the case of the Chinese’.120 To the Londoner Freie Presse, these remarks were indicative of a wider phenomenon: anyone who has lived in London for several years will not have missed the fact that from all sides, in the daily and weekly press, in the music halls and churches, in temperance meetings and pubs, great efforts are made to tell the English proletariats that it is the ‘bloody Germans’ who are to blame for the misery of English workers.121

146

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

In January 1888, a contributor to the Londoner Freie Presse further addressed the issue of ‘German-baiting’.122 His article began with the observation that a popular West End music hall show had featured a song in which Germans were told to return to their ‘home, sweet home’. The author wondered whether English people were ‘so foolish as to believe that the great misery in London has been caused by foreigners’. His subsequent discussion juxtaposed the two nations’ attitude towards other cultures, describing Germans as ‘virtually the opposite’ of the English in this respect: ‘He [the German] has a real passion for everything alien and foreign …. He learns foreign languages – which very few Englishmen do – in short, he is a citizen of the world comme il faut.’123 These claims about German cosmopolitanism were not free from contradictions: after all, the author acknowledged that it was repression at home rather than ‘sheer pleasure’ that had forced many Germans to come to ‘foggy England’. While these generalizations reveal the author’s own prejudices, the wider framing of the critique is interesting: it cast exiles as the better internationalists, arguing that ‘from a socialist standpoint, we regard national particularism as an obstacle to culture’.124 More than two decades later, the Londoner Volks-Zeitung also commented on the suspicions faced by the German community. For instance, it noted the ‘widely held view among the English that unemployment in all sectors is largely attributable to foreign immigrants who, through their low wage demands, make it impossible for British workers to compete’.125 It pointed to official statistics, suggesting that longterm migration was more limited than widely believed. Another article argued that the presence of foreign workers on British soil need not necessarily have to depress local wages, provided that foreign workers were integrated into local trade unions.126 The forging of links between the British labour movement and foreign communities could be one way of reducing potential tensions. Yet, interaction was sporadic rather than systematic – primarily manifesting itself on specific occasions such as the commemorations of the Paris Commune or, from 1890 onwards, the annual May Day celebrations. Moreover, relations between German radicals and the British labour movement were hardly free from political tensions. Some British socialists did join the ‘Freiheit Defence Committee’ after Most’s arrest in 1881 – but such activism was largely shaped by a concern for civil liberties rather than ideological proximity.127 In the late 1880s, police reports noted that links between German exiles and British organizations such as the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and the Socialist League.128 However, other parts of the British left were often reluctant to associate themselves with forces that were deemed more radical. Reflecting such tensions, the Londoner Freie Presse criticized the British trade union leader Henry Broadhurst in 1888 as he had planned an international labour congress from which many socialists would be excluded.129 G. D. H. Cole has noted that British trade unionists had been keen to make this event ‘as far as they could, non-political’.130 In response, the Londoner Freie Presse provided ample coverage to a rival international meeting held in London on the same occasion. In doing so, it quoted Heinrich Rackow’s comment that Broadhurst ‘served the interest of the property-owning classes’ because of his efforts to keep socialists away from organized labour.131 The negative portrayal of British trade union leaders continued in 1889 as the paper described them as ‘entrepreneurial fellows, with a fine understanding

Political Contestation and Internal Strife

147

of the opportunities for a so-called labour leader to line his own pockets through services rendered to the political parties and capitalist groups’.132 The Londoner Freie Presse was not the only German periodical that debated the stances of the British left. In March 1889, Der Sozialdemokrat published the German translation of an English leaflet in which Eduard Bernstein defended German socialists ‘against deliberately false accusations’.133 This was a response to an article in Justice, the fortnightly of the SDF. The British paper had claimed that Germans in Britain and the USA ‘strictly confine themselves to their own national clubs’ and alleged that they were undermining propaganda efforts in Britain and the USA ‘by printing their newspaper in a language which not one in a thousand of their neighbours can understand’.134 To the German social democrats, such criticism seemed ‘incredible’. They pointed out that Der Sozialdemokrat was written in German because its intended audience was German, with nine-tenths of its print run distributed in Germany. In other words, the place of publication was the result of German oppression rather than of any particular link with Britain. The pamphlet also mentioned the Londoner Freie Presse, describing it as a ‘local paper in the German language’ whose ongoing existence demonstrated ‘that it supplies a want’.135 Such examples illustrate the tensions between German exile activists and British labour. The foundation of the Londoner Volks-Zeitung in 1909 was a notable initiative as it was conceived as a forum for dialogue. Its first editorial presented the paper as a response to ‘the seriousness of the international political situation’ and to ‘the ever-present danger of war’.136 According to its co-founder Józef Sachse, German and English labour activists could make a positive change in international relations – but to do so, they would have to ‘cooperate truly, i.e. not only to limit themselves to holding speeches and passing resolutions, but to develop programmes for action from time to time’.137 The Londoner Volks-Zeitung was construed as a step in this direction. While most of its content was written in German, it occasionally published pieces in English, starting with its bilingual opening editorial. Another example was the publication of a debate between Karl Kautsky and Keir Hardie. The root of this dispute had been in the opening edition as Kautsky had noted the ‘masterly…demagogy’ of the English bourgeoisie.138 He subsequently wrote a more substantial article, commenting on problems faced by the British labour movement.139 His piece triggered a response by Keir Hardie, who defended the achievements of the British left, pointing out that Kautsky’s own time in Britain had been over twenty years ago.140 Kautsky responded and – perhaps unsurprisingly – the Londoner Volks-Zeitung took his side.141 The newspaper argued that ‘the English had no need to feel smug about their insular obtuseness’. It criticized the ‘political intelligence of the ordinary worker’, noting that many workers voted for liberals or conservatives rather than Labour candidates.142 While the debate with Hardie was conducted in cordial fashion, a more serious dispute concerned Robert Blatchford, who served as editor of the left-wing Clarion. In 1909, Blatchford published a series of articles in the Daily Mail, covering Germany’s alleged plans to inflict a war on Britain.143 In line with its founding mission, the Londoner Volks-Zeitung repeatedly condemned these reports. While the article series was still ongoing, it commented sarcastically that ‘this jingoistic organ, the Daily Mail,

148

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

has had the splendid idea to send a socialist leader, Robert Blatchford, to Germany so that he could get confirmation of the Teutonic plans for world domination…on the spot’.144 The Volks-Zeitung subsequently denounced the ‘almost infantile articles which also-comrade Robert Blatchford has written about Germany’ and labelled him a ‘warmonger’.145 Seen in this context, the paper is a prism through which we can see how Anglo-German antagonism affected the labour movement, including its representatives within the exile communities.

Conclusion What, then, does an analysis of the German political press in London show us? First of all, it is evident that a presence in London enabled German socialists and anarchists to promote their views in the era of the Anti-Socialist Laws. Der Sozialdemokrat used London as its base when even Switzerland no longer accepted its presence. Having come to Britain, its editors interacted with a lively community that maintained its own weekly, the Londoner Arbeiter-Zeitung/Londoner Freie Presse. As far as the anarchists are concerned, both Johann Most’s Freiheit and Josef Peukert’s Die Autonomie played important roles. The former was important in challenging the party leadership, printing revolutionary rhetoric and championing the ‘propaganda of the deed’. The latter was more concerned with disseminating anarcho-communist ideas, publishing theoretical considerations along the reporting of specific events. On the whole, London was an important site for both the propaganda and ideological development of the German left. The early presence of a figure such as Most contributed to the city’s prominence as an international anarchist hub – while attracting controversy and the attentions of the police. Secondly, the analysis shows that for members of the German left, exile was a site of intense ideological and personal strife. In some respects, this was a corollary of operating within a marginal community. Exile activism involved people who faced repression at home, scepticism from the host society and potential infiltration from police spies. The fact that the community was very small was certainly a factor as well – as personal disputes could easily be amplified. Thirdly, the case of the German political press illustrates wider issues in the history of internationalism. The periodicals certainly promoted the idea of being part of a greater cause. Moreover, these publications were linked to venues such as the CABV and the Club Autonomie – venues where manifold transnational encounters occurred. Yet, as the complex relationships with the host society demonstrate, it is important to remember the limitations of this internationalism.

Notes 1 Theodore Rothstein, ‘Zur Genealogie der “Londoner Volks-Zeitung” ’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 1 January 1910. 2 ‘Was wir wollen’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 23 October 1909.

Political Contestation and Internal Strife

149

3 Rothstein, ‘Zur Genealogie’. 4 Bernard Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Britain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 8. See also Pietro Di Paola, The Knights Errant of Anarchy: London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880–1917) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013), 18. 5 Panikos Panayi, ‘German Immigrants in Britain, 1815–1914’, in Germans in Britain since 1500, ed. Panikos Panayi (London: Hambledon Press, 1996), 73. 6 Panikos Panayi, Immigrants, Ethnicity and Racism in Britain, 1815–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 67–9 and 95. 7 Panayi, ‘German Immigrants in Britain’, 77. 8 Rosemary Ashton, Little Germany: German Refugees in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989); Christine Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialists in Britain, 1840–1860 (London: Routledge, 2006). 9 Prussian police report, 11 December 1878, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven: Übersicht der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878–1913, vol. i: 1878–1889, ed. Dieter Fricke and Rudolf Knaack (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1983), 10. 10 Prussian police report, 15 June 1881, in ibid., 105. 11 By 1911, at least 27,290 Germans lived in London: Panayi, ‘German Immigrants in Britain’, 78. Census data, however, tended to ignore some individuals. Christine Lattek has pointed out that while official figures for 1861 were 12,448, German residents assumed a much higher number: Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees, 9. 12 Prussian police report, 24 July 1886, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 298. 13 Prussian police report, 22 November 1889, in ibid., 359. 14 Horst Bartel, Wolfgang Schröder, Gustav Seeber and Heinz Wolter, Der Sozialdemokrat 1879–1890: Ein Beitrag zur Rolle des Zentralorgans im Kampf der revolutionären Arbeiterbewegung gegen das Sozialistengesetz (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1975), 105. 15 Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees, 194. 16 Of these, an estimated 4,500 went to Europe: Prussian police report, 6 July 1885, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 275. 17 ‘Freunde und Genossen’, Die Autonomie, 6 November 1886. 18 Hermia Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (London: Croon Helm, 1983); Constance Bantman, The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914: Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013); Di Paola, The Knights Errant. 19 Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees, 19. 20 Di Paola, The Knights Errant, 159–60; Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees, e.g. 22; Prussian police report, 5 September 1878, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 11. 21 Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement, 5; Di Paola, The Knights Errant, 10. 22 Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees, 193. 23 Rudolf Rocker, Johann Most: Das Leben eines Rebellen (Berlin: Verlag ‘Der Syndikalist’, 1924), 21; Tom Goyens, Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880–1914 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 92; Frederick Trautmann, The Voice of Terror: A Biography of Johann Most (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980), 40. 24 Prussian police report, 29 December 1879, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 37. 25 Johann Most, ‘Endlich’, Freiheit, 19 March 1881.

150

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

26 Bernard Porter, ‘The Freiheit Prosecutions, 1881–1882’, The Historical Journal 23, no. 4 (1980): 833–56. 27 On official responses, see Rocker, Johann Most, 130; Porter, ‘The Freiheit Prosecutions’, 852–3. 28 Prussian police report, 4 March 1884, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 221. 29 August Bebel, Aus meinem Leben, vol. iii (7th edn; Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1922), 24 and 26. 30 Prussian police reports, 15 November 1887 and 22 November 1889, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 328 and 359. 31 ‘An alle Freunde der Arbeitersache’, Londoner Freie Presse, 8 October 1887. 32 ‘Eine Neujahrsrede’, Londoner Freie Presse, 8 January 1888. 33 In his memoirs, Bernstein mentions lecturing at the CABV in 1899: Eduard Bernstein, My Years of Exile: Reminiscences of a Socialist, trans. Bernard Miall (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Howe, 1921), 252. 34 Ibid., 174. 35 Ibid., 196–204. The ‘close connection’ between Der Sozialdemokrat and Engels is noted in Bartel et al., Der Sozialdemokrat 1878–1890, 106–26. 36 ‘Ende des Sozialistengesetzes’, Der Sozialdemokrat, 2 August 1890. 37 Józef Sachse to Karl Kautsky, 5 October 1909, in Karl Kautsky und die Sozialdemokratie Südosteuropas: Korrespondenz 1883–1938, ed. Georges Haupt, János Jemnitz and Leo van Rossum (Frankfurt: Campus, 1986), 497. 38 Karl Steinhardt (Gruber), ‘Meetings with the Great Lenin’, in They Knew Lenin: Reminiscences of Foreign Contemporaries, ed. S. F. Bezveselny and D. Y. Grinberg (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1968), 57. 39 Prussian police report for 1909, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven: Übersichten der Berliner Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878–1913, vol. iii: 1906–1913, ed. Dieter Fricke and Rudolf Knaack (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschaftsverlag 2004), 242. 40 Prussian police report for 1910, in ibid., 333. 41 Josef Peukert, Erinnerungen eines Proletariers aus der revolutionären Arbeiterbewegung (Frankfurt: Verlag AV, 2002 [orig. 1913], 176. 42 Bantman, The French Anarchists in London, 39; Di Paola, The Knights Errant, 71; Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees, 195. For an example of a joint gathering, see ‘Internationale anarchistische Konferenz in London’, Die Autonomie, 4 April 1891. 43 Prussian police report for 1901, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven: Übersichten der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878–1913, vol. ii: 1890–1906, ed. Dieter Fricke und Rudolf Knaack (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1989), 260. 44 The attack itself is immortalized in Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent (1907). 45 With the exception of Der Rebell, all papers in this table were conceived as weeklies. They mostly comprised four pages, although the Londoner Neue Presse and the Londoner Volks-Zeitung were twice this size. 46 Prussian police report, 15 January 1898, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. ii, 94. See largely identical remarks in the report covering events in 1898: ibid., 148. 47 Max Nettlau, Geschichte der Anarchie, vol. v: Anarchisten und Syndikalisten (Vaduz: Topos-Verlag, 1984), 181. On the trial itself, see also Di Pietro, The Knights Errant, 76–8. 48 ‘Kleine Chronik’, Londoner Arbeiter-Zeitung, 6 August 1887.

Political Contestation and Internal Strife

151

49 For Rocker’s own assessment of the Arbeter Fraint’s significance, see Rudolf Rocker, The London Years (Nottingham: Five Leaves Press, 2005 [orig. 1956]), 96. In 1909, its estimated circulation was 2,000: Prussian police report for 1909, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. iii, 242. 50 In 1909, the year that it ceased publication, Germinal’s estimated circulation stood at 3,000: ibid. 51 Rocker, Johann Most. Rocker’s publication was also important as the events covered in Most’s memoirs predate his time in London and New York: Johann Most, Memoiren: Erlebtes, Erforschtes und Erdachtes (New York: J. Most, 1903). 52 Bartel et al., Der Sozialdemokrat 1879–1890, 38. 53 Prussian police report, 29 December 1879, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol.i, 31. 54 Rocker, Johann Most, 72. 55 Max Nettlau, Geschichte der Anarchie, vol. ii: Der Anarchismus von Proudhon zu Kropotkin. Seine historische Entwicklung in den Jahren 1859–1880 (Glashütten: Auermann, 1972), 301. See also idem, Geschichte der Anarchie, vol. iii, Anarchisten und Sozialrevolutionäre. Die historische Entwicklung des Anarchismus in den Jahren 1880–1886 (Glashütten: Auermann, 1972), 145–67; Rocker, Johann Most, 65. 56 Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 93. 57 Prussian police report, 10 June 1880, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 58–9. 58 Lattek, Revolutionary Refugees, 195. 59 Prussian police report, 15 June 1881, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 105. 60 Prussian police report, 15 November 1887, in ibid., 333. 61 Peukert, Erinnerungen, 189. 62 Nettlau, Geschichte der Anarchie, vol. v, 167. 63 ‘Bruggener Resolution’, Londoner Freie Presse, 5 November 1887. 64 ‘Nah und fern’, Londoner Freie Presse, 5 May 1888. 65 ‘An die Arbeiter und Arbeiterinnen Deutschlands’, Die Autonomie, 7 February 1891. 66 ‘Der internationale sozialistische Arbeiter-Kongress und die deutsche Presse’, Der Sozialdemokrat, 10 August 1889; ‘Die beiden Arbeiterkongresse’, Londoner Freie Presse, 3 August 1889. Der Sozialdemokrat’s positive coverage of the Second International’s formation is analysed in Kevin Callahan, Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889–1914 (Leicester: Troubadour, 2010), 55–6. 67 ‘Die internationalen Congresse’, Die Autonomie, 17 November 1888. 68 ‘An die Adresse der Brüsseler Gaukler’, Die Autonomie, 5 September 1891. 69 E. Heine, ‘Kongress-Betrachtungen’, Die Autonomie, 12 September 1891. 70 Prussian police report, 22 November 1889, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 359. 71 ‘Der Festtag der Arbeit’, Der Sozialdemokrat, 26 April 1890. 72 Callahan, Demonstration Culture, 194. 73 ‘Zur 1. Mai Bewegung’, Die Autonomie, 10 January 1891. 74 ‘Internationale anarchistische Konferenz in London’, Die Autonomie, 4 April 1891. 75 ‘Zum 1. Mai 1910’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 30 April 1910. 76 Rocker, Johann Most, 222. 77 Ibid., 216. 78 Prussian police report, 1 November 1884, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 252.

152 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95

96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

110 111 112 113 114

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London Peukert, Erinnerungen, 150. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 128. See also Trautmann, The Voice of Terror, 172. Rocker, Johann Most, 226. Prussian police report, 4 March 1884, in Fricke and Knaack, Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 221–2. See the Fricke and Knaack’s note in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. ii, 140. Peukert, Erinnerungen, 155. Rocker, Johann Most, 229. Ibid., 239–43; Peukert. Erinnerungen, 143–4. Prussian police report, 6. July 1885, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 275. Rocker, Johann Most, 230. ‘Freunde und Genossen!’, Die Autonomie, 6 November 1886. ‘Der Personenkultus’, Die Autonomie, 28 January 1887. Nettlau, Geschichte der Anarchie, vol. v, 168. See also ibid., 182. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 92. See also Rocker, Johann Most, 225. Anon., Trau, schau, wem! Victor Daves Thätigkeit in der Arbeiter-Bewegung (London: Fischer, 1886). Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement, 17. There are a various accounts of these incidents. Apart from those by Peukert, Rocker and Nettlau, see also Prussian police report, 15 November 1887, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 333; Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 128–30; Alex Butterworth, The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents (London: The Bodley Head, 2010), 210–11. ‘Wie John Neve der preußischen Polizei in die Hände geliefert wurde’, Der Sozialdemokrat, 13 May 1887. Peukert, Erinnerungen, 185. ‘Zur Beachtung’, Die Autonomie, 2 July 1887. ‘An den Pranger’, Die Autonomie, 16 July 1887. ‘Kleine Chronik’ and ‘Sprechsaal’, Londoner Arbeiter-Zeitung, 11 June 1887; ‘Kleine Chronik’, Londoner Arbeiter-Zeitung, 18 June 1887. ‘Erklärung’, Die Autonomie, 15 October 1887. Prussian police report, 22 November 1889, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 359. Goyens, Beer and Revolution, 86. Ibid., 116. Ibid., 130–3. Emma Goldman, Living my Life (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1931), 74. Ibid., 74. Ibid., 76. In a letter to German anarchist Gustav Landauer, Peukert said that his memoirs had to discuss the argument with Most ‘without sugarcoating it’, even if this resulted in ‘an ugly picture’: letter of 1 July 1909, cited in the introduction to Peukert, Erinnerungen, n.p. Rocker, Johann Most, 9–10. Nettlau, Geschichte der Anarchie, vol. v, 153. Rocker, Johann Most, 294. Ibid., 282. Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Britain, 210.

Political Contestation and Internal Strife

153

115 On the latter, see Richard Bach Jensen, The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Pietro Di Paola, ‘The Spies Who Came in from the Heat: The International Surveillance of the Anarchists in London’, European History Quarterly 37, no. 2 (2007): 189–215. 116 ‘Vom Boden der Republik in die Metropole der Monarchie’, Der Sozialdemokrat, 22 September 1888. 117 Goldman, Living my Life, 165. 118 Porter, The Refugee Question in Mid-Victorian Britain, 226; Panayi, ‘German Immigrants in Britain’, 92. See also Panayi, Immigrants, Ethnicity and Racism, 118. 119 ‘Der Londoner Correspondent eines deutschen Arbeiterblattes und die deutschen Arbeiter im Auslande’, Londoner Freie Presse, 3 December 1887. 120 ‘English Paupers and German Paupers’, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 30 October 1887. 121 ‘Deutsche Paupers in London’, Londoner Freie Presse, 5 November 1887. 122 ‘Deutschenhetze in London’, Londoner Freie Presse, 21 January 1888. 123 Ibid. 124 Ibid. 125 ‘Arbeitslosigkeit und Ausländer’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 27 November 1909. 126 ‘Die gewerkschaftliche Internationale’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 13 November 1909. 127 Porter, ‘The Freiheit Prosecutions’, 840. 128 Prussian police report, 15 November 1887, in Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven, vol. i, 334; Rocker, Johann Most, 249. 129 ‘Zwei internationale Congresse’, Londoner Freie Presse, 21 January 1888. 130 G. D. H. Cole, A History of Socialist Thought, vol. iii, pt. i: The Second International, 1889–1914 (London: Macmillan, 1956), 5. 131 ‘Hoch der internationale Sozialismus’, Londoner Freie Presse, 17 November 1888. 132 ‘Englische Gewerkschaften’, Londoner Freie Presse, 11 May 1889. 133 ‘Der internationale Arbeiterkongress von 1889: Eine Antwort an die “Justice”’, Der Sozialdemokrat, 30 March 1889. The pamphlet was Eduard Bernstein, The International Working Men’s Congress of 1889: A Reply to Justice (London, 1889); a transcription is available via https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bernstein/ works/1889/xx/reply-justice.htm. 134 ‘The German “Official” Social-Democrats and the International Congress in Paris’, Justice, 16 March 1889. 135 Bernstein, The International Working Men’s Congress. 136 ‘Was wir wollen’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 23 October 1909. See also the paper’s comments on the Anglo-German naval race: ‘Die deutsch-englischen Beziehungen’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 23 October 1909. 137 Józef Sachse to Karl Kautsky, 5 October 1909, in Haupt et al, Karl Kautsky und doe Sozialdemokratie Südosteuropas. 497–8. 138 Karl Kautsky, ‘Lieber Genosse Sachse’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 23 October 1909. 139 Karl Kautsky, ‘The Constitutional Crisis in England’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 30 October 1909. 140 Keir Hardie, ‘Die politische Krise der Arbeiterbewegung’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 20 November 1909. 141 Karl Kautsky, ‘Demagogie und Demokratie in England’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 4 December 1909. 142 ‘Die Woche’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 4 December 1909.

154

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

143 A. J. A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896–1914 (Abingdon: Routledge, 1984), 213–19; Matthew Johnson, Militarism and the British Left, 1902–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013), 101–2. 144 ‘Robert Blatchford und die Kriegshetze’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 13 November 1909. 145 J.B. Askew, ‘Die positive Arbeit der deutschen Sozialdemokratie’, Londoner VolksZeitung, 20 November 1909; ‘Blatchford als Kriegshetzer’, Londoner Volks-Zeitung, 18 December 1909.

8

News of the Struggle: The Russian Political Press in London 1853–1921 Charlotte Alston

Between 1855 and 1917, almost fifty different Russian-language periodicals were published in London and the surrounding area.1 Although the backgrounds, politics and tactics of the editors varied widely, each of these publications engaged in one way or another in the struggle against the tsarist government: the censorship regime in the Russian Empire meant that these periodicals could only be published abroad. In 1875–6 the eminent Russian philosopher and socialist Petr Lavrov edited his biweekly review Vpered! (Forward!) at offices in Lower Charles Street, Clerkenwell, and forwarded copies of the journal to the library of the British Museum from his home address on Moray Road, near Finsbury Park.2 In 1897, Vladimir Burtsev established his shortlived but notorious periodical Narodovolets (Member of the People’s Will) in London: articles in this journal advocating the assassination of the tsar led to Burtsev’s arrest for inciting regicide.3 The following year, not far away at Purleigh in Essex, Vladimir Chertkov and Pavel Biriukov began a Tolstoyan journal, Svobodnoe Slovo (The Free Word), devoted to the rejection of violence in all its forms.4 In the revolutionary year of 1905, a periodical entitled Novosti Borby (News of the Struggle) appeared in six issues between February and March. In the years following the October revolution London resumed its status as a home for Russian political publishing, as the city hosted a wave of new, and old, emigrants who campaigned in print against the Bolshevik regime. This chapter explores the nature and scope of Russian political publishing in London from the 1850s to the 1920s. Firstly, it focuses on three key phases of activity in Russian publishing in London: the work of Alexander Herzen and his Free Russian Press in London from 1853 to 1865; the activities of the Free Russian Press Fund in London in the 1890s; and the post-revolutionary publishing scene in 1918–21. It discusses the commercial operation, distribution networks, longevity and purpose of some key enterprises. Secondly, it draws some conclusions about the character of the Russian political publishing world across the period in question, focusing on the transnational networks within which Russian editors and publishers worked; their engagement (or otherwise) with London life, politics and audiences; questions of unity and disunity in the Russian emigration; and the temporal as well as geographical connections between different centres, and phases, of the Russian political emigration.

156

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Table 8.1 Principal Russian-language periodicals mentioned in this chapter Title 

Date of Publication

Editor(s)

Poliarnaia zvezda

1855–68 (London, then Geneva) 1857–67 (London, then Geneva) 1873–7 (Zurich, then London) 1893–9 (London) 1897–1903 (London, then Geneva) 1897 (London) 1890–1914 1918–19 1919

A. Herzen, N. Ogarev

Kolokol Vpered! Letuchie listki Narodovolets Sovremennik Free Russia The Russian Commonwealth The Russian Outlook

A. Herzen, N. Ogarev P. Lavrov F. Volkhovskii V. Burtsev P. A. Dementev S. Stepniak-Kravchinskii, F. Volkhovskii S. Poliakov-Litovtzeff S. C. Talbot

Alexander Herzen and the Free Russian Press The first and the best-known Russian publishing house in London was the Free Russian Press, founded by Alexander Herzen at 82 Judd Street in Bloomsbury in 1853.5 Herzen, the ‘father of Russian socialism’, left Russia in 1847, and spent five years in Italy, Switzerland and (in 1848) France. He was exceptionally well connected with European revolutionaries, and strove to educate European socialists about the state of affairs in Russia, positing Russian peasant socialism as a model for the west. Disillusioned by the trajectory of the 1848 revolutions, and deeply affected by the deaths of first his wife and then his mother and son, Herzen moved to London and resolved not to focus on the concerns of Western Europe, but instead to devote himself to providing an outlet for free, uncensored Russian thought.6 Herzen announced the arrival of the Free Russian Press in a short pamphlet that asked Russians to send material – everything ‘written in a spirit of freedom’ would be published. In the meantime he would publish his own manuscripts, but he was not principally interested in sharing his own ideas with his readers; rather he wanted to provide a vehicle for discussion of theirs.7 Besides Russian-language books and pamphlets, Herzen’s press published two important periodicals. The first, Poliarnaia zvezda (The Polar Star, 1855–68) brought together a range of materials: the editors hoped to feature in each edition a general article on the philosophy of revolution, or socialism; a historical or statistical article about Russia or the Slav world; an analysis of a work of history, politics or philosophy; a literary article; and a selection of letters, a bibliography and a chronicle of events.8 The publication of Poliarnaia zvezda was directly inspired by the death of the repressive tsar Nicholas I: its first edition contained both an indictment of Nicholas’s policies and an open letter to his successor, Alexander II, urging moderation and reform.9 In the meantime, Herzen hoped that the journal would be a home for all those manuscripts that were ‘drowning in the imperial censorship, and all those that it had mutilated’.10 The

The Russian Political Press in London

157

second periodical, Kolokol (The Bell, 1857–67), was initiated as a supplement to Poliarnaia zvezda but overtook it in circulation and notoriety. It was launched in 1857 after the arrival in London of Herzen’s closest friend Nikolai Ogarev. Having come directly from Russia, Ogarev believed that the new environment of Alexander II’s reign demanded a more frequent publication that could respond rapidly to the concerns of the time.11 Kolokol was by any measure (longevity, circulation, sustainability) one of the most successful Russian émigré publications. Two hundred and forty-five issues were produced across the decade between 1857 and 1867, and it had a circulation at its peak of 2,500 copies.12 Despite Herzen’s initial frustration at the lack of dialogue with Russian writers and thinkers (before 1856 few manuscripts arrived from Russia, and some visitors pressed Herzen to stop his publishing enterprises), by the time the second issue of Poliarnaia zvezda appeared sales of books, and letters and contributions for the paper, were rising. By the end of 1858, the publishing house was making a profit.13 Of course, it helped that Herzen had a private fortune to draw on: he regarded money as one of his ‘weapons’, and used it to make a success of his publishing enterprises. After the establishment of Kolokol, Herzen’s press moved to larger premises at 136 and 138 Caledonian Road. An English observer described this as ‘a small house with a workshop attached to it, decorated with a doorplate bearing the words ‘Vol’naya Russkaya Tipografiya’ written in Russian characters’. The papers printed there were ‘destined to circulate over the whole continent, and not only to be passed from hand to hand in every city of European Russia, but perhaps to penetrate into the farthest parts of Asia, to be eagerly read by insurgents in the forests of Poland and to cheer the hearts of exiles on the confines of Tartary…. The presses furnish little that is intended for home consumption. Their sheets are adapted for Russian eyes alone’.14 In the 1860s, Herzen’s publishing enterprises became a victim of their own success. The emancipation act of 1861 rewarded Herzen’s hopes for reform, but at the same time his activities had paved the way for a proliferation of Russian émigré periodicals, representing different revolutionary parties and points of view. In 1865, Herzen transferred the Free Russian Press to Geneva, now a thriving centre for Russian political publishing. London was still one hub in the Russian publishing network. Petr Tkachev and Petr Dolgorukov published some works in London in the 1860s and 1870s, and Petr Lavrov briefly moved his Vpered! – ‘a journal of information rather than inspiration’ according to Lavrov’s biographer – to the city.15 Vpered! ran to 16 pages of fairly theoretical articles on, for example, the workers’ movement, or students and the people, along with a short editorial and a chronicle of ‘the struggle’.16 Lavrov positioned himself outside the struggles of the First International, but alienated some supporters by advocating a long period of study and preparation for revolutionaries undertaking revolutionary propaganda work among the masses: an attitude rather out of kilter with the enthusiasm among Russian socialists at this time to get into the countryside and educate, and learn from, the people.17 Tensions among the Vpered! group, who ran the journal’s operations as a commune at a series of addresses around Finsbury Park, eventually led Lavrov to move to Paris in 1877. It was not until two decades later that London saw a renewed burst of Russian publishing activity.

158

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

The Free Russian Press Fund in the 1890s The next major phase began in the 1890s with the establishment of the Free Russian Press Fund in London. The two guiding figures in this movement were Sergei Kravchinskii (who wrote under the pseudonym Stepniak) and Feliks Volkhovskii In Russia, both had been members of the populist propaganda circle associated with Nikolai Chaikovskii in the 1870s.18 Chaikovskii was already in England in the 1880s, and encouraged Kravchinskii to base himself there – he was negotiating for English publication of Kravchinskii’s account of the Russian revolutionary movement, Underground Russia (1883).19 Volkhovskii escaped from a penal settlement in Siberia in 1889, and was initially involved in lecturing and propaganda activities in Canada, before joining Kravchinskii in London.20 Kravchinskii was the more charismatic and dynamic of the pair, but he and Volkhovskii worked for similar aims: they intended both to enlist western public opinion in the struggle against the tsarist government and to unite the fissile Russian emigration into ‘an effective coalition against autocracy’.21 Both these strands were pursued through their political publications in London. Kravchinskii and Volkhovskii first London-based periodical was an Englishlanguage publication, Free Russia (1890–1914). This was the journal of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, an organization established by Kravchinskii in conjunction with Newcastle-based liberal and Quaker Robert Spence Watson in 1889.22 Initially, Kravchinskii envisaged both an English-language paper (to publicize the cause) and a Russian-language paper (as an outlet for Russian discussion of political affairs), but as plans developed he felt that it was unwise to confuse the two projects. The Russian paper was quietly dropped, though some translations of material in Free Russia were made for circulation in Russia.23 Kravchinskii hoped to sell 5,000 of Free Russia per month. Sales certainly did not live up to this target, but circulation does seem to have been healthy. Newsstand sales for 1891 and 1892 were 3606 and 14,483 respectively the paper was also sold at meetings of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom and other sympathetic organizations, and one would assume the largest sales came through subscriptions.24 Special issues of the journal and illustrations were also supported by subsidies from the Society’s members.25 In June 1891 Kravchinskii, Volkhovskii Chaikovskii, M. V. Voinich and Leonid Shishko established the Free Russian Press Fund, the Russian-language arm of their publishing enterprises. Kravchinskii intended the fund to be a ‘medium of expression free from the constraints not only of censorship but of factional politics and ideological rigidity’.26 Like Herzen, they began with the publication of books, opening a bookstore at 15 Augustus Road, and counterparts run by Shishko in Paris and Egor Lazarev in Zurich. The Fund’s stores stocked an eclectic range of Russian revolutionary texts, from the writings of Tolstoy to those of Georgi Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich.27 Their first pamphlet set the tone for the Fund’s publication strategy, calling on both Russian liberals and Russian socialists in emigration to unite (even if temporarily) in their opposition to tsarism, working first of all for constitutional reforms.28 From December 1893 onwards the Fund published a bulletin, Letuchie listki (Flying Leaflets, 1893– 9). Again these echoed Herzen: while the editors initially claimed they had started the bulletin because there was so much information coming to them from Russia,

The Russian Political Press in London

159

Volkhovskii later admitted that they had only hoped that someone would reply to their request for news.29 Forty-six issues of Letuchie listki were published between December 1893 and August 1899. In the two years up to December 1893, the Fund estimated that they had distributed 33,000 copies of forbidden books. They were smuggled into Russia, sold through the Fund’s bookshops to émigrés, and advertised in hotel lobbies to Russians travelling abroad. When Letuchie listki was launched its print run varied between 4,000 and 10,000. Copies were sent unsolicited to editors of Russian newspapers, and to regional and government officials in Russia. Many Russian Free Press fund activities were financed by a substantial loan (£40) from sympathizer Mary S. Beard, which they paid back at 8 pounds a year over five years.30 Other publishers and periodicals operated in proximity to the Russian Free Press Fund – Vladimir Burtsev borrowed type from them in order to print his Narodovolets, although Volkhovskii and Chaikovskii did not approve of the journal’s upfront advocacy of terror.31 There were also other Englishlanguage Russian publishing enterprises in the 1890s. In 1897 Jaakoff Prelooker set up The Anglo-Russian (1897–1914) with the aim of improving Anglo-Russian relations (although the journal was nevertheless hostile to the tsarist regime).32 At Christchurch, near Bournemouth, Vladimir Chertkov established both English- and Russianlanguage divisions – The Free Age Press, and Izdatel’stvo Svobodnago Slova (The Free Word Press) – for his press devoted to publishing Tolstoy’s works and sympathetic Tolstoyan material.33 One of the principal setbacks the Fundists faced was the death of Sergei Kravchinskii on 23 September 1895. On his way to Shepherd’s Bush for a meeting with Volkhovskii and Lazarev about the establishment of a new, all-party Russian-language journal, Kravchinskii was hit by a train on a level crossing not far from his apartment in Bedford Park.34 Kravchinskii’s death deprived the Russian emigration of one of its most dynamic figures, and proved a major setback for their cross-party plans. While Letuchie listki continued under Volkhovskii in the late 1890s it abandoned its all-party stance and became a vehicle of the Socialist Revolutionary Party.

Post-revolutionary political publishing After the 1905 revolution, new political freedoms meant many Russian political émigrés returned to the Russian empire, and the relaxation of censorship meant their publishing enterprises switched there too. Burtsev, for example, re-established his periodical Byloe (The Past) on his return to Russia. New political parties reflecting the politics of the emigration were established and so too were official publications. Some activists remained in or returned to emigration in this period: Russian anarchists in the Kropotkinite Khleb i volya group published in London in the pre-revolutionary years, for example.35 In 1918 however, as the Bolshevik government closed the newly elected constituent assembly, and clamped down on political freedoms, a new wave of activists returned to European centres of emigration. This wave of emigration included many who had previous experience of Russian activism abroad: Pavel Miliukov, for example, who had toured the United States and Europe for the revolutionary cause in

160

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

1903–4; Nikolai Chaikovskii, who had worked with the Russian Free Press Fund, and once again found himself again in England; and Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, who had worked for the Russian émigré journal Osvobozhdenie (Liberation) in Stuttgart and Paris, and now established herself in London. Tyrkova-Williams was a journalist, novelist and central member of the Constitutional Democratic Party. She was one of the principal organizers of the Russian Liberation Committee, established in London in February 1919 to coordinate publicity for the anti-Bolshevik cause. The Committee included prominent pre-revolutionary politicians and academics including Miliukov (who was Foreign Minister in the first Provisional Government of 1917) and historian Mikhail Rostovtsev.36 They published weekly bulletins (news sheets to which the Foreign Office and the State Department, among others, subscribed); pamphlets on specific topics (from the Volunteer armies to Lenin’s terror), which were usually produced in print runs of 5,000 to 10,000; and, from early 1920, the periodicals The New Russia (1920–1), and Russian Life (1921–2) which detailed the activities of the Russian emigration in London, and focused on longer term issues such as aid for Russian refugees in Europe.37 The Committee also managed the London end of a telegraphic service that wired news directly from the anti-Bolshevik fronts in the civil war, and placed this information both in their own publications and in the mainstream London press. The Committee’s publishing enterprises were based at 173 Fleet Street – formerly Moscow newspaper Russkoe Slovo’s London office  – where they had a staff of twenty-one.38 Russia’s anti-Bolshevik socialists were also represented in the post-revolutionary publishing scene. The Russian Commonwealth (1918–19) a twice-monthly journal edited by S. Poliakov-Litovtsev, aimed to unite Russians who opposed the Bolsheviks and favoured a) a republic, b) the summoning of a democratically elected constituent assembly and c) close cooperation with the Allies in ‘the regeneration of Russia’.39 The journal’s contributors included socialist revolutionaries Aleksandr Kerensky and Aleksandr Titov, and Social Democrat Pavel Akselrod. The latter had been a leading figure in the Social Democratic Party in emigration and was now a fierce anti-Bolshevik campaigner who worked particularly to influence international socialist opinion. The paper pitched his contributions as of particular interest to British Labour.40 There were domestic lobbies too: businessmen, bankers and industrialists had a vested interest in the downfall of the Bolshevik regime. The Russian Outlook (1919– 20), edited by businessman Stafford Talbot and published at 69 Fleet Street, was set up in 1919 to ‘give the large public in foreign countries, who are interested in affairs in Russia, accurate information with regard to its political, economic and social conditions’.41 The journal was published every other week: it principally comprised contributions from British MPs, businessmen, military figures and clergymen, but also featured articles and letters by Russians in emigration, including Miliukov, Chaikovskii and General Lazar Bicharakov. The anti-Bolshevik enterprises of the post-revolutionary emigration focused less on profit and more on maximizing readership. Readers of the Russian Liberation Committee’s pamphlets and bulletin were encouraged to pass the publications on to a friend once they had finished reading them. Indeed, the Committee’s activities were heavily subsidized, firstly by businessman Nikolai Denisov, and later by Admiral

The Russian Political Press in London

161

Kolchak’s government, and other wealthy members of the Russian emigration.42 Despite the presence of a growing community of Russian émigrés in London, the periodical press of the early post-revolutionary years focused predominantly on lobbying domestic audiences, in English, rather than catering to the needs (social or political) of Russians in London.

London and the wider networks of the Russian émigré press ‘In both the pre- and post-revolutionary periods’, London was just one centre in a larger European network of Russian émigré publishing. When Herzen began his Russian-language press in London, the only Russian networks available to him were rather unsympathetic ones: he had to procure the type for his printing press from the firm that supplied official Russian printers. When ‘two or three’ Russian printing presses opened in Germany in the 1850s, Herzen recalled that ‘our press felt like a grandfather’.43 In the latter half of the nineteenth century, continental cities like Geneva, Zurich, Leipzig and Paris surpassed London as centres for Russian publishing. Switzerland was a major centre both for organization and publishing in the Russian emigration: in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was home to Russian Social Democrats Georgi Plekhanov, Vera Zasulich, Pavel Akselrod and Vladimir Lenin.44 Although some centres were associated with specific political parties or publications, this was a network around which publications travelled. Many pre-revolutionary periodicals moved with their editors and according to their circumstances, from one European city to another. Zhizn (Life, 1897–1902), a literary, scientific and political journal published by Social Democrats Vladimir BonchBruevich and Vladimir Posse, was published first in St. Petersburg, and when closed down by the censor moved to London, and finally to Geneva. Iskra (Spark, 1900–5) was founded by Lenin as the official publication of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, but Bonch-Bruevich also collaborated on it (a contributing factor in the closure of Zhizn): it began life in Leipzig but was later published in Munich, then London (where it was produced in offices at Clerkenwell Green) and finally Geneva. Russkii Rabochii (The Russian Worker, 1894–9) and Revolutsionnaya Mysl’ (Revolutionary Thought, 1908–9), both Socialist Revolutionary publications, were published first in London before moving to Paris; the Socialist Revolutionary Party’s principal organ, Revolutsionnaya Rossiya (Revolutionary Russia, 1900–5) moved in the other direction, from Paris to London. Vladimir Burtsev’s Narodovolets (1897, 1903) was published first in London and then in Geneva; the anarcho-communist Rabochii Mir (Workers World, 1912–14) was published first in Zurich and then in London.45 The operations of the Russian political press in London crossed borders in other ways too. Transporting publications back to Russia was all-important for those enterprises focused on providing a vehicle for free Russian expression. The routes by which this was achieved were many but were also precarious. Polish émigrés in London helped to transport Herzen’s early publications into the Russian empire.46 Later Bakunin and Alexander Herzen junior worked with sympathetic Finns to establish a network for the

162

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

transport of revolutionary literature through Scandinavia. Michael Futrell illustrates the mixed success of this enterprise: in 1880 when a grocers shop in Hammerfest closed down, local authorities found multiple copies of Kolokol which the owner (rather than passing them on) had used as wrapping paper for groceries and insulation for the shop’s windows.47 Nevertheless, copies of Kolokol reached cities like Chita and Irkutsk, and the newspaper contained correspondence from readers in Siberia.48 The Scandinavian connection was still alive and well in the 1890s. One regular route for the dispatch of Russian Free Press Fund literature to Russia was through Ingeborg Taflin in Stockholm. Taflin had met Feliks Volkhovskii in England in the summer of 1895, and from the autumn of that year the Fundists forwarded parcels of literature to her business address. After hours (to avoid the oversight of her business partner, who was unaware of this clandestine activity) she broke up the parcels and dispatched the literature in individual letters to Russia, sending them from train stations in order to disguise her location.49 In the latter part of 1896 the Russian Free Press Fund paid Taflin expenses of around 80 kroner for six months: she dispatched around 50 letters each month.50 The publishing houses and private homes of Russians in London also became a meeting point for Russian political émigrés of all shades. Herzen’s contemporaries noted that there was ‘scarcely a single Russian abroad’ who did not visit him.51 Stepniak’s house was described in the 1890s as ‘a meeting-place for all sorts and conditions of unorthodox literary people, and the intellectual centre of the colony of Russian political exiles in London’.52 At Vladimir Chertkov’s home at Purleigh, Dmitri Abrikosov found a house ‘full of guests who were interested in Tolstoy’s teachings and came to discuss them’, but also a Russian lady who sought to persuade him that ‘the only revolutionary activity which could be of any use in Russia was terrorism’.53 In the post-revolutionary period Tyrkova-Williams’s London home was a social hub for Russian émigrés in the city: a place where ‘a new-comer would sit down at the table, push away the plate of one who had gone before, and… join in at once the general never-ceasing anecdotal, philosophical… and above all political conversation’.54 Connections with other émigré groups in London were also important. Such connections were key for Herzen, who was well connected among European revolutionaries: he initially came to London to see Giuseppe Mazzini, rather than to stay. On arrival in London, the activities of Polish exiles in the city, led by Stanislaw Worcell, were an inspiration to him. Worcell encouraged Herzen in his project to establish a Russian press, and also supported him in practical terms: helping with orders, and initially housing the press on the premises of his own Polish printing house.55 Polish independence was a major plank of Herzen’s political programme, and the Russian-Polish cooperation continued when Ludvik Czarnecki became the manager of the Russian Free Press. The post-revolutionary emigration on the other hand consciously worked against other national groups of the Russian empire, because they found their causes in direct competition at the post-war peace negotiations in Paris. Faced with the threat of recognition of Russia’s border states rather than support for the anti-Bolshevik struggle, even the Russian Commonwealth argued that only ‘a maniac of the “self-determination” formula could prefer the existence of a series of powerless, puny, “independent” republics to a mighty harmonious state’.56

The Russian Political Press in London

163

When they appealed to an English-language readership for support this was often also part of a broader international initiative. In the 1890s, for example, the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom’s journal Free Russia was published in two Englishlanguage versions, for a British and American readership; it also had a Germanlanguage counterpart. Herzen’s publications may have been ‘adapted for Russian eyes alone’, but Poliarnaia zvezda was announced in the French press, and in Frenchlanguage pamphlets.57 Anti-Bolshevik émigrés also sought to make their appeal a truly international one: activists operating in Britain, America and France shared news and tactics, placed each other’s articles in domestic press outlets, and sought to ‘ensure complete unity of action between the Allies’.58 Leonid Andreev’s interventionist pamphlet ‘SOS’ was published in English, French and Russian, and also appealed to international audiences according to their traditions and characteristics. Andreev told French readers that ‘Even as an infant I learned to love and respect you, Frenchman, and to seek in the history of your life models of chivalry and great spirited nobility. It is of you that I have learned of liberty, equality and fraternity’. He appealed to the Englishman as ‘the man whose word is akin to law’, and to the American as ‘young and rich… broad in spirit and energetic’, saying, ‘The torch of your freedom shall throw its light in distant Europe also.’59

English audiences, sympathizers and support Herzen’s own accounts of his life in London give the impression that he did not like the city, did not really engage with the English, and did not make much impact there. In his memoir My Past and Thoughts he described growing ‘unaccustomed to others’, and living in ‘hermit-like seclusion’: there was ‘no town in the world which is more adapted for training one away from people and training one into solitude than London’.60 His life there was ‘about as boring as that of worms in cheese’, he reported, without ‘a spark of anything healthy, vigorous or hopeful’.61 Herzen certainly does not seem to have settled. He moved his domestic residence continually, living at addresses in Primrose Hill, Euston Square, Richmond, Twickenham, Finchley Road, Putney, Fulham, Regents Park, Westbourne Terrace, Teddington and Maida Hill: he stayed at none of these addresses for much more than two years, and in most cases for much shorter periods.62 However, both Monica Partridge and Françoise Kunka have challenged this picture, demonstrating Herzen’s engagement in social and political networks, and the practical support offered to his publishing enterprises by English sympathizers.63 The Rothschilds, for example, were instrumental in the release of Herzen’s fortune from Russia, and Lionel Rothschild allowed his business address to be used as a cover for correspondence with the Free Russian Press.64 Charles Wentworth Dilke used his diplomatic passport to transport to Russia ‘the most extraordinary collection of books that was probably ever got together in that country, unless in the office of the censorship of police’.65 Partridge and Kunka suggest that Newcastle-based radical politician Joseph Cowen was involved in shipping Herzen’s publications to European ports. Certainly Cowen provided some forms of practical support: writing to Joseph Nicholson of Heaton in the 1880s he recalled printing some of Herzen’s papers at his

164

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

own private press at Stella, on the banks of the river Tyne.66 Cowen’s connections with Russian revolutionaries spanned many years: he corresponded with Petr Kropotkin in the 1880s, and negotiated for a serialization of Kravchinskii’s Underground Russia in the Newcastle Chronicle.67 The establishment of branches of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in Cardiff, Oxford, Edinburgh and Perth among other places provides further evidence that support networks for Russian émigré publishing and campaigning extended well beyond London. Nevertheless, while Herzen’s life in London was productive and he clearly had networks of support, his enterprises were always explicitly directed at discussions for Russians by Russians about their own affairs. He was not interested in writing about Russia for the English press, although there clearly was an appetite for such material: Herzen said that he was ‘all the time being asked for articles about Russia… but somehow I cannot get on with them’.68 Monica Partridge finds only one example – an early article for The Leader on Russian serfdom – in which Herzen directly appealed to the English public to involve themselves in Russian affairs.69 For Herzen, then, London was principally a place from which he could do service for other Russian opponents of tsarism, by taking advantage of publishing freedoms, and facilitating discussion. He was not focused on opening that discussion up to his hosts. The ‘Fundists’ of the 1890s were the first to use their publishing enterprises to target domestic audiences. Kravchinskii believed that public opinion in free countries made a considerable impression on Russia’s educated classes, and that ‘every energetic manifestation of sympathy’ with the struggle for freedom could have a beneficial impact.70 When Free Russia was first launched Spence Watson hoped that ‘our paper will become the vehicle of expression for the Russians upon the many burning questions which in Russia itself are forbidden topics’, but in the paper’s first editorial Kravchinskii made it clear that this was precisely not the journal’s aim. ‘Many Russians of all creeds and persuasions have availed themselves of the freedom of the press in foreign countries to print their papers, pamphlets, and books in order to propagate their ideas among their countrymen’, he wrote, ‘Our paper written in a foreign tongue has evidently no such aim.’ Rather, the intention was to educate international opinion and to use that opinion to exert an influence on the tsarist government.71 Kravchinskii regretted the fact that their enterprise had been started so late: ‘Had we set ourselves to the work of propaganda among foreigners some four five years earlier … it would have corresponded with the epoch of the greatest intensity of the struggle at home…. Now we come forward at a dead hour, when there is a lull in the actual fight and consequently a flagging of the interest for it abroad’. Nevertheless, he hoped that ‘when the struggle once again assumes its acute form… the sympathies of the civilized world will be secured already and will find hundred means of being manifested’.72 The paper aimed to broaden the terms in which its English readership understood the Russian revolutionary movement, highlighting not just the treatment of political prisoners in Siberia (which were much reported in the Western press) but also the oppression of religious minorities, the condition of the Russian peasantry, and the struggle for political freedoms and constitutional reforms.73 Nevertheless the paper’s editors understood how to cater to the interests of its English audience. They played down their advocacy of terror tactics, and changed

The Russian Political Press in London

165

‘chameleon-like’ ‘to make the most effective appeal to whatever segment of public opinion in England was most closely affected by particular developments in Russia’. They cooperated with clergymen and philanthropists in the case of famine and humanitarian crisis; or with labour leaders and trade unionists in support of striking workers.74 All those involved perceived limits to the utility of external engagement in Russian affairs. At a meeting of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom in December 1891, William Morris objected to the idea of Englishmen looking down on the Russians as though things were perfect in England – he believed the movement should work for badly needed improvements in both countries.75 On the other hand, as editor Volkhovskii was clear that that it was not in Free Russia’s remit to take a position on British politics, as interference in this respect would have implications for the aims, and strategies, of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom. In 1900, Volkhovskii came under pressure for the journal to protest against the Russian government’s tacit support for the Boers in Britain’s war in South Africa. He refused to get involved. Volkhovskii objected to the idea that ‘if a nation has a bad government, another nation is justified in going to war with the former for the purpose of coercing it into what is supposed to be good government’. Would Free Russia for once adopt such a doctrine it would mean, logically, that the Friends of Russian Freedom and their Russian allies would like Great Britain to invade Russia for the purpose of introducing constitutional government in her. As a matter of [sic] the F. of R. F. – both British and Russian – always protested against such an idea. All they wanted was to prevent the Russian bad government doing harm on foreign soil to Russian aspirations to freedom, to show active sympathy with the Russian aspirants to freedom by materially and morally supporting the victims of tyranny, by educating public opinion, and, if possible, by preventing the British Government from taking any step which might be a support to the Russian official system. But they could never wish the British to go, arms in hand, to coerce Russia into a better political organisation …. A foreign invasion, even with the best intentions, unless it were called for by a large section of the Russian nation itself – would rouse the feeling of patriotism, and this, instead of promoting the downfall of the tyrannical government of the Tzar, would unite the Russians under its leadership.76

In the post-revolutionary period, sections of the Russian emigration aimed precisely at encouraging external intervention in a war with Russia. This was not a unanimous position and was only gradually arrived at.77 However, enterprises like the Russian Liberation Committee and The Russian Commonwealth lobbied hard for military intervention, emphasizing the despotic nature of the Bolshevik government, and portraying the leaders of the Russian emigration as representatives of the ‘real Russia’. Like the Fundists of the 1890s, their lobbying efforts went beyond their own periodical publications and extended to lecture tours, meetings with influential figures, and placing material in the London press. At the outset in the 1850s Russian publishing in London had focused on facilitating uncensored discussion among Russian writers,

166

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

thinkers and revolutionaries, but by the 1920s these émigré enterprises were very much about engaging, and lobbying, domestic audiences.

Unity and disunity in the emigration Unity (and the appearance of unity) in the Russian emigration were concerns perpetually reflected in the political press. A united front was important in coordinating resistance to the tsarist regime, and in convincing international audiences that the Russian revolutionary movement was a cause worth backing. The Russian periodical press in London was notable for its attempts to bring the Russian political emigration together, and to present an impression of unity. Nevertheless, divisions persisted. Herzen’s ambition when he established his Free Russian Press was to publish ‘everything written in the spirit of freedom’: to be an all-party platform for opposition to the tsarist regime. Nevertheless, his activities attracted criticism from activists at home, particularly radicals (such as Nikolai Dobrolybov and Nikolai Chernyshevsky) who regarded Herzen as too moderate and pressed him to advocate violent revolution. Herzen was hostile to the trend towards violence among revolutionaries, and opposed terrorist acts. In an open letter to Alexander II in 1855, he appealed to the Tsar’s own instinct for reform, writing that ‘people expect from you mildness and a human heart’ and expressed his ‘real hope that you will do something for Russia’.78 When Herzen did articulate a programme, he identified the emancipation of Russia’s serfs as the principal priority – on this issue, all banners should ‘disappear into one’, and other questions could be tackled later on.79 His platform also embraced demands for Polish independence. By the 1890s many different political positions were represented in émigré publishing: liberals, populists, anarchists and Marxists. The émigrés associated with the Russian Press Fund came from the populist tradition, but they aimed at creating strategic unity in the emigration, and building a cross-party opposition. In the first issue of Letuchie listki, the editors stated that they aimed to ‘aid all revolutionary and opposition factions’ in Russia, but that they refused to ‘help along their mutual feuds’.80 Volkhovskii believed that revolutionary and ‘oppositionist’ strategies could work together: as long as the revolutionary terrorist organization Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) was operational, for example, the government was more inclined to listen to liberal opinion.81 However, projects for uniting émigré publishing almost always focused on constitutional reforms as a first step. Russian Marxists in emigration objected to this on the grounds that such political reforms were insufficient: a challenge to the whole social and economic structure was needed. For this reason, Kravchinskii’s enterprises never succeeded in winning the full support of Russian socialists in Geneva and Paris. Although initially in cautious sympathy with the work of the Free Russian Press Fund, by 1891 Petr Lavrov came out against it.82 He believed Kravchinskii and Volkhovskii incapable of representing the true nature and views of the Russian revolutionary movement, because neither liberals nor socialists were prepared to fully cooperate with them.83 He regarded the idea that public opinion in Europe and America could induce the Russian government

The Russian Political Press in London

167

to make liberal reforms as such a fantasy that it was not worth developing a detailed critique of the strategy.84 Vera Zasulich also apparently ‘constantly sniped at the SFRF and Free Russia’ in her letters to Plekhanov.85 Plekhanov, for his part, declared that the fact that he and Volkhovskii were both ‘against Russian absolutism’ was ‘hardly enough to permit us to pull amicably together in the same literary harness’.86 In defence of their projects (and alarmed at the damage these divisions might do to them), Stepniak wrote to English supporter Edward Pease that such factionalism was common to all small parties (including the British socialists) and to emigrations of all nationalities.87 Plans for the new all-party journal, which was to have been called Zemskii sobor (Assembly of the Land), were put on hold after Stepniak’s death. After a pause, the project was taken up by P. A. Dementev, a Russian businessman who had made his fortune in America and who named the town of St. Petersburg, Florida.88 Dementev’s career may have been flamboyant, but his journal, Sovremennik (The Contemporary, 1897) proved uninspiring. In the spirit of Herzen, Sovremennik offered no definite programme, but opened its pages to ‘all dissatisfied elements’.89 However, Dementev either did not seek or did not receive much cooperation from others, and wrote a lot of the content himself. Each of the journal’s three issues contained a long ‘open letter’ (to liberals, to the tsar, and finally to ‘dissatisfied Russians’), along with one other long article and some small excerpts of news.90 In the absence of any effective rallying call its programme appeared vague rather than broad. A review in Burtsev’s Narodovolets praised the idea of an all-party journal, which might do a great service to the struggle against autocracy, but found the first number disappointing: its editors seemed ‘so consumed with fear of presenting real ideas that they did their utmost to obscure them and make them difficult for their readers to understand’.91 Lavrov also opposed Sovremennik, telling Dementev that the only means of cooperation between socialists and non-socialists was for all those opposing autocratic government to join a socialist party – to advocate an alliance in which socialist principles were rejected would be ‘a renunciation of [Lavrov’s] whole political past’.92 There were divisions among those editors producing English-language publications too. Prelooker’s The Anglo-Russian explicitly opposed Free Russia’s advocacy of violence, and his paper attracted criticism from associates of Free Russia who were not happy about splitting the support base for the cause of Russian freedom.93 Nor was the network of western sympathizers free of factionalism. In 1891 when Kravchinskii compiled a bibliography intended to reflect the literature relating to their movement, he found it ‘impossible not to offend anybody’ by the inclusion or exclusion of authors who considered themselves – but were not considered by others – to be credible sources on the Russian revolutionary movement.94 The post-revolutionary anti-Bolshevik emigration comprised many different political positions, from Mensheviks to monarchists, united only by their opposition to the Bolshevik government. Nadezdha Teffi said of the anti-Bolshevik Russians in emigration that they ‘all hated each other so much, that you couldn’t put twenty people together, of whom ten were not enemies of the other ten’.95 Nevertheless, in their publishing enterprises in the immediate post-revolutionary period they worked hard to present a united front, and to present the diversity of their politics as a strength. The Russian Commonwealth positioned itself quite consciously as a journal uniting ‘men

168

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

of different political opinions and social tendencies’: they were ‘striving for a complete harmony in a great variety of tones’.96

Afterlives of the Russian émigré press There was substantial overlap between the generations of Russian émigré publishers mentioned in this chapter. Nikolai Ogarev, Herzen’s closest collaborator on Poliarnaia zvezda and Kolokol, was later associated with the group around Lavrov who published Vpered!97 Many of the instigators of anti-Bolshevik publishing enterprises in 1919–20 had been involved in earlier activist publishing circles. Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, who coordinated the work of the Russian Liberation Committee, had worked with Petr Struve’s liberal émigré periodical Osvobozhdenie (Liberation, 1902–5) in Stuttgart and Paris – she was responsible for smuggling copies of the journal across the border between Finland and Russia: later she worked on the journal’s editorial staff.98 Vladimir Burtsev returned to emigration and in the 1920s worked with Sergei Melgunov and Anton Kartashev on a periodical project Borba za Rossiiu (The Struggle for Russia, 1926).99 Perhaps the most remarkable career was that of Nikolai Chaikovskii, whose propaganda circle was a training ground for many émigré authors and publishers in the 1870s: he worked with Kravchinskii and Volkhovskii in London in the 1890s; toured America in 1905, raising awareness of and funds for the revolutionary struggle; was a member of the Petrograd Soviet in 1917; and headed the anti-Bolshevik government in North Russia during the civil war. In emigration in the 1920s he was involved in a variety of anti-Bolshevik projects.100 The strategies for publishing and publicizing their opposition to the incumbent Russian government were familiar ones. The instigators of these émigré publishing enterprises were also conscious of the history of Russian activism and publishing abroad. Poliarnaia zvezda, the first Russian political periodical to be published in London, featured a woodcut of the martyred Decembrists (by William Linton, a British artist and friend of Herzen’s) on its cover. In the 1890s, the Free Russian Press still sold an extensive collection of Herzen’s publications. They also stocked old numbers of the periodical Narodnaia Volia.101 Almost all Russian émigré publishers compared themselves to Herzen. Stepniak asserted that through the Russian Free Press Fund’s enterprises, London in the 1890s was ‘gradually returning to its old function’ as a home for free Russian speech.102 In its title, Vpered! echoed Herzen’s 1856 article ‘Vpered! Vpered!’. After the October Revolution, these émigré enterprises became part of the revolutionary history of the Soviet state. In the early 1920s, the Petrograd Commission for the history of the October Revolution and the Russian Communist Party launched an initiative to reprint full editions of revolutionary literature.103 In the 1960s, a full facsimile edition of Poliarnaia zvezda for the years 1855 to 1869 was published in Moscow. The editors and publishers were celebrated too: Ogarev’s remains were removed from the cemetery at Shooter’s Hill and he was reburied in Moscow in 1966. Figures like Herzen and Ogarev occupied the curious position of being honoured in the Soviet Union as revolutionary heroes, and outside it as forerunners of the Soviet dissident cause.104

The Russian Political Press in London

169

Conclusion London was by no means the only, or the principal location of Russian political publishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It was however an important centre, and one with some distinct characteristics. While Russian publishing enterprises on the continent represented particular parties and political positions, London hosted many that aimed at uniting the opposition. Alexander Herzen’s press, the ‘grandfather’ of Russian publishing abroad, established a broad, all-party platform. In the 1890s, the activists of the Russian Free Press Fund took up Herzen’s mantle. While Petr Struve’s Ozvobozhdenie (published in Stuttgart and Paris) is credited with bringing together liberals and socialists and creating the climate of cooperation evident in the revolutionary year of 1905, the Russian Free Press Fund’s all-party projects foreshadowed this work.105 Representing all sections of Russian émigré opinion could mean pleasing none, but it was considered worthwhile in order to have maximum impact on the government in Russia, and to enlist external support. The émigré political press certainly made an impression on authorities in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and challenged them to come up with a response. Under Alexander II, Russian government officials considered launching an anti-Herzen magazine, and/or reprinting articles from Kolokol in order to refute them. These propositions were overruled as being ‘the equivalent of killing oneself out of a fear of being killed’.106 The tsarist government directed substantial resources to countering the activities of the Free Russian Press Fund: through official appeals to the British Government, and by covert operations to damage their reputation or infiltrate their activities.107 Attempts to induce the British authorities to act against the émigré publishers eventually paid off with the arrest and trial of Vladimir Burtsev. In return, Free Russia launched a fighting fund for Burtsev’s defence. Russian émigré publishers were masters at publicizing a cause, and their efforts in London were aimed not only at opening up discussion about Russian affairs, and organizing for the revolutionary (or counter-revolutionary) cause, but also at publicizing what they regarded as the most egregious crimes of the government in Russia. Whether organizing their own efforts or enlisting external support, the work done through the periodical press was, as Herzen first said, a prelude to action. The discussion, organization and publicity afforded by the émigré political press were a means of influencing the climate of opinion, but also strengthening the revolutionary ‘fighting body’.108

Notes 1 47 publications that were published in London are listed in Tatiana Ossorguine, Eugénie Lange and Paul Chaix, ‘Périodiques en langue russe publié en Europe de 1855 à 1917’, Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 11, no. 4 (1970), 629–709. 2 Note from Lavrov in the copy of Vpered! 15/3 January 1875, 1, held at the British Library. On Lavrov in London see Philip Pomper, Peter Lavrov and the Russian Revolutionary Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 155–200.

