Michele Angiolillo e l’assassinio di Cánovas del Castillo

Abstract

Michele Angiolillo and Cánovas del Castillo’s assassination.

On the afternoon of August 8, 1897, the Spanish Prime Minister Antonio Cánovas del Castillo was shot four times at point blank range in Santa Agueda’s spa in the Western Pyrenees. Cánovas, mortally wounded, died within an hour. The killer was Michele Angiolillo, a young Italian anarchist, who claimed the shooting was a vengeance’s act for torturing and executing five anarchists in Barcelona’s notorious Montjuich prison. But, who really was Angiolillo? Did he act alone or was he part of a larger conspiracy led by the international anarchist movement or by the Paris Cuban delegation, run by Ramón Emeterio Betances? To this day, nearly a century after the assassination, the matter has not been studied, and any like lihood of clearing it up has faded away with the passing of time. This study tries to reply to all these controversial and unanswered questions, investigating Angiolillo’s long troveis through different Europe an countries, his personal relationships with several anarchist leaders and Cuban independence supporters, and focusing on the supposed effects Cánovas’ sudden death brought to the agonizing Spanish empire, on the edge of its 1898 final breakdown.