Translation Rights TQE / Daggers and Dynamite. Anarchists and the Birth of Terrorism

It has been said that anarchism represents an exaggerated idea of liberty, a dream of an egalitarian world, freed from all forms of power and coercion. A utopia, perhaps, but a beautiful one at that. The real history of anarchism, however, has been linked to the practice of an extreme form of coercion: violence, often indiscriminate, against people. Juan Avilés explores how some anarchists deduced the legitimacy of their attacks from the principle of liberty, thus becoming pioneers of this type of violence which we have come to know as terrorism.

La daga y la dinamita takes a closer look at Bakunin’s romantic appeal to the revolutionary destruction of existing social order, offers an account of the spiral of massive murders that cast a shadow over European and North American politics during the last third of the 19^th century, concludes with the terrorist attempts that shed blood on the streets of Paris and Barcelona, such as the bomb at the Liceo, while it explains why Spain is one of the countries where anarchist ideology became most consolidated

Juan Avilés Farré is a professor of Contemporary History at the UNED. He has written books about the civil war: Pasión y farsa: franceses y británicos ante la guerra civil española (Passion and Farce: The French and British in View of the Spanish Civil War), the birth of Communism: La fe que vino de Rusia: la revolución bolchevique y los españoles (The Faith That Came from Russia: The Bolshevik Revolution and the Spaniards), Ferrer y Guardia: Francisco Ferrer y Guardia: pedagogo, anarquista y mártir  (Francisco Ferrer y Guardia: Pedagogue, Anarchist and Martyr) and Al Qaeda: Osama Bin Laden y Al Qaeda: el fin de una era (Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda: The End of an Era). True to Voltaire’s advice, he believes that the historian has two main obligations: to entertain and to tell the truth.