170

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

3 Robert Henderson, ‘International Collaboration in the Persecution of Russian Political Émigrés: the European Pursuit of Vladimir Burtsev’, Revolutionary Russia 22, no. 1 (2009): 21–36. 4 M. J. de. K. Holman, ‘Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press: Vladimir Chertkov and his English Manager Arthur Fifield’, Slavonic and East European Review 66, no. 2 (1988): 184–97; Charlotte Alston, Tolstoy and his Disciples: The History of a Radical International Movement (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014), 143–4. 5 On Herzen’s life see E. H. Carr, The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth Century Portrait Gallery (New York: Octagon Books, 1975); on his thought see Martin Malia, Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism 1812–1855 (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965), and Edward Acton, Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). On Herzen in Europe, see Judith Zimmerman, Midpassage: Alexander Herzen and European Revolution (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). On Herzen’s London see Monica Partridge, ‘Alexander Herzen and England’ in Alexander Herzen: Collected Studies (Nottingham: Astra, 1993), 101–15, and ‘Alexander Herzen and the English Press’, Slavonic and East European Review 36, no. 87 (June 1958): 453–70; also Françoise Kunka, ‘Alexander Herzen and the Free Russian Press in London 1852– 1866’ (MA diss., University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, 2007). Robert Harris’s critical essay ‘Alexander Herzen: Writings on the Man and His Thought’, in A Herzen Reader, ed. Kathleen Parthé (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002), 343–70 gives an excellent view of the development of writing on Herzen from 1905 to date. 6 ‘Vol’noe Russkoe knigopechatanie v Londone’, 21 February 1853, in A. I. Gertsen, Sobranie sochinenii v vosmi tomax. tom 8 (Moscow: Izdatelstvo Pravda, 1975), 5–7. 7 Ibid. 8 Poliarnaia zvezda 1 (1855), ix; ‘L’Étoile Polaire: Revue de l’emancipation Russe’, DF.COW/A/463, Joseph Cowen Papers, Tyne and Wear Archives. 9 ‘Pis’mo k imperatoru Aleksandru vtoramu’, Poliarnaia zvezda 1 (1855): 11–14. 10 Poliarnaia zvezda 1 (1855), ix. 11 Parthé, A Herzen Reader, xviii. 12 Robert Harris, ‘Alexander Herzen, Writings on the Man and his Thought’ in Parthé, A Herzen Reader, 343. 13 ‘Predislovie’, Kolokol, 1 July 1857, 1–3. 14 Monica Partridge, ‘Herzen, Ogarev and their Free Russian Press in London’, The Anglo-Soviet Journal, Spring 1966, 12. 15 John Slatter, ‘Bibliography: The Russian émigré press in Britain, 1853–1917’, Slavonic and East European Review 73, no. 4 (1995): 717. 16 See for example Vpered! 15/3 January 1875; Vpered! 1 February/20 January 1875; Vpered! 15/3 February 1875. 17 Pomper, Lavrov and the Russian Revolutionary Movement, 147–50. See also Boris Sapir, ‘Unknown Chapters in the History of “Vpered”’, International Review of Social History 2, no. 1 (1957): 52–77. 18 On the Chaikovskii circle see Franco Venturi, Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 469–506. 19 Donald Senese, S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii: The London Years (Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1987), 26–8. 20 Donald Senese, ‘Feliks Volkhovsky in London, 1890–1914’, Immigrants and Minorities 2, no. 3 (1983): 69–71.

The Russian Political Press in London

171

21 Senese, Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 1. 22 On the SFRF see Barry Hollingsworth, ‘The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom: English Liberals and Russian Socialists 1890–1917’ in Oxford Slavonic Papers New Series 3 (1970): 45–64, and Ron Grant, ‘The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (1890–1917) – A Case Study in Internationalism’, Scottish Labour History Society Journal 3 (1970): 3–24. 23 Sergei Stepniak-Kravchinskii to Robert Spence Watson, 19 December 1889, SW1/17/56, 15 December 1889, SW1/17/85, and 25 January 1890, SW 1/17/89, Spence Watson Papers, Robinson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne. 24 Senese, Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 51. 25 Feliks Volkhovskii to Robert Spence Watson, 4 Jan 1900 SW1/19/3; StepniakKravchinskii to Spence Watson, 14 April 1890, SW1/17/91. 26 Senese, Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 73. 27 Donald Senese, ‘S. M. Kravchinskii and the National Front Against Autocracy’, Slavic Review 34, no. 3 (1975): 506–22. 28 Senese, ‘S. M. Kravchinskii and the National Front Against Autocracy’, 508–9. 29 Ibid., 518. 30 Receipts 13 July 1897, 12 September 1898, and 16 January 1900, File 6, ‘Accounts’, Coll. Misc 1156, LSE Library. 31 Henderson, ‘Vladimir Burtsev and the Russian Revolutionary Emigration’, 182; Hollingsworth, ‘Society of Friends of Russian Freedom’, 58. 32 John Slatter, ‘Jaakoff Prelooker and The Anglo-Russian Immigrants’, and Minorities 2:3 (1983), 48–66. 33 Holman, ‘Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press’, 184–97; Alston, Tolstoy and his Disciples, 144–7. 34 E. Lazarev, ‘Smert’ S. M. Kravchinskago-Stepniaka’, Letuchie listki 28 (18 January 1896): 3–6. 35 Slatter, ‘Bibliography: The Russian Émigré Press in Britain’, 718. 36 See Charlotte Alston, ‘The Russian Liberation Committee in London’, Slavonica 14, no. 1 (2008): 1–11. 37 The Committee’s pamphlet publications included Ariadna Tyrkova-Williams, Why Soviet Russia is Starving; Dioneo [I. V. Shklovskii], ‘Russia Under the Bolsheviks’; and Mikhail Rostovtseff, ‘Proletarian Culture’ (all London: Russian Liberation Committee, 1919). On The New Russia’s programme see ‘To Our Readers’, The New Russia 1, no. 1 (5 February 1920): this journal was replaced in August 1921 by the monthly (later two-three monthly) Russian Life. 38 Russian Liberation Committee, Salaries paid, Box 27, BAR MS Coll. TyrkovaWilliams, Bakhmeteff Archive, Columbia University Library; Details of the telegraphic service and telegrams received can be found both in Box 27, BAR MS Coll TyrkovaWilliams and in the H. W. Williams papers, Add. 54447-54463, British Library. 39 ‘The Union “Russian Commonwealth”’, The Russian Commonwealth 1, no. 1 (1 November 1918): 24. 40 Pavel Akselrod, ‘Who are Traitors to International Socialism – the Bolsheviks or their Socialist Opponents in Russia?’ The Russian Commonwealth 1, no. 2 (15 November 1918): 36–9; 1, no. 3 (1 December 1918): 62–6, and 1, no. 5–6 (20 January 1919): 121–4. 41 ‘Foreword’, The Russian Outlook 1, no. 1 (10 May 1919): 4. 42 Cash Statements; and correspondence with Russian Telegraphic Agency, Omsk, BAR MS Coll. Tyrkova-Williams Box 27.

172

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

43 Parthé, A Herzen Reader, xii and 179–85. 44 See Alfred Erich Senn, The Russian Revolution in Switzerland 1914–1917 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971). 45 Ossorguine, Lange and Chaix, ‘Périodiques en langue russe’, 629–709. 46 Herzen, ‘1853–1863’ in Parthé, A Herzen Reader, 179–85. 47 Michael Futrell, Northern Underground: Episodes of Russian Revolutionary Transport and Communications through Scandinavia and Finland 1863–1917 (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 33. 48 Helen Williams, ‘Ringing the Bell: Editor-Reader Dialogue in Alexander Herzen’s Kolokol’ Book History 4 (2001), 121. 49 Ingeborg Taflin to Feliks Volkhovskii, 25 July 1895, and 30 September 1895, File 6, Coll Misc 1156, LSE Library. 50 Ingeborg Taflin to Feliks Volkhovskii, 13 January 1896, File 6, Coll Misc 1156, LSE Library. 51 Partridge, ‘Alexander Herzen and the English Press’, 465. 52 ‘Terrible Death of M. Stepniak’ The Standard, 24 December 1895, 3. 53 George Lensen (ed.), Revelations of a Russian Diplomat: the Memoirs of Dmitri I. Abrikossow (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964), 62–3. 54 Frank Swinnerton, Swinnerton: An Autobiography (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1935), 263 55 Herzen, ‘1853–1863’, 181. See also Partridge, ‘Herzen, Ogarev and their Free Russian Press’, 10, and Kunka, ‘Herzen and the Free Russian Press’, 81. 56 ‘The Border Provinces’ The Russian Commonwealth 1, no. 4 (16 December 1918): 82. See also, for example, E. A. Brayley Hodgetts, ‘Self-Determination and the Baltic’, The Russian Outlook 1, no. 6 (14 June 1919): 127–8. 57 ‘L’Étoile Polaire’, DF.COW/A/463, Joseph Cowen papers. 58 Samuel Harper to Harold Williams, 8 May 1918, Box 5, Folder 6, Samuel Harper papers, University of Chicago Library. 59 Leonid Andreev, SOS (London: Russian Liberation Committee, 1919); Au Secours! (Paris, 1919); Spasite! (Paris, 1919). 60 Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts (London: Chatto and Windus, 1974), 445–7. 61 Carr, The Romantic Exiles, 132. 62 E H Carr gives a list of Herzen’s many London addresses, with dates, in an appendix to The Romantic Exiles, 373. See also Sarah Young, ‘Russians in London: Alexander Herzen, with a note on Nikolai Ogarev’ http://www.sarahjyoung.com/ site/2010/11/28/Russians-in-london-alexander-herzen-with-a-note-on-nikolaiogarev/ (accessed 24 August 2016). 63 On politics see for example a letter from Herzen to Michelet, 31/19 January 1855, in A. I. Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh tom 25 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1961), 230. 64 Herzen to E. F. Korsh and N Kh. Ketchera, 4 June 1857, in Herzen, Sobranie sochinenii tom 26, 95–6. 65 Partridge, Collected Studies, 151. 66 Joseph Cowen to Jos. Nicholson, 30 April 1885, DF.COW/F/54, Joseph Cowen papers. 67 Joseph Cowen to Petr Kropotkin, 31 October 1884, DF.COW/F/54, Joseph Cowen papers. Senese, Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 27. 68 Partridge, ‘Alexander Herzen and the English Press’, 458.

The Russian Political Press in London

173

69 Ibid., 455. 70 Hollingsworth, ‘Society of Friends of Russian Freedom’, 49. 71 ‘The Movement in England’, Free Russia 1, no. 1 (June 1890): 17, and Free Russia 1, no. 1 (June 1890): 1–2. 72 Kravchinskii to Spence Watson, 23 March 1889, SW 1/17/83, Spence Watson papers. 73 Free Russia 1:1 (June 1890), 2. 74 Senese, Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 54. On the presentation of terror tactics for western audiences, see Jane Good, ‘America and the Russian Revolutionary Movement’, The Russian Review 41, no. 3 (1982): 273–87. 75 ‘Meeting of December 2nd’, Free Russia 3, no. 1 (January 1892): 6. 76 Feliks Volkhovskii to Robert Spence Watson, 4 January 1900, SW1/19/3, Spence Watson papers. 77 Anatol Shmelev, ‘The Allies in Russia, 1917–20: Intervention as seen by the Whites’, Revolutionary Russia 16, no. 1 (2003): 88–91. 78 ‘Pis’mo k imperatoru Aleksandru vtoramu’, Poliarnaia zvezda 1 (1855): 11–14. 79 Parthé, A Herzen Reader, 46–50. 80 Senese, ‘S. M. Kravchinskii and the National Front Against Autocracy’, 518. 81 Ibid., 515. 82 Lavrov to Kravchinskii, 29 January 1890, and Kravchinskii to Lavrov, 6 February 1890, in S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii v Londonskoi emigratsii (Nauka, Moscow, 1968), 269–70. 83 Petr Lavrov to E. Lineva, 2 April 1891, in Boris Sapir (ed.) Lavrov: Gody emigratsii: arkhivnye materialy v dbukh tomakh. Tom 2 (Dordrecht: D Reidel, 1974), 376–7. 84 Lavrov to Lineva, 2 April 1891, in Sapir (ed.) Lavrov: Gody emigratsii. Tom 2, 379. 85 Senese, Stepniak-Kravchinskii, 64. 86 Senese, ‘S. M. Kravchinskii and the National Front against Autocracy’, 521. 87 Kravchinskii to Edward Pease, late April or early May 1891, in S. M. StepniakKravchinskii v Londonskoi emigratsii, 301–2. 88 G. Michael Hamburg, ‘The London Emigration and the Russian Liberation Movement: the Problem of Unity, 1889–1897’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 25 no. 3 (1977): 333. 89 ‘Vmesto predisloviia’, Sovremennik 1 (April 1897): 6. 90 Sovremennik 1 (April 1897); 2 (May 1897); 3 (June 1897). G. Michael Hamburg discusses the establishment of Sovremennik in detail in ‘The London Emigration and the Russian Liberation Movement’, 333–6. 91 ‘Bibliografia’, Narodovolets 1 (1897): 30. 92 Hamburg, ‘The London Emigration and the Russian Liberation Movement’, 335. 93 Slatter, ‘Jaakoff Prelooker and The Anglo-Russian’, 48–66. 94 Kravchinskii to Spence Watson, April 14 1890, SW1/17/91, Spence Watson papers. 95 Paul Robinson, The White Russian Army in Exile 1920–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 22. 96 ‘The Russian Commonwealth’, The Russian Commonwealth 1, no. 1 (1 November 1918). 97 Sapir, ‘Unknown chapters in the history of Vpered’, 53. 98 Richard Pipes, Struve: Liberal on the Left 1870–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 352–3; and 388. 99 Borba za Rossiiu 1 (26 November 1926): 1. 100 V. I. Goldin, ‘Nikolai Chaikovskii in Revolution and Counter-Revolution’, Revolutionary Russia 14, no. 1 (2001): 22–41.

174

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

101 See Letuchie listki 28 January 1896, and Senese, ‘S. M. Kravchinskii and the National Front against Autocracy’, 514. 102 Free Russia, 2, no. 12 (1 December 1892): 4. 103 ‘Predislovie’, Chernyi Peredel: organ sotsialistov-federalistov 1880–1881 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo, 1923), 3–4. 104 Harris, ‘Alexander Herzen: Writings on the Man and his Thought’, 346–50. 105 See Hamburg, ‘The London Emigration and the Russian Liberation Movement’, 321, and Senese, ‘S. M. Kravchinskii and the National Front Against Autocracy’, 506. 106 Parthé, A Herzen Reader, xxi. 107 Senese, Stepniak-Kravchinskii: the London Years, 91–103. 108 Kravchinskii to Elizabeth Spence Watson, n.d., SW1/17/93, Spence Watson papers.

9

The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865–1914 Ole Birk Laursen1

After the East India Company was nationalized by the British Government in the wake of the Indian unrest of 1857, the Indian struggle for self-determination and dominion status increasingly shifted to London and organized in nationalist groups. In mid- to late-nineteenth-century London, Indian nationalists and retired British officials from the Indian Civil Service often collaborated to campaign for greater autonomy and a say in matters relevant to India in Parliament. In the early twentieth century, however, the Indian nationalist movement became increasingly radicalized and shifted its campaign to achieving outright independence from Britain. With the emergence of the cheap press in the mid-1850s, Indian nationalist organizations in Britain readily started agitating through their own papers.2 At the same time, due to Britain’s liberal tradition, these publications were not subject to the same censorship restrictions as in India, where the introduction of the Licensing Act of 1857 restricted the circulation of printed books and papers, but enjoyed the privileges of freedom of the press. Set against this combination, this chapter charts the Indian nationalist movement in London through three organizations and their publications, each representing a distinct period of agitation against the British Empire. The first period, from 1865 to 1885, revolved around Dadabhai Naoroji’s agitation for greater self-determination, the East India Association (EIA) and its paper the Journal of the East India Association. The journal primarily printed papers and proceedings from the organization’s meetings, discussing matters relating to India’s economy and politics until it was incorporated into The Asiatic Review in 1885. Established as an independent British branch of the Indian National Congress (INC) in 1889, the British Committee of the Indian National Congress (BCINC) and its organ India was the most prominent political publication in the second period. The BCINC acted as a local pressure group and sought to organize sympathizers to Congress in Britain, write and distribute Congress annual reports and advocate for greater political autonomy within the British Empire. It remained loyal to the British Government, and the first fifteen years were dominated by the so-called moderates within the Congress, but after the partition of Bengal in 1905 it attracted more ‘extremist’ supporters. In the third period, those supporters were also attracted to Shyamaji Krishnavarma’s The Indian Sociologist. Founded as a radical

176

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

alternative to India and set up as the organ for the India Home Rule Society (IHRS), the journal operated outside parliamentary politics and advocated a violent overthrow of the British Empire. While the Journal of the East India Association (1867–85), India (1890–1921) and The Indian Sociologist (1905–22) served different political agendas, they were all central to the development of the Indian nationalist movement in Britain in the long nineteenth century. An examination of these publications opens a window onto the Indian nationalist movement in Britain and emphasizes the role of the press in confronting colonial discourse. In doing so, this chapter reveals the dynamics of transnational political and cultural exchange in London and highlights the imperial metropolis as the nexus of political dissenters in exile. While there is now a substantial body of scholarship on the history of South Asians and the nationalist movement in Britain, these works have paid surprisingly little attention to the role of the political press in the formation of responses to the British Raj.3 At the same time, the sporadic but growing corpus of research on the role of the press and media in British imperial relations with India has focused primarily on nationalist literature published within India or the representation of India in the British press and popular culture.4 However, Chandrika Kaul briefly notes that India was a ‘confessedly propagandist journal’ that was ‘moderately successful in presenting the INC point of view’.5 David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers’ edited collection Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media (2000) focuses on the ‘exchange of news, ideas and technologies of communication between India and Britain’, but none of the essays in their collection deals with any of the nationalist periodicals under scrutiny in this chapter. However, I am guided by their argument that ‘mass media was simultaneously a site where knowledge of India could be acquired and put to imperial use as well as a place from whence challenges to the empire could be raised’.6 Paying attention to such challenges to the empire, this chapter closely examines the Journal of the East India Association, India and The Indian Sociologist and seeks, firstly, to provide an overview of the emergence of the Indian nationalist movement in Britain and, secondly, to explore the role of political publications in the formation of Indian responses to British colonialism. Tracing key issues such as famines, the Indian Civil Service (ICS) exams, which were required for employment in administrative services in India, and self-governance, it argues that an investigation of the Indian nationalist movement in Britain in the long nineteenth century must take into account the history of nationalist publications in London. In fact, I suggest that these journals served three important purposes: firstly, to represent India to the British public as well as the parliament and, in doing so, challenge dominant colonial discourses; secondly, to operate as links between the nationalist movement in India and the various Indian nationalist groups across the world and, thirdly, to communicate with other nationalist groups and radical anti-imperialists in Britain. However, the manner in which these processes worked varied greatly, so to pursue these arguments, the first part of this chapter charts the nascent beginnings of Indian nationalist politics in Britain through the EIA and the Journal of the East India Association before exploring parliamentary agitation in the BCINC’s publication India. The last part of the chapter focuses on Krishnavarma and The Indian Sociologist as an important organ for the Indian revolutionary movement abroad.

The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865–1914

177

Nationalism in the making: The Journal of the East India Association, 1865–85 By the mid-nineteenth century, there were several hundred Indians living in Britain. Many had come as labourers, sailors and nannies, and an increasing number of students had arrived to study at universities in England and Scotland.7 While insignificant in size, Indians in Britain played a vital role in shaping the discourse of anti-imperialism in the long nineteenth century. Throughout the 1830s to the 1850s, Indians such as Rajah Rammohun Roy and Dwarkanath Tagore agitated alongside William Adam and George Thompson, but the British India Society’s organ the British Indian Advocate acquired limited publicity, and the India Reform Society languished by the end of the 1850s.8 By contrast, Dadabhai Naoroji was more successful in his agitation against British rule in India. He knew the political value of the press and had established the journal Rast Goftar in Bombay in 1851, but it was in Britain that his nationalist politics matured.9 In the wake of the Indian unrest in 1857, he became more politically engaged and, with W. C. Bonnerjee, Manmohun Ghose, Pherozeshah Mehta, Badruddin Tyabji and Gnanendramohan Tagore, among others, he set up the London Indian Society as a forum for ‘discussion of political, social and literary subjects relating to India, with a view to promote the interests of the people of that country’ in March 1865.10 It was a short-lived organization, however, and was superseded by the EIA, which was founded in December 1866 for the ‘independent and disinterested advocacy and promotion by all legitimate means of the interests and welfare of India generally’.11 The membership fee was ‘One Sovereign or Ten Rupees’ and by the summer of 1867 around 300 people had joined. By 1868 it had nearly 600 members and by 1871 over 1,000 with local branches established in Bombay, Calcutta, Hong Kong and Madras.12 Many of its members were retired British officials from the ICS and Lord Lyveden served as its first president but, as Anil Seal notes, ‘this London-based association had some claim to be a national body’.13 In other words, despite its large British membership, the organization played an important role in the development of the Indian struggle for self-determination in this period. The EIA met regularly at 55 Parliament Street in London, and from its inception the association reached its members as well as the British government and public by publishing lectures and speeches from its meetings in the Journal of the East India Association. The first issue was published in January 1867, and it cost 1 shilling and 6 pence for members and 2 shillings and 6 pence for non-members. The Journal of the East India Association was edited by a managing committee ‘composed of a Chairman, Six Members, and the Chairman of each of the Special Committees’ and published by William Clowes & Sons.14 By the mid-nineteenth century, Clowes was among the largest printing works in the world, signalling the Journal of the East India Association’s central place in London’s cultural landscape.15 The association relied heavily on donations from wealthy Indians and received a total of £271 in its first year. This sum covered the publication costs of the three first issues of the journal, while a fourth issue was predicted to cost no less than £150. The Managing Committee’s report for year 1867–8 noted that ‘it is evident from the state of the Accounts, that unless the Annual Subscription of Members is increased, or the

178

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

price of the Journal augmented, the publication of this valuable record – upon which the permanent stability of the Association so much depends – must cease’.16 Having published only three issues at irregular intervals in the first two years, the committee recommended that ‘the Journal should in the future be published, if possible, quarterly, and it is hoped that the funds necessary for this purpose will be provided by the Members of the Association’.17 As the membership slowly grew, the necessary funds were obtained and the periodical’s readership expanded. While it is difficult to assess the circulation of the journal, the reduced price of just 1 shilling already in 1868 may be an indication of a greater print run. Ensuring it was transparent and open to all its readers, each issue included a list of members and the rules of the association. While a majority of the association’s members was British, particularly Naoroji and Bonnerjee were vocal agitators from the beginning. In his inaugural lecture ‘England’s Duties to India’ delivered on 2 May 1867, Naoroji discussed how British colonial policies in India drained the country of its wealth, and argued that ‘[i]n the shape of “home charges” alone there has been a transfer of about 100 millions of pounds sterling, exclusive of interest on public debt, from the wealth of India to that of England since 1829’.18 This lecture initiated his long campaign against British rule in India and the development of his so-called drain theory.19 In the same speech he also advocated greater involvement of Indians in their own political affairs and easier access to the ICS exams. A few months later, on 25 July 1867, Bonnerjee opined in one of the association’s lectures that ‘there ought to be a representative assembly and a senate sitting in India, with a power of veto to the governor-general, but under the same restrictions as exists in America, with perhaps an absolute power of veto to the Crown’, suggesting an early attempt at articulating an Indian constitution similar to that in the United States.20 In other words, during its early years, the association advocated a nationalist policy from within the imperial metropolis and two issues were key to its political agenda: first, the loss of wealth due to British colonial policy and, second, more self-governance within the British Empire. Lastly, the series of famines that affected India from 1860 to 1880 as well as access to the ICS exams in India were also frequently discussed. After the establishment of local branches in India, Naoroji noted that the duties of these associations were, first, to educate the people in their political duties and rights and, second, to ‘watch and discuss every measure that is brought before the local Legislative Councils and the Governor-General’s Legislative Council’.21 However, as ‘[a]ll their efforts have a provincialism about them, which renders their voice on questions of general importance and policy powerless’, their third duty was to ‘keep this Association fully informed with their views from time to time upon all subjects of general importance’. This could be done, he said, ‘by sending to this Association wellconsidered papers on such subjects’.22 These papers would then attain general publicity through the journal. It was clear, though, that the main work would be done by the British branch because ‘[a]ll the great questions of Indian politics, administration, and finance will be discussed and decided chiefly in [Britain]’ and ‘[s]uch questions can never be properly agitated by the local Indian Associations with effect’.23 One of Naoroji’s key strategies was to draw on British liberal thinkers such as Thomas Paine, Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill in his orations. For instance, in ‘The Wants and Means of India’, originally given on 27 July 1870 and later published

The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865–1914

179

separately as an essay elsewhere, Naoroji drew on Britain’s liberal tradition and argued that no foreign rule can maintain itself unless it manages to enable the country to produce not only sufficient for the ordinary wants of a civilized nation, but also for the price of the foreign rule itself. If the foreign rule fails to produce this result, its existence is naturally felt as a crushing burden to the nation, and either starvation, decimation, and poverty, or rebellion against the foreign rule is the inevitable consequence.24

Naoroji’s critique was not levelled against British rule of India per se, but what he considered un-British rule. In other words, drawing exactly on such thinkers, he argued that Britain’s colonial policies in India contradicted the long tradition of liberalism that was the foundation of British society. His ideas were later developed and published in Poverty of India (1876) and Poverty and Un-British Rule in India (1901). While Naoroji developed his economic critique of British rule India in articles for the journal, the issue of more self-representation was discussed chiefly with reference to the ICS exams. The Charter Act of 1853 had granted access to the ICS to all British subjects between the ages of 18 and 23, but the exams were only held in Britain. This meant that, except for a rich Indian elite, who could afford a round-trip passage to Britain, entry into administrative positions in India was effectively barred.25 Naoroji argued against this issue: ‘[t]he only way in which natives of India can be put on an honestly equal footing with Englishmen is by holding examinations in India also’.26 His tireless agitation, however, had little effect on the British Government and ICS exams were not held in India until 1922. By the end of the 1870s, as the organization’s membership had fallen to 73 against more than 1,000 in 1871, the political importance of the association and its journal waned as it became increasingly dominated by the British contingency with only Naoroji still fighting for its original intentions.27 At the same time, the National Indian Association, established in 1870 by Mary Carpenter and Keshub Chunder Sen, and its organ the Journal of the National Indian Association attracted more resourceful and wealthy Indians, further minimizing the influence of the EIA.28 The Journal of the East India Association was amalgamated into The Asiatic Review in 1885, but the EIA continued to exist until 1949 when it merged with the National Indian Association to form the Britain, India and Pakistan Association. However, the journal was an important early publication and, in many ways, laid the foundation for renewed nationalist agitation through the INC.29

Parliamentary pressure: India, 1890–1905 Dadabhai Naoroji was also instrumental in forming the INC in Bombay in 1885 and served as its president in 1886 and 1893. Established under the guidance of Allan Octavia Hume and William Wedderburn, other founding members included alumni of the London Indian Society and EIA such as W. C. Bonnerjee, who served as the

180

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

first president of Congress, Badruddin Tyabji, who became president after Naoroji in 1887, and Pherozeshah Mehta, who was elected president in 1890. The aim of the INC was ‘the promotion of personal intimacy and friendship among all the more earnest workers in our country’s cause in the parts of the Empire’ and, at the first congress, Bonnerjee noted that ‘their desire to be governed according to the ideas of government prevalent in Europe was in no way incompatible with their thorough loyalty to the British Government. All that they desired was that the basis of the government should be widened and that the people should have their proper and legitimate share in it’.30 Such views among moderate politicians professing their allegiance to the British Raj and carrying out their work through constitutional channels dominated the first twenty years of the INC. Inspired by the Irish National League of Great Britain, formed by Frank Hugh O’Donnell in 1882, Naoroji again saw the need for vocal agitation in Britain and, with Wedderburn, W. S. Caine and W. S. B. McLaren, set up the Indian Political Agency in late 1888. Bonnerjee, Hume, Charles Bradlaugh, Eardley Norton and William Digby joined shortly after, and they set up office at 25 Craven Street, at first, and then moved to the Trafalgar Buildings on Northumberland Avenue in London.31 The Agency was dissolved in July 1889 but was soon replaced when, at the fifth session of the INC in Bombay in 1889, it was formally agreed to set up a British Committee to ‘represent its views in England, and press upon the consideration of the British public the political reforms which the Congress has advocated’, including many of the Agency people.32 While not members of the BCINC, other radicals such as Keir Hardie and H. M. Hyndman also supported the efforts of Indian nationalists in Britain.33 ‘From the late 1880s until the outbreak of World War I’, Jonathan Schneer notes, ‘this was the most notable Indian nationalist organization in England’, and, in many ways, it reflected the radical optimism that also lead to the formation of the Labour Party that year.34 Importantly, as Seal argues, it shifted the ‘centre of Indian politics still further towards London’.35 In addition to parliamentary agitation and the arrangement of public meetings, the BCINC was convinced that its demands were most successfully pushed forward through a local publication.36 Consequently, in line with the resolution adopted in 1889, the BCINC set up its own journal, India, which soon, as Kaushik notes, ‘became the chief vehicle of Indian agitation in England’.37 Its subtitle varied between ‘A Journal for the Discussion of Indian Affairs’ and ‘A Record and Review of Indian Affairs’ because, as stated on a wrapper of a 1893 issue, ‘ “India” is not merely a political organ. It represents New India in every [department] of progress – literary, social and industrial’.38 It was published irregularly at first and then, from 1892, became a monthly journal before becoming a weekly publication from January 1898. It had a circulation of 10,000 at its peak, which declined to around 3,000 in 1907, with subscribers largely in India.39 Its first editor was William Digby (1890–2), followed by Morse Stephens (1893), Gordon Hewart (1893–1905), John Henry Muirhead (1905–6), H. E. A. Cotton (1906–19) and lastly H. S. Polak before it folded in 1921.40 By 1903, the journal had made significant losses and the management was transferred to The Indian Newspaper Company formed by Hume, Wedderburn and Naoroji, among others.41 A major expense was Digby’s work for the Committee. In addition to the £500 (ca. £30,000 in contemporary

The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865–1914

181

terms) a year he drew as secretary for the Committee and the £400 (ca. £24,000 today) he charged for the use of his rooms and secretaries, Digby earned £100 (ca. £6,000 today) a year for editing India.42 Partly as a consequence of his expenditures, Digby was dismissed from the Committee in 1892. The journal featured leading articles written by BCINC members and often included clippings about matters relating to India from other newspapers across Britain and Europe. Moreover, many of its editors frequently wrote for other publications such as Contemporary Review and The Statesman.43 In the first issue, the editors noted that ‘the demands of the Congress may be resolved into three main requests: (1) the introduction of the representative principle into the various Legislative Councils; (2) the right of interpellation on domestic affairs; (3) the annual discussion of the budget’.44 In many ways, India continued in the tradition of the Journal of the East India Association and often focused on similar issues such as famines, access to the ICS exams and the economic drain of wealth from India. The difference was, however, that the BCINC had the support of experienced British politicians. In an open letter to the members of the House of Commons, Digby remarked that ‘Britain, after first destroying nearly all Indian industries, takes the profit made in India, and spends them out of the country. Britain, no doubt, without meaning to do so, has exploited, and is exploiting, the Empire’.45 The critique of the drain of wealth from India and the expenditures on railways also related to the wave of famines that had affected India from the mid-nineteenth century. According to Digby, from 1802 to 1854 there were thirteen famines with an estimated life loss of 5 million people compared to the postrailway era from 1860 to 1879 where there were sixteen famines and 12 million deaths. He argued that ‘whatever might be the advantages of railways in RELIEVING famine … they had absolutely done nothing to PREVENT famines’.46 Such articles prompted Secretary of State for India Lord Hamilton to write to Viceroy Lord Curzon, ‘I note that India frequently starts lies here that are reproduced in details by the Congress paper, in fact nearly all information about India is derived from this poisonous little rag’.47 Despite Digby’s damning indictment, the British parliament rarely listened to these grievances and ignored the demands for simultaneous ICS examinations as well.48 Adding to such frustrating efforts, the work of the BCINC was beset with internal conflicts. Without a formal constitution and acting independently from the INC, the BCINC saw itself as an intermediary between the INC and the British government, and this schism, notes Nicholas Owen, was symbolized by the journal India.49 While agitating for Indian causes, the journal was principally edited and written by the British constituency. Without much first-hand knowledge of India, these individuals informed the parliament of the effects of British rule in India and, at the same time, this information trickled back to India through the journal. This disparity between the editors and the readers, combined with personal differences between Wedderburn, Hume and D. E. Wacha, on the one hand, and the followers of Naoroji’s drain theory as well as the displaced Digby and Caine, on the other, had a number of important consequences. Firstly, the pages of India featured moderate pro-Empire voices such as Wedderburn alongside more radical calls for independence from the likes of H. M. Hyndman and Edward Carpenter. Secondly, it made it increasingly difficult to attract funding for the activities of the BCINC, in general, and India, in particular.50 Indeed,

182

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

funding was so scant that in one year Naoroji himself picked up the salary for India’s journalists for the past twelve months and paid the rent for the BCINC’s offices.51 Throughout the late 1890s, Naoroji continued to make the case for the ‘drain theory’ and protest against un-British rule of India. He slowly became the single Indian voice in the BCINC and sympathetic towards the increasingly radical sentiments expressed by Bal Gangadhar Tilak and Bipin Chandra Pal, leaders of the ‘extremist’ wing of the INC, while remaining loyal to Britain. Alongside his work for the Committee, Naoroji stood as a Liberal Party candidate for the Conservative seat of Holborn in 1886. When he lost, Lord Salisbury remarked that ‘I doubt if we have yet got to that point of view where a British constituency would elect a black man’.52 However, when Naoroji successfully contested and won the seat of Central Finsbury in the 1892 general election to win a seat in the House of Commons, it was covered widely in India. 53 Although now in Parliament, Naoroji was increasingly trapped between the moderate faction of the Committee and the younger, growing body of extremists, who were frustrated with the inefficiency of the Congress to attain any progress towards independence. At the same time, with the likes of Carpenter and particularly Hyndman calling for more radical measures, Naoroji struggled to justify the necessity of the Committee and India.54 Throughout the late 1890s, there were increasingly calls to rein in the expenses of the money-losing India and in 1901 the Indian Congress Committee voted to end the periodical altogether. The BCINC, however, balanced its books and saved India on a reduced budget. The growing rift between British liberals and the Indian readers led to less funding and the circulation of the journal fell, resulting in a weakened organization by 1905. Indeed, as Edward Moulton notes, 1905, twenty years after its establishment, Congress had little tangible to show for its efforts in the way of administrative or constitutional reform’.55 Frustrated with the lack of progress, many Indian nationalists denounced the efforts of the BCINC and called for more radical measures along the lines of the Irish Fenians. However, if the influence of the BCINC and India had diminished by the turn of the century, the journal was an important organ within the broader anti-imperial movement. Indeed, as Schneer concludes, ‘the activities of the parliamentary committee, the books, pamphlets, and newspaper helped to shape London in 1900, contributed to the ongoing process by which the imperial metropolis defined itself ’.56 At the same time, the internal unrest within the BCINC, the schism between the British Committee and its Indian readers as well as the absence of results left a vacuum in the Indian nationalist movement in Britain around the turn of the century. Although India continued until 1921, the gap left by the BCINC gave rise to another publication: The Indian Sociologist.

The radical turn: The Indian Sociologist, 1905–14 Viceroy Lord Curzon’s proposal to partition Bengal in January 1904 cemented the split between the ‘moderates’ and the ‘extremists’ in the INC, and by the time the province was divided in October 1905, the political landscape of India looked significantly different from that in the previous decades. Capturing the extremist spirit of Indian nationalism in the early twentieth century, Shyamaji Krishnavarma set up The Indian Sociologist in

The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865–1914

183

January 1905 as an ‘organ of freedom, and of political, social, and religious reforms’ because ‘[t]he political relations between England and India’, he claimed, ‘require a genuine Indian interpreter in the United Kingdom to show, on behalf of Indians, how Indians really fare and feel under British rule’.57 Edited solely by Krishnavarma from his home on 9 Queen’s Wood Avenue, Highgate, it was printed by Alice Bradlaugh and Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner in London. While both the Journal of the East India Association and India had a greater print run, The Indian Sociologist had a broader circulation. With a print run of around 1,000 and a worldwide circulation, the importance of The Indian Sociologist, as Harald Fischer-Tiné argues, lies in the fact that it was ‘distributed to virtually every place on earth with an Indian minority community, thus connecting the Indian nationalist diaspora living in South Africa, California, Mauritius, Hong Kong and England with one another and like-minded groups at home’.58 Although he was on friendly terms with Naoroji, Krishnavarma implicitly criticized the work of the BCINC in the first issue and asserted that ‘[n]o systematic attempt has, so far as our knowledge goes, ever been made in this country by Indians to enlighten the British public with regard to the grievances, demands, and aspirations of the people of India’.59 Where Naoroji drew on British liberals such as Paine, Burke and Mill, Krishnavarma was highly influenced by the works of Herbert Spencer. While the two never met, Krishnavarma attended Spencer’s funeral in Golders Green in December 1903 and, in early 1904, endowed an annual lecture at the University of Oxford in honour of Spencer. Drawing on Spencer’s libertarian thinking, The Indian Sociologist aimed to ‘inculcate the great sociological truth that “it is impossible to join injustice and brutality abroad with justice and humanity at home”’.60 Much more radical than any previous nationalist publication, Krishnavarma warned ‘[i]t will from time to time remind the British people that they can never succeed in being a nation of freemen and lovers of freedom so long as they continue to send members of the dominating classes to exercise despotisms in Britain’s name upon the various conquered races that constitute Britain’s military Empire’.61 Whereas the BCINC used India to agitate in the British parliament, The Indian Sociologist was not ‘identified with any political party’ and was instead ‘guided in its policy by the fundamental truths of Social Science’.62 It carried on its masthead two quotes from Spencer: the first, ‘[e]very man is free to do that which he wills, provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man’, and the second, ‘[r]esistance to aggression is not simply justifiable but imperative. Nonresistance hurts both altruism and egoism’. The second quote was frequently deployed in The Indian Sociologist to justify violent resistance against the British. Whereas Marxism often offered the revolutionary impetus for nationalist movements, Spencer’s social evolutionary thoughts with an emphasis on individual freedom held wide appeal among Krishnavarma and his group. ‘Despite his anti-imperial stance’, Shruti Kapila argues, ‘it was not Spencer’s anti-imperialism in itself … that was the cause of kinship between him and a diverse set of radical nationalists such as Shyamji Krishnavarma, B. G. Tilak and Lala Har Dayal, but rather it was the valuation of the self that held some critical appeal’.63 Although not affiliated with any political party, The Indian Sociologist became the organ for the IHRS, established by Krishnavarma in February 1905 with the stated aim to ‘secure home rule for India’, ‘carry on propaganda in the United Kingdom by all practical means with a view to attain the same’ and ‘spread among the people of

184

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

India a knowledge of the advantages of freedom and national unity’.64 Again criticizing the BCINC, Krishnavarma argued that ‘[t]he present organisations in the United Kingdom, connected with India, are practically all at the disposal of the bureaucrats; it is, therefore, a matter of paramount importance that a new organisation on independent lines should be set on foot, for obtaining for India what is its indefeasible right’.65 Krishnavarma served as president, and the council of vice-presidents included S. R. Rana and M. B. Godrej, who co-founded the Paris Indian Society with Madame Bhikaiji Cama in early 1905. Unlike the EIA and the BCINC, the IHRS was ‘restricted to Indian gentlemen only’.66 The annual membership of ‘three shillings or Rupees 2-40’ also entitled the member to receive The Indian Sociologist.67 In the first issue, Krishnavarma announced the establishment of five ‘Herbert Spencer Indian Fellowships’ and one ‘Swami Dayananda Sarasvati Fellowship’ worth 2,000 Rupees each for enabling graduates to finish their education in Britain. He had proposed the scheme to Wedderburn and the INC, but they turned it down because, as a condition of taking up a fellowship, ‘an Indian Graduate … under this scheme shall not accept any post, office, emoluments, or service under the British Government after his return to India’.68 To accommodate these students, Krishnavarma set up a hostel at 65 Cromwell Avenue, Highgate.69 Known as India House, it was formally opened on 1 July 1905 by H. M. Hyndman in the presence of Naoroji, Lala Lajpat Rai, Madame Cama, Hugh Swinny of the London Positivist Society, the British Marxist Henry Quelch and suffragette and Sinn Fein activist Charlotte Despard, among others. As numerous Indian nationalists passed through India House in the next five years, preparing bombs and plotting assassinations, it became what Valentine Chirol described as ‘[t]he most dangerous organization outside of India’.70 In The Indian Sociologist, Krishnavarma proceeded to criticize British rule of India as well as those Indians agitating along parliamentary lines through the BCINC. He aligned himself explicitly with the ‘extremists’ and praised B. C. Pal’s new publication New India.71 Signifying the global reach of The Indian Sociologist, the extremists in India reciprocated Krishnavarma’s gestures and soon reproduced clippings from the London journal in their own publications.72 During the first couple of years, The Indian Sociologist remained mild in its criticism of the British Empire. However, throughout 1907, Krishnavarma’s rhetoric became more violent. For instance, in the June issue, he wrote that ‘[a]ll repressive measures adopted by the British Government in India for suppressing the Home Rule sentiment can only lead to secret revolutionary movements’, and in the July issue he noted that ‘[w]e, representing the advanced section of the Indian people, absolutely deny the right of the British to remain any longer in India, and we are prepared to achieve Indian independence at all costs and risks’.73 The violent rhetoric led to the formation of the Lee-Warner Committee to inquire into the role of Indian students in Britain and increased Scotland Yard surveillance of India House. The issue was also raised in the House of Commons in July 1907, when MP John David Rees inquired Secretary of State for India Lord Morley whether his attention [had] been called to the newspaper The Indian Sociologist, edited in London by one Shyamaji Krishnavarma, M. A. Oxon, elsewhere described as

The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865–1914

185

the president of the Indian Home Rule Society, in which it is said in an editorial article that if a man is dubbed to be an ardent rebel simply because he advises his countrymen to shake off an oppressive foreign yoke, we confess we are proud to be called such.

He asked further whether, ‘since the editor claims he is no British subject, the Government will consider the propriety of moving the Public Prosecutor to proceed against this person in view to his ultimate expulsion as an undesirable alien’.74 Responding to the debate in the September 1907 issue, Krishnavarma quoted from a Sanskrit saying that ‘it is better not to put your foot in mud at all than to put it in and wash it’.75 With increased surveillance and unwanted attention from the government, and as a consequence of Lala Lajpat Rai’s arrest and deportation to Mandalay, Burma, in May 1907, Krishnavarma left for Paris in June but continued editorship of the journal from there.76 The Sea Customs Act of 1878 was frequently deployed to prohibit the importation of seditious literature. Moreover, to stem the growing unrest in India in 1907, the government introduced a range of repressive measures such as the Newspapers (Incitement to Offences) Act, in effect from 8 June 1908, and the Indian Press Act, in effect from 9 February 1910.77 Together with Hyndman’s Justice and George Freeman’s New York-based Sinn Fein paper The Gaelic American, The Indian Sociologist was prohibited from import into India under the Sea Customs Act in September 1907.78 However, while Krishnavarma speculated in response to the ban that the ‘next step will be to stop its publication in England’, revealing the discrepancy between British liberalism at home and authoritarian colonialism in India, the paper was still free to be published in London.79 Although banned from India, it was smuggled in, hidden in book covers and, as an agent from the Criminal Intelligence Department remarked a month later, ‘the number of copies intercepted during the current month amounted to nearly 800, or about four times the number seized in any previous month. It would appear from these figures that the paper must be growing very greatly in popularity’.80 While Krishnavarma edited the journal from his home in Paris, it was still printed in London. The distance from Britain may have emboldened Krishnavarma to increasingly and openly advocate violent resistance against the British. In the December 1907 issue, for example, he wrote that ‘[i]t seems that any agitation in India now must be carried on secretly, and that the only methods which can bring the English Government to its senses are the Russian methods vigorously and incessantly applied until the English relax their tyranny, and are driven out of the country’.81 Krishnavarma’s absence from India House left the reins to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, and under his control the activities of the group soon reflected the writings of the journal. In the July 1909 issue, Krishnavarma wrote that ‘[a]t the risk of alienating the sympathies and good opinion of almost all our old friends and acquaintances in England and some of our past helpmates in India, we repeat that political assassination is not murder’.82 When Madan Lal Dhingra, a former India House resident, assassinated political aide-de-camp Sir William Hutt Curzon Wyllie on 1 July 1909, Krishnavarma’s somewhat prescient defence of political assassination naturally brought the publication

186

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

into the spotlight of Scotland Yard. The Indian nationalists immediately defended Dhingra’s action and, writing in The Times, Krishnavarma hailed Dhingra as a ‘martyr in the cause of Indian independence’.83 The assassination and Krishnavarma’s statement led the British authorities to charge the printer Arthur Fletcher Horsley with sedition.84 Horsley had printed the May, June and July issues, and it was ‘[t]he July number’, the court held, that ‘contained an article which the Attorney-General described as one of the worst that could possibly have been-published, containing the clearest and most criminal incitements to murder’.85 Horsley was sentenced to four months imprisonment. On the same day as Horsley’s court appearance, Dhingra was sentenced to death for the murder of Curzon Wyllie.86 The anarchist Guy Aldred and his Bakunin Press then assumed the printing of The Indian Sociologist, but only managed to print the August issue before he too was arrested and charged with sedition. In that issue, Krishnavarma reiterated his defence of Dhingra and stated that ‘I frankly admit I approve of the deed, and regard its author as a martyr in the cause of Indian independence’.87 Aldred added four extra pages to the issue and, under the headline ‘Sedition!’, addressed ‘the right of freedom of publication as defined in the British Constitution; the legality and ethics of political revolution and assassination; and the anti-constitutional nature of the law of seditious libel’.88 Charged with sedition for printing ‘a violent article, justifying the methods of Indian

Figure 9.1 Front page of the controversial August 1909 issue of The Indian Sociologist. © The British Library Board.

The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865–1914

187

“Nationalists”’, Aldred defended that he ‘had printed the “Indian Sociologist” because he claimed the right of an enlightened race to have a free Press’.89 He was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment. Krishnavarma continued to edit and print the journal from Paris, but his influence slowly diminished as younger, more radical voices emerged.90 The Indian Sociologist, however, inspired similar publications that emerged in Indian nationalist networks until the outbreak of the First World War. In September 1909 in Paris, Madame Cama established Bande Mataram in honour of the banned Calcutta-based publication of the same name. It was printed in Geneva and published monthly until August 1912. In November 1909, Cama also set up the short-lived Talvar, edited by Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, who was in Berlin at the time, and printed in the Netherlands. Inspired by the Russian socialist revolutionaries, who were living in exile in Paris at the time, Cama had these publications printed in Switzerland and the Netherlands to avoid potential prosecution of its editors.91 Talvar folded in June 1910, when Chattopadhyaya moved to Paris and assumed leadership of the Paris India Society. Still living in Paris, Krishnavarma joined Chempakaraman Pillai’s International Pro-India Committee in Zürich in June 1912, and assisted in producing its organ the Pro India established in 1914.92 In the build-up to the First World War, it became clear that, as potential subversives, the Indian nationalists would find it difficult to maintain their activities in countries allied with Britain. In April 1914, during the visit of King George V, Krishnavarma was asked by the French authorities to leave Paris. He moved to Geneva where, as a condition for political asylum in Switzerland, he ceased publication of The Indian Sociologist from August 1914. Although revived only two months after the end of the First World War, The Indian Sociologist was published irregularly and eventually folded in September 1922.93

Table 9.1 List of Indian and associated periodicals published in London and the diaspora mentioned in this chapter (1841–1914) Title 

Date of Publication

Editor(s)

Bande Mataram British Indian Advocate India

1909–12 1841–2 1890–1921

Journal of the East India Association Journal of the National Indian Association Justice

1867–85

Bhikaiji Cama William Tyler? William Digby; Morse Stephens; Gordon Hewart; John Henry Muirhead; H. E. A. Cotton; H. S. Polak Managing Committee

Pro India Talvar The Gaelic American The Indian Sociologist

1914 1909–10 1903–51 1905–14, 1919–20, 1922

1871–1933 1884–1925

Mary Carpenter; Elizabeth Adelaide Manning; A. A. Smith C. L. Fitzgerald; Henry Mayers Hyndman; Henry Hyde Champion; Ernest Belfort Bax; Harry Quelch; Henry W. Lee Chempakaraman Pillai Virendranath Chattopadhyaya; Bhikaiji Cama John Devoy; George Freeman Shyamaji Krishnavarma

188

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

Conclusion Publications such as the Journal of the East India Association, India and The Indian Sociologist were central to the development of the Indian nationalist movement in Britain during the long nineteenth century. The emergence of the cheap press in the 1850 combined with Britain’s liberal tradition and free press, which contrasted with colonial censorship in India, enabled the production of a foreign political press in London. Representing three different stages – nationalist organization, parliamentary agitation and violent resistance – the publications were a platform from where colonial discourse was challenged and anti-colonial resistances were articulated. At the same time, Indian nationalists in London used the press to engage in transnational conversations with Britain’s liberal ideologues as well as other radical anti-imperial traditions in London. The two towering figures, Naoroji and Krishnavarma, agitated along different political lines but, rather than viewing them as opposites, the overview presented in this chapter illuminates the continuity, overlap and antagonism between their political philosophies and practices. Importantly, as this analysis has shown, these issues find their profound expression in Indian nationalist publications of the time.

Notes 1 I am grateful to Pavan Malreddy and Florian Stadtler for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter. 2 For more on the 1855 removal of stamp duty and the emergence of cheap newspapers, see Martin Hewitt, The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, 1849-1869 (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 3 Rehana Ahmed and Sumita Mukherjee, eds, South Asian Resistances in Britain, 18581947 (London and New York: Continuum, 2012); Elleke Boehmer, Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Antoinette Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late-Victorian Britain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Michael Fisher, Shompa Lahiri and Shinder Thandi, A South-Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Indian Sub-Continent (Oxford: Greenwood World, 2007); Shompa Lahiri, Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 18801930 (London: Frank Cass, 2000); Susheila Nasta, ed., India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1858-1950 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Ruvani Ranasinha, ed., South Asians and the Shaping of Britain: A Sourcebook (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012). 4 Sushila Agrawal, Press, Public Opinion and Government in India (Jaipur: Asha Publishing House, 1970); Norman Barrier, Banned: Controversial Literature and Political Control in British India, 1907-1947 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974); Christopher Alan Bayly, Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Milton Israel, Communications and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Indian Nationalist Struggle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Sukeshi Kamra, The Indian Periodical Press and the Production of Nationalist Rhetoric (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Chandrika Kaul, Communications, Media

The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865–1914

5 6

7 8

9 10

11 12

13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

189

and the Imperial Experience: Britain and India in the Twentieth Century (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); John D. Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); James D. Startt, Journalists for Empire: The Imperial Debate in the Edwardian Stately Press, 1903-1913 (New York and London: Greenwood, 1991). Chandrika Kaul, Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880-1922 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2003), 89–90. David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers, ‘ “A Great System of Circulation”: Introducing India into the Nineteenth-Century Media’, in Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, ed. David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 1. Rozina Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700-1947 (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 11–75. Harish Kaushik, The Indian National Congress in England, 1885-1920 (Delhi: Research Publications in Social Sciences, 1972), 4; S. R. Mehrotra, ‘The British India Society and Its Bengal Branch, 1839-1846’, Indian Economic and Social History Review 4, no. 2 (1967): 131–54; Rozina Visram, Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History (London: Pluto, 2002), 34; C. S. Srinivasachari, ‘The India Reform Society and Its Impact on the Indian Administration in the Decade 1853-62’, Indian Journal of Political Science 8, no. 1 (1946): 648–61. R. P. Masani, Dadabhai Naoroji: The Grand Old Man of India (London: Allen & Unwin, 1939), 61–2. B. B. Majumdar, Indian Political Associations and Reform of Legislature (Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1965), 97; Masani, Dadabhai Naoroji, 54; Visram, Asians in Britain, 124. ‘Rules of the East India Association’, Journal of the East India Association 1, no. 1 (1867): 8. Ibid, 9; ‘The Jubilee of the East India Association’, The Asiatic Review 1 (January 1917): 6–7, 10; Kaushik, The Indian National Congress in England, 5; Visram, Asians in Britain, 124. Anil Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century (London: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 246. ‘Introduction’, Journal of the East India Association 1, no. 1 (1867): 2. Alexis Weedon, Victorian Publishing: The Economic of Book Production for a Mass Market, 1836-1916 (London: Routledge, 2003), 158. ‘Report for Year 1867-68’, Journal of the East India Association 2, no. 2 (1868): 11–12. Ibid., 12. ‘England’s Duties to India’, Journal of the East India Association 1, no. 1 (1867): 29. Bipin Chandra, ‘Indian Nationalists and the Drain, 1880-1905’, Indian Economic Social History Review 2 (1965): 103; Masani, Dadabhai Naoroji, 77–8. ‘Representative Government for India’, Journal of the East India Association 1, no. 2 (1867): 176. ‘On the Duties of Local Indian Associations in Connection with the London Association’, Journal of the East India Association 2 (1868): 3–5. Ibid., 9–12. Ibid, 9. ‘The Wants and Means of India’, Journal of the East India Association 4 (1870): 279. A. Martin Wainwright, ‘The Better Class’ of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858-1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), 165.

190

The Foreign Political Press in Nineteenth-Century London

26 ‘On the Admission of Educated Natives into the Indian Civil Service’, Journal of the East India Association 3, no. 4 (April 1869): 126. 27 Visram, Ayahs, Lascars and Princes, 77; Journal of the East India Association 15 (1883): 161. 28 Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, 57–9; Wainwright, ‘The Better Class’ of Indians, 47–8. 29 Kaushik, The Indian National Congress in England, 7. 30 ‘Proceedings of the First Indian National Congress’ (1885): 16–18. 31 Mary Cumpston, ‘Some Early Indian Nationalists and Their Allies in the British Parliament, 1851-1906’, English Historical Review 76, no. 299 (1961): 281–5; Nicholas Owen, The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885-1947 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 30–1; Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 187; Visram, Asians in Britain, 125. 32 Resolution XIII (e), quoted in Kaushik, The Indian National Congress in England, appendix III, xxvii. 33 Cumpston, ‘Some Early Indian Nationalists’, 288–9. 34 Schneer, London 1900, 185. 35 Seal, The Emergence of Indian Nationalism, 285. 36 R. C. Majumdar, History of the Freedom Movement in India, Vol. I (Calcutta: Firma Mukhopadhyay, 1971), 367. 37 Kaushik, The Indian National Congress in England, 33. 38 India 4, 10 (1893), wrapper page. 39 Kaul, Reporting the Raj, 89; Kaushik, The Indian National Congress in England, 52; Owen, The British Left and India, 41. 40 Kaushik, The Indian National Congress in England, appendix II, xix. 41 Ibid., 53. 42 Ibid., 33; Owen, The British Left and India, 31. 43 Kusoom Vadgama, India: British-Indian Campaigns in Britain for Reforms, Justice & Freedom, 1831-1947 (London: Banyan Tree, 1997), 105. 44 India 1, 1 (1890): 2. 45 India 2, 16 (1891): 2. 46 Ibid., 3. 47 Kaul, Reporting the Raj, 90. 48 India 3, 28 (1892): 65. 49 Owen, The British Left and India, 41. 50 Ibid., 32. 51 Schneer, London 1900, 194. 52 Quoted in Masani, Dadabhai Naoroji, 95. 53 Burton, At the Heart of the Empire, 67-68; India 3, 4 (1892): 28; India 3, 27 (1892): 192, 201; India 3, 34 (1892): 214–18; India 4, 1 (1893): 1, 17–19. 54 Masani, Dadabhai Naoroji, 100-01. 55 Edward C. Moulton, ‘British Radicals and India in Early Twentieth Century’. In Edwardian Radicalism, 1900-1914: Some Aspects of British Radicalism, ed. A. J. A. Morris (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974), 27. 56 Schneer, London 1900, 202. 57 ‘Ourselves’, The Indian Sociologist 1, no. 1 (January 1905): 1. 58 Harald Fischer-Tiné, Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-Imperialism (New Delhi: Routledge, 2014), 58. 59 Ibid.

The Indian Nationalist Press in London, 1865–1914 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

78

79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

93

191

Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Shruti Kapila, ‘Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890-1920’, Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 1 (2007): 111. ‘The Indian Home Rule Society’, The Indian Sociologist 1, no. 3 (March 1905): 10. ‘Home Rule for India’, The Indian Sociologist 1, no. 3 (March 1905): 9. Ibid., 11. Ibid. ‘Ourselves’, The Indian Sociologist 1, no. 1 (January 1905): 3. ‘“India House”’, The Indian Sociologist 1, no. 5 (May 1905): 20. Valentine Chirol, Indian Unrest (London: Macmillan, 1910), 148. See, for instance, ‘Benefits Received Incidentally do not Call for Gratitude’, The Indian Sociologist 3, no. 1 (January 1907): 1. Indulal Yajnik, Shyamaji Krishnavarma: Life and Times of an Indian Revolutionary (Bombay: Lakshmi Publications, 1950), 144–5. ‘The Results of Oppression’, The Indian Sociologist 3, no. 6 (1907): 21; ‘Indian Independence Must be Secured at all Costs’, The Indian Sociologist 3, no. 7 (1907): 28. House of Commons debate, 30 July 1907, vol. 179, cc 757–8. ‘Ourselves and the House of Commons’, The Indian Sociologist 3, no. 9 (1907): 33. Ibid; see also Fischer-Tiné, Shyamji Krishnavarma, 112. Kamra, The Indian Periodical Press and the Production of Nationalist Rhetoric, 5; James Campbell Ker, Political Trouble in India, 1907-1917 (Delhi: Oriental Publishers, [1917] 1973): 59. ‘(Secret) Prog. No. 49, DCI, 28.9.1907, B October 1907, Nos. 40-49’, quoted in Arun Coomer Bose, Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 1905-1927: Select Documents (New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 2002), 18; Fischer-Tiné, Shyamji Krishnavarma, 69. ‘The Forbidden Fruit’, The Indian Sociologist 3, no. 10 (October 1907): 38. ‘(Secret) Prog. No. 49, DCI, 28.9.1907, B October 1907, Nos. 40-49’, 18. ‘England’s Repressive Measures Invite Secret Revolutionary Movements and Russian Methods in India’, The Indian Sociologist 3, no. 12 (December 1907): 46. ‘A Brief Statement of Our Case’, The Indian Sociologist 5, no. 7 (July 1909): 25. ‘Mr Krishnavarma in His Defence’, The Times (17 July 1909): 10. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, 12 August 2015), July 1909, trial of HORSLEY, Arthur Fletcher (printer) (t19090719-54). Ibid. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, 12 August 2015), July 1909, trial of DHINGRA, Madar Lal (25, student) (t19090719-55). ‘Our Accusers and Ourselves’, The Indian Sociologist 5 (August 1909): 36. ‘Sedition!’, The Indian Sociologist 5 (August 1909): 32. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, 12 August 2015), September 1909, trial of ALDRED, Guy Alfred (22, publisher) (t19090907-44). Ker, Political Trouble in India, 99. ‘A Suggestion for Starting a Central Press in India’, The Indian Sociologist 3 (November 1907): 44. Harald Fischer-Tiné, ‘The Other Side of Internationalism: Switzerland as a Hub of Militant Anti-Colonialism’, in Colonial Switzerland: Rethinking Colonialism from the Margins, ed. Patricia Purtschert and Harald Fischer-Tiné (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 229–31. Fischer-Tiné, Shyamji Krishnavarma, 121, 123–4.

