The New Ferment

By the closing years of the nineteenth century, an organized libertarian movement in Spain had virtually ceased to exist. Police reprisals against the terrorists, coupled with repressive legislation, led to the dissolution in 1896 of the Pact of Union and Solidarity. The Anarchist Organization of the Spanish Region was in shambles. Workers began to leave libertarian organizations as rapidly as they had entered them several years earlier. In Cordoba, for example, after the promising revival of the 1880s, only a few acolytes could be persuaded to attend the May 1 celebration of 1893. In the following years, the rallies were given up altogether. In vain did leading Anarchists reverse their views and speak out against terrorism. As early as 1891, Kropotkin warned that while “the development of the revolutionary spirit gains enormously from heroic individual acts ... it is not by these heroic acts that revolutions are’made.” By 1900, all but a handful of the outstanding Anarchists who had supported “propaganda by the deed” had abandoned terrorist methods as a strategic form of direct action.

Yet the “Idea” was far from dead in Spain, and Anarchist terrorism was never to disappear totally. Libertarian ideas now began to take root among the intellectuals. It was at this time that leading Spanish writers and painters such as the novelist Pio Baroja and a young artist, Pablo Picasso, began to flirt with the “Idea.” Others, notably the astronomer Tarrida del Marmol and the engineer Ricardo Mella, were actively involved in the movement itself. La Revista Social, an outstanding Anarchist theoretical journal founded in 1896, became a forum for a wide range of professional people from the universities, arts, and sciences. Disillusioned by the failure of terrorist tactics, many Anarchists began to place their strongest emphasis on the importance of education in achieving their social goals. This period was the heyday of libertarian schools and pedagogical projects in all areas of the country where Anarchists exercised some degree of influence. Perhaps the best-known effort in this field was Francisco Ferrer’s Modern School (Escuela Moderna), a project which exercised a considerable influence on Catalan education and on experimental techniques of teaching generally. The persecution to which Ferrer was subjected in later years brings into sharp focus the enormous problems and obstacles that faced almost every effort to reform Spanish society. To promote the concepts of the Modern School, Ferrer was obliged to be more than an educator and his personal fate, in turn, became a political event of great importance in the early years of the twentieth century.

There seems to be nothing in Francisco Ferrer y Guardia’s background that should have made him an educator or even an iconoclast. He was born on January 10, 1859, in Alella, twelve miles from Barcelona. His parents were devout Catholics who raised their son in the traditional manner of moderately well-to-do peasants (his father owned a small vineyard), and there is no evidence of any rebellion in the boy until he was sent off to work in a Barcelona firm at the age of fifteen. The owner, a militant anticleric, apparently exercised a great influence on his young employee. In any case, by the time Ferrer had reached twenty he had declared himself a Republican, an anticleric, and joined the Freemasons, the traditional haven for liberal thought and political conspiracy in Spain.

The young Catalan caught the attention of Manuel Ruiz Zorrilla, the radical Republican who had been a former premier under Amadeo and who in 1885, was enjoying a lively conspiratorial exile in Paris. Working as a railway employee, Ferrer rode the trains between the French frontier and Barcelona, engaged in the precarious job of smuggling political refugees to France. He also functioned as a courier in Zorrilla’s efforts to win over army officers to a Republican coup. When General Villacampa pronounced for a republic in September 1886, Ferrer participated in an aborted Catalan uprising. This was the last insurrectionary attempt to turn Spain into a republic for the next half century. Its failure found Ferrer in Paris, occupying the post of secretary to Ruiz Zorrilla.

It was in the French capital that Ferrer began to abandon the party politics of the Republicans for education. This was a major shift that marked his development toward Anarchism, although he was careful never to describe himself as more than a “philosophical Anarchist,” an acrata. He was greatly influenced in that direction by Anselmo Lorenzo, whom he met in Paris. In any case, his new interests could not have been better placed. Almost any effort to bring more schools to Spain would have fallen like rain on a parched land. At the turn of the century, nearly 70 percent of the Spanish population was illiterate. Teachers were grossly underpaid, and rural schools (where there were any) were often little more than shacks in which barefooted, ill-nourished children were given only the most rudimentary instruction.

The project that Ferrer was to establish as the Modern School has many elements that would almost seem conventional today, but it was also distinguished by features that even now have scarcely advanced beyond the experimental stage. To understand the remarkable advance scored by the Modern School, one must see it against the background of the Spanish educational system as a whole.

Although Spain had a universal education law, the majority of schools were run by clerics who used brutal teaching methods and emphasized rote instruction in Catholic dogma. These clerics openly inveighed against any political group, scientific theory, or cultural tendency which displeased the church. Coeducation, tolerated in the countryside only for want of school space, was rigorously prohibited in the cities.

To this bleak establishment Ferrer opposed a program and method of instruction that the clerics could regard only as “diabolical.” He planned to establish a curriculum based on the natural sciences and moral rationalism, freed of all religious dogma and political bias. Although students were to receive systematic instruction, there were to be no prizes for scholarship, no marks or examinations, indeed no atmosphere of competition, coercion, or humiliation. The classes, in Ferrer’s words, were to be guided by the “principle of solidarity and equality.” During a period when “wayward” students in clerical schools were required to drop to their knees in a penitent fashion and then be beaten, the teachers in the Escuela Moderna were forewarned that they must “refrain from any moral or material punishment under penalty of being disqualified permanently.” Instruction was to rely exclusively on the spontaneous desire of students to acquire knowledge and permit them to learn at their own pace. The purpose of the school was to promote in the students “a stem hostility to prejudice,” to create “solid minds, capable of forming their own rational convictions on every subject.”

To Ferrer, however, “the education of a man does not consist merely in the training of his intelligence, without having regard to the heart and will. Man is a complete and unified whole, despite the variety of his functions. He presents various facets, but is at the bottom a single energy, which sees, loves, and applies a will to the prosecution of what he has conceived.” One of the most important tasks of the Escuela Moderna, Ferrer insisted, was to maintain this unity of the individual, to see to it that there was no “duality of character in any individual—one which sees and appreciates truth and goodness, and one which follows evil.” The school itself must be a microcosm of the real world, embodying many different sides and human personalities. Hence, Ferrer insisted not only on coeducation of the sexes but on a representative variety of pupils from all social classes. Every effort must be made to bring the children of workers together with those of middle-class parents in order to create a milieu for the young that is fully liberatory, a “school of emancipation that will be concerned with banning from the mind whatever divides men, the false concepts of property, country, and family... Much of this is pure Anarchism and reveals the influence of Lorenzo and Kropotkin on Ferrer’s mind.

It was not until September 1901, that Ferrer established the Escuela Moderna in Barcelona. He had been a teacher during his long stay in Paris. There he had befriended an elderly student in one of his Spanish classes, Mile. Ernestine Meunier, who left him a substantial legacy after her death. With these resources, the first Modem School was started with an original class of twelve girls and eighteen boys. Within ten months, the number of students had more that doubled, and in the next few years fifty schools based on the principles of the Modern School were established in Spain, mainly in Catalonia. Ferrer, who had invested Mile. Meunier’s money in well-paying securities, built up sufficient funds to establish a publishing house that turned out small, inexpensive, easily understood books on a variety of scientific and cultural subjects. These were distributed widely throughout Spain to peasants, braceros, and workers, often by wandering Anarchist propagandists. It was from these booklets that the poorer classes of Spain acquired their first glimpse into the strange, almost totally unknown world of science and culture that lay beyond the Pyrenees. Although more guardedly than in Paris, Ferrer maintained his association with Anarchists, taking a number of them on his staff and giving employment to his friend, the aged Anselmo Lorenzo, as a translator.

The growth of the Escuela Moderna and the wide distribution of its booklets infuriated the clergy. But for years there was little they could do beyond denouncing the school and pouring vituperation on Ferrer’s personal life.[16] The opportunity to restrict Ferrer’s work finally came in 1906 when Mateo Morral, a member of Ferrer’s staff, threw a bomb at the royal couple of Spain. The assassination attempt miscarried, and Morral committed suicide. Ferrer and the Modern School were held responsible, although the young assassin had explicitly denounced the Catalan educator and Anselmo Lorenzo for their opposition to atentados. Such was the state of Spanish justice at the time that Ferrer was held in jail for an entire year while police professed to be accumulating evidence of his complicity in the Morral attempt. A review of the case by the civil courts established his innocence, and he was released, but he never reopened the original Modem School in Barcelona.

This strong emphasis on education did not mean that Spanish Anarchism vyas not still occupied primarily with the tasks of the class struggle and the building of a revolutionary movement. Syndicalism was gaining in popularity. The idea, ostensibly French in origin, that an economic organization of workers—a revolutionary union as distinguished from a political party—can take over society by means of a general strike can be traced back to the days of the Industrial Revolution. In the 1830s, the Chartist movement in England had advanced the proposal of a “Grand National Holiday” (a euphemism for a general strike) to fulfill the demands of the workers. This alluring concept of social change soon faded away once the British labor movement became reformist, only to reappear in 1869 at the famous Basel congress of the International Workingmen’s Association. Here, in a debate initiated by the Belgian section with the support of delegates from Spain, the Swiss Jura, and France, the proposal was advanced that the unions should provide the nuclear structure of a future Socialist society. Eugene Hins, the Belgian delegate, outlined the actual form of organization these unions should take. He called for a “dual form of organization”: a federation of industry-wide “workers’ associations” on the one hand and a federation of local, regional, national, and international “labor councils” on the other. This structure forms the model of the syndicalist type of labor organization. As we have seen, the old Spanish International adopted it from the very outset. The “workers’ associations” were the Secciones de oficio, or trade sections, and the “labor councils” were the Federaciones locales, or local federations.

To understand clearly syndicalist organization, it should be examined in two periods: before a revolutionary change, and afterwards, when the “syndicates” are expected to take over the management of the economy. Under capitalism, the federation of “workers’ associations,” organized by trades, is engaged in conducting the day-to-day class struggle and dealing with the immediate grievances of the workers. In this period, the “labor councils,” organized geographically, have the tasks of education, propaganda, and the promotion of local solidarity between the “workers’ associations.” After the social revolution, the “workers’ associations” assume the responsibility for the overall administration and technical coordination of the economy. They see to it that the productive units throughout the country are supplied with raw materials, means of transportation, machinery, etc. The “labor councils,” in turn, which contain representatives from each trade and enterprise in the locality, administer the economic operations of the community or region, determine its needs, and arrange for the distribution of goods. In this dual system of organization, the local “workers’ associations” and the “labor councils” are federated into parallel municipal, regional, and national bodies until, at the summit of society two councils emerge—one composed of representatives of the trades and the other of the regions—which coordinate the total production and distribution of goods. Inasmuch as representatives of the trades also constitute the “labor councils,” the two parallel organizations tend to intersect at every geographic level, but each obviously has separate functions in economic life.

This model, of course, is abstract and overly schematic. Its purpose is to explain the essential structure of a syndicalist organization in the simplest possible terms. In practice, syndicalist federations have been far more flexible than any model could possibly indicate and they incorporated long-established unions that retained distinctly nonsyndicalist features. Moreover, there is no model that, in itself, provides a guarantee that a labor federation is syndicalist in a revolutionary sense. The avowedly reformist American labor movement is also organized on a dual basis. “International” unions in the United States—such as the automobile and steel workers’ federations, for example—might be said to correspond in a very rough way to the “workers’ associations” and the various city, county, and state labor councils to the “labor councils” described by Hins at the Basel congress. In all other respects, however, the differences between revolutionary syndicalist and reformist unions are more decisive than the similarities.

For one thing, the goal of syndicalism is the elimination of capitalism, not merely the amelioration of the workers’ immediate economic problems and labor conditions. Its aim is admittedly revolutionary. Not less important is the syndicalist goal of vesting all economic and social decisions in the hands of the direct producers— the workers in each specific enterprise. The guiding and most important principle of syndicalism is that the management of production occurs at the base of society, not at its summit, and decisions flow from below to above. Hence, syndicalism is anti-authoritarian. The democratic, federalist, and decentralized economic organs of the proletariat replace the political agencies of the state. Authority that is currently vested in political organs is turned over to the economic units of society and the actual producers who operate them.

Accordingly, each enterprise is administered by its own workers through an elected committee whose members are presumably (although not necessarily) removable. The various committees are linked together by delegates on local “labor councils” and on an industry-wide basis through the “workers’ associations,” or trade unions. Obviously, the pivotal bodies in this structure are the workers’ committees which administer the individual factories, systems of transportation, etc., as well as the “labor councils” which deal with the affairs and needs of the localities. The vocationally structured trade unions (as distinguished from the geographically organized unions), although useful in organizing industry-wide strikes under capitalism, have no real function after the revolution. The task of coordinating production, which the syndicalists vest in the unions, can be handled just as easily by the local, regional, and national “labor councils.” Indeed, it was to be symptomatic of the decay of syndicalist ideals in France that increasing authority was vested in the trade unions while the “labor councils” were permitted to atrophy.

In its emphasis on economic control at the base of society, syndicalism is consciously antiparliamentary and antipolitical. It focuses not only on the realities of power but also on the key problem of achieving its disintegration. Real power in syndicalist doctrine is economic power. The way to dissolve economic power is to make every worker powerful, thereby eliminating power as a social privilege. Syndicalism thus ruptures all the ties between the workers and the state. It opposes political action, political parties, and any participation in political elections. Indeed, it refuses to operate within the framework of the established order and the state. What, then, will be the substitute for these traditional methods? Here, syndicalism turns to direct action—strikes, sabotage, obstruction, and above all, the revolutionary general strike. Direct action not only perpetuates the militancy of the workers and keeps alive the spirit of revolt, but awakens in them a greater sense of individual initiative. By continual pressure, direct action tests the strength of the capitalist system at all times and presumably in its most important arena—the factory, where ruled and ruler seem to confront each other most directly.

At the same time that syndicalism exerts this unrelenting pressure on capitalism, it tries to build the new social order within the old. The unions and the “labor councils” are not merely means of struggle and instruments of social revolution; they are also the very structure around which to build a free society. The workers are to be educated in the job of destroying the old propertied order and in the task of reconstructing a stateless, libertarian society. The two go together. When all the conditions have ripened to a point where social revolution is possible, the workers go on a general strike with the avowed aim of toppling capitalist society. All means of production and transportation cease to operate. The capitalist economy is brought to a standstill.

In the 1870s, almost two decades before syndicalism was to become popular in France, Friedrich Engels attributed the concept of the revolutionary general strike to the Bakuninists. His criticism is worth examining. “One fine morning,” he writes, “all the workers of all trades in some country, or even all over the world, down tools and thus, in at most four weeks, force the possessing classes either to eat humble pie or let loose their violence against the workers, so that the latter then have the right to defend themselves, and while doing so bring down the whole of the old society.” After examining the pedigree of this notion, Engels adds: “On the other hand, the governments, especially if encouraged by political abstention, will never let the organizations or the treasury of the workers get that far; and on the other hand, political events and the excesses of the ruling classes will effect the liberation of the workers long before the proletariat gets to acquiring these ideal organizations and this immense reserve fund. Moreover, if it had them it would not need the circuitous path of the general strike to achieve its aims.”

This description, with its crass political perspective and bookkeeping, is demagogery, yet it is interesting that Marx’s closest collaborator was compelled to use such an approach. In admittihg that the Bakuninists were prepared to “defend themselves” (that is, to rise in insurrection), Engels plainly indicates that the’Anarchists were not prepared to stop with a peaceful strike—indeed, that they were only too mindful that a strictly economic test of strength in “at most four weeks” was four weeks too long for the workers to endure. To the Anarchists, the general strike was the steppingstone to an insurrectionary confrontation between the two classes, a confrontation in which the proletariat also exercised its economic power to paralyze the functions of the state and block the movement of troops.

Even more interesting is Engel’s remark that the state, “encouraged by political abstention, will never let the organizations or the treasury of the workers get that far.” Ironically this statement could apply more readily to a political party than to a syndicalist union. Sixty years later German fascism was to annihilate two huge Marxian political parties with scarcely a flicker of resistance by their leaders and following. The German proletariat, in fact, was to become so completely divested of revolutionary initiative by its well-disciplined Social Democratic and Communist parties that Hitler marveled at the ease with which it was shackled to the totalitarian state.[17]

Syndicalism, to be sure, has many shortcomings, but its Marxian critics were in no position to point them out because they were shared by Socialist parties as well. In modeling themselves structurally on the bourgeois economy, the syndicalist unions tended to becorrfe the organizational counterparts of the very centralized apparatus they professed to oppose. By pleading the need to deal effectively with the tightly knit bourgeoisie and state machinery, reformist leaders in syndicalist unions often had little difficulty in shifting organizational control from the bottom to the top. Many older Anarchists were mindful of these dangers and felt uncomfortable with syndicalist doctrines. Errico Malatesta, fearing the emergence of a bureaucracy in the new union movement, warned that “the official is to the working class a danger only comparable to that provided by the parliamentarian; both lead to corruption and from corruption to death is but a short step.”[18] These Anarchists saw in syndicalism a shift in focus from the commune to the trade union, from all of the oppressed to the industrial proletariat alone, from the streets to the factories, and, in emphasis at least, from insurrection to the general strike.

In France, where syndicalism initiated a worldwide radicalization of the unions in the 1890s, all the latent dangers in the movement’s structure were cultivated to produce a reformist organization. Under Leon Jouhaux, the syndicalist Confederation Generate du Travail (CGT) became bureaucratized and, apart from its revolutionary rhetoric, a fairly conventional trade union. Almost exclusively proletarian in composition, it exercised very little influence in rural areas. The word syndicalisme acquired a neutral meaning—“unionism”—and revolutionary adherents of the original doctrine by contrast were to be called “Anarchosyndicalists.” A few intellectuals were attracted to the promise of the old syndicalist goals and especially to its militancy. Georges Sorel, who sought in proletarian aggressiveness a regenerative force to overcome bourgeois decadence, attempted to give syndicalism a heroic philosophy of its own. But his works exercised very little influence among the French workers and none whatever on the Spanish labor movement. Like the majority of intellectuals who were captivated by syndicalism, Sorel soon became disillusioned with the movement’s pragmatic and opportunistic goals.

In contrast to France, syndicalism in Spain developed a fiery elan as far back as the days of the International, and reached out to embrace the countryside. It would be more precise to say that Spanish syndicalism was compelled to evolve in a revolutionary, Anarchosyndicalist direction because of the social and political conditions that prevailed below the Pyrenees. Yet in the opening years of the twentieth century, this overall development was not easily discernible. The Madrid government seemed to be more stable than ever, and economic life had begun a surprising recovery from the low produced by the losses of Cuba and the Philippines’in the Spanish-American War. In restive Catalonia, local political life was parceled out between the Lliga Regionalista (Regionalist League), a bloc of right-wing autonomist groups favored by the manufacturers, and the Radical Republican Party, a political machine led by an unscrupulous demagogue, Alejandro Lerroux y Garcia. The Lliga had mustered the support of those well-to-do Catalans who were not committed to the Madrid parties. The Radicals, buoyed up by the inflammatory rhetoric of Lerroux, enjoyed the support of the great majority of workers and middle-class democrats in Barcelona. Apart from its incidental nuisance value, the Anarchist movement, after a brief resurgence in the strikes of 1901–03, had been virtually extirpated by the repression of the Barcelona labor organizations. Indeed for a time, it appeared that the industrial workers of Catalonia would drift toward the Socialist rather than the Anarchist fold.

