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.

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.

[8] 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.

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.

[15] 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 (Catalan: Gran Teatre del Liceu) being welcomed as a distraction from public fears of bombing attacks.

[30] 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.

[32] 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.

[38] 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.

[43] 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.

[44] The Republican paper Diario Mercantil [es] argued that the perpetrator, assumed to have been an anarchist, displayed an "instinctive cruelty" by targeting innocent people.

[48] In response to attacks on civil liberties by the right-wing press, the republican newspaper El País argued that the bombing had proven the monarchy to be incapable of maintaining social order and posited that such acts of terrorism would not have taken place in a republic.

[50] A letter to La Correspondencia de España [es] invoked the example of lynching in the United States and called for the extrajudicial murder of anarchists, who they believed threatened women and children.

[51] Another letter to La Dinastía called for the wealthy Spaniards to fund the creation of a secret police, which could carry out the political repression of the anarchist movement.

with Foreign Secretary Archibald Primrose pointing out that it could lead to continent-wide political repression if the accord did not draw a clear line between anarchism and other schools of opinion.

The military tribunal was presided over by lieutenant colonel Enrique Marzo [es], who rushed through the process, even skipping a number of steps, intending to root out a suspected anarchist conspiracy.

[68] In an unpublished letter to El País, Cerzuela described his experience being tortured, including sleep deprivation, beatings and even genital mutilation, which had elicited his false confession.

[69] Accusations of torture and forced confessions were denied by the right-wing press, including El País, which continued to justify the extrajudicial punishment of the anarchist movement.

[70] Republican politician Baldomer Lostau wrote a letter to the Minister of War Marcelo Azcárraga, protesting against the torture of prisoners who had been detained after the Liceu bombing.

[67] In August 1894, Salvador changed his story about his motivations; rather than wanting revenge for the execution of Pallàs, he now said that he had begun to plan the bombing attack after he had been beaten by police in Valencia.

[78] Catholic newspapers publicised the story of his conversion and reported that his cell had become a shrine, with sacred images on the walls and religious books lining the shelves.

[84] Fears of propaganda of the deed heightened after the 1894 assassination of Sadi Carnot, which coming so soon after the bombings of Gran Via and the Liceu, made anarchist terrorism a continuing threat.

[85] In July 1894, the Spanish government passed an anti-anarchist law, which outlawed anarchist associations and publications,[67] and punished the possession of explosives with life imprisonment or execution.

[90] At a demonstration in London, where English anarchists protested against the Montjuïc Trials, Peter Kropotkin pointed at that the Spanish state had been torturing prisoners since the Gran Via and Liceu bombings.

[91] During the subsequent Montjuïc trial, the anarchist writer Joan Montseny was reprimanded for publishing pamphlets that had reported on police abuse against the suspects of the Gran Via and Liceu bombings.

[63] In April 1897, five people were sentenced to death: the main suspect, Tomàs Ascheri [ca]; and his alleged accomplices, Joan Alsina, Lluís Mas, Josep Molas and Antoni Nogués.

[97] Wealthy Catalans who supported Antoni Gaudí's construction of the Sagrada Familia conceived of the building as an expiatory chapel, built to atone for the city's growing radicalism and secularism.

[99] One survivor of the Liceu bombing, Catalan journalist Tomàs Caballé [ca], wrote in 1945 that memories of the attack still elicited intense emotions within him.

[100] Joaquim Maria de Nadal i Ferrer [ca] wrote that it took some time before performances of the Liceu theatre returned to normalcy, although some seats were kept permanently empty in memory of the attack.

[67] Terrorism researcher Timothy Shanahan has described attacks such as the Liceu bombing, which target generalised groups of people rather than specific individuals, as "strategically indiscriminate".