Appendix: Biographies of Journalists

Agresti, Antonio (b. Florence, 1864; d. Rome, 1926). Agresti began his political activities in Florence. In 1884, to escape a jail sentence for publishing a seditious manifesto, he took refuge in France – first in Marseille and then Paris. Returning to Italy in 1890 he resumed his political activities. In 1891 Agresti returned to Paris where was arrested and jailed. Expelled to Brussels he moved to London, to Malatesta’s house. In London he met Olivia Rossetti whom he married in 1897. From 1894 he was actively involved in publication of The Torch and contributed to the single issue L’Anarchia (1896). In 1895 he moved to the United States, where he edited the newspaper La Questione Sociale in Paterson. In 1897 he returned to Italy. Abandoning his anarchist militancy, he devoted himself to journalism and literary works. In 1914 he supported Italy’s intervention in the First World War, publishing with other anarchists the manifesto La Sfida (1914) and the pamphlet Perché sono interventista. After the conflict he collaborated on the conservative newspaper La Tribuna and sympathized with the Fascist movement. He died in Rome in 1926. Bello, Andrés (b. Caracas, 1781; d. Santiago de Chile, 1865). Perhaps the foremost man of letters in nineteenth-century Spanish America, Andrés Bello was also a diplomat, jurist, philologist and journalist. He received an excellent education and quickly established himself as a cautious intellect and moderate supporter of the royalist regime. He acted as Simón Bolívar’s tutor from 1797 to 1799, and hosted Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland in Caracas in 1800. From 1802 to 1810, Bello worked as a file clerk and translator in the colonial administration and produced an ode to vaccination. In 1810, he went to London as secretary of the patriot’s legation and remained there for nearly two decades. While there, he worked a series of jobs including tutor, translator, clerk and publicist. Bello collaborated on three different periodicals in London: El Censor Americano (1820), El Repertorio Americano (1823) and El Repertorio Americano (1826–7). Although he had hoped to return to Venezuela after independence was secured, political conditions changed and he opted to settle in Chile instead. In Santiago, Bello became a respected jurist, one of the founders of the University of Chile and its first rector in 1843, and the author of one of the most significant early academic studies of Spanish grammar. Bernstein, Eduard (b. Schöneberg, 1850; d. Berlin, 1932) was a central figure in the history of German social democracy. Having become politically active in his early twenties, he contributed to the Gotha Congress of 1874 which unified the two dominant factions within German socialism. In the wake of the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878, Bernstein moved to Zurich. There, he co-edited the socialist weekly Der Sozialdemokrat from its foundation in September 1879. In April 1888, the Swiss authorities expelled

194

Biographies

Bernstein and his fellow editors, who then continued their activities from their new base in London. While in Britain, Bernstein discussed socialist principles not only with Friedrich Engels but also with the journalist and theorist Karl Kautsky. Bernstein collaborated with Kautsky and August Bebel in drafting the Social Democratic Party’s influential Erfurt Programme (1891). In the second half of the 1890s, Bernstein’s ‘revisionist’ theses provoked debate as he embraced a reformist path towards socialism. In 1901, Bernstein was allowed to return to Germany; he subsequently served as a Reichstag deputy in both the Second Empire and the Weimar Republic. During the Great War, Bernstein’s growing criticism of German war policies led him to join the Independent Social Democratic Party, yet he re-entered the Social Democratic Party in 1919. Blanco White, José María (b. Seville, 1775; d. Liverpool, 1841). José María Blanco White was born in Seville to an Irish father and a Spanish mother, and grew up in the bilingual and bicultural environment provided by his merchant family. He was ordained a priest in 1799 in spite of his mounting religious doubts and, after a period of residence in Madrid, he returned to Seville during the outbreak of the Peninsular War, where he collaborated in the Semanario Patriotico. In 1810 he emigrated to England, where he was welcomed into the Whig circle of Holland House. He started publishing El Español and converted to Anglicanism in 1812, becoming a preacher in Oxford in 1829, although his attitude towards the emancipation of the Catholics alienated him from Oxford later on. He died in Liverpool in 1841 after period of residence in Dublin close to the bishop Richard Whateley, and having converted to Unitarianism in his late years. He was a renowned theological writer in his time, as well as a literary critic and an influential voice in the early debates on American independence. As well as El Español, he published several periodicals in English and Spanish (Variedades, London Review) and, in 1822, Letters from Spain, a prominent text on Spanish customs and manners which became a commercial success. Bonnerjee, W. C. (b. Kidderpore, 1844; d. Croydon, 1906). Born on 29 December 1844 into a Hindu Brahmin family in Kidderpore, Bengal, Woomes Chunder Bonnerjee (also Womesh Chunder Bonnerjee and Womesh Chandra Bonnerjee), was a lawyer and politician. Educated at the Oriental Seminary and the Hindu School, Calcutta, Bonnerjee won a government scholarship to study law in Britain in 1864, where he enrolled at Middle Temple and was called to the Bar on 11 June 1867. With Dadabhai Naoroji, he was one of the co-founders of the London Indian Society in 1865 and the East India Association in 1866. Upon return to India in 1868, he enrolled as a lawyer at the Calcutta High Court and became involved with Calcutta University. He was a founding member of the Indian National Congress and was elected as its first president in 1885 (and again in 1892). Travelling frequently between India and Britain, he sent his children to be educated in Britain and, around 1890, bought a house in Croydon and named it ‘Kidderpore’. From 1902 he lived mostly at his home in Croydon and practised before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. He died at ‘Kidderpore’ on 21 July 1906. Calero y Portocarrero, Marcelino (b. Badajoz, 1778; d. Madrid, 1838). He was a printer, editor and Liberal Spanish politician. He published seven different magazines

Biographies

195

during his life, starting with El Ciudadano por la Constitución (1812–14). He was exiled in France during 1814–15 and in London after 1823, where he established a printer and publisher specialized in Spanish themes, such as dictionaries, grammars, literary editions and anthologies and periodicals such as Ocios de Espanoles Emigrados (1824–6) and El Emigrado Observador (1828–9) – the latter was also edited by Calero himself. His own Semanario de Agricultura y Artes (1829–33), was started in London and continued in Spain when he returned after his exile. His publishing line remained close to political Liberalism and on his death his printer was taken over by his widow, becoming the Imprenta de la Viuda de Calero. Carvalho, José Liberato Freire de (b. Coimbra, 1772; d. Lisbon, 1855). Born in Coimbra on 20 July 1772, in 1787 he entered the Saint Augustine Order and in 1800 he went to Lisbon where he was Professor of Logic and Rhetoric, at the University of Lisbon. He attended political debate gatherings and joined the Freemasonry in 1802. In 1804 he was admitted as a partner at the Royal Academy of Sciences. Persecuted by the Quartermaster of Lisbon Police from 1805, he had to leave Lisbon. He returned in 1808 but his liberal ideas, as well as the suspicions of him being mason and a sympathizer with the French, led to him being arrested in 1811. In 1813 he fled to England and then abandoned religious life. From 1814 he became the editor of the paper O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra, which he left in late 1818. The following year he founded Campeão Portuguez. He returned to Portugal in 1820 and was elected Member of Parliament, but was once again persecuted and had to return into exile in 1828. He then took part in the civil war and was elected Member of Parliament in 1834. Elected again in 1836 and 1839, he was close to the parliamentary left. He abandoned politics in 1840, devoting himself to writing and to translations until the end of his life. Corio, Silvio (b. Saluzzo, 1875; d. Woodford Green, 1954). Corio frequented socialist and anarchist circles in Turin from an early age. During his national service he was accused of disseminating subversive propaganda and punished. Discharged, he moved to Paris. In 1901 he was suspected of being an accomplice of Gaetano Bresci and expelled from France. He took refuge to London where he became an active member of the anarchist community, contributing to the establishment of L’Università Popolare in 1902 and taking the role of secretary of the International Club in 1909. He participated in the International Anarchist Congress in Amsterdam in 1907. His articles in L’Internationale, La Rivoluzione Sociale and Lo Sciopero Generale were signed with the pen name ‘Crastinus’. In 1917 he met Sylvia Pankhurst and collaborated on her newspaper, Workers’ Dreadnought. In 1927 Corio and Pankhurst had a child, Richard, who took Pankhurst’s surname. In the 1920s Corio was active in anti-Fascism and contributed to the newspaper Il Comento. During the Spanish Civil War, Corio was involved in the publication of Spain and the World with Vernon Richards and Marie Louise Berneri. In 1936, he published with Sylvia Pankhurst New Times and Ethiopia News to denounce the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and continued to support Ethiopia after the war. Costa Pereira Furtado de Mendonça, Hipólito José da (b. Sacramento, 1774; d. London, 1823). He lived in Rio Grande do Sul for part of his youth, coming to Portugal to study Philosophy and Law at the University of Coimbra in 1792. Between 1798 and 1800

196

Biographies

he toured the United States, as a chargé d’affaires of the Portuguese crown. He joined the Freemasons at a Philadelphia lodge. On his return to Portugal he was appointed Director of the Royal Press, a position he held until 1802 when he was arrested by the Inquisition. He was tortured and imprisoned until 1805, when he fled to London with the help of Freemason friends. It was there that he began the publication of the review Correio Braziliense in 1808. The periodical, considered the pioneer of Brazilian journalism, was published until 1822. The following year Hipólito José da Costa was appointed representative of the Brazilian imperial government at the Royal Court of London, but passed away before taking office. Delescluze, Charles (b. Dreux, 1809; d. Paris, 1871). He was born into a middle-class republican family in Dreux on 2 October 1809. During the July Monarchy, he joined republican secret societies, spent 1836–41 in exile in Belgium and then edited the democratic L’Impartial du nord. In 1848 the Second Republic named him commissaire of the Nord before he moved to Paris, founded the newspaper La Révolution démocratique et sociale and helped forge the broad left-wing démocrate-socialiste alliance. Delescluze fled to London during the repression that followed the failed anti-Bonaparte protests of June 1849. There he co-edited and contributed heavily to Le Proscrit, La Voix du proscrit and Le Peuple. He returned to Paris in 1853 to foment rebellion against Napoleon III, but was arrested and imprisoned until 1859. During the republican revival of the 1860s he edited Le Réveil and was elected to the Third Republic’s National Assembly in 1871. Breaking with the government over its capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War, he became an important figure on the Paris Commune’s ruling council, eventually serving as civilian War Delegate. Despairing at the Commune’s destruction during the semaine sanglante, he mounted a barricade wearing a red sash on 25 May 1871 and was quickly shot dead, ensuring his status as a martyr for the French left. De Miranda, Francisco (b. Caracas, 1750; d. Cádiz, 1816). Known as ‘the Precursor’, Francisco de Miranda was a genuinely Atlantic figure and an archetypal man of the Enlightenment. He began his career as a Spanish army captain, serving in North Africa and the Caribbean theatres. Miranda deserted and fled to the United States in 1783 where he kept a diary of his remarkable year-long tour of the young country before heading for Europe in 1784. He travelled throughout Europe for five years, including one year spent as a guest of Catherine the Great in Russia and arriving in Paris in May 1789. He fought for the Girondins in the French Revolution and ended up being jailed by Robespierre’s direct order. In 1806, Miranda recruited an expeditionary force in the United States and staged a short and ill-fated invasion at Coro, in modern-day Venezuela. Back in London, he and James Mill prepared a sophisticated propaganda campaign in the British press. In 1810, when the patriots seized power in Caracas, Miranda returned home to serve as a delegate in the Congress and then as the generalin-chief to combat the royalist counterattack. He was taken prisoner in 1812 and died in La Carraca prison in Spain. Fernández Sardino, Pedro Pascasio (b. 17??; d. 18??). Pedro Pascasio Fernández Sardino was a doctor and journalist whose first collaborations in periodicals appeared during the 1808 crisis, when he was enlisted as army surgeon for the troops stationed at Extremadura. There is no certainty about the date and place of his birth and death,

Biographies

197

although from references in his work it is likely that he was born either in Castille or Extremadura, He published articles in Diario de Badajoz and Almacén Patriótico, although his most notorious work was his periodical El Robespierre Español (1811), published during the Courts of Cádiz. He was arrested due to the revolutionary nature of the periodical, although its publication continued under the supervision of his wife, María del Carmen Silva. Together with Manuel María Acevedo he published El Español Constitucional during his exile in London, which became one of the most important organs of expression for Spanish political radicalism. He published two periodicals in Spain during the Trienio Liberal: Redactor General de España (1821) and El Cincinato (1821–2). Flórez Estrada, Álvaro (b. Pola de Somiedo, 1765; d. Noreña, 1853). Álvaro Flórez Estrada was a renowned Spanish economist and politician. He held a prominent role in the Junta Central during the uprising against Napoleon and became its envoy in London in 1810, a city to which he returned with the exiles of 1814 and 1823. He was an important figure in early Liberal debates, both as deputy during the Courts of Cádiz and as a minister and jurist during the later constitutional periods. The exile in London had a significant effect on his political and economic ideas, some of which were exposed in El Español Constitucional and in his Curso de economía política (1828). His third and longest period of emigration was one of fervent activity, both as journalist and political and economic writer but also as an active conspirator against the Fernandine government. On his return to Spain after the death of Ferdinand VII he gravitated towards the moderate wing of Liberalism. Fonseca Magalhães, Rodrigo da (b. Condeixa-a-Nova, 1787, d. Lisbon, 1858). Born in Condeixa-a-Nova in 1787, he died in Lisbon in 1858. He participated in the Peninsular War. He attended the College of Arts in Coimbra, from which he went to University and conducted studies in Theology, Philosophy and Mathematics (1806– 7), and was initiated into Freemasonry. He was involved in the conspiracy of Gomes Freire de Andrade (1817). He lived in secrecy in Lisbon until 1819, when he took refuge in Brazil. He was the secretary of the Pernambuco Governing Board loyal to the Constituent Congress and founder of Aurora Pernambucana (1821). In 1822 he returned to Lisbon, where he obtained the official post in the Secretariat of State for the Affairs of Justice. With the Vilafrancada coup he would be dismissed and deported to Figueira da Foz (1823). In 1824, he took up residence in Viana do Castelo, returning to the capital the following year to be reinstated in the civil service. Between 1828 and 1832 he emigrated to England, where he was secretary of the diplomatic services of Dom Pedro. In London he was responsible for editing Paquete de Portugal (1829– 31), together with Father Marcos Pinto Soares Vaz Preto and José Liberato Freire de Carvalho, who later on abandoned the project, and A Aurora (1831–2), the most radical title in the uncompromising defence of government policy among the exiles. In 1833 he was appointed administrator of the National Press and founded A Revista with António Pereira dos Reis. He was the man of consensus, who criticized political parties for their exclusive nature, considering them a permanent source of hatred and discord. He was elected member of parliament in 1834, as well as in 1836, 1838, 1840, 1842 and 1845. As minister of the Home Office in 1835 and in 1839–42, he

198

Biographies

proposed the integration of radicalism in the liberal regime. He was responsible for administrative and education reforms. He was also minister of foreign affairs (1841–2). He was appointed Peer of the Kingdom in 1847. He was once again appointed to head the Home Office at the beginning of the Regeneration (1851–6). García del Río, Juan (b. Cartagena, 1794; d. Mexico City, 1856). Born to a middleclass family, Juan García del Río was educated in Cádiz, Spain. He volunteered for the patriotic defence forces when Napoleon invaded the Iberian peninsula in 1808 and returned to New Granada (today Colombia) in 1811. Fluent in both English and French, García del Río travelled to London as secretary of the diplomatic legation in 1814. In mid-1817, he became the undersecretary of foreign affairs to the independent Chilean government and later served in a similar position in Peru in 1821. García del Río and his close friend and collaborator James ‘Diego’ Paroissien were jointly appointed as independent Peru’s emissaries to the Court of St. James where they served from 1822 to 1824. He remained in London until 1828 when he returned to Colombia, founded a literary arts salon and served as a deputy in the Congress. García del Río had a predilection for English-style constitutional monarchy and emphasized the redemptive power of education in all his journalistic activities: El Sol de Chile (Santiago, 1818–19), El Telégrafo (Santiago, 1819–20), La Biblioteca Columbiana (Lima, 1821-La Biblioteca Americana (London, 1823), El Repertorio Americano (London, 1826–7), El Museo de Ambas Américas (Valparaiso, 1842) and El Mercurio (Valparaíso, 1843). Herzen, Alexander (b. Moscow, 1812; d. Geneva, 1870). Herzen was born and raised in Moscow. While at university, he and his lifelong collaborator Nikolai Ogarev were arrested as members of a socialist reading circle. Herzen spent eight years in exile in Vyatka, Vladimir and Novgorod. In the 1840s Herzen argued that Russia should embrace western culture and freedoms, rather than following its own Orthodox and eastern roots. After the 1848 revolutions however he reacted against the idea that western Europe represented the future of socialism, and presented Russia’s collectivist traditions as a model for a future socialist order. In 1853 Herzen established the Free Russian Press, a London-based publishing house that invited contributions from Russians of all political shades. It published two important periodicals, Poliarnaia zvezda (The Polar Star, 1855–68) and Kolokol (The Bell, 1857–67). Herzen moved to Geneva in the 1860s, where he lived until his death. Hyndman, Henry Mayers (b. London, 1842; d. London, 1921). The British socialist Henry Mayers Hyndman was born in London on 7 March 1842. He trained as a journalist and often wrote for the Pall Mall Gazette, where he frequently praised the deeds of British imperialism. However, after reading Naoroji’s Poverty of India, the two became friends and Hyndman became interested in Indian affairs. Influenced by Karl Marx, he founded the Social Democratic Federation in 1881 and regularly championed India’s cause in the SDF’s journal Justice. Although they remained close friends, Naoroji often found Hyndman’s politics too radical. Hyndman’s calls for revolution in India, however, soon resonated with the politics of Shyamaji Krishnavarma, who invited him to open India House in July 1905. Through his affiliation with Krishnavarma, Hyndman met many other Indian nationalists such as Madame Bhikaiji Cama, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and B. G. Tilak. After Madan Lal Dhingra’s assassination of William Hutt

Biographies

199

Curzon Wyllie in July 1909, Hyndman wrote in the 10 July 1909 issue of Justice that he had long warned that if the British continued their policy of ‘despotism and bleeding India’ it would lead to terrorism. He set up the British Socialist Party in 1911 and, following his support of Britain’s participation in the First World War, the National Socialist Party in 1916, which he led until his death in 1921. Kravchinskii, Sergei (b. Novy Starodub, 1851; d. London, 1895). Kravchinskii graduated from military academy in St Petersburg in 1870, and became part of the reading circle associated with Nikolai Chaikovskii. He took part in the ‘going to the people’, disseminating revolutionary propaganda in Tver and Tula provinces in the autumn of 1874. He left Russia first for the Balkans and then for Italy, but on a brief return to Russia in 1878 stabbed to death Nikolai Mezentsov, the chief of the secret police. In England in the 1890s Kravchinskii was an instigator of both the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom and the Russian Free Press Fund. He lectured extensively, and wrote both fictional and factual accounts of the Russian revolutionary movement. In 1895 he was hit by a train at a level crossing in Bedford Park. Krishnavarma, Shyamaji (b. Mandvi, 1857; d. Geneva, 1930). The Indian revolutionary nationalist Shyamaji Krishnavarma (also Shyamji Krishna Varma) was born on 4 October 1857 in Mandvi, Kutch, Gujarat. He arrived in Britain in 1879 as a Sanskrit scholar and assistant to Professor Monier-Williams at University of Oxford. After graduating from Balliol College in 1883, he was called to the Bar in 1884 and returned to India to practise law that same year. In India, Swami Dayananda Saraswati and the revival of ancient texts informed Krishnavarma’s struggle against the Raj. He served as a lawyer in a number of princely states, but returned to Britain in 1897 and settled in Highgate, London. He drew inspiration from Herbert Spencer and established The Indian Sociologist in January 1905 and the India Home Rule Society a month later. He also set up two scholarships in honour of Saraswati and Spencer for Indian students to come to Britain. To accommodate these students, he established India House in July 1905 as a hostel and the house soon became a meeting-place for Indian revolutionaries in Britain. Krishnavarma fled to Paris in the summer of 1907 to avoid arrest for seditious literature published in The Indian Sociologist and subversive political activities at India House. He was involved with the Paris Indian Society, but moved to Geneva just before the outbreak of the First World War. He died there on 30 March 1930. Lavrov, Petr (b. Melekhovo, 1823; d. Paris, 1900). He was a philosopher and a leading Russian socialist. He taught mathematics at university until he was in his forties. In 1867 he was exiled to the Urals for his connections with the Russian revolutionary movement – he edited a revolutionary newspaper and had anti-government poetry published in Herzen’s Kolokol. Lavrov escaped to Paris and took part in the Paris Commune of 1871. In the 1870s he launched the influential revolutionary journal Vpered! (Forward!, 1873–7) which was published first in Zurich and later in London. In later life Lavrov lived in Paris and corresponded with all sections of the Russian political emigration. Loureiro, João Bernardo da Rocha (b. Gouveia, 1778; d. Lisbon, 1853). He attended the University of Coimbra between 1800 and 1805, having completed studies in Law

200

Biographies

and Canons. He went to live in Lisbon, looking to practise as a lawyer. However, it was journalism that attracted him and in 1809 he founded Correio da Península together with Pato Moniz. The paper’s liberal ideas, as well as the controversies in which Loureiro was involved, namely with the fierce supporter of absolutism José Agostinho de Macedo, contributed to the periodical’s license not being renewed in 1810. In 1812, the target of political persecution, he went into exile in England, where he joined the milieu of Portuguese liberal journalists and Freemasonry in London. After collaborating with O Espelho Político e Moral between 1813 and 1814, he founded O Portuguez ou Mercúrio Político, Comercial e Literário in that same year, a periodical which survived until 1826. He returned to Portugal after the Liberal Revolution in late 1821, and was elected Member of Parliament by the most radical faction of liberalism in 1822. He returned to exile after the liberal period and in 1826 he opposed the granting of the Constitutional Charter by Dom Pedro. Following the restoration of absolute rule by Dom Miguel in 1828, he took refuge again in London, collaborating with Paquete de Portugal for a short period. After the civil war, he was elected Member of Parliament, campaigning for the left. After another exile period in Spain from 1842, he returned to Portugal in 1851. Malatesta, Errico (b. Santa Maria Capua Vetere, 1853; d. Rome, 1932). Malatesta was one of the leading figures and theoreticians of the Italian and international anarchist movement. His activities extended from the 1870s to the 1930s. He was one of the founders of the Italian Federation of the International Working Men’s Association (the First International) in 1872. He was among the organizers of two insurrectionary attempts in South and Central Italy in 1874 and 1877, after which he spent most of his life in exile until 1919. During his sporadic visits to Italy in this period he organized revolutionary attempts. He travelled to Egypt, South and North America, France and Britain. Returning to Italy in 1919, he played a leading role in the revolutionary movement during the ‘Biennio Rosso’ (1919–21). Under the Fascist regime from 1926 onwards he was kept under strict and continuous surveillance (almost placed under house arrest) until his death in 1932. Malatesta edited several influential newspapers: La Questione Sociale (Florence, 1883); L’Associazione (Nice-London 1889); L’Anarchia (London, 1896); L’Agitazione (Ancona, 1897–8); Volontà (Ancona, 1913–15); Umanità Nova (Milan, 1920–2); Pensiero e Volontà (Rome, 1924–6). He was also the author of influential anarchist pamphlets translated into many different languages: Anarchy, A Talk Between Two Peasants and At the Café. Malato, Charles (b. Foug, 1857; d. Paris, 1938).  The son of an Italian revolutionary of noble origins and a Lorraine-born mother, Charles Malato was a prominent anarchist writer, journalist and activist. Aged 17, he followed his parents in deportation to New Caledonia in 1874, returning to France in 1881. His numerous and eclectic journalistic ventures include La Révolution cosmopolite (1886) and L’Attaque (1890). During this period, he wrote influential essays about anarchism (Philosophie de l’anarchie, 1888) and his memoirs (Prison fin de siècle, 1891). He was formally expelled from France in April 1895, already having been in England for 3 years. He remained prolific, setting up Le Tocsin (9 issues) where he discussed the general strike and May Day demonstrations, and later dramatizing these London years in a delightful memoir, Les Joyeuseutés de

Biographies

201

l’exil (The Joys of Exile). While in London, he also contributed to the non-anarchist L’Intransigeant and highly nationalistic La Cocarde. Back in Paris, he made notable contributions to the Dreyfusard paper Journal du Peuple (1899) and the antimilitarist La Guerre Sociale. During the First World War, he was one of the signatories of the Manifesto of the Sixteen and tried to enlist. Remaining an active trade unionist and writer until his last days, he died in 1938. Midosi, Paulo (b. Lisbon, 1790; d. Lisbon, 1858). Born in Lisbon in 1790, the city where he died in 1858. He was educated in Britain. In addition to Portuguese and English, he spoke fluent Spanish, French and Italian. In 1822, together with Almeida Garrett, José Liberato Freire de Carvalho and Pato Moniz, among others, he founded the Literary Patriotic Society, and entered as an ordinary officer in the Home Office. In October 1826, Midosi and Garrett founded O Portuguez, a periodical through which they made a fierce defence of the liberal cause. In September 1827 Midosi would be arrested following the criticism in the paper of the coup Archotadas. He took refuge in London and then in Plymouth, where he worked as secretary of the exiles’ deposit. In 1828, he was responsible for the publication of an anonymous leaflet called Quem he o legitimo Rey de Portugal? Questão portugueza submettida ao juízo dos homens imparciais por um portuguez residente em Londres, in which he argued in favour of the legitimacy of Dom Pedro to the Portuguese throne. This pamphlet drew the attention of the local media to the ‘Portuguese issue’ and opened the ‘war of the pamphlets’. Still in London, already in 1929 he founded, again in partnership with Almeida Garrett and José Ferreira Borges, O Chaveco Liberal with the purpose of achieving adherence to liberalism. In 1836 he was promoted to higher office of the Secretariat of State for the Affairs of the Home Office. He was the editor O Nacional and Diário do Governo. In the elections of 1834, 1836 and 1838 he was elected Member of Parliament. Mier Noriega y Guerra, Servando Teresa de (b. Monterrey, 1765; d. Mexico City; 1827). A gifted writer and orator, Mier received a doctorate in theology and quickly became one of the most promising young Dominican friars in New Spain. In 1794, he was chosen to deliver the famous speech to the colony’s patron saint, the Virgin of Guadalupe. Mier’s interpretation of the Virgin’s apparition included the shocking declaration that the Americas had been evangelized before the Spanish Conquest, thus negating one of their strongest claims to possession of the New World. He was swiftly proscribed by the Inquisition, taken to Spain in chains, and effected a daring escapes. Mier resided in Paris then moved to London in 1811. He polemicized with Joseph Blanco White over the issue of American independence and produced two influential patriotic texts; one was a general history of the revolution of New Spain (which he restored to its Nahuatl name Anáhuac) and the other an edition of sixteenth-century Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas’ brutal account of the conquest of Mexico. Mier returned to Mexico as chaplain with the Mina expedition in 1817, was jailed until 1820, and subsequently became a vigorous republican delegate in the Congress of 1824. Most, Johann (b. Augsburg, 1846; d. Cincinnati, OH, 1906) is remembered as an outspoken advocate of the ‘propaganda of the deed’. Trained as a bookbinder, he joined the growing socialist movement, travelling and working in Switzerland, Austria and

202

Biographies

Germany. In 1874, he was elected to the German Reichstag. The same year, he publicly praised the Paris Commune, which resulted in his imprisonment until 1876. In response to the Anti-Socialist Laws of 1878, Most moved to London, where he founded the weekly Freiheit. In 1880, he was expelled from his party because of his increasingly radical stance. In this period, Most’s revolutionary socialism developed into anarchism and included support for targeted acts of terror. Accordingly, in an 1881 article, he celebrated the assassination of Alexander II – which led to a trial and prison sentence for Most. Shortly after his release in 1882, he left London for New York. There, he continued to play an active role in anarchist politics, editing Freiheit, giving speeches and receiving three more prison sentences. Most certainly was a controversial figure. His followers admired his uncompromising stance and his passionate oratory. His detractors regarded him as sinister – a perception nourished by his violent rhetoric and his physical appearance (he suffered from facial disfigurement due to a botched childhood operation). Even among anarchists, Most’s sensitivity to perceived slights repeatedly triggered division. Naoroji, Dadabhai (b. Bombay, 1825; d. Bombay, 1917). Born into a Parsi family on 4 September 1825 in Bombay, Dadabhai Naoroji, known as the Grand Old Man of India, was an intellectual, economist and early nationalist. He arrived in Britain in 1855 as a business partner in Cama & Co., the first Indian trading firm in England, and became a professor of Gujarati at University College, London. He set up his own cotton trading company in 1859 and, with his former business partner M. H. Cama, formed the Zoroastrian Association in the autumn of 1861. In March 1865 he co-founded the London Indian Society, which was superseded by the East India Association in December 1866. Through this organization he fought for Indian rights in relation to the Indian Civil Service and became a proponent of the ‘drain theory’, critiquing the Raj’s economic exploitation of India. After co-founding the Indian National Congress in 1885, Naoroji campaigned as Liberal Party candidate for Holborn in 1886 but lost, prompting the Prime Minister Lord Salisbury to remark that a British constituency was not ready to elect a ‘black man’. He was a founding member of the British Committee of the Indian National Congress in 1889 and a member of the Second International. In 1892 he successfully contested the seat of Central Finsbury, campaigning on Gladstone’s platform of Liberalism,  and was elected with a majority of five, becoming the first Indian MP. Naoroji attended the International Socialist Congress in Amsterdam in 1904, and in 1907 he left Britain to retire in Bombay, where he died in 1917. Neve, John (Johann) (b. Uelvesbüll, 1844; d. Berlin, 1896) exemplified the transnational trajectories of anarchism. Born in Schleswig, he spent the years between 1863 and 1887 in France, Britain, the USA, Switzerland and Belgium. His most substantial London stint lasted from 1877 to 1882. In this period, Neve played an active role in the political ventures of German exiles, including the Communist Workers’ Educational Association (CABV). After Johann Most’s imprisonment in 1881, he edited the anarchist periodical Freiheit and co-organized the International Social Revolutionary Congress in London. He later served as a European distributor for both Freiheit and its rivals within the anarchist spectrum (Der Rebell, Die Autonomie). Although German anarchists were divided between the followers of Johann Most and Josef Peukert, Neve was respected

