Secondly, as observed by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, man's worst fear is not death, but violent and unexpected death. Anarchist violence, with its strong element of random terror, provoked this extreme fear in those who were imminently threatened. Human beings have erected elaborate rituals and rules for killing each other, by wars, slavery, persecution, and execution, but the anarchists appeared to ignore them. Their violence was therefore labelled as 'insane' and 'inhuman'. By comparison, the mass execution of thousands of Communards in 1871 or the organised slaughter of millions of soldiers in the First World War were seen as strictly according to the rules, however much to be regretted.

Thirdly, anarchist violence was accused of being a revolt against man's basic nature. Authority, it was generally believed, is natural to man: the father was held to be a natural authority to his son, and the men of superior talents to those who were less gifted. The anarchists, by denying the inevitability of authority, were thus denounced as rebels against nature, and their destructiveness as an absurd and desperate attempt to defeat the natural process. Lombroso even suggested that anarchist assassination was a kind of indirect suicide. Assassins like Henry and Caserio, he said, despaired of the world but lacked the courage to take their own lives. They therefore murdered,knowing they would be executed, a complete repudiation of life,abnormal and unnatural.

How did the anarchists meet these reactions? How did they justify their violence in the face of public horror and hostility? When Emile Henry was condemned to death THE ANARCHIST, an English paper, concluded its editorial:

'Men like Emile Henry may be an error, but they are at least sincere. There is no greater proof of a man's sincerity than that he will lay down his life for a cause. And Ravachol, Pallas, Vaillant, and Henry have done this.

We say to the rich, if these men are monsters you have to created them. You who have butchered the people wholesale for greed. Can you be surprised if from their blood should arise the avengers?

Is it right to kill, to kill the innocent to attain riches and power? Then it is right to kill those who are responsible for the murder of the innocent. And who are responsible? All those who live idly upon the robbery and murder of the workers...

Our modern civilisation is a Moloch temple reared upon the bodies of slaughtered slaves. Let the terrorists do what they will, they cannot equal the crimes of our masters.'

The full ingredients of the more moderate anarchist position are contained in this extract. Extreme publication like the French MANIFESTO DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF COMRADE RAVACHOL, ASSASSINATED AT MONTBRISON BY EXECUTIONERS PAID BY THE BOURGEOIS OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC went further, and revelled in the prospect of bloodshed, concluding: 'The bourgeois have sown the wind, they shall reap the tempest.' But the justification is the same: anarchist terror is presented as self-defence, justice, and revenge.