Yet the-very opposite was to occur. The assassination of Canovas in August 1897 produced no change in Turnismo, the politically deadening system in which Conservative and Liberal ministries alternated with each other. This blocked any serious parlimentary expression of ferment in the country. In the period between 1899 and 1909, the ministry was occupied by three Conservative premiers, Silvela, Villaverde, and Maura, followed by the Liberals Montero Rios and Moret, and finally, for nearly three years, by Maura again. This final Maura ministry was to undermine Turnismo almost completely, opening the way to one of the most stormy periods in modern Spanish history.

For a point was now being reached where Canovas’s old strategy of calculated political stagnation could no longer contain the new demands that were emerging in Spanish society. The 1880s and 1890s as we have noted, were decades of major industrialization, indeed, of overexpansion. The Catalan manufacturers, burdened by large surpluses of textiles and by the high price of raw cotton, began to press for tax relief and higher tariffs. When their demands were ignored, they were forced into a fatally discordant strategy: independent political action on the one hand, and wage-cutting on the other.

Although by 1907 the government yielded to the manufacturers’ demands, virtually closing the internal Spanish market to foreign competition, irreparable damage had already been done to the political stability of Catalonia. A system of “degenerative feedback” had been initiated which was not to be arrested for the next three decades. Despite its Catalanist pretensions, the right-wing Lliga was opportunistic to the core. The manufacturers who subsidized it could not divest themselves of old habits and continued to make concessions to Madrid in exchange for econogiic privileges. This vacillating policy promoted the expansion of Lerroux’s Radical Party, which now gathered behind it many Republicans who were disillusioned with the Lliga’s opportunism. The Lliga had raised the specter of Catalan nationalism to frighten Madrid; Lerroux was eager to rally the great mass of Murdanos who were indifferent or even hostile to Catalanism, so he unleashed a violent antinationalist campaign in Barcelona. This campaign was spiced with a bitter anticlericalism, giving the Radical Party an aura of militancy without endangering the position of the bourgeoisie. The Madrid government in turn decided to play the Lliga and Radicals against each other on the principle that the greater the instability in Barcelona, the less likely Ihe Catalans were to unite against the central power.

Mysterious funds began to flow into Lerroux’s coffers. At the same time, bombs began to explode on the premises of Catalan textile manufacturers who were known to belong to the Lliga. “Anarchist” terrorism seemed to revive with every upsurge of Catalan nationalist activity. Having raised violence in Barcelona to extravagant proportions, the Madrid government created an ongoing crisis in the city—a crisis it would henceforth be unable to control short of dictatorship or civil war. Lerroux, in turn, was to saddle himself with an irresolvable contradiction between word and deed that eventually undermined the last ties of the Barcelona working class to political parties.

But these factors, undeniably important in themselves, merely exacerbated a mounting class war between the Barcelona working class and the textile manufacturers. Although the cotton industry had expanded greatly over the 1880s and 1890s, it did not expand sufficiently to absorb the enormous infldw of Murcianos and rural Catalans into industrial areas. The urban population in Barcelona had increased by 10 percent between 1900 and 1910—an accretion composed overwhelmingly of people from the countryside. For many of the new rural immigrants there was no steady work and no adequate shelter. Demoralized and semistarved, this desperate mass formed an excitable reservoir of discontent that Lerroux stirred with appeals to violent action against the clergy.

No less disaffected were the industrial workers in Barcelona and outlying factory towns. Rising prices had made it impossible for a working-class family to live on the father’s wages. Although it required about 112 pesetas for a family of four to satisfy its minimal needs, a day laborer ordinarily received 60 pesetas, a plasterer 96, and a metallurgical worker 108. Three quarters of a worker’s wages went to food. To surive, a working-class family had no alternative but to send the wife or children to work. It would have been difficult enough for a worker to accept this bleak situation as a fixed way of life. To also be confronted with a wage-cut hanging over one’s head, however, was intolerable. Faced with, such grim prospects, the Catalan proletariat was seething with discontent.

The confluence of growing economic problems with syndicalist ideas from France soon led to the formation of a new Anarchist labor organization. On October 13, 1900, a conference of unions, organized on the initiative of a Madrid bricklayers’ union, was held in Madrid. Delegates claiming to represent some 50,000 workers were sent from Catalonia, Andalusia, Valencia, Asturias, the Basque country, Coruna, Valladolid, and other areas. Many represented local affiliates of the old Workers’ Federation and Pact of Union and Solidarity that had survived the repression of the 1890s. With syndicalism in the air and new union organizations forming throughout the country, the prospects seemed particularly bright for a new labor federation based on Anarchosyndicalist principles.

