AL-QAEDA’S international terror network is not unrivalled in history. A little over a century ago, anarchist cells, operating throughout the Western world, caused havoc. In the space of nine years between 1892 and 1901, anarchists assassinated the President of the United States, the President of France, the Prime Minister of Spain, the Empress of Austria and the King of Italy. As scalp hunting goes, this was an impressive collection.

In London, post offices were blown up and public figures were targeted. A bomb went off on an Underground train as it was passing from Farringdon into what was then the Aldersgate Tube station. The carriage was shredded. Miraculously only one man was killed. Bombs were lobbed from upper galleries on to the floors of the Paris stock exchange and the French Chamber of Deputies. Army barracks were attacked. A bomb was detonated in a café near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Another device was tossed into a Madrid theatre, killing 20 people.

These indiscriminate acts caused widespread alarm. Dark and shadowy bearded figures, with capes concealing orb-shaped bombs with fizzing fuses, stalked the popular imagination. The Times warned its readers of the “anarchist epidemic” and told the Home Secretary, Herbert Asquith, to quit his “masterly inactivity” and get a grip on the problem. For a brief moment in the mid-1890s, the Western world shook before this new enemy within. And yet, where is the anarchist terror network now? Are there lessons in its rise and fall for today’s war on terror?

The militant atheists of late 19th- century Europe would have found little common intellectual ground with 21st-century Islamists. Yet, both were ascetic movements whose followers were repelled by the decadence and thoughtless exploitation they believed inherent in Western bourgeois society. Both movements turned away from the world as it was in favour of an idealised world as it might be. Like the Islamists, the anarchists rejected the political compromises of the democratic process. The more desperate among them put their point across with dynamite instead.

Anarchists justified terrorism with the euphemism “propaganda by the deed”. The argument was lucidly expressed by Emile Henry when he stood in the dock during his trial for bombing the Parisian station café: “I wanted to show the bourgeoisie that their pleasures would no longer be complete, that their insolent triumphs would be disturbed, that their golden calf would tremble violently on its pedestal, until the final shock would cast it down in mud and blood.”

These sentiments are reminiscent of those believers in American hubris who applauded when the mighty twin towers came tumbling down. Like al-Qaeda’s operatives, anarchists thrived on the cult of death. The 30,000 killed in the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871, the hanging of four anarchists on flimsy evidence for a Chicago bomb explosion and even the death of three protesters at the hands of the police trying to prevent an illegal demonstration in Trafalgar Square in 1887 (the original “Bloody Sunday”): all were co-opted as martyrs to the cause whose deaths should be avenged.

Unlike nationalist terrorist groups, such as the IRA or ETA, the gripe of anarchists and al-Qaeda was not confined to a specific grievance against a single country and its government. Rather, the grievance was international in reach and fundamental in ideology. Many of the anarchist outrages were committed by terrorists who were not of the same nationality as their target. A high proportion came from immigrant communities, often those who had arrived as political asylum-seekers through Victorian Britain’s open door.

It was widely assumed in Europe that there was a tacit understanding that the anarchist cells could remain unmolested in Britain so long as they carried out their attacks abroad. In an echo of today’s scathing criticism of “Londonistan”, such tolerance infuriated European neighbours who believed London was becoming a base for terrorist strikes on the Continent. When the terror came to London, the foreign press could scarcely conceal its relief.

In 1898 the Italian Government called an international conference to address the anarchist threat. The intention was to reach agreement for each country to frame laws that banned anarchist publications and publicity of anarchist trials and that all anarchists should be repatriated to their country of origin. This proved too sweeping at the time, although the US Congress responded to the assassination of President McKinley with a law banning entry to the country to anyone “who disbelieves in or is opposed to all organised governments”. In Britain, the 1905 Aliens Act allowed for the deportation of undesirable immigrants.

By then, the anarchist terror threat had already abated. Partly, it was because the forces of law and order made life so difficult for the terrorists and their sympathisers. This was not easy. The decentralised nature of anarchism meant that its terrorist cells were small. It could not be decapitated merely by rounding up the ringleaders. Indeed, many of the atrocities were committed by adherents acting on their own initiative.

However, this was not an excuse for doing nothing. Suspected anarchists were watched, their meetings monitored, their clubs closed down. Groups remaining unmolested feared that they had been infiltrated by police informers. This had a corrosive effect on the bonds of trust that underground movements depend upon. Those sent to prison became suspicious on release of those who remained at liberty. Suspicion bred disintegration.

The principal cause, though, was the realisation that while other socialist movements were making gains, the anarchists, by refusing to engage and cooperate, were not. Potential converts joined the radical causes that were succeeding instead. This is the problem for “all-or-nothing” fundamentalism: it usually ends with nothing.

Terrorists with specific goals and the nous to make tactical compromises can end up in power. But this imperfect world is not good enough for al-Qaeda. And that profound weakness may yet confine it to the same historical irrelevance as the 1890s anarchists.

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