Biographies

203

by both camps. His subsequent fate, however, exacerbated the intra-anarchist rift. On New Year’s Day 1887, Neve and Peukert met in Liège. Peukert brought along Theodor Reuß, not knowing that the latter was a police spy. This encounter seemingly allowed the Belgian police to verify Neve’s identity. In February 1887, the Belgian authorities expelled Neve to Germany, where he was promptly arrested and sentenced. Most’s followers blamed Peukert for Neve’s imprisonment, whereas Peukert cast suspicions on Victor Dave, a London-based Belgian ally of Most. Neve’s psychological condition declined drastically during his imprisonment; he died in Berlin’s Moabit prison after contracting tuberculosis. Pazos Kanki, Vicente (b. Lacareja, 1779; d. Buenos Aires, 1853). Born to an indigenous woman near Lake Titicaca, in modern-day Bolivia, Vicente Pazos Kanki became a multilingual member of the lower clergy and a fierce diplomat-writer. He earned a doctorate in sacred theology in 1804 at the Pontifical University of San Antonio de Abad in Cuzco, Peru where he subsequently taught courses which included the Quechua language. Pazos Kanki was part of the progressive circle at the university in Chuquisaca in 1808 and spent much time investigating the wretched conditions in the silver mines before joining the radical morenista wing of Buenos Aires’ 1810 revolution. He translated Thomas Paine before moving to Britain in 1813 after he fell afoul of the changing regimes. In London, Pazos Kanki left the church, married and began to advocate more forcefully for liberal ideas. After a brief return to South America, he participated in the short-lived Florida republic of 1817 before returning to Europe where he spent the 1820s eking out a living as a translator for the British and Foreign Bible Society. Pazos Kanki was a collaborator on several influential independence -era newspapers: La Gazeta de Buenos Ayres (1811–12), El Censor (Buenos Aires, 1816), La Crónica Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1816–17). Peukert, Josef (b. Albrechtsdorf, 1855; d. Chicago, IL, 1910) was an Austrian-German anarchist from Bohemia. He left home aged sixteen and moved to Germany, where he first encountered socialist ideas. After his return to Austria in 1874, he became involved in political agitation, which extended to stints in France and Switzerland, as well as writing for the radical Austrian paper Die Zukunft. In 1884, Peukert headed to London, narrowly avoiding arrest by the Swiss police. Soon after his arrival in Britain, he published the paper Der Rebell which challenged Johann Most’s Freiheit. While being a less charismatic figure than Most, Peukert disseminated the anarchist communism of Petr Kropotkin among German-speakers. Peukert’s paper Die Autonomie (launched in 1886) was a key vehicle for these ideas, and the Club Autonomie, which he co-founded, became a centre for London-based anarchists. Peukert’s reputation suffered a severe blow when his carelessness seemingly contributed to the arrest of John Neve. In 1890, Peukert moved to the USA – first to New York and later to Chicago. In this period, he worked with an American ‘Autonomie’ group, wrote for the paper Der Anarchist and attended the First Convention of the Industrial Workers of the World. Pouget, Emile  (b.  Pont-de-Salars,  1860; d.  Palaiseau, 1931).  He was born into an impoverished middle-class family from Aveyron, and moved to Paris in the late 1870s. In 1883 he was imprisoned for leading with Louise Michel a demonstration of unemployed workers at the Invalides. In 1886 he set up Le Père Peinard, a fiercely

204

Biographies

proletarian, pro-strikes and anti-colonial paper, famous for its biting slang and artistic contributions. He was indicted and sentenced in absentia in the 1894 antianarchist Trial of the Thirty and sought refuge in England. By February 1894 he had resurrected the Le Père Peinard, publishing six ‘London issues’, many of which were smuggled into France. There he recommended British-style trade unions to French anarchists as a tactical venue for militant action. He returned to France in 1895, immersing himself in syndicalist propaganda through Le Père Peinard and his new paper, La Sociale (1895–6). Between 1901 and 1908, he was general secretary of the CGT and played a significant part in its radicalization towards revolutionary syndicalism and direct action, successfully introducing a motion on sabotage in 1897 and drafting its Charte d’Amiens swearing off all political parties and factions. After the outbreak of the war in 1914, he retreated completely from political life, and died on 21 July 1931. Ribeyrolles, Charles (b. Lot, 1812; d. Rio de Janeiro, 1860). He was born in the Lot in 1812. Driven by his principles to hide his aristocratic origins, Ribeyrolles entered republican and socialist political life in Paris after the July revolution. His successful editorship of the Toulouse-based L’Émancipation in 1840–6 led to his invitation to write for the influential radical paper La Réforme. Ribeyrolles became La Réforme’s chief editor in 1848 and through it defended the February Revolution and promoted leftist unity. Like Delescluze he helped found the démoc-soc alliance and fled France during the repression of 1849. In London, he co-edited and wrote for Le Proscrit and La Voix du proscrit before moving to Jersey. There, in 1853, he founded L’Homme, the most influential exile paper of the 1850s. Ribeyrolles was L’Homme’s most prolific author, and, in the interests of political unity, opened its pages to contributors from across the exile community. Expelled from Jersey in 1855, he relocated to London, where L’Homme finally folded in August 1856. He travelled to Brazil in 1858, publishing a study of the country, Le Brésil pittoresque, the following year. He hoped to return to Europe after Napoleon III’s 1859 amnesty, but caught yellow fever and died in Rio de Janeiro on 13 June 1860. Rocker, Rudolf (b. Mainz, 1873; d. Mohegan colony, NY,1958) was a key figure in twentieth-century anarchism. Born in the German city of Mainz, he trained as a bookbinder and joined the anarchist movement in the early 1890s. His radicalism forced him to leave Germany: he first moved to France and then to Britain, where he stayed until the end of the First World War. In London, he focused his political energies on the Jewish workers in the East End, many of them immigrants from Eastern Europe. Despite his gentile background, Rocker became the editor of two Yiddish publications, taking the reins of the weekly Arbeter Fraint (Workers’ Friend) in 1899 and co-founding the journal Germinal in 1900. For a while, these were the highest-circulating anarchist periodicals in Britain. Rocker remained involved in radical politics well beyond the Great War, returning to Germany to promote the anarchist movement and co-founding the anarcho-syndicalist International Workers’ Association (1922). In 1933, he fled Nazi Germany and continued his publishing activity from his American exile. Rossetti, Olivia (b. London, 1875; d. Rome, 1960); Helen Rossetti (b. London, 1879; d. Woodstock, 1969). Daughters of William Michael Rossetti, grandchildren of

Biographies

205

the political exile Gabriele Rossetti and nieces of Maria Francesca Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Christina Rossetti. From 1891 to 1896 they printed The Torch, subsequently describing their experiences in the anarchist movement in the novel A Girl Among the Anarchists, written under the pseudonym Isabel Meredith in 1903. Olivia Rossetti married Antonio Agresti in 1897 and lived in Milan and Rome. Olivia worked for most of her life as an interpreter at international conferences and the League of Nations. She was a supporter of the Fascist regime, supporting the invasion of Abyssinia (Not Invaders but Liberators, 1936; After Mussolini What? 1937). In 1937 Olivia became a close friend of the poet Ezra Pound. Helen Rossetti married Angeli, collected records of the Rossetti family and edited the works of Dante Gabriel Rossetti. (The Life and Work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti,1902; Dante Gabriele Rossetti, His Friend and Enemies, 1949). Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar (b. Bhagur, 1883; d. Bombay, 1966). The Hindu nationalist Vinayak Damodar Savarkar was born on 28 May 1883 in Bhagur in the state of Maharashtra. In 1902 he enrolled at Ferguson College, Poona, where he became involved in nationalist politics. In collaboration with his brother Ganesh, he set up the Giuseppe Mazzini-inspired Abhinav Bharat Society (Young India Society) in 1904. With a reference from Bal Gangadhar Tilak in hand, Savarkar won one of Shyamaji Krishnavarma’s ‘Shivaji scholarships’ reserved for students from Maharashtra. Arriving in London in July 1906, he soon became a protégé of Krishnavarma and founded the Free India Society after Krishnavarma left for Paris. His translation of a biography of Mazzini as well as his Indian War of Independence (1909) were banned by the British authorities, but excerpts were frequently read aloud at India House-meetings. After Madan Lal Dhingra’s assassination of Curzon Wyllie, life became difficult for the Indian nationalists at India House and Savarkar left for Paris in January 1910, where he joined other Indian nationalists in exile. Against their advice, however, he returned to London in March and was immediately arrested and sent to Brixton jail. He was to stand trial in India, and embarked the S.S. Morea on 1 July 1910. As the ship lay outside Marseille, Savarkar escaped to French territory, where he was apprehended by a policeman and handed over to the British. In breach of international law, the case came before the Permanent Court of International Arbitration in 1910, which ruled in favour of Britain. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and while serving his sentence he developed his anti-Muslim, antiBritish, Hindu nationalist politics. Released from prison in 1921 and then interned until 1937, Savarkar remained politically active until he died in Bombay in 1966. Tyrkova-Williams, Ariadna (b. St Petersburg, 1869; d. Washington, 1962) was a journalist, novelist and liberal politician. She grew up on the Tyrkov family estate in Novgorod, and studied in St. Petersburg. In the early 1900s she smuggled copies of the liberal periodical Osvobozhdenie across the Finnish border into Russia, and later she worked on the paper’s editorial team in Paris. In 1905 Tyrkova joined the Constitutional Democrat (Kadet) party: in 1917 she became a member of the party’s Central Committee. After the October revolution Tyrkova-Williams coordinated the Russian Liberation Committee, an anti-Bolshevik publishing enterprise based in London. She remained an important figure in the Russian emigration until her death in 1962, living in Paris and finally Washington.

206

Biographies

Vermersch, Eugène (b. Lille, 1845; d. London, 1878). He was born in Lille on 13 August 1845. Sent to Paris by his family to study medicine, he instead pursued a literary career and published widely, particularly poetry, from the mid-1860s. Vermersch was deeply involved in the republican journalism of the late Second Empire and early Third Republic, editing the satirical Le Hanneton and contributing to Henri Rochefort’s La Marseillaise and Jules Vallès’s Cri du peuple. In 1871, Vermersch co-founded with Alphonse Humbert and Maxime Vuillaume Le Père Duchêne. Taking the slogan ‘The Republic or death’, it became one of the most successful newspapers of the Paris Commune. Escaping the Commune’s destruction, Vermersch fled to London, where he chronicled the semaine sanglante in his poem Les Incendaires. He was perhaps the most constant figure in the early exile communard press, successively editing Qui vive!, Vermersch-Journal and L’Union démocratique during 1871–2. Yet he quarrelled with his fellow exiles, resulting in his expulsion from the editorship of L’Union démocratique and a temporary move to Switzerland and the Low Countries in 1874–6. Isolation and poverty took a toll on Vermersch’s physical and mental health, and after a struggle with dementia, he died in Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum on 9 October 1878, aged 33. Villanueva y Astengo, Joaquín Lorenzo (b. Xátiva, 1757; d. Dublin, 1837). A writer and historian, he taught Philosophy and Theology in several seminaries in Spain and was member of the Real Academia de la Lengua and Real Academia de la Historia. He was appointed deputy for Valencia during the Court of Cádiz, when he published works defending a conciliation between political Liberalism and Thomism and became an important influence on the religious policy of the first generation of liberales. Imprisoned in a convent in Guadalajara after the return of Ferdinand VII in 1814, he became once again a deputy in the Cortes of 182 and was exiled alongside the majority of Liberals on the send absolutist restoration of 1823. In London, together with his brother Jaime, the politician José Canga Argüelles and the bookseller and printer Vicente Salvá he published Ocios de españoles emigrados (1824–7). He stayed in the British Isles until his death in Dublin in 1837, and published books on topics such as grammar and etymology, church affairs, memoirs, etc. Volkhovskii, Feliks (b. Poltava, 1846; d. London, 1914). Volkhovsky was born in Poltava, and became involved in the Russian revolutionary movement in St. Petersburg in the 1860s. He joined the Chaikovskii reading circle, and organized an affiliated group in Odessa. Volkhovskii was exiled to Siberia for spreading revolutionary propaganda, but escaped to Canada in 1889 and arrived in London in 1890. Volkhovskii worked with Sergei Kravchinskii on the activities of the Society of Friends of Russian Freedom and the Free Russian Press Fund. From the 1900s he moved closer to the Socialist Revolutionary Party, and worked on their publications and propaganda. He died in London in 1914.

Bibliography

Foreign political press published in London discussed in the volume (selective list) A Aurora (1831) Cause ed Effetti (1900) Chaveco Liberal (1829) Chernyi Peredel (1880–1881) Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário (1814–1817) Correo Político y Literario de Londres (1826) Der Rebell (1884–1886) Der Sozialdemokrat (1888–1890) Die Autonomie (1886–1893) El Colombiano (1810) El Emigrado Observador (1828–1829) El Español (1810–1814) El Español Constitucional (1818–1820; 1824–1825) El Instructor o Repertorio de historia, bellas letras y artes (1834–1841) El Museo Universal de Ciencias y Artes (1824–1826) El Repertorio Americano (1826–1827) El Robespierre Español, Amigo de las Leyes (1811–1812) Free Russia (1890–1914) Freiheit (1878–1882 [in London]; then until 1910 [in the United States]) India (1890–1921) Journal of the East India Association (1867–1885) Kolokol (1857–1867) L’Ambigu: ou Variétés littéraires, et politiques (1802-1818) L’Anarchia (1896) L’Associazione (1889–1890) L’Avenir (1872) L’Homme: Journal de la démocratie universelle (1853–1856) L’International (1890) L’Internazionale (1901–1902) L’Union démocratique (1872) La Colmena (1842–1845) La Fédération (1872–1875)

208

Bibliography

La Grève Générale/La Sciopero Generale (1902) La Guerra Tripolina (1912) La Guerre Sociale/La Guerra Sociale (1878) La Rivoluzione Sociale (1902–1903) La Tribune Libre (1890–1891) La Voix du proscrit: Organe de la république universelle (1850–1851) Le Bulletin de l’Association Internationale (1857–1858) Le Courrier révolutionnaire (1876) Le Nouveau Monde (1849–1851) Le Père Peinard, London series (1894–1895) Le Proscrit: Journal de la république universelle (1850) Le Rothschild (1891) Le Tocsin (1892–1894) Letuchie listki (1893–1899) Londoner Arbeiter-Zeitung (1886–1887) Londoner Freie Presse (1887–1890) Londoner Volks-Zeitung (1909–1910) Lo Sciopero Generale (1902) Louis Blanc’s Monthly Review (1849) Microscópio de verdades ou Oculo Singular (1814) Narodovolets (1897–1903) O Correio da Península, ou Novo Telegrapho (1810) O Correio dos Açores (1830) O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra (1814–1818) O Portuguez Constitucional em Londres (1832) Ocios de Españoles Emigrados (London, 1824–1826) Paquete de Portugal (1829) Poliarnaia zvezda (1855–1868) Qui vive! (1871) Rabochii Mir (1812–1814) Russian Life (1921–1922) Semanario de Agricultura y Artes (1828–1833) Sovremennik (1897) The Asiatic Review (1885–1952) The Indian Sociologist (1905–1922) The International Courier/Le Courrier International (1864–1867) The London Review (1829) The New Russia (1920–1921) The Russian Commonwealth (1918–1919) The Russian Outlook (1919–1920) The Torch of Anarchy (1891–1896) Variedades; o Mensagero de Londres (1823–1825) Vermersch-Journal (1871–1872) Vpered! (1874–1877)

Bibliography

209

Other printed primary material Agresti, Olivia Rossetti. The Anecdotage of an Interpreter. Reminiscences. Manuscript Collection, Columbia University in New York, 1958. Analytical Review. Andreev, Leonid. SOS. London: Russian Liberation Committee, 1919. Anon. Trau, schau, wem! Victor Daves Thätigkeit in der Arbeiter-Bewegung. London: Fischer, 1886. Antepara, José María. South American Emancipation. Documents Historical and Explanatory, shewing the Designs which have been in progress and the Exertions made by General Miranda for the South American Emancipation during the last Twenty-Five Years. By J. M. Antepara, a native of Guayaquil. London: R. Juigné, 1810. Barton, Benjamin Smith. A Memoir Concerning the Disease of Goitre, as it Prevails in Different Parts of North-America. Philadelphia: The Author, 1800. Barton, Benjamin Smith. Memoria sobre a bronchocelle, ou papo da America Septentrional. Lisboa: Typographia Chalcographica, Typoplastica, e Litteraria do Arco do Cego, 1801. Bebel, August. Aus meinem Leben, vol. iii (7th edn). Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1922. Bernstein, Eduard. My Years of Exile: Reminiscences of a Socialist, translated by Bernard Miall. New York: Harcourt, Brace and H owe, 1921. Bernstein, Eduard. The International Working Men’s Congress of 1889: A Reply to Justice. London, 1889. Available online : https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/ bernstein/works/1889/xx/reply-justice.htm (accessed 1 December 2016). Bigmore E. C. and Wyman, C. W. H. A Bibliography of Printing, Compiled by … II. London: Bernard Quaritch, 1884. Blanc, Louis. Dix ans de l’histoire d’Angleterre, 10 vols. Paris: Lévy, 1879–81. Burke, William. Additional Reasons, for our immediately emancipating Spanish America. 2nd edn. London: J. Ridgway, 1808. Bustamante, Carlos María. Resúmen histórico de la Revolución de los Estados Unidos Mejicanos; sacado del ‘Cuadro Histórico’ que en forma de cartas escribió el lic. D. Carlos María Bustamante. ORDENADO EN CUATRO LIBROS por D. Pablo de Mendíbil. London: R. Ackermann, 1828. Colombia, being a Geographical, Statistical, Agricultural, Commercial, and Political Account of that Country, adapted for the General Reader, the Merchant, and the Colonist. 2 vols. London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1822. Colombian State Papers, Translated and Published from Official Copies; Being the Act of Installation of the Houses of Senate and Representatives; the Message of the Vice President on the Opening of Congress; a Report on the Diplomatic Relations of Colombia &c., &c. London: Ridgway, Piccadilly; Booth, Duke Street, Portland Place; and Richardson, opposite the Royal Exchange, 1823. Costa, Hipólito da. ‘Cartas sobre a Framaçonaria’, inJoão Nery Guimarães (ed.), Obras maçônicas de Hipólito José da Costa. Brasilia: Grande Oriente do Brasil, 2000. Costa, Hipólito da. A Narrative of the Persecution of Hippolyto Joseph da Costa Pereira Furtado de Mendonça … imprisoned and tried in Lisbon, by the Inquisition, for the pretended crime of free-masonry. To which are added, the bye-laws of the Inquisition of Lisbon, both ancient and modern … taken from the originals in one of the Royal Libraries in London. London: W. Lewis, 1811. Costa, Hipólito da. Descripçaõ da arvore assucareira, e da sua utilidade e cultura cultura, Lisbon: Typographia Chalcographica e Litteraria do Arco do Cego, 1800.

210

Bibliography

Costa, Hipólito da. Descripção de huma maquina para tocar a bomba a bordo dos navios sem o trabalho de homens: offerecida a Real Marinha Portuguesa. Lisbon: Typographia Chalcographica e Litteraria do Arco do Cego, 1800. Costa, Hipólito da. Diário de minha viagem para Filadélfia (1798–1799). Brasília: Senado Federal, 2004. Available online: http://www.dominiopublico.gov.br/pesquisa/ DetalheObraForm.do?select_action=&co_obra=18960 (accessed 20 October 2016). Costa, Hipólito da. Narrativa de perseguiçaõ de Hippolyto Joseph da Costa Pereira Furtado de Mendonça … Prezo, e processado em Lisboa pelo pretenso crime de framaçon ou pedreiro livre. London: W. Lewis, 1811. Costa, Hipólito da. Sketch for the History of Dyonisian Artificers: A Fragment. Red. J. B. Hare, London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones; Paternoster-Row, 1820. De Toledo, Lafayette. ‘Imprensa Paulista’. Revista do Instituto Històrico e Geogràfico de São Paulo 3 (1898): 303–521. Dioneo. Russia Under the Bolsheviks. London: Russian Liberation Committee, 1919. Discurso que puede servir de preliminar á las noticias de la última conspiración de Caracas. Escrito por un Español Americano que tuvo ocasión de manejar, y admirar estos papeles. London: R. Juigné, 1811. Dourado, Mecenas. Hipólito da Costa e o Correio Braziliense. Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca do Exército Editora, 1957. Dubois, Félix. The Anarchist Peril. London: Fisher Unwin, 1894. Edinburgh Review (1802–1929). English Review (1783). Ermasheva, M. E. (compiler). S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii v Londonskoi emigratsii, Nauka, Moscow, 1968. Esquiros, Alphonse, L’Angleterre et la vie anglaise. 5 vol. Paris: Chez Claye et Hetzel, 1859–65. Fernández Madrid, José. Poesías. London: Imprenta Española M. Calero, 1828. Fortune, E. F. Thomas. A Concise and Authentic History of the Bank of England. With Dissertations on Metals and Coin, Banknotes, and Bills of Exchange. London, 1797. Fortune, E. F. Thomas. Historia breve e authentica do Banco de Inglaterra, com dissertações sobre os metaes, moeda, e letras de cambio, e a carta de incorporação. Lisbon: Typographia Chalcographica, e Litteraria do Arco do Cego, 1801. Fricke, Dieter and Knaack, Rudolf (eds). Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven: Übersicht der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878–1913, vol. i: 1878–1889. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1983. Fricke, Dieter and Knaack, Rudolf (eds). Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven: Übersichten der Berliner politischen Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878–1913, vol. ii: 1890–1906. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1989. Fricke, Dieter and Knaack, Rudolf (eds). Dokumente aus geheimen Archiven: Übersichten der Berliner Polizei über die allgemeine Lage der sozialdemokratischen und anarchistischen Bewegung 1878–1913, vol. iii: 1906–1913. Berlin: Berliner Wissenschagtsverlag, 2004. Goldman, Emma. Living my Life. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1931. Guerra, José [Fray Servando Teresa de Mier Noriega y Guerra]. Historia de la revolución de Nueva España, o verdadera orígen y causas de ella con la relación de sus progresos hasta el presente año de 1813. Paris: La Sorbonne, 1990.

Bibliography

211

Head, Francis Bond. ‘Reports Relating to the Failure of the Rio Plata Mining Association formed under an Authority Signed by His Excellency Don Bernardino Rivadavia.’ Quarterly Review 36, 71 (1827): 81–106. Head, Francis Bond. Reports of the Failure of the Rio Plata Mining Association, formed under an Authority signed by his Excellency Don Bernardino Rivadavia. London: John Murray, 1827. Herzen, A. I. Sobranie Sochinenii v tridtsati tomakh. Moscow : Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1954–66. Herzen, A. I. Sobranie Sochinenii v vosmi tomax. Moscow : Izdatelstvo Pravda, 1975. Herzen, Alexander. My Past and Thoughts. London: Chatto and Windus, 1974. Historia de Portugal. Composta em inglez por uma sociedade de literatos, trasladada em vulgar com as notas da edição franceza, e do traductor portuguez, Antonio Moraes de Silva; e continuada até os nossos tempos: em nova edição. London: Offic. de F. Wingrave, T. Boosey, Dulau e Co., and Lackington, Allen e Co., 1809. Hugo, Charles. Les Hommes de l’exil. Paris: Lemerre, 1875. Interesting Official Documents Relating to the United Provinces of Venezuela. London: Longman & Co., 1812. Irisarri, Antonio José de [pseud. Dionisio Terrasa y Rejón]. Carta al Observador en Londresó Impugnación á las falsedades que se divulgan contra América. London: Imprenta de E. Justins, 1819. Irisarri, Antonio José de [pseud. Dionisio Terrasa y Rejón]. Memoria sobre el estado presente de Chile. London: En la Imprenta de L. Nichols, Callejón de Earl, Calle de Newport, 1820. Irisarri, Antonio José de [pseud. Dionisio Terrasa y Rejón] [pseud José Isidro Inana y Torre]. Carta de un americano á un diputado de las Cortes Extraordinarias de España. London: Imprenta de Nichols, 1821. Justificación de la conducta pública seguida por D. Juan García del Rio i Diego Paroissien, ex-Ministros Plenipotenciarios del Gobierno del Perú cerca de las Cortes de Europa. London: G. Marchant, 1825. Karcher, Théodore. Études sur les institutions politiques et sociales de l’Angleterre. Paris: Librairie Internationale, 1867. La Biblioteca Americana, ó miscelánea de literatura, artes y ciencias. London: G. Marchant, 1823. La Révolte (Paris, 1887–1894). Lensen, George (ed.). Revelations of a Russian Diplomat: the Memoirs of Dmitri I. Abrikossow, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1964. Meredith, Isabel (Helen and Olivia Rossetti). A Girl Among the Anarchists. London: Duckworth & Co., 1903. Most, Johann. Memoiren: Erlebtes, Erforschtes und Erdachtes. New York: J. Most, 1903. Naoroji, Dadabhai. Poverty and Un-British Rule. London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co., 1901. Nova grammatica portuguesa e inglesa. Nova Edição. Revista e consideravelmente aumentada, por H. J. da Costa. London: Off. Typograf. de F. Wingrave, Strand, 1818. [Núñez, Ignacio Benito]. Noticias históricas, políticas y estadísticas de las Provincias Unidas del Río de la Plata con un apéndice sobre la usurpación de Montevideo por los gobiernos portugués y brasilero. London: R. Ackermann, 1825. O’Squarr, Flor. Les Coulisses de l’Anarchie. Paris: Albert Savine, 1892. Palacio Fajardo, Manuel. Outline of the Revolution in Spanish America; or, an Account of the Origin, Progress, and Actual State of the War Carried on between Spain and Spanish America; Containing the Principal Facts which have Marked the Struggle. By a South American. New York: James Eastburn and Co., 1817.

212

Bibliography

Peukert, Josef. Erinnerungen eines Proletariers aus der revolutionären Arbeiterbewegung. Frankfurt: Verlag AV, 2002 (1913). ‘Proceedings of the First Indian National Congress’, 1885. Available online: http://dspace. gipe.ac.in/xmlui/handle/10973/38189 (accessed 1 December 2016). Pyat, F., Besson, A., Talandier, A. and Holyoake, G. J. Letter to the Parliament and the Press. London: G. J. Holyoake, 147 Fleet Street, 1858. Riva Agüero, José de la. [Paul Pruvonena, pseud.]. Exposición de Don José de la Riva Agüero acerca de su conducta política en el tiempo que ejercició la Presidencia de la República del Perú. London: C. Wood, 1824. Rostovtseff, Mikhail. Proletarian Culture, London: Russian Liberation Committee, 1919. Sapir, Boris (ed.). Lavrov: Gody emigratsii: arkhivnye materialy v dbukh tomakh, Dordrecht: D Reidel, 1974. Semanario Patriótico, Madrid; Seville; Cadiz, 1808–1812. Sweeney, John. At Scotland Yard. London: Alexander Moring Ltd, 1905. Swinnerton, Frank. Swinnerton: An Autobiography. London: Hutchinson and Co., 1935. Schœlcher, Victor. Sunday Rest. London: Austen, 1870. Steinhardt, Karl. ‘Meetings with the Great Lenin’. In S. F. Bezveselny and D. Y. Grinberg (eds), They Knew Lenin: Reminiscences of Foreign Contemporaries, Moscow : Progress Publishers, 1968. The Critical Review. The English Republic (1851–1855). The Gentleman’s Magazine ‘The Jubilee of the East India Association’. The Asiatic Review XI, vol. 29 (1917): 1–14. The Monthly Review. Thompson, Sir Benjamin, Count Rumford. Ensayos politicos, economicos, e philosophicos. Lisbon: Typographia Chalcographica, Typoplastica, e Litteraria do Arco do Cego (volume I), and Regia Officina Typografica (volum II), 1801–1802. Thompson, Sir Benjamin, Count Rumford. Essays, Political, Economical, and Philosophical. Dublin: W. Porter; J. Archer, 1796. Tyrkova-Williams, Ariadna. Why Soviet Russia is Starving. London: Russian Liberation Committee, 1919. Vellozo, José Mariano da Conceição. Florae fluminensis, seu, Descriptionum plantarum praefectura fluminensi sponte nascentium... Rio de Janeiro: Typographia Nacional, 1825.

Secondary sources Abreu, Márcia, Os Caminhos dos Livros. Campinas; São Paulo: ALB/Mercado de Letras; FAPESP, 2003. Acton, Edward. Alexander Herzen and the Role of the Intellectual Revolutionary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Agrawal, Sushila. Press, Public Opinion and Government in India. Jaipur: Asha Publishing House, 1970. Ahmed, Rehana and Mukherjee, Sumita (eds). South Asian Resistances in Britain, 18581947. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Alcalá Galiano, Antonio. Recuerdos de un anciano. Madrid: Librería de Perlado, Páez & Co., 1913. Alston, Charlotte. ‘The Russian Liberation Committee in London’. Slavonica 14, no. 1 (2008): 1–11.

Bibliography

213

Alston, Charlotte. Tolstoy and his Disciples: the History of a Radical Iinternational Movement. London: I. B. Tauris, 2014. Alves, José Augusto dos Santos. A Opinião Pública em Portugal (1780-1820). Lisboa: Universidade Autónoma de Lisboa, 2000. Alves, José Augusto dos Santos. Ideologia e política na imprensa do exílio: O Portuguez (1814-1826). Lisbon: Impr. Nacional, Casa da Moeda, 2005. Alves, Luís Alberto Marques. Subsídios para a História da Imprensa em Portugal. Porto: Centro de Estudos Humanísticos, 1983. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1991. Aprile, Sylvie and Dufoix, Stéphane. Les mots de l’immigration, Paris : Belin, 2009. Aprile, Sylvie, Le Siècle des exilés. Bannis et proscrits de 1789 la Commune. Paris: CNRS Editions, 2010. Araújo, Ana Cristina. A Cultura das Luzes em Portugal. Temas e Problemas. Lisbon: Livros Horizonte, 2003. Ashton, Rosemary. Little Germany: German Refugees in Victorian Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989. Bach Jensen, Richard. The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism: An International History, 1878–1934. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Bantman, Constance. French Anarchists in London, 1880-1914. Exile and Transnationalism in the First Globalisation. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Barker, Hannah. Newspapers, Politics and English Society 1695-1855, Harlow, 2000. Barker, Hannah and Burrows, Simon (eds). Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760-1820. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Barman, Roderick. Brazil: The Forging of a Nation, 1798-1852. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. Barrier, Norman. Banned: Controversial Literature and Political Control in British India, 1907-1947. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974. Bartel, Horst, Schröder, Wolfgang, Seeber, Gustav, and Wolter, Heinz. Der Sozialdemokrat 1879–1890: Ein Beitrag zur Rolle des Zentralorgans im Kampf der revolutionären Arbeiterbewegung gegen das Sozialistengesetz. Berlin: Dietz, 1975. Bayly, Christopher Alan. Empire and Information: Intelligence Gathering and Social Communication in India, 1780-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Berruezo León, María Teresa. La lucha de Hispanoamérica por su independencia en Inglaterra 1800-1830. Madrid: Ediciones de Cultura Hispánica, 1989. Berti, Giampietro. Errico Malatesta e il movimento anarchico italiano e internazionale. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2003. Bertolucci, R. (ed.), Errico Malatesta. Epistolario 1873-1932. Avenza: Centro Studi Sociali, 1984. Bianco, René. ‘100 ans de presse anarchiste’. PhD diss., Université d’Aix-Marseille, 1987. Available online: http://bianco.ficedl.info/ (accessed 10 June 2016). Bistarelli, Agostino. Gli esuli del Risorgimento. Bologna: Il Mulino, 2011. Boehmer, Elleke. Indian Arrivals, 1870-1915: Networks of British Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Borghi, Armando. Errico Malatesta. Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1947. Bose, Arun Coomer. Indian Revolutionaries Abroad, 1905-1927: Select Documents. New Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 2002. Brake, Laurel. Print in Transition. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001. Brake, Laurel and Demoor, Marysa (eds). DNCJ. Dictionary of Nineteenth-century Journalism. Ghent: Academia Press, 2009.

214

Bibliography

Breña, Roberto. ‘José María ‘Blanco White y la Independencia de América: ¿Una postura pro-americana?’. Historia Constitucional 3 (2002): 1–17. Breña, Roberto. ‘Liberalism in the Spanish-American World, 1808-1825’, in Miguel A. Centeno and Agustin E. Ferraro (eds), State and Nation Making in Latin America and Spain: Republics of the Possible. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Brunello, Piero, Storie di anarchici e di spie. Rome: Donzelli, 2009. Brunello, Giulia, ‘La storiografia sull’anarchismo in Brasile: temi e prospettive di ricerca’, in Carlo De Maria and Giampietro Berti (eds), L’Anarchismo Italiano. Storia e Storiografia, 351–68. Milan: Biblion Edizioni, 2016. Burdiel, Isabel, ‘Myths of Failure, Myths of Success: New Perspectives on Nineteenth‐Century Spanish Liberalism’. The Journal of Modern History 70, no. 4 (1998): 892–912. Burrows, Simon. French Exile Journalism and European Politics, 1792-1814. The Royal Historical Society : Boydell and Brewer, 2000. Burton, Antoinette. At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in LateVictorian Britain. Berkeley : University of California Press, 1998. Butterworth, Alex. The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists and Secret Agents. London: The Bodley Head, 2010. Buvalovas, Thais Helena dos Santos. ‘Hipólito da Costa em Londres: libertadores, whiggs e radicais no discurso político do Correio Braziliense (1808-1812)’. PhD thesis, Universidade do Estado de São Paulo, 2012. Available online: PhD thesis (http://www. teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8138/tde-30042013-102854/pt-br.php (accessed 28 August 2017). Calance, Mădălina. ‘Reason, Liberty and Science. The Contribution of Freemasonry to the Enlightenment’. Available online: https://www.degruyter.com/downloadpdf/j/ hssr.2014.3.issue-2/hssr-2013-0033/hssr-2013-0033.xml (accessed 20 October 2016). Callaghan, Kevin. Demonstration Culture: European Socialism and the Second International, 1889–1914. Leicester: Troubadour, 2010. Calman, Alvin R. Ledru-Rollin après 1848 et les proscrits français en Angleterre. Paris: F. Rieder, 1921. Candido, Antonio. Formação da literatura brasileira (Momentos decisivos). São Paulo: Martins, 1962. Carr, E. H. The Romantic Exiles: A Nineteenth Century Portrait Gallery. New York: Octagon Books, 1975. Carvalho, José Murilo de, Construção da Ordem e Teatro das Sombras. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2003. Castells Oliván, Irene. ‘La resistencia liberal contra el absolutismo fernandiano 1814-1833’. Ayer 41 (2001): 43–62. Chandra, Bipin. ‘Indian Nationalists and the Drain, 1880-1905’. Indian Economic Social History Review 2 (1965): 103–44. Chapman, Jane. ‘Counter Hegemony, Newspapers and the Origins of Anti-Colonialism in French India’. International Journal of Social Economics 38, no. 2 (2011): 128–39. Charle, Christophe. Le Siècle de la presse (1830-1939). Paris: Seuil, 2004. Chirol, Valentine. Indian Unrest. London: Macmillan, 1910. Cole, G. D. H. A History of Socialist Thought, vol. iii, pt. i: The Second International, 1889–1914. London: Macmillan, 1956. Coletes Blanco, Agustín and Laspra Rodríguez, Alicia (eds), Libertad frente a tiranía. Poesía inglesa de la Guerra de la Independencia 1808-1814. Madrid: Fundación Dos de Mayo; Espasa, 2013.

Bibliography

215

Coltham, Stephen. ‘English Working-Class Newspapers in 1867’. Victorian Studies 13 (1969): 159–80. Conboy, Martin. Journalism: A Critical History. London: Sage, 2004. Cooper-Richet, Diana. ‘As grandes revistas literárias e políticas na formação das elites britânicas durante a primeira metade do século XIX’, in Eliana de Freitas Dutra and Jean-Yves Mollier (eds), Política, nação e edição: o lugar dos impressos na construção da vida política no Brasil, Europa e Américas nos Séculos XVIII-XX, 413–29. São Paulo: Annablume, 2006. Cooper-Richet, Diana. ‘Pour une étude de la presse de la presse d’exil, miroir des échanges transculturels (xix°-xx° siècle)’, in Judit Maár and Augustin Lefebvre, Cahiers de la Sorbonne nouvelle (eds), Exils et transferts culturels dans l’Europe moderne, 199–208. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2015. Cooper-Richet, Diana. ‘La presse en langue étrangère publiée, en France, au xix° siècle’. Available online: https://www.academia.edu/26639295/La_librairie_%C3%A9trang%C 3%A8re_%C3%A0_Paris_au_XIXe_si%C3%A8cle (accessed 26 November 2016). Cottret, Bernard. Terre d’asile. L’Angleterre et ses réfugiés, XVI-XVIIe siècles. Paris: AubierMontaigne, 1985. Cronqvist, Marie and Hilgert, Christoph. ‘Entangled Media Histories. The value of Transnational and Transmedial Approaches in Media Historiography’. Media History (2017). Cumpston, Mary. ‘Some Early Indian Nationalists and Their Allies in the British Parliament, 1851-1906’. English Historical Review 76, no. 299 (1961): 364–83. Davies, Catherine, ‘The Contemporary Response of the British Press to the 1812 Constitution’, in Stephen Roberts and Adam Sharman (eds), 1812 Echoes: The Cádiz Constitution in Hispanic History, Culture and Politics, 103–18. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Dessal, Marcel. Un Révolutionnaire jacobin : Charles Delescluze, 1809-1871. Paris: Rivière, 1952. Diaz, Delphine. Un Asile pour tous les peuples ? Exilés et réfugiés étrangers en France au cours du premier XIXe siècle. Paris: Armand Colin, 2014. Diemoz, Erika. A morte il tiranno. Anarchia e violenza da Crispi a Mussolini. Turin: Einaudi, 2011. Di Paola, Pietro. ‘ The Spies Who Came in from the Heat: The International Surveillance of the Anarchists in London’, European History Quarterly 37, no. 2 (2007): 189–215. Di Paola, Pietro. The Knights-Errant of Anarchy. London and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora 1880-1917. Liverpool: LUP, 2013. Eastman, Scott. ‘Introduction: The Sacred Mantle of the Constitution of 1812’, in Scott Eastman and Natalia Sobrevilla Perea (eds), The Rise of Constitutional Government in the Iberian Atlantic World. The Impact of the Cadiz Constitution of 1812. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2015. Fabbri, Luigi. La Vida de Malatesta. Barcelona: Guilda de Amigos del Libro, 1936. Fabbri, Luigi, Malatesta. L’uomo e il pensiero. Naples: EdizioniRL,1951. Fernández Sarasola, Ignacio. ‘La Constitución de Cádiz en Inglaterra’. Historia Constitucional 13 (2012): 1–21. Fernández Sebastián, Javier. ‘Liberales sin fronteras. Cádiz y el primer constitucionalismo hispánico’, in Fernando García Sanz, Vittorio Scotti Douglas, Romano Ugolini and José Ramón Urquijo Goitia (eds), Cadice e oltre: Costituzione, Nazione e Libertà, 465–90. Roma: Istituto per la Storia del Risorgimento Italiano, 2015. Ferreira, João Pedro Rosa. O jornalismo na emigração: ideologia e política no Correio brazilience 1808-1822. Lisbon: Instituto Nacional de Investigação Científica, 1992.

216

Bibliography

Finn, Margot. After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848-1874. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Finkelstein, David and Peers, Douglas M. ‘“A Great System of Circulation”: Introducing India into the Nineteenth-Century Media’, in David Finkelstein and Douglas M. Peers (eds), Negotiating India in the Nineteenth-Century Media, 1–22. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. Fiori Antonio. Archivio Centrale dello Stato. Direzione Generale della Pubblica Sicurezza. La stampa italiana nella serie F1 (1894-1926). Inventario. Rome: Ministero per i Beni Culturali e Ambientali, 1995. Fischer-Tiné, Harald. ‘Indian Nationalism and the “World Forces”: Transnational and Diasporic Dimensions of the Indian Freedom Movement on the Eve of the First World War’. Journal of Global History 2, no. 3 (2007): 325–44. Fischer-Tiné, Harald. ‘The Other Side of Internationalism: Switzerland as a Hub of Militant Anti-Colonialism’, in Patricia Purtschert and Harald Fischer-Tiné (eds), Colonial Switzerland: Rethinking Colonialism from the Margins, 221–58. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Fischer-Tiné, Harald. Shyamji Krishnavarma: Sanskrit, Sociology and Anti-Imperialism. New Delhi: Routledge, 2014. Fisher, John. ‘Absolutism and Liberalism in the Hispanic World, 1808-1814: The Background and Significance of the 1812 Constitution of Cadiz’, in Stephen Roberts and Adam Sharman (eds), 1812 Echoes: The Cádiz Constitution in Hispanic History, Culture and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Michael, Shompa Lahiri and Thandi, Sinder. A South-Asian History of Britain: Four Centuries of Peoples from the Sub-Continent. Oxford: Greenwood World, 2007. Flórez Estrada, Álvaro. Representación hecha a S. M. C el Señor Don Fernando VII en defensa de las Cortes. London: E. Justins, 1819. Francis, David. Portugal 1715-1808: Joanine, Pombaline and Rococo Portugal as seen by British Diplomats and Traders. London: Tamesis, 1985. Freitag, Sabine (ed.). Exiles From European Revolutions, Exiles From European Revolutions: Refugees in Mid-Victorian England. New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2003. Furtado, Alcebíades. ‘Biographia de Hippolito José da Costa Pereira Furtado de Mendonça’. Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico de São Paulo 17 (1912). Futrell, Michael. Northern Underground: Episodes of Russian Revolutionary Transport and Communications through Scandinavia and Finland 1863-1917. London: Faber and Faber, 1963. Gabaccia, Donna. Italy’s Many Diasporas. London: UCL Press, 2000. Garnica, Antonio. ‘Introducción’, in A. Garnica, L. M. Portillo and J. Vallejo (eds), Obras completas de José Blanco White, XVI–XVII, vol. III. Granada: Almed, 2009. Giulietti, Fabrizio. Storia degli anarchici italiani in età giolittiana. Milan: Franco Angeli, 2012. Goldin, V. I. ‘Nikolai Chaikovskii in Revolution and Counter-Revolution’. Revolutionary Russia 14, no. 1 (2001): 22–41. Good, Jane. ‘America and the Russian Revoutionary Movement’. The Russian Review 41, no. 3 (1982): 273–87. Goyens, Tom. Beer and Revolution: The German Anarchist Movement in New York City, 1880 – 1914. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007. Grant, Ron. ‘The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom (1890-1917) – A Case Study in Internationalism’. Scottish Labour History Society Journal 3 (1970): 3–24. Grases, Pedro. ‘The First English Publisher for Latin America’. Revista Shell. Caracas, 15 (June 1955): 25–33.

Bibliography

217

Grases, Pedro. La trascendencia de la actividad de los escritores españoles e hispanoamericanos en Londres, de 1810 a 1830. Caracas : Editorial Élite, 1943. Grases, Pedro. Tiempo de Bello en Londres y otros ensayos. Caracas: Biblioteca del Ministerio Venezolano de Cultura, 1962. Guitarte, Guillermo. ‘Juan García del Río y su Biblioteca Colombiana (Lima 1821): Sobre los orígenes de La Biblioteca Americana (1823) y El Repertorio Americano (1826-27) de Londres. Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 18, no. 1 (1965–6): 85–149. Hamburg, G. Michael. ‘The London Emigration and the Russian Liberation Movement: the Problem of Unity, 1889-1897’. Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 25 (1977): 321–39. Hampton, Mark. ‘“Understanding the Media”: Theories of the Press in Britain, 1850-1914’. Media, Culture and Society 23 (2001): 213–31. Hampton, Mark. Visions of the Press in Britain 1850-1950. The Cultural and Intellectual History of the British Press. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Hampton, Mark. ‘Defining Journalists in Nineteenth-Century Britain’. Critical Studies in Media Communication 22, no. 2 (2005): 138–55. Hampton, Mark. ‘The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: the End of the “Taxes on Knowledge”’, 1849-1869/ British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘“Public Opinion,” 1867-1914’. Journal of Victorian Culture 20, no. 4 (2015): 559–63. Harris, Robert. ‘Alexander Herzen: Writings on the Man and His Thought’, in Kathleen Parthé (ed.), A Herzen Reader, 343–70. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Haupt, Georges, Jemnitz, János and Rossum, Leo van (eds.), Karl Kautsky und die Sozialdemokratie Südosteuropas: Korrespondenz 1883–1938. Frankfurt: Campus, 1986. Henderson, Robert. ‘International Collaboration in the Persecution of Russian Political Émigrés: the European Pursuit of Vladimir Burtsev’. Revolutionary Russia 22, no.1 (2009): 21–36. Hewitt, Martin. The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, 1849-1869. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. Hickerson, Andrea, Gustafson, Kristin L. ‘Revisiting the Immigrant Press’. Journalism (2014): 1–18. Hollingsworth, Barry. ‘The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom: English Liberals and Russian Socialists 1890-1917’. Oxford Slavonic Papers (1970): 45–64. Holman, M. J. and de K. ‘Translating Tolstoy for the Free Age Press: Vladimir Chertkov and his English Manager Arthur Fifield’. Slavonic and East European Review 66, no. 2 (1988): 184–97. Ipanema, Cybelle and Ipanema, Marcelo. ‘Imprensa na Regência: Observações Estatísticas e de Opinião Pública’. Revista do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro. Rio de Janeiro, v. 307, 1976. Iriye, Akira and Saunier, Pierre-Yves (eds). The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History. From the Mid-19th Century to the Present Day. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Israel, Milton. Communications and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Indian Nationalist Struggle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Jaksić, Iván. Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation-Building in Nineteenth Century Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Johnson, Barry (ed.). Olive & Stepniak. The Bloomsbury Diary of Olive Garnett 1893-1895. Birmingham: Bartletts Press, 1993. Johnson, Matthew. Militarism and the British Left, 1902–1914. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2013. Jones, Aled. Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England. Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996.

218

Bibliography

Kamen, Henry. The Disinherited: The Exiles Who Created Spanish Culture. London and New York: Allen Lane, 2007. Kamra, Sukeshi. The Indian Periodical Press and the Production of Nationalist Rhetoric. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Kanellos, Nicolás. Hispanic Periodicals in the United States: A Brief History and Comprehensive Bibliography. Houston: Arte Público Press, 2000. Kapila, Shruti. ‘Self, Spencer and Swaraj: Nationalist Thought and Critiques of Liberalism, 1890-1920’. Modern Intellectual History 4, no. 1 (2007): 109–27. Kaul, Chandrika. Communications, Media and the Imperial Experience: Britain and India in the Twentieth Century. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Kaul, Chandrika. Reporting the Raj: The British Press and India, c. 1880-1922. New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Kaushik, Harish. The Indian National Congress in England, 1885-1920. Delhi: Research Publications in Social Sciences, 1972. Kelly, Debra and Cornick, Martyn (eds). A History of the French in London. Liberty, Equality, Opportunity. London: Institute of Historical Research, 2013. Ker, James Campbell. Political Trouble in India, 1907-1917. Calcutta: Superintendent Government Printing, 1917. King, Andrew, Easley, Alexis and Morton, John (eds). The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers. Abingdon: Routledge, 2016. Knepper, Paul. The Invention of International Crime: A Global Issue in the Making, 1881–1914. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Kunka, Françoise. ‘Alexander Herzen and the Free Russian Press in London 1852-1866’. MLitt diss., University of Aberdeen, 2007. Lahiri, Shompa. Indians in Britain: Anglo-Indian Encounters, Race and Identity, 1880-1930. London: Frank Cass, 2000. Lattek, Christine. Revolutionary Refugees: German Socialists in Britain, 1840–1860. London: Routledge, 2006. Laursen, Ole Birk. ‘“Anarchy Defined – No Anarchists in India”: Colonial Discourse and the Rhetoric of Indian Anti-Colonialism in Britain’, in Carl Levy (ed.), Anarchism and the Postcolonial Turn, London: Routledge, forthcoming (2016). Lima Sobrinho, Alexandre José Barbosa. Hipólito da Costa, pioneiro da independência do Brasil. Brasília: Fundação Assis Chateaubriand, 1996. Llorens, Vicente. Liberales y románticos: una emigración española en Inglaterra, 1823-1834. Madrid: Editorial Castilla, 1979 (1954). Llorens, Vicente. ‘Colaboraciones de emigrados españoles en revistas inglesas, 1823-1834’. Hispanic Review 19, no. 2 (April 1951): 121–42. Loubère, Leo A. Louis Blanc: His Life and Contribution to the Rise of French JacobinSocialism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1961. Lousada, Maria Alexandre. ‘Espaços de sociabilidade em Lisboa: finais do século XVIII a 1834’. Phd thesis, Universidade de Lisboa, 1995. Luhman, Niklas. Political Theory in the Welfare State. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1989. Lustosa, Isabel. ‘Correio Braziliense (1808-1822): la presse brésilienne est née anglaise et libérale’, in Eliana Freitas Dutra e Jean-Yves Mollier (eds), La place de l’imprimé dans la construction de la vie politique. Brésil, Europe, Amériques (XVIIIe-XXe siècles), v. 1, 331–41. Rennes, França: PUR – Press Universitaires de Rennes, 2015. Lustosa, Isabel. ‘Correio Braziliense (1808–1822): a imprensa brasileira nasceu inglesa e liberal’. In Política, nação e edição: o lugar dos impressos na construção da vida política. Brasil, Europa e Américas nos Séculos XVIII-XX, edited by Eliana Freitas Dutra e Jean-Yves Mollier.

Bibliography

219

Lustosa, Isabel. Imprensa se Escreve com I de Independência: os Primeiros Jornais Brasileiros. São Paulo: Jorge Zahar, 2003. Lustosa, Isabel. ‘Hipólito da Costa e o Rio Grande’. Revista do Livro 45 (2002): 25–34. Lustosa, Isabel. Insultos impressos: a guerra dos jornalistas na Independência (1821-1823). São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000. Lustosa, Isabel. ‘His Royal Highness e Mr. da Costa’, in Alberto Dines and Isabel Lustosa (eds), Hipólito José da Costa e o Correio Braziliense, 15–60. São Paulo and Brasília: Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo, Correio Braziliense, 2003. Lynch, John (ed.). Andrés Bello, The London Years. Richmond, Surrey : The Richmond Publishing Company, 1982. Machado, Adelaide Maria Muralha Vieira. ‘A importância de se chamar portuguez: José Liberato Freire de Carvalho na direcção do Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra, 1814-1819’. PhD thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2011. MacKenzie, John M. Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. Magalhães, Pablo Antonio Iglesias. ‘A palavra e o império: Manoel de Freitas Brazilierio e a Nova Grammatica Ingleza e Portugueza’. Available online: http://www.revista. ufpe.br/revistaclio/index.php/revista/article/viewFile/283/184 (accessed 1 October 2016). Majumdar, B. B. Indian Political Associations and Reform of Legislature, 1818-1917. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1965. Malerba, Jurandir, A Corte no Exílio. Civilização e Poder no Brasil às Vésperas da Independência (1808 a 1821). São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000. Malia, Martin. Alexander Herzen and the Birth of Russian Socialism 1812-1855. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965. Marques, António Henrique de Oliveira. História da Maçonaria em Portugal. 3 vol, Lisbon: Editoral Presença, 1990–7. Martínez Hoyos, Francisco. ‘Londres, capital de América. Francisco de Miranda y sus proyectos emancipatorios’. Diálogos. Revista Electrónica de Historia 14, no. 2 (2013– 14): 125–44. Martinez, P. K. ‘Paris Communard Refugees in Britain, 1871-1880’. PhD thesis, University of Sussex, 1981. Masani, R. P. Dadabhai Naoroji: The Grand Old Man of India. London: Allen & Unwin, 1939. Masini, Pier Carlo. Storia degli anarchici italiani nell’epoca degli attentati. Milan: Rizzoli, 1981. Mehrotra, S. R. ‘The British India Society and Its Bengal Branch, 1839-1846’. Indian Economic and Social History Review 4, no. 2 (1967): 131–54. Méndez Reyes, Salvador. ‘La misteriosa estancia de los Fagoaga en Londres.’ Relaciones 63/64 (1995): 123–38. Miller, Sally M. ‘Distinctive Media. The European Ethnic Press in the United States’, in Carl F. Kaestle and Janice A. Radway (eds), Print in Motion: The Expansion of Publishing and Reading in the United States, 1880-1940, volume 4 of A History of the Book in America, 299–311. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Morris, A. J. A. The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896–1914. Abingdon: Routledge, 1984. Moulton, Edward C. ‘British Radicals and India in Early Twentieth Century’, in A. J. A. Morris (ed.), Edwardian Radicalism, 1900-1914: Some Aspects of British Radicalism, 26–46, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974. Müller Lehning. A. ‘The International Association (1855-1859)’. International Review for Social History 3 (1938): 185–284.

220

Bibliography

Munaro, Luís Francisco. ‘“O sol da liberdade pura aqui reluz contínuo”: a construção da imprensa lusófona na Inglaterra (1808-1822)’. Idéias. Revista do Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas da UNICAMP 5: no. 8 (2014): 241–63. Munaro, Luis Francisco, ‘Fofocas, Boatos e Rumores: Os Portugueses em Londres (1808-1822)’. Mosaico 4, no. 7 (2014). Available online: http://cpdoc.fgv.br/ mosaico/?q=artigo/fofocas-boatos-e-rumores-os-portugueses-em-londres-1808-1822 (accessed 20 October 2016). Munaro, Luis Francisco. O jornalismo portuguez em Londres (1808–1822). PhD thesis, Universidade Federal Fluminense, 2013. Available online: http://www.historia.uff.br/ stricto/td/1634.pdf (accessed 20 October 2016). Munaro, Luis Francisco. O jornalismo portuguez em Londres (1808-1822): retrato de um tempo e uma profissão. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Publit, 2014. Muñoz Sempere, Daniel and Alonso García, Gregorio (eds). Londres y el liberalismo hispánico. Madrid: Iberoamericana Vervuet, 2011. Murphy, Martin. Blanco White: Self-Banished Spaniard. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989. Murphy, Martin. ‘Critics of the 1812 Constitution: Lord Holland and Blanco White’, in Stephen Roberts and Adam Sharman (eds), 1812 Echoes: The Cádiz Constitution in Hispanic History, Culture and Politics, 119–29. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013. Narain, Prem. Press and Politics in India, 1885-1905. Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1970. Nasta, Susheila (ed.). India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1858-1950. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Nettlau, Max. Errico Malatesta. Vita e pensieri. New York: Casa Editrice Il Martello, 1922. Nettlau, Max. Geschichte der Anarchie, vol. ii: Der Anarchismus von Proudhon zu Kropotkin. Seine historische Entwicklung in den Jahren 1859–1880. Glashütten: Auermann, 1972. Nettlau, Max. Geschichte der Anarchie, vol. iii, Anarchisten und Sozialrevolutionäre. Die historische Entwicklung des Anarchismus in den Jahren 1880–1886. Glashütten: Auermann, 1972. Nettlau, Max. Geschichte der Anarchie, vol. v: Anarchisten und Syndikalisten. Vaduz: Topos-Verlag, 1984. Neves, Lucia Maria Bastos Pereira das Neves, Corcundas, Constitucionais e Pés-de-chumbo: a Cultura Política da Independência, 1820-1822. Rio de Janeiro: FAPERJ: Revan, 2003. Nobre, José Freitas. História da imprensa de São Paulo. São Paulo: Edições Leia, 1950. O’Malley, Tom, ‘Mitchell’s Newspaper Press Directory and the Late Victorian and Early Twentieth-Century Press’. Victorian Periodicals Review 48, no. 4 (2015): 591–606. Oliver, Hermia. The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London. London: Croon Helm, 1983. Oliveira, Carlos Eduardo França de, ‘Tipógrafos, Redatores e Leitores: Aspectos da imprensa Periódica no Primeiro Reinado’. Revista Brasileira de História & Ciências Sociais. Vol. 2, n. 3, July 2010, www.rbhcs.com, 02 April 2017. Oliveira, João Gualberto. Nascimento da imprensa paulista. São Paulo: Ed. Do Autor, 1978. Ortalli, Massimo. Gaetano Bresci. Tessitore anarchico e uccisore di re. Rome: Nova Delphi, 2011. Ossorguine, Tatiana, Lange, Eugénie and Chaix, Paul. ‘Périodiques en langue russe publié en Europe de 1855 à 1917’. Cahiers du monde russe et soviétique 11, no. 4 (1970): 629–709.

Bibliography

221

Owen, Nicholas. The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885-1947. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pallares-Burke, Maria Lúcia G. The Spectator, o teatro das luzes: diálogo e imprensa no século XVIII. São Paulo: Hucitec, 1995. Panayi, Panikos. ‘German Immigrants in Britain, 1815–1914’, in Panikos Panayi (ed.), Germans in Britain since 1500, London: Hambledon Press, 1996. Panayi, Panikos. Immigrants, Ethnicity and Racism in Britain, 1815–1945. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Paquette, Gabriel. ‘Introduction: Liberalism in the Early-Nineteenth Century Iberian World’. History of European Ideas 41, no. 2 (2015): 153–65. Parthé, Kathleen. A Herzen Reader. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2002. Partridge, Monica. ‘Herzen, Ogarev and their Free Russian Press in London’. The AngloSoviet Journal (1966): 8–12. Partridge, Monica. ‘Alexander Herzen and the English Press’. Slavonic and East European Review 36, no. 87 (1958): 453–70. Partridge, Monica. Alexander Herzen: Collected Studies. Nottingham: Astra, 1993. Pedreira, Jorge and Dores Costa, Fernando. D. João VI. Lisbon: Círculo de Leitores, 2006. Peers, E. Allison, ‘The Literary Activities of the Spanish Emigrados in England. 18141834’. The Modern Language Review 19, no. 4 (1924): 445–58. Pérez Viejo, Tomás. ‘El imperio que quiso ser nación: Cádiz, 1812’, in Roberto Breña (ed.), Cádiz a debate: actualidad, contexto y legado, 63–84. Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2014. Pernicone, Nunzio. Italian Anarchism 1864-1892. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pi Sunyer, Carlos. Patriotas americanos en Londres (Miranda, Bello y otros figuras). Caracas: Monte Ávila Editores, 1978. Pipes, Richard. Struve: Liberal on the Left 1870-1905. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970. Pomper, Philip. Peter Lavrov and the Russian Revolutionary Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972. Pons, Andre. Blanco White y España. Oviedo: Instituto Feijoo de Estudios del Siglo XVIII, 2002. Popplewell, Richard J. Intelligence and Imperial Defence: British Intelligence and the Defence of the Indian Empire, 1904-1924. London: Cass, 1995. Porter, Bernard. The Refugee Question in mid-Victorian Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Porter, Bernard. ‘The Freiheit Prosecutions, 1881–1882’. The Historical Journal 23, no. 4 (1980) : 833–56. ‘Projet Gazettes Européennes du 18e siècle’. Available online : http://www.gazettes18e.fr/ projet (accessed 25 November 2016). Racine, Karen. Francisco de Miranda: A Transatlantic Life in the Age of Revolution, 17501816. Wilmington DE: Scholarly Resources, 2003. Racine, Karen. ‘“This England and this Now”: British Cultural and Intellectual Influence in the Spanish American Independence Era’. Hispanic American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (2010): 423–54. Ranasinha, Ruvani (ed.). South Asians and the Shaping of Britain: A Sourcebook. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012. Reis, Fernando José Egídio. ‘Os periódicos portugueses de emigração (1808-1822)’. PhD thesis, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2007.

222

Bibliography

Rizzini, Carlos. Hipólito da Costa e o Correio Braziliense. São Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional, 1957. Robinson, Paul. The White Russian Army in Exile 1920-1941. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002. Rocker, Rudolf. Johann Most: Das Leben eines Rebellen. Berlin: Verlag ‘Der Syndikalist’, 1924. Rocker, Rudolf. The London Years. Nottingham: Five Leaves Press, 2005 (1956). Rodríguez, Mario. ‘William Burke’ and Francisco de Miranda: The Word and the Deed in Spanish America’s Emancipation. Lanham MD: University Press of America, 1994. Rodríguez O., Jaime E. The Emergence of Spanish America: Vicente Rocafuerte and Spanish Americanism 1808-1832. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975. Roldán Vera, Eugenia. The British Book Trade and Spanish American Independence. Education and Knowledge Transmission in Transcontinental Perspective. Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2004. Roldán Vera, Eugenia. ‘Reading in Questions and Answers: The Catechism as an Educational Genre in Early Independent Spanish America’. Book History 4 (2001): 17–48. Roper, Derek. Reviewing before the ‘Edinburgh’, 1788-1802. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1978. Royle, Edward. Radicals, Secularists and Republicans: Popular Freethought in Britain, 18661915. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980. Saglia, Diego. Poetic Castles in Spain: British Romanticism and Figurations of Iberia. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodolpi, 2000. Sánchez García, Raquel. ‘El primer exilio de Antonio Alcalá Galiano’. Investigaciones históricas 19 (1999): 143–57. Sánchez Mantero, Rafael. ‘Exilio liberal e intrigas políticas’. Ayer 47, ‘Los exilios en la España contemporánea’ (2002): 24–6. Santos, Maria Helena Carvalho dos. ‘Imprensa periódica clandestina no século XIX: “O Portuguez” e a Constituição’. Análise Social 26, no. 61–2 (1980): 429–45. Sapir, Boris. ‘Unknown Chapters in the History of “Vpered”’. International Review of Social History 2, no. (1957): 52–77. Sardica, José Miguel. A Europa Napoleónica e Portugal: Messianismo Revolucionário, Política, Guerra e Opinião Pública. Parede: Tribuna da História, 2011. Sareen, Tilak. Indian Revolutionary Movement Abroad. New Delhi: Sterling, 1979. Schneer, Jonathan. London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999. Saurín de la Iglesia, María Rosa (ed.). Cancionero liberal contra Fernando VII. Fasano: Schena Editore, 1998. Seal, Anil. The Emergence of Indian Nationalism: Competition and Collaboration in the Later Nineteenth Century. London: Cambridge University Press, 1968. Senese, Donald. ‘S. M. Kravchinskii and the National Front Against Autocracy’. Slavic Review 34, no. 3 (1975): 506–22. Senese, Donald. S. M. Stepniak-Kravchinskii: The London Years. Newtonville, MA: Oriental Research Partners, 1987. Senese, Donald. ‘Feliks Volkhovsky in London, 1890-1914’. Immigrants and Minorities 2, no. 3 (1983): 67–78. Senn, Alfred Erich. The Russian Revolution in Switzerland 1914-1917. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971. Shattock, Joanne. Politics and Reviewers: the Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age. Leicester and New York: Leicester University Press and St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Bibliography

223

Shattock, Joanne (ed.). Journalism and the Periodical Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Shmelev, Anatol. ‘The Allies in Russia, 1917-20: Intervention as seen by the whites’. Revolutionary Russia 16, no. 1 (2003): 87–107. Silva, Ana Cláudia Suriani da Silva and Vasconcelos, Sandra (eds), Books and Periodicals in Brazil 1768-1930: A Transatlantic Perspective, Studies in Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures. Oxford: Legenda, 2014. Slatter, John. ‘Jaakoff Prelooker and The Anglo-Russian.’ Immigrants and Minorities 2, no. 3 (1983): 48–66. Slatter, John. ‘Bibliography: The Russian émigré press in Britain, 1853-1917’, Slavonic and East European Review 73, no. 4 (1995): 716–47. Soler Pascual, Emilio. ‘Ocios de españoles emigrados: una revista del exilio londinense’, in Antonio Mestre and Enrique Giménez López (eds), Disidencias y exilios en la España Moderna, 842–43. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1997. Soriano, Simão José da Luz. História da Guerra Civil e do Estabelecimento do Governo Parlamentar em Portugal. Segunda época. Vol. II. Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, 1871. Sousa, José Manuel Motta de and Mariano, Maria Lúcia Veloso. História da Imprensa Periódica Portuguesa: Subsídios para uma Bibliografia. Coimbra: Biblioteca Geral da Universidade, 1987. Srinivasachari, C. S. ‘The India Reform Society and Its Impact on the Indian Administration in the Decade 1853-62’. Indian Journal of Political Science 8, no. 1 (1946): 648–61. Startt, James D. Journalists for Empire: The Imperial Debate in the Edwardian Stately Press, 1903-1913. New York: London: Greenwood, 1991. Taylor, Antony. ‘Down with the Crown’: British anti-Monarchism and Debates about Royalty since 1790. London: Reaktion Books, 1999. Tengarrinha, José. Da liberdade mitificada à liberdade subvertida: uma exploração no interior da repressão à imprensa periódica de 1820 a 1828. Lisbon: Colibri, 1993. Tengarrinha, José. História da imprensa periódica portuguesa. Lisbon: Caminho, 1989. Tengarrinha, José. Nova história da imprensa portuguesa das origens a 1865. Lisbon: Temas e Debates, 2013. Tengarrinha, José. ‘Os comerciantes e a imprensa portuguesa da primeira emigração’. Available online: http://ler.letras.up.pt/uploads/ficheiros/5037.pdf (accessed 20 October 2016). Tengarrinha, José. ‘Jornalismo de convergências e de confrontos’. Available online: http:// observatoriodaimprensa.com.br/primeiras-edicoes/jornalismo-de-convergncias-e-deconfrontos-2/ (accessed 20 October 2016). Tombs, Robert. The Paris Commune 1871. London: Longman, 1999. Torgal, Luís Reis (ed.). Liberalismo. Vol. V of História de Portugal. Lisbon: Estampa, 1993. Trautmann, Frederick. The Voice of Terror: A Biography of Johann Most. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980. Trento, Angelo. Do outro lado do Atlântico: um século de imigração italiana no Brasil. São Paulo: Nobel/Istituto Italiano di Cultura di San Paolo, 1988. Tully, Carol. ‘Ackermann, Mora and the transnational context: cultural transfer in the Old World and the New’, in D. Muñoz Sempere and G. Alonso García (eds). Londres y el liberalismo hispánico, 153–64. Madrid: Iberoamericana-Vervuert, 2010. Turcato, Davide. ‘Italian Anarchism as a Transnational Movement 1885-1915’. International Review of Social History 52 (2007): 407–44.

224

Bibliography

Turcato Davide. Making Sense of Anarchism: Errico Malatesta’s Experiments with Revolution, 1889-1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Vadgama, Kusoom. India: British-Indian Campaigns in Britain for Reforms, Justice & Freedom, 1831-1947. London: Banyan Tree, 1997. Van Remoortel, Marianne, Ewins, Kristin, Koffeman, Maaike and Philpotts, Matthew. ‘Joining Forces: European Periodical Studies as a New Research Field’. Journal of European Periodical Studies 1, no. 1 (Summer 2016): ii. Varela Suanzes. Joaquín. ‘El pensamiento constitucional español en el exilio: el abandono del modelo doceañista’. Revista de Estudios Políticos 88 (1995): 63–90. Venturi, Franco. Roots of Revolution: A History of the Populist and Socialist Movements in Nineteenth Century Russia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. Villalta, Luiz Carlos Villalta, ‘O que se fala e o que se lê: língua, instrução e leitura’, in Laura de Mello Souza (ed.), História da Vida Privada no Brasil, vol. 1, 331–85. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1997. Visram, Rozina. Asians in Britain: 400 Years of History. London: Pluto, 2002. Visram, Rozina. Ayahs, Lascars and Princes: Indians in Britain, 1700-1947. London: Pluto Press, 1986. Wainwright, A. Martin. ‘The Better Class’ of Indians: Social Rank, Imperial Identity, and South Asians in Britain, 1858-1914. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Williams, Helen. ‘Ringing the Bell: Editor-Reader Dialogue in Alexander Herzen’s Kolokol’. Book History 4 (2001): 115–32. Wittke, Carl. The German-Language Press in America. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957. Yajnik, Indulal. Shyamaji Krishnavarma: The Life and Times of an Indian Revolutionary. Bombay : Lakshmi Publications, 1950. Zimmer, Kenyon. Immigrants Against the State. Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America. Urbana, Chicago and Springfield: University of Illinois Press, 2015. Zimmerman, Judith. Midpassage: Alexander Herzen and European Revolution. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989.

Index A Aurora Boreal 86 Acevedo, Manuel 41, 197 Ackermann, Rudolf 26, 31, 40 Adam, William 177 Agresti, Antonio 118–20, 193, 205 Alcalá Galiano, Antonio 33, 36, 42 Aldred, Guy 11, 186, 187, 191 Alexander II of Russia 137, 156, 157, 166, 169, 202 Almeida Garrett, João Baptista da Silva Leitão de 78, 84, 86, 201 Analytical Review 60 Anglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1810 58 Annaes das Sciencias, das Artes e das Letras 58 Antepara, José María 18–20, 30, 209 Anti-Corn Law League 105 Anti-Socialist Laws (Germany) 135–8, 148, 193, 202 Arbeter Fraint 140, 151, 204 Argus Lusitano ou Cartas Analíticas 77, 78 Austria 138, 142, 201, 203 Autonomie, Die 136, 138–45, 148, 202, 203 Bacherini, Antonio 124 Bakunin, Mikhail 141, 161 Baukunin Press 186 Bande Mataram 187 Barton, Benjamin Smith 54 Belgium 95, 99, 102, 118, 129, 143, 196, 202 Brussels 99, 103, 113, 124, 141, 193 Bello, Andrés 20, 23–6, 28, 193 Bengal (division of) 175, 182 Beresford, William Carr/Marshal of 59, 82 Berjeau, Jean-Philibert 92, 95, 96 Berkman, Alexander 144 Berlin 11, 137, 187, 193, 202–3

Bernard, Martin 92, 96, 106 Bernard, Simon 107 Berneri, Marie Louise 131, 195 Bernstein, Eduard 136, 138, 139, 147, 193, 194 Bevington, Louise Sarah 117, 118, 132 Birmingham 99 Black Legend 18 Blanc, Louis 92, 93, 95, 96, 102–6 Blanco White, José María 18, 21, 28, 36, 38, 39, 47, 194, 201 Blatchford, Robert 147, 148 Boichot, Jean-Baptiste 92 Bolívar, Simón 39, 63 Bonaparte, Joseph 64 Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon (Napoleon III, President Bonaparte) 92, 93, 103, 104, 105, 107, 196, 204 Bonaparte, Napoleon 20, 21, 22, 27, 34, 35, 38, 39, 56, 58, 64, 66, 75, 81, 92, 197, 198 Bonapartism 34, 93, 104 anti-Bonapartism 104 Bonner, Hypatia Bradlaugh 183 Bonnerjee, W. C. 177, 178, 179, 180, 194 Bonnet-Duverdier, Prosper 94, 106 Borges, José Ferreira 78, 86, 201 Bourdin, Martial 139 Bradlaugh, Alice 183 Bradlaugh, Charles 106, 180 Brazil 4, 9, 11, 12, 27, 51–3, 55–9, 61–8, 73, 75, 76, 80, 82, 84, 127, 130, 197, 204 Pernambuco 64, 65, 80, 197 Rio de Janeiro 51, 52, 55, 57, 58, 62, 65, 83, 204 Rio Grande (do Sul) 53, 62, 68, 196 São Paulo 127 Brazilian Constitution (1824) 84 Bresci, Gaetano 121, 122, 133, 195

226

Index

Britain, India and Pakistan Association 179 British and Foreign Bible Society 27, 28 British Committee of the Indian National Congress (BCINC) 175, 202 British Indian Advocate 177, 187 British India Society 177 British Socialist Party 199 Bulletin de l’Association Internationale 94, 96, 101, 104, 107 Burke, Edmund 65, 178, 183 Burke, Henry 137 Burke, William 17 CABV (Communist Workers’ Educational Association) 10, 137–40, 142, 202 Cahaigne, Joseph 94 Caine, W. S. 180, 181 Calatrava, José María 42 Calero y Portocarrero, Marcelino 43, 45, 47, 194, 195 Cama, Bhikaiji ‘Madame’ 184, 187, 198 Cama, Muncherjee Hormusji 202 Canga Argüelles, José 43–5, 206 Carlyle, Thomas 60 Carpenter, Edward 181, 182 Carpenter, Mary 179, 187 Carvalho, José Liberato Freire de 56, 76, 78, 82, 85, 86, 195, 197, 201 Carvalho, José Pinto Rebelo 78 Caserio, Sante 118 Castro, Bernardo José de Abrantes e 76, 78 Castro, Miguel Caetano de 76, 78 Cause ed Effetti 119, 121–3, 131, 133 Caussidière, Marc 92, 106 Cavendish, Lord 137 censorship 3, 8, 11, 20, 36, 38, 52, 58, 68, 74–6, 79, 83, 92, 93, 97, 99, 101, 103, 124, 155, 156, 158, 159, 163, 175, 188 Charter Act of 1853 179 Chartism 11, 83, 84, 86–8, 94, 95, 106 Chattopadhyaya, Virendranath 187 Cherkezov, Varlaam 124 Chirol, Valentine 184 Cioci, Giuseppe 115, 117 City of London tavern 56

Clarion 147 Club Autonomie (Autonomie Club) 10, 99, 138–42, 148, 203 Cœurderoy, Ernest 104 Collet, Joseph-Charles 95, 96, 100, 106, 109 Columbus, Christopher 25, 27 Comité central démocratique européen 92, 101, 102, 103, 104, 106, 109 Communards 8, 96, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106 Congress Political Agency (Indian Political Agency) 180 Consorti, Giuseppe 115 Constitutional Charter (1826) 73, 83–8, 200 Constitution of Cadiz (Cadiz Constitution) 9, 81 Contemporary Review 181 Corio, Silvio 123–5, 126, 130, 131, 195 Correio Braziliense ou Armazém Literário 2, 6, 51–71, 76, 78, 82, 89, 196 Correio da Península ou Novo Telegrapho 57 Correio dos Açores 84, 86, 90 Correios dos Portugueses Emigrados 78, 84, 86 Costa, Hipólito (José) da Costa (Furtado de Mendonça) 2, 8, 9, 51–71, 78, 81, 195, 196 Diário de minha viagem para Filadélfia 53, 65 A Narrative of the Persecution 54, 55 Cotton, H. E. A. 180 Coutinho, D. Domingos de Sousa/Count of Funchal 53, 56 Criminal Intelligence Department 185 The Critical Review 59 Cuba 3, 102 Cuisinier, Henri 96 Cunha, Vicente Pedro Nolasco da 76, 78 Curzon Wyllie, William Hutt 185, 186, 199, 205 Daily Mail 147 Darasz, Albert 92, 96, 102 Dave, Victor 143–5, 203

Index Declaration of Independence of the United States 53 Delescluze, Charles 92, 96, 196, 204 del Marmol, Tàrrida 124, 133 Depoilly, Louis 96, 101 Deroin, Jeanne 95, 104 Despard, Charlotte 184 Dhingra, Madan Lal 185, 186, 191, 198, 205 Digby, William 180, 181, 187 digitization 1, 2, 9 D. João VI 52, 53, 57, 64, 65 D. Maria II/princess Maria da Glória 84, 85 D. Miguel 74, 83, 86, 88, 200 D. Pedro IV/Duke of Bragança 74, 83 Duke of Cumberland 66 Duke of Kent 66 Duke of Sussex 51, 55, 57, 65–7 Duke of York 66 East India Association (EIA) 174, 189, 194, 202 East India Company 175 Edinburgh Review 60, 61 El Colombiano 2, 10, 18, 39 El Emigrado Observador 45, 46, 48, 195 El Español 2, 6, 8, 10, 11, 18, 21, 36–40, 194, 197 El Español Constitucional 40–3, 47, 48, 50, 197 El Productor 115 El Repertorio Americano 24, 26, 27, 193, 198 Engels, Friedrich 138, 139, 194 English Review 59 Esteve, Pedro 122 Farrah, Frederick 95, 106 Faure, Philippe 94, 105 Fernández Sardino, Pedro Pascasio 196 Fernando VII (of Spain) 64–5, 81 First World War 2, 114, 130, 187, 193, 199, 201, 204 Florez Estrada, Avaro 41 Fortune, E. F. Thomas 54 France 2, 11, 21, 55, 64, 66, 75, 81, 88, 91–111, 114, 123, 125, 127, 129, 163, 200, 202, 203

227

As a host country for exiles 3–4, 33, 34, 42, 45, 48, 156, 193, 195 Paris 4, 11, 24, 46, 48, 58, 64, 76, 84, 92, 93, 95–9, 101, 103, 105, 106, 115, 120, 123–5, 129, 146, 158, 160–2, 166, 168, 169, 184, 185, 187, 193, 195, 196, 199–206 France, Nicolas 96 Francisco Simões Margiochi 78 Franco-Prussian War 95, 196 Freedom 99, 107, 119, 124, 131 freedom of the press 3, 4, 35, 39, 58, 65, 67, 75, 76, 79, 80, 83, 114, 145, 164, 176 Freemasonry 51, 53, 55, 56, 195, 197, 200 Freiheit 136–40, 142–6, 148, 202, 203 Freitas, Joaquim Ferreira de 77, 78 French Charter (1814) 84 French Invasions (1807–1811) 73, 76, 77, 79 French Revolution 1789 5, 9, 10, 28, 33, 34, 35, 53, 74, 80, 81, 91, 102, 104, 196 1830 10, 33 1848 10, 91–111, 145, 156, 196, 198 Fröhlich, Conrad 139 The Gaelic American 185, 187 Galassini, Antonio 127, 131 García del Río, Juan 24, 25, 198 Gazeta do Rio de Janeiro 52 The Gentleman’s Magazine 67 Germany 11, 92, 102, 135–40, 142, 143, 147, 148, 161, 194, 202–4 Germinal 102, 140, 204 Germinal (São Paulo) 127 Ghose, Manmohun 177 Glenie, Mary Ann 57 Godrej, Manchershah Barjorji 184 Goldman, Emma 144, 145 Gori, Pietro 118, 125 Har Dayal, Lala 183 Hardie, Keir 147, 180 Harney, George Julian 105, 106 Haymarket Affair 141 Henriques, José Anselmo Correia 77, 78 Herzen, Alexander 94, 102, 155, 156–8, 161–4, 166–9, 198, 199

228

Index

Hewart, Gordon 180, 187 Holstein, D. Pedro de Sousa, Marquis of Palmela 56, 84 Holyoake, George Jacob 102, 106 Horsley, Arthur Fletcher 186 Huguenot 91 Hume, Allan Octavia 179–81 Hungary 92, 102, 138 Hyndman, Henry Mayers 180, 181, 182, 184, 187, 198, 199 Il Risveglio 122 Imprimerie universelle 94, 98 India 6, 175, 176, 179–83, 187, 188 India Home Rule Society (IHRS) 176, 199 India House 184, 185, 198, 199, 205 Indian Civil Service (ICS) 175, 176, 202 Indian National Congress (INC) 8, 175, 194, 202 Indian Press Act (1910) 185 The Indian Sociologist 3, 11, 175, 176, 182–8, 199 India Reform Society 177 Inquisition Portuguese 51, 55, 58, 64, 65, 196 Spanish 15, 23, 35, 39, 43, 201 International Association (IA) 94 International Courier/ Le Courrier International 95, 96, 98, 101–3 International Working Men’s Association (IWMA) 95, 200 Ireland 22, 137 Irish National League of Great Britain 180 Italy 2, 11, 92, 102, 113–17, 119, 121–5, 127, 129, 130, 156, 193, 199, 200 Rome 92, 193, 200, 204, 205 Joffrin, Jules 96 Journal of the East India Association 175, 176, 177, 179, 181, 183, 187, 188 Journal of the National Indian Association 179, 187 June Days (1848) 92 Junot, General 75 Justice (SDF) 147, 185, 187, 198, 199 Kampffmeyer, Bernhard 119

Kautsky, Karl 147, 194 Kelly, Harry 125 Knauerhase, Gustav 142 Kossuth, Lajos (Louis) 1, 94, 103 Krishnavarma, Shyamaji 175, 176, 182–8, 198, 199, 205 Kropotkin, Peter (Petr) 1, 11, 117, 118, 124, 142, 159, 164, 203 La Biblioteca Americana 6, 17, 24–7, 31, 198 Labour Party 161, 180 L’Agitazione (Ancona) 121, 200 La Grève Générale/ Il Sciopero Generale 96, 125, 126, 130, 131, 195 La Guerra Tripolina 129, 130, 131 La Guerre Sociale/ La Guerra Sociale 96, 97, 113, 114, 131 L’Anarchia 117, 119, 120, 130, 131, 193, 200 Lapie, Armand 99 L’Apostolato Popolare 113 La Questione Sociale (Buenos Aires) 103, 117 La Questione Sociale (Florence) 115, 200 La Questione Sociale (New Jersey) 118, 120, 124, 127, 193 Las Casas, Bartolomé 25, 27, 201 L’Associazione 114–17, 130, 131, 200 La Tribune Libre 96, 97, 101 L’Aurora (Spring Valley) 124 L’Avenir 96 La Voix du proscrit 11, 92, 93, 96, 98, 99, 101–6, 196, 204 Le Courrier révolutionnaire 96, 97 Ledru-Rollin, Alexandre 92, 95, 96, 98, 103, 106 Lee Warner Committee 184 Le Nouveau Monde 92, 96 Le Père Peinard 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 203, 204 Le Peuple 93, 101, 102, 196 Le Proscrit 10, 92, 96, 101, 102, 106, 196, 204 Le Rothschild 96, 97, 99, 101 Les Temps Nouveaux 101, 124 Le Tocsin 96–9, 105, 200 Le Travail. Bulletin Mensuel du Club International d’études sociales de Londres 6

Index L’Homme 102–7, 113, 204 Liberal Revolution (Portugal, 1820) 35, 57, 73, 74, 77, 79, 83, 87, 200 Liberty 99, 107 L’International 96, 97, 98, 99 L’Internazionale 123, 124, 125, 131 Linton, William 105, 106, 168 Liverpool 99, 194 Londoner Freie Presse 138, 141, 145–8 Londoner Volks-Zeitung 135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 146, 147 London Indian Society 177, 179, 194, 202 London Positivist Society 184 López Méndez, Luis 20, 25 Lord Lyveden (Robert Vernon Smith) 177 Louis Blanc’s Monthly Review 92, 96, 105 Loureiro, João Bernardo da Rocha 56, 76, 78 L’Union démocratique 96, 97, 98, 104, 206 L’Uomo Libero 121 McLaren, W. S. B. 180 Magalhães, Rodrigo da Fonseca 78, 85, 86, 197 Malatesta, Errico 114–22, 125–9, 131, 193, 200 Malato, Charles 96, 97, 107, 118, 200 Martín, José de San 25, 65 Martins, Domingos 64 Marx, Karl 1, 141, 198 Massena, General 75, 82 May Day 100, 141, 142, 146, 200 Mazzini, Giuseppe 1, 92, 94, 96, 101, 102, 103, 106, 113, 162, 205 Mehta, Pherozeshah 177, 180 Mendibil, Pablo 45 Meneses, Francisco de Alpoim 77, 78 Merlino, Francesco Saverio 115, 120 Mesa do Desembargo do Paço 83 Mesquita, Pedro Pereira Fernandes de 53 Mexico 16, 18, 24, 26, 28, 201 Mexico City 99, 198, 201 Michel, Louise 118, 124, 125, 204 Microscópio de Verdades ou Óculo Singular 76, 77, 78 Midosi, Paulo 78, 84, 86, 87, 201 Mier, Servando Teresa de 21, 22, 30 Miguelismo 83

229

Mill, John Stuart 178 Miranda, Francisco de (‘O Precursor’) 8, 10, 15–20, 38, 63, 65, 196 Monier-Williams, Monier 199 Moniz, Nuno Álvares Pereira Pato 4, 57, 200, 201 The Monthly Review 59 Mora, José Joaquín de 40, 47 Most, Johann 3, 8, 136, 137, 139, 140, 142–6, 148, 201–3 Motteler, Julius 136, 139 Muirhead, John Henry 180, 187 Naoroji, Dadabhai 8, 175, 177–82, 194, 198, 202 Napoleonic Wars 2, 17 National Indian Association 179 nationalism 9, 16, 80, 101, 129, 177, 182 National Socialist Party 199 Nettlau, Max 118, 119, 140, 143, 144 Neve, John (Johann) 137, 139, 143, 144, 202, 203 New India 184 Newby, Thomas 92 New Times and Ethiopia News 131, 195 New York 3, 5, 24, 99, 136, 137, 142, 144, 152, 185, 202, 203 Nikitine, Louis 96 Norton, Eardley 180 O’Brien, Bronterre 95 O Campeão Portuguez ou o Amigo do Rei e do Povo 76, 78, 83 O Censor 78 O Chaveco Liberal 78, 84–6, 201 Ocios de Españoles Emigrados 41, 43, 195, 206 O Correio Interceptado 78 O Cruzeiro ou Estrela Constitucional dos Portugueses 78 O’Donnell, Frank Hugh 180 O Espelho Político e Moral 4, 5, 57, 77, 78, 200 O Fulminante 78, 84, 85 O’Higgins, Bernardo 25 O Inominado 78, 84 O Investigador Portuguez em Inglaterra 2, 3, 6, 56, 74, 76, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 195

230

Index

Olmedo, José Joaquín de 27 O Observador Lusitano em Paris ou Colecção Literária, Política e Commercial 58 O Padre Amaro ou Sovela, Política, Histórica e Literária 56, 77, 78 O Padre Malagrida ou a Tezoira 78, 84, 85 O Palinuro 78, 84, 86 O Pelourinho 86 O Perguntador 78, 87 O Popular 78 O Portuguez Constitucional em Londres 78, 84, 87 O Portuguez Emigrado ou Realista Constitucional 78, 84, 85 O Portuguez ou Mercúrio Político, Comercial e Literário 4, 57, 76, 78 O Precursor 78, 84, 86 Orsini, Felice 3, 104, 107, 145 O Zurrague Político das Cortes Novas 77, 78 Paine, Thomas 45, 178, 183, 203 Pal, Bipin Chandra 182 Palacio Fajardo, Manuel 22, 23, 24 Pall Mall Gazette 198 Palmelistas 84 Pankhurst, Sylvia 130, 131, 195 Paquete de Portugal 78, 84, 85, 197, 200 Paris Commune (1871) 95, 125, 146, 196, 199, 202, 206 Paris Indian Society 184, 199 Parmeggiani, Luigi 140 Passos brothers (José and Manuel) 84 Pazos Kanki, Vicente 23, 28, 203 Peninsular War 57, 73, 194, 197 Peru 18, 25, 26, 28, 38, 198, 203 Peters, Carl 116 Peukert, Josef 136, 138, 139, 141–4, 148, 202, 203 Pezzi, Francesco 115 Pianciani, Luigi 94, 107 Pissarro, Lucien 118 Pizarro, Rodrigo Pinto 84 Plymouth 4, 74, 83, 84, 85, 87, 88, 201 Polak, H. S. 180, 187

Poland 92, 102, 157 police 55, 97, 98, 106, 115–17, 126, 135, 137–40, 142, 144, 195, 203 authorities 99 censorship 163 cooperation 8 policeman 205 reports 136, 137, 141, 146, 148 secret 199 spy 143, 148, 203 surveillance 4 Portugal 2, 4, 9, 12, 34, 35, 51–3, 55–9, 62, 64, 73–7, 80, 82, 83, 84, 86, 87, 195–7, 200, 201 Lisbon 51, 54, 56–8, 64, 65, 75, 78, 84, 195, 197, 199–201 Porto 57, 79 Pouget, Emile 96, 97, 98, 101, 107, 118, 203 Preto, Marcos Pinto Soares Vaz 78, 85, 197 Prussia 96, 103 public opinion 10, 11, 16, 28, 29, 73, 75, 76, 87, 158, 164, 165, 166 Pyat, Félix 92, 95, 96, 97, 100, 107 Quarterly Review 60, 61 Queen Victoria 107 Quelch, Henry 184, 187 Qui vive! 96, 97, 206 Rackow, Heinrich 137–40, 146 Rai, Lala Lajpat 184, 185 Rana, Sardar Singh 184 Rast Goftar 177 Rawdon-Hastings, Francis/The Earl of Moira 66 Rebell, Der 138, 139, 142, 143, 203 Recchioni, Emidio 116 Republicanism 9, 45, 91, 104, 105 Reuß, Charles Theodor 143, 203 Revolution of Pernambuco of 1817 64 Reynolds’s Newspaper 145 Ribeyrolles, Charles 92, 94, 96, 98, 101, 103, 104, 105, 106, 107, 204 Richards, Vernon 131, 195 Rinke, Otto 138, 139, 141, 142–4 Rocafuerte, Vicente 26, 27, 45 Rocker, Rudolf 140, 142–5, 204

Index Roman Republic (1849) 102, 103 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel 118, 205 Rossetti, Gabriel Arthur 118, 131 Rossetti, Helen 204, 205 Rossetti, Olivia 118, 194, 204, 205 Rossetti, William Michael 118, 204 Rothstein, Theodore 135, 139 Roy, Rajah Rammohun 177 Rubino, Gennaro 126 Ruge, Arnold 92, 96, 102 Russia 2, 102, 124, 135, 155–74, 196, 198, 199, 205 Moscow 160, 168, 169, 198 St. Petersburg 161, 169, 199, 205, 206 Sachse, Józef 138, 139, 147 Saint-Helier (Jersey) 94, 98 Sanders, John 106, 107 SAP (Socialist Workers’ Party, Germany) 136–8, 140, 141 Sarasvati, Swami Dayananda 184 Savarkar, Vinayak Damodar 185, 198, 205 Schlüter, Hermann 136, 139 Scolari, Gaetano 126 Scotland Yard 184, 186 Scott, Walter 60 SDF (Social Democratic Federation) 146, 147, 198 Sea Customs Act of 1878 185 Second Empire (France) 93, 95, 194, 206 Second International 120, 141, 202 Second Republic (France) 92, 93, 95, 100, 104, 196 Sen, Keshub Chunder 179 Setembrizada 75 smuggling 8, 115, 168 Socialist League 99, 105, 146 Soriano, Simão José da Luz 74 Soult, General 75 Sozialdemokrat, Der 136, 138–41, 143, 145, 147, 148, 193 Spain 9, 21, 22, 25, 33–42, 45, 47, 48, 52, 53, 64, 73, 81, 102, 128, 129, 195–8, 200, 201, 206 Cadiz 35, 37, 38, 39, 64 Constitution of Cadiz 9, 81 Madrid 18, 20, 34, 37, 42, 99, 194

231

Spencer, Herbert 183, 184, 199 Spies 99, 101, 116, 127, 128, 143, 144, 148, 203 The Statesman 181 Stephens, Morse 180, 187 Stepnyak-Kravchinskii Sergei Mikhaylovich 118 subscriptions 11, 116, 124, 127, 129, 158 surveillance 4, 8, 145, 184, 185, 200 Swinny, Hugh 184 Świętosławski, Zeno 94 Switzerland 11, 95, 102, 127, 128, 137, 139, 140, 141, 142, 145, 148, 156, 161, 187, 201, 202, 203, 206 Geneva 4, 5, 98, 99, 113, 117, 156, 157, 161, 166, 187, 198, 199 Lausanne 98 Zurich 4, 5, 124, 136, 140, 143, 156, 158, 161, 193, 199 Tafery, François 95 Tagore, Dwarkanath 177 Tagore, Gnanendramohan 177 Talandier, Alfred 94–6 Talchi, Giovanni 115 Talvar 187 Tauscher, Leonhard 136, 139 Taxes on knowledge 3 Tchorzewski, Stanisław 102 Terceira Island (Azores) 86 The Asiatic Review 175, 179, 189 Thompson, George 177 Tilak, Bal Gangadhar 182, 183, 198, 205 The Torch 10, 11, 99, 107, 117–19, 131, 193, 205 Treaty of San Idelfonso 53 Tyabji, Badruddin 177, 180 Vellozo, Mariano da Conceição 54 Venezuela 20, 25, 63, 193, 196 Venezuelan Revolution 39 Venezuelan Declaration of Independence (1811) 39 Vermersch, Eugène 96–8, 206 Vermersch-Journal 96, 97, 98, 206 Vésinier, Pierre 96, 98 Vezzani, Felice 122 Villaneuva brothers (Jaime and Lorenzo) 43, 44

232 Villanueva y Astengo, Joaquín Lorenzo 206 Volkhovskii, Feliks 158, 162, 206

Index Worcell, Stanisław 92, 94, 96, 162 Working Man 95, 98, 102, 103, 104, 106 Xavier, Cândido José

Wacha, D. E. 181 Wedderburn, William 179–81, 184 Wicked Laws (France) 97 William Clowes & Sons 177

85, 86

Zanardelli, Tito 96, 114, 123, 128 Zmichowsk, Erasmus 102 Zoroastrian Association 202