The organization called itself the Federation of Workers’ Societies of the Spanish Region, adopting the structure of its predecessors of 1873 and 1881. It was scarcely in existence for more than a year when it found itself riding a wave of general strikes in Valencia, Seville, Saragossa, and other Anarchist strongholds. In Andalusia, town after town went on strike, in some cases posing only one demand— comunismo libertario. There were even minor insurrections reminiscent the Jerez uprising. The movement in the countryside continued for several years and did not come to an end until 1905, when famine in the south litefally starved it into quiescence.

The Federation of Workers’ Societies was suppressed, but not before it had initiated one of the most portentous general strikes in the early history of the Catalan labor movement. The strike was to reveal the extraordinary sense of solidarity that by this time had developed among the workers of Barcelona and the intractability of the manufacturers in dealing with labor grievances. It was a portent of the years to come and of the new relationship of forces that was emerging in the great Catalan seaport.

The first skirmishes occurred in the spring of 1901, when the yarn manufacturers of the Ter valley attempted to fix a lower wage scale by replacing men with women on newly installed automatic spinning machines. A strike followed in which the workers fought bitterly with strikebreakers and police. The Ter valley strike was answered with a lockout: the manufacturers closed down the plants in order to starve the workers into obedience. It seemed probable that an employer victory in the Ter valley would lead to lower wage scales not only for textile operatives but for workers in other branches of industry. As the summer of 1901 came to an end, the key unions in Barcelona began to gird themselves for a confrontation with the manufacturing class as a whole.

The obstacles the unions faced were enormous. Less than a third—indeed closer to a quarter—of the city’s labor force belonged to labor organizations. In the large textile industry, the overwhelming majority of operatives were women and children—the groups most intractable to union influence. In formulating strategic decisions, the union leadership was sharply divided between syndicalists, Anarchists, and Socialists, not to speak of ordinary unionists whose outlook was shallow and whose capacity for class solidarity was limited. An immense reservoir of unskilled and illiterate rural unemployed was available to the employers as scab labor. The textile workers were scattered over nearly 750 factories, many of them widely dispersed and difficult to coordinate for common actions. Finally the employers were united in a tightly knit organization of their own, the powerful Fometito del Trabajo National, and could count on the full cooperation of the police and military. It was with these elements that the Federation-of Workers’ Societies, a decentralized, libertarian organization, would have had to piece together an effective general strike. Yet the strange dialectic of the strike is that it occurred precisely because the Barcelona proletariat, schooled in direct action and Anarchist tactics, had developed a remarkably high degree of initiative. Without that initiative, the strike would have been virtually impossible.

The strike was touched off by a limited, almost peripheral conflict. On December 6,1901, the metallurgical workers of Barcelona walked out. Despite the absence of strike funds, they remained out for the next three months pressing their main demand for an eight-hour day. The employers were uncompromising, flatly refusing all offers of mediation and turning a deaf ear to public criticism. The Republican newspaper El Diluvio warned that if the workers were defeated, they would interpret this as an indication of the uselessness of peaceful strikes. The observation proved to be acutely perceptive, as the employers were to learn several years later. As the weeks passed and it became clear that the strike was turning into a confrontation between the Barcelona proletariat and the manufacturers, a show of working-class solidarity became absolutely necessary. The municipal organization of the Federation of Workers’ Societies thereupon decided to intervene and on Monday morning, February 17, 1902, declared a general strike throughout the entire city.

The strike lasted a full working week. Its scope was enlarged by employers who closed down, fearing damage to their businesses. Some street fighting developed between the strikers and the army, but for the most part the strike was peaceful. On the following Monday, February 24, most of the workers returned to their jobs, and the general strike was over. The strikers had raised no demands and, despite the participation of the Federation of Workers’ Societies, had conducted the action without any visible leadership. The general strike, in short, was not only an act of solidarity with the metal workers but a superb demonstration of working-class initiative and capacity for self-organization.

These lessons were not lost on the employers and government, who combined their forces to smash the Barcelona labor movement. More strikes followed in 1903 as the proletariat tried desperately to resist the offensive of the state and manufacturers. Carlos Gonzalez Rothwos, the new governor appointed by the Liberals, arrested more than 350 militants that year and closed down a large number of workers’ centers. By 1904, the strike movement had begun to subside. Most of the strikes had been lost, leaving two thousand unemployed. Between 1902 and 1909, Barcelona’s union membership had been reduced from 45,000 to 7,000, and the employers could congratulate themselves that the labor movement had been all but obliterated in that city.

