Our comrade Toby Shone was released from prison on 28th December 2022 under heavy restrictions (license conditions), which was overseen by a multi-agency team (MAPPA) including the National Security Division (counter-terror) and forced to live in a filthy bail hostel in Gloucester for 9 months. Since then he was abducted on 19th September 2023 at gun point by the armed scum of the anti-terrorist unit in between Gloucester and the Forest of Dean, along with being thrown back into prison once again.
We as anarchists in complicity with our comrade would like to highlight an intriguing and amusing event that occurred when Toby was still under bail and in conditions that were no better than an open prison.
Added to this post is a letter dated 14th April 2023 received from Lewis Thomas the scum Probation Service – National Security Division officer who was managing Toby’s bail and conditions. It expresses in a comical language that puts across an image of wanting to help our comrade rather oppressing him, which was pretty much the tactic adopted generally by the goons of the National Security Division towards our comrade, as if anarchism and holding revolutionary ideas is a mental disease that needs to be treated. For us this letter highlights even more the climate that is starting to begin in the United Kingdom that anarchism is to be combined alongside fascist and Islamic ideologies as extremism and terrorism.
In the spirit of this comical letter and in the age-old tradition of assassination that the UK state and all states around the world should fear, we give a limited chronological account of the history of attempted and successful assassinations of monarchs by anarchists, revolutionaries and rebels who made the fear change sides, with the propaganda of the deed.
God will not save the King!
Anarchists in complicity with anarchist comrade Toby Shone
The History of Regicide by Anarchists, Revolutionaries & Rebels
(Attempted) Napoleon III of France, 1858
On the evening of 14 January 1858, as the Emperor and Empress were on their way to the theatre in the Rue Le Peletier, the precursor of the Opera Garnier, to see Rossini’s William Tell, Felice Orsini Italian revolutionary, leader of the ‘Carbonari’ and his accomplices threw three bombs at the imperial carriage. The first bomb landed among the horsemen in front of the carriage. The second bomb wounded the animals and smashed the carriage glass. The third bomb landed under the carriage and seriously wounded a policeman who was hurrying to protect the occupants. Eight people were killed and 142 wounded, though the emperor and empress were unhurt. They judged it best to proceed to the performance and appear before the public in their box.
Orsini himself was wounded on the right temple and stunned. He tended his wounds and returned to his lodgings, where police found him the next day. Orsini was sentenced to death and went calmly to the guillotine on 13 March 1858. Accomplices Pieri was executed and Gomez condemned to hard labour for life. Di Rudio was sentenced to death, which was commuted to life imprisonment on Devil’s Island near Cayenne, whence he escaped and later went to America.
The improvised bomb that Orsini used was infamously named after him the ‘Orsini Bomb’ (pictured below). The weapons were somewhat commonly used by anarchists in the latter half of the 19th century in Europe, and surplus bombs were also used by the Confederacy during the American Civil War. The design is reminiscent of modern impact fused grenades, such as the Soviet RGO hand grenades. Orsini bombs were designed to remove “the uncertainty of slow burning fused weapons”. In several plots, including an attack at Rossini’s Opera William Tell at Liceu Theater in 1893 by anarchist Santiago Salvador; resulting in the death of 20 people and wounding 30.
Carlo Carrà, The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli, 1910-1911 (oil on canvas, 198.7×259.1 cm, currently at the Museum of Modern Art, New York).
