THE first real challenge to Britain's system of political policing came later in the year as a result of yet another gruesome, high-profile assassination. On the afternoon of 10 September 1898, shortly after leaving the Hôtel Beau Rivage in Geneva, the sixty-one-year-old Empress Elisabeth of Austria was attacked by a short, burly looking man and stabbed with a triangular needle file. Within the hour, the empress was dead from suffocation (her right lung having been punctured), leaving worldwide public opinion in a state of appalled disbelief. The bereaved Emperor Franz Joseph declared his incomprehension ‘that a man could be found to attack such a woman, whose whole life was spent in doing good and who never injured any person’, while the socialist L’Aurore described the assassination as ‘the act of an unthinking idiot [and] a stroke of bloody madness’.

The assassin, a twenty-five-year-old French-born Italian named Luigi Lucheni, had offered no resistance to police when apprehended, appearing simply to bask in his newfound notoriety. Despite boasting of being a ‘most dangerous anarchist’, Lucheni was also a clearly disturbed individual, as attested by his erratic behaviour, his express wish to be guillotined, as well as the fact that the Empress Elisabeth had been only a last-minute substitute for his actual intended target, the Duke d’Orleans. Following a brief trial in Geneva, where the death penalty had been abolished, Lucheni received a sentence of life in prison, which he served until his suicide in 1910.

Despite this pathetic dénouement, however, in countries where anarchist outrages had been a common feature all throughout the decade, the official mood was decisively vindictive. In the wake of the assassination, Alessandro Guiccioli, the mayor of Rome, dreaded: