The Liceu bombing was a terrorist attack by the Spanish anarchist Santiago Salvador, who killed 20 to 30 people at Barcelona's Grand Lyceum Theatre on 7 November 1893. The bombing was in response to the execution of Paulí Pallàs, who had himself attempted to assassinate the Captain General of Catalonia, Arsenio Martínez Campos.
The attack quickly caused a reaction from the right-wing press, which engaged in the dehumanisation of anarchists, calling for their constitutional rights to be revoked and the repression of the anarchist movement by a new secret police. Valeriano Weyler was appointed as Captain General of Catalonia and initiated a crackdown against the anarchist movement. The police arrested 415 people, both known and suspected anarchists, over the subsequent months. The military tribunal disregarded Salvador's confession of sole responsibility, convinced that a conspiracy existed.
Several anarchists were tortured into giving forced confessions, leading to the execution of six people and the life imprisonment of four others. After spending the last months of his life feigning a conversion to Catholicism, which helped him avoid torture and receive more public support, Salvador was executed by garrote. Despite the introduction of anti-anarchist legislation by the Congress of Deputies, the 1896 Barcelona Corpus Christi procession bombing took place two years later. Many of those arrested in the aftermath of the Liceu bombing were arrested again during the Montjuïc trials.
At the time, the Liceu bombing was one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in world history, causing a higher death toll than the previous three decades of terrorist attacks. It has been categorised as an indiscriminate attack and contrasted with most other acts of anarchist terrorism, which largely focused on targeted assassinations of state officials and symbolic acts of property damage.
Background In 1858, the Italian nationalist revolutionary Felice Orsini invented a new type of improvised explosive device, the self-titled Orsini bomb. It was a rectangular-shaped bomb, which ranged between various different sizes and weighed roughly 1.5 kg. The bombs were detonated after colliding with a solid object, which would push its protruding "nipples" back into the bomb's core, filled with mercury fulminate and black powder, and cause an explosion. Orsini and his collaborators used the bomb to carry out an assassination attempt against French Emperor Napoleon III, while he was on his way to see Gioachino Rossini's William Tell. The Orsini bomb would be used by terrorists for decades after the attempt against Napoleon.
Following the emergence of an organised anarchist movement in the late 19th century, a minority of anarchists began to advocate for revolutionary terrorism as a way to combat state terrorism. These insurrectionary anarchists were opposed by the anarcho-syndicalists, who focused on trade union organising. Some revolutionary anarchists sympathised with certain violent acts on a case-by-case basis, depending on the methods and target of the attack. The latter case was illustrated by the Russian anarchist philosopher Peter Kropotkin, who in 1880 expressed his support for propaganda of the deed, which he considered to be a valid method of instigating revolution. By 1891, he had changed his opinion, arguing that capitalism and the state could not be destroyed by bombing attacks, although he still privately sympathised with individual attackers.
The 1890s were characterised by anarchist terrorism. Between 1886 and 1900, fifty bombing attacks took place in Spain. During this period, terrorists switched from using dynamite to Orsini bombs, which became the new favourite weapon of anarchists. Until 1893, few of the bombings that took place actually caused deaths or any significant damage. On 24 September 1893, the Catalan anarchist Paulí Pallàs attempted to assassinate Arsenio Martínez Campos, the Captain General of Catalonia. He threw two Orsini bombs at Martínez's military procession as it passed through Gran Via, where they exploded, killing one person and wounding 16 others; his target was only slightly injured. Pallàs was arrested and imprisoned in the Drassanes barracks and later tried by a military tribunal at Montjuïc Castle, where he was sentenced to execution by firing squad. The trial and execution were closely followed by the anarchist Santiago Salvador, who decided to avenge Pallàs' death by carrying out his own terrorist attack.
Attack The opera night
The month after the execution of Pallàs, bourgeois society in Barcelona began to return to a sense of normality, with the winter opening of the Great Lyceum Theatre () being welcomed as a distraction from public fears of bombing attacks. The Liceu, rebuilt in 1862, was at the centre of high society in Barcelona. The theatre was attached to a private members' club, the Cercle del Liceu, where wealthy patrons could dine before the evening play. On 7 November 1893, the theatre was nearly filled to its 3,600 person capacity. Attendees included the wife and daughters of Arsenio Martínez Campos. Its opening production was of Rossini's Guglielmo Tell, an opera extolling the virtues of freedom and tyrannicide. That evening, Santiago Salvador left his house with two Orsini bombs. With a peseta that his wife had given him to buy salt, he bought a ticket for one of the cheap seats on the fifth floor.