The Spanish Socialist Party, which had played no role in the strike, drew its own conclusions. The general strike, it warned, was a threat to public order, inviting grave reprisals that would diminish all possibilities of collective bargaining. This reaction is significant as an indication of the party’s policy at the time. Politically and organizationally, the Spanish Socialist Party had become another branch in the tree of European Social Democracy: opportunistic in method and reformist in policy. In Barcelona, where employer and police violence tended to turn every major strike into a near-insurrection, the party was simply irrelevant and its isolation from the workers complete. That the Socialist Party and the UGT did not succeed in remaining consistently reformist is due more to the mounting crisis in Spanish society than to any latent militancy in the Socialist leadership. Brenan observes that where Anarchist unions were strong, the Socialists were usually reformist; where they were weak, the Socialists behaved as radicals. Perhaps it would be more pointed to say that where the Anarchist unions were strong, they became the brunt of employer offensives while the UGT, shielded by its libertarian rivals, tried to make deals with the employers at the expense of the Anarchists. Where the UGT was the larger organization, it was goaded into militancy by the intransigence of the employers and by the demands of its rank and file.

These traits were not lost on the workers in Barcelona. The UGT tried energetically to bring the Catalan proletariat-into the Socialist fold. Indeed, the first national office of the UGT had been established in Barcelona, where the union made some inroads among skilled workers. Caught between Anarchist militancy and employer intransigence, it could make very little headway. In 1898 its headquarters were finally transferred to the more congenial environment of Madrid. Yet here too it encountered Anarchist competition, never gaining complete control over the key construction workers, who eventually drifted into Anarchosyndicalist unions.

In Madrid a vigorous effort was made to get UGT backing for the general strike, and Pedro Vallina leaves us a priceless account of what happened. After a meeting at the Casino Federal del Horno in the capital, where the Anarchists unanimously pledged their support to the Barcelona workers, a committee was appointed to visit the UGT headquarters. “One of the UGT leaders, Largo Caballero, received us in his office,” writes Vallina, “and without consulting anyone rejected our demand. In a joking, derogatory manner, he asked if we believed in the possibility of a successful strike. I answered we did, even if the Socialists did not help us, because we had confidence in the good will of the workers of Madrid. The attitude of Largo Caballero was so disagreeable that one of our delegates, becoming indignant, threatened to punch him. In fact, the Socialists declined all participation in the conflict. They were at that time a model of commonsense.”

The juxtaposition of the cynical Socialist union boss with the idealistic, volatile Anarchists forms a perfect study in contrasting humantypes. As it turned out, both the Catalan employers and Madrid Socialist leaders were to be proven wrong in their assessments. The Barcelona union movement would recover and call a second general strike. This would develop into a week of full-scale insurrection. It too would be defeated, becoming known as the “Tragic Week.” But instead of falling apart, the Barcelona labor movement would emerge in a more vigorous—and more revolutionary—form than at any time in the past.

“The Tragic Week”

The collapse of the Catalan unions after the general strike of 1902 shifted the center of conflict from the economic to the political arena. In the next few years, the workers of Barcelona were to shift their allegiances from the unions to Lerroux’s Radical Party.

The Radical Party was not merely a political organization; it was also a man, Alejandro Lerroux y Garcia, and an institutionalized circus for plebians. On the surface, Lerroux was a Radical Republican in the tradition of Ruiz Zorrilla: bitterly anticlerical and an opponent of Catalan autonomy. Lerroux’s tactics, like Ruiz’s, centered around weaning the army and the disinherited from the monarchy to the vision of a Spanish republic.

In his younger days, Lerroux may have sincerely adhered to this program. The son of an army veterinary surgeon, he became a deft journalist who could mesmerize any plebian audience or readership. After moving from Madrid to Barcelona in 1901, Lerroux openly wooed the army officers while at the same time, in the exaltado tradition of the old Republican insurrectionaries, shopped around Europe looking for arms. Had he found them, however, he probably would never have used them. His main goal was not insurrection but the revival of the dying Republican movement with transfusions of working-class support. This he achieved with dramatic public rallies, violently demagogic oratory, and a network of more than fifty public centers in Barcelona alone. It was Lerroux who introduced into Spain the Casa del Pueblo (People’s House), an institution of the Belgian Socialists that combined meeting halls, classrooms, a library, and a tavern in a single building. Later the Spanish Socialists were to establish People’s Houses of their own as means of expanding their movement. In addition to the People’s Houses, Lerroux and the Radicals provided the Barcelona poor with food cooperatives, mutual benefits, day and evening classes, and inexpensive theatrical productions. Part of the money for initiating this costly establishment came from secret government funds that the Liberal premier, Moret, fed to the Radicals in hopes of counteracting the Catalan autonomists.

The masses flocked to the Radicals in droves. More than two-thirds of the party were made up of workers, including tough working-class women who formed their own Radical organizations—the Damas Radicales and Damas Rojas. The more volatile youth of Barcelona were incorporated into the Juventud Republicana Radical—the Jovenes Barbaros (Young Barbarians), as they were called—whose task it was to protect Radical rallies and break up those of opponent organizations. This apparatus spread through Barcelona into the workers’ suburbs, collecting thousands into a far-reaching political network.

