The World That Never Was  

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"In the early years of the twenty-first century, a British Home Secretary recommended that those wishing to understand what at that time was still termed the ‘War on Terror’ should look back to the 1890s. Parallels were widely drawn with the wave of bombings and assassinations that had swept Europe and America at the end of the nineteenth century, perpetrated by anarchists and nihilists for whom London and Switzerland had provided refuge. Then as now, it was remarked, disaffected young men from swollen immigrant communities had been radicalised by preachers of an extremist ideology and lured into violence. Some commentators wrote of ‘Islamo-anarchism’, while others remarked that Al-Zawahiri, the ‘brains’ of Al-Qaeda, had studied the revolutionary writings of the godfather of anarchism, Michael Bakunin."--The World That Never Was (2010) by Alex Butterworth

The Anarchist (1892) by Félix Vallotton
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The Anarchist (1892) by Félix Vallotton

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The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents is a 2010 book by Alex Butterworth about anarchism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe and the United States. On the cover of some editions is the woodcut The Anarchist (1892) by Félix Vallotton.

Overview

The book begins with the story of the exposure of Yevno Azef, a leading member of Russia's Socialist Revolutionary Party, as an agent of the Okhrana in 1908. Butterworth then moves on to the events preceding the Paris Commune of 1871, including biographical sketches of the French anarchist and geographer Élisée Reclus and the German spy Wilhelm Stieber; and the Commune itself, with an account centring on the experience of Louise Michel, an anarchist and school teacher. The following chapters focus on the activities of the Russian anarchist and geographer Peter Kropotkin, the French radical Victor Henri Rochefort, Marquis de Rochefort-Luçay, the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Tchaikovsky and the Russian spy Pyotr Rachkovsky in the 1870s.

Butterworth's focus then moves to London, focusing in particular on the artist and writer William Morris; and to Chicago and the events leading up to the Haymarket affair of 1886 including Johann Most's lecture tour (which began in 1883). The chapters that follow focus on the activities of London's Metropolitan Police Service and its Special Branch (including around Bloody Sunday), Rachkovsky's work in Paris in the late 1880s, William Melville's pursuit of anarchists in London, and the change in public perception of anarchism and anarchists concurrent with the emergence of propaganda of the deed and Leon Czolgosz's assassination of U.S. President William McKinley. The final chapters deal with the deaths of Michel and Reclus, the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917, and Kropotkin's death in 1921.

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