Bombing
During the second act of the opera, Salvador threw the two bombs from the fifth-story balcony into the crowd below. One of the bombs exploded on impact, hitting rows 13 and 14, where a number of people were killed immediately. It also destroyed seats and discharged shrapnel, which wounded spectators in the upper rows. The other failed to detonate, as its fall had been broken by a woman it landed on. The explosion filled the theatre with dark grey smoke. Some members of the audience initially assumed it was a part of the show and applauded the act, before realising what had happened. The singers and the orchestra froze and panic swept the audience, who trampled over each other as they rushed to escape the theatre. As the wounded people's cries of pain began to be heard over the mass of noise, the production's singers also pushed their way out onto the street in full costume. Salvador made use of the confusion to escape undetected.
By the time the authorities arrived, many had already died. Many of the wounded were treated on-site by doctors who had been in the audience. Stretchers were brought for the wounded from the military hospital at the Drassanes barracks, allowing them to be rushed to the nearby Hospital de la Santa Creu. Meanwhile, priests hurried to administer last rites to the dying. Journalists took note of the details of every corpse, describing what they were wearing and the fatal wounds they had suffered. As news of the bombing spread, friends and family of the attendees rushed to theatre trying to find them.
In the immediate aftermath, the police began arresting anyone suspicious who they could find, including an Italian marble worker and French baker who they had previously detained under suspicion of bombing attacks. A local jeweler who had survived the attack returned to find that someone had taken advantage of the police's distraction to rob his nearby jewelry store; the thief was never apprehended. The attacker Santiago Salvador stood by and watched the panicked crowd of police, survivors and passers-by. After observing how frightened he had made the Catalan bourgeoisie, he withdrew from the crowd and fled into the night. The following day, Salvador casually walked around the city. When he met up with some of his anarchist comrades, he bragged to them about his attack. When they tried to get him to leave, he responded that they lacked character and courage while he himself had sacrificed his own life "in the benefit of human progress". As he returned home that evening, all the city's theatres had closed in mourning. He told his wife what he had done, causing her to break down in tears. He personally remained proud of his attack and eagerly read the newspapers' accounts of the bombing, delighting in the panic his attack had stirred among the bourgeois press.
Casualties
An accurate count of the victims has been difficult to ascertain, as the Spanish government provided no official death toll and imposed a gag order on press coverage of the bombing. According to the court case files, 20 people were confirmed to have been killed and 27 more were wounded. Among the dead was a 14-year-old girl, and nine women. Historian Julián Casanova gave 22 as the number of people killed. In The Battle Against Anarchist Terrorism, Richard Bach Jensen estimated that as many as 30 people had been killed: according to historian George Esenwein, the bombing initially killed 15 people and wounded 50; by December 1893, The Times and The New York Times reported that 15 more people had died from their wounds. This would have left 35 people among the wounded survivors. The highest estimate of the death toll was provided by a 1901 article published in The Catholic World, which claimed that the bombing had instantly killed 15 people and mortally wounded 40 more.
At the time, the Liceu bombing was one of the deadliest terrorist attacks in the history of the anarchist movement. The bombing killed more people in a single attack than the total number of deaths caused in the previous three decades of terrorist attacks, including all those caused by anarchist terrorism since the 1880s. It also killed twice as many people as had died as a result of French anarchist terrorism during the whole 1890s.
Two days after the bombing, a mass funeral for those killed in the bombing was held, with their caskets being taken out in heavy rain on a procession from the Hospital de la Santa Creu. At the head of the procession were mounted police of the Municipal Guard, followed by children holding candles and priests reciting mourning rites. Passing many mourners along the way, the procession made its way down La Rambla, where streetlights decorated with black ornaments and black sheets hung from balconies. Hearses carrying the dead, covered in flowers, moved slowly down the street. They were followed by members of Barcelona's high society, including Martínez Campos himself. As the procession approached the Columbus Monument, the police grew nervous that it would become a target for another anarchist attack. Santiago Salvador had asked his comrades for more bombs so that he could attack the procession, but they refused to give him any. He instead joined the procession at the Columbus Monument, where he saw all of the local authorities gathered together; he lamented that he had missed a "magnificent occasion to throw more bombs".
Press reaction The Catalan newspaper La Vanguardia described the unknown perpetrator as an inhuman monster, driven by "instincts of a hyena [and] the hatreds of a savage", who had set human civilization back by centuries. The Republican paper argued that the perpetrator, assumed to have been an anarchist, displayed an "instinctive cruelty" by targeting innocent people. Due to the makeup of the Liceu audience, which consisted of people from different social classes, as well as the cross-class reaction against the bombing, the press initially neglected to consider the motive of class conflict. At this point in time, an indiscriminate attack against a large crowd was unprecedented. El País pointed to how other terrorist attacks by Irish nationalists, Russian nihilists and anarchists had specific high-profile targets; no terrorist had yet considered it permissible to kill random people in advancement of their political cause. One newspaper, , described the Liceu bombing as having ushered in an unprecedented "lottery of death".