There was nothing to equal this network among Catalan autonomists or the unions. By March 1907, the autonomists had been compelled to join forces against the Law of Jurisdictions which gave the military authorities the power to try by courts martial all civilian acts mimical to the army. The new electoral bloc,Teamed Solidaridad Catalana, included moderate Republicans, the business-oriented Lliga, and Carlists. Despite its popularity at the polls, Solidaridad Catalana held no attraction for the workers and Murcianos, who no longer took elections very seriously in any case.

The unions were still in debris. Many sindicatos (as they were now called) had simply disbanded or were shadow organizations, although their leaders retained contact with each other in the years following the general strike. It was not until 1907 that the Barcelona labor movement recovered sufficiently to hold a local congress. In June a commission composed of metallurgical workers, typesetters, bakers, painters, and store clerks gathered in the store clerks’ union headquarters to lay plans for a municipal federation. The federation, called Solidaridad Obrera (Worker Solidarity), was founded on August 3 and two months later began publishing a newspaper of the same name. Although the new organization grew slowly, it managed to take hold among workers outside the city. A year later, in September 1908, it was expanded into a regional federation embracing 112 labor syndicates throughout Catalonia with a membership of twenty five thousand workers. The Radical leaders were disconcerted by the emergence of this new rival for working-class support. After an exchange of suspicious cordialities, they began to move against it with the intention of either dominating or destroying it.

Initially, the Radicals had very little to fear. Solidaridad Obrera was a “pure syndicalist” union, organized entirely around immediate demands and collective bargaining. The, union declared that it was not under the “tutelage of any political party or ... either of the two branches of socialism” (Marxism or Anarchism). It enjoyed the favor of the governor, Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, who liked its Socialist members and lamented the weakness of their party in Catalonia. Inevitably, however, the labor federation became a battleground between the Socialists and Anarchists. The Socialists, led by union officials like Antonio Badia Matemola, Arturo Gas, and the Catalan intellectual Antonio Fabra Rivas, were intent on bringing Solidaridad Obrera into the UGT. They strongly approved of the union’s opportunism; indeed, as Arturo Gas was to emphasize, “Workers conscious of their position emerge from strong syndicates, and from such workers emerge good Socialists.” Like the Radicals, the Socialists regarded Solidaridad Obrera as a rival to their own organization and were intent on absorbing it or crushing it. That they were in the new union at all was due to the Catalan Socialist Federation’s lack of influence in Barcelona.

The Anarchists in Solidaridad Obrera were Anarchosyndicalists who believed in operating within large labor movements—workers like Jose Rodriguez Romero, Tomas Herreros, and the publicist Leopolda Bonofulla. Encouraged by Ferrer, they opened a concerted attack on the Socialists and tried to guide the labor federation toward revolutionary goals. Their efforts, fostered by the drift of the early French CGT toward revolutionary syndicalism, were to be marked by increasing success. The periodical Solidaridad Obrera soon fell under Anarchosyndicalist control and on June 13, 1909, a congress of the labor federation voted overwhelmingly to accept the general strike tactic “depending upon circumstances.”

The Anarchosyndicalists were viewed with disdain by the Barcelona Anarchist Communists associated with the periodical Tierra y Libertad and the terrorist-oriented Grupo 4 de Mayo (May 4^th Group). This handful of purists was all that remained of the much larger Anarchist Communist movement formed in the 1890s. Their ranks had been terribly depleted by arrests and persecutions. Owing to a lack of funds, they were compelled to give up their headquarters and meet in the offices of the newspaper. The editors, Juan Baron and Francisco Cardenal, regarded the Anarchosyndicalists as deserters to reformism and held faithfully to the doctrines that had formed the basis of the old Anarchist Organization of the Spanish Region.

Although there were no visibly organized libertarian federations at this time, Anarchists were numerically significant in the Catalan labor movement. A large number of Anarchosyndicalists were united informally by their common objectives in Solidaridad Obrera. Lerroux’s own party contained many ex-Anarchists whose commitment to Republican politics was superficial. These “anarchistic” types (if such they can be called) were to contribute materially to the destruction of the Radical Party merely by doing what it had preached. Yet in the end it was not numerical strength that was to establish Anarchist influence in the Barcelona labor movement, but the sharpening struggle that developed between the Catalan proletariat and the employers.

By the spring of 1909, the class conflict between the Barcelona workers and the textile manufacturers began to look like an uncanny replay of the events that had led to the general strike of 1902. On May 15, the Rusinol factory in the Ter valley was closed down, and 800 workers were discharged. The lockout was the opening blow in another campaign to lower wages throughout the textile industry. At a two-day assembly of Solidaridad Obrera in July, speakers exhorted the delegates to throw the full weight of the labor federation behind the textile workers and to plan for a general strike. There seemed to be broad agreement among the delegates on this proposal. Although most of the workers outside the textile industry were apathetic, the idea of a general strike had been accepted by the union not merely in the abstract but concretely