L'attentato di Matteo Morral [The Attempt on Matteo Morral]. East Boston: Gruppo Autonomo, [1910?]

L'attentato di Matteo Morral [The Attempt on Matteo Morral]. East Boston: Gruppo Autonomo, [1910?]

This is the Italian-language version of a French anarchist's perspective on the Morral affair, an attempted assassination of the Spanish King Alfonso XIII and his bride, Victoria Eugenie, on their wedding day, May 31, 1906 by Mateu Morral, who threw a bomb from a balcony, killing 24 bystanders without harming the royal procession.

Two days after the attack, militiamen accosted Morral, who killed one before killing himself. Morral was likely involved in a similar attack on the king a year prior.

The affair became a pretext to stop Francisco Ferrer,  an anarchist pedagogue who ran Escuela Moderna, the influential, rationalist, antigovernment, anticlerical, antimilitary, Barcelonean school in whose library Morral worked. 

Morral is celebrated here as a hero. The Boston-based Gruppo Autonomo that published this edition, affiliated with Luigi Galleani, did not refrain from violence when it believed it was necessary.

Author Charles Malato (1857–1938) was a French anarchist and writer. He was born to a noble Neapolitan family; his grandfather Count Malato was a Field Marshal and the Commander-in-Chief of the army of the last King of Naples. 

Count Malato ferociously suppressed a popular anti-dynastic insurrection; his son – Charles' father – supported the communards of the Paris Commune, and was banished as a result to the penal colony of New Caledonia, where Charles was born. After the amnesty of anarchists and communists, Charles and his by that time ninety-year-old father returned to Paris, where they immersed themselves in the anarchist movement.

Carlo [Charles-Armand-Antoine] Malato

Gruppo Autonomo

[1910?]

13 x 8.5cm; 20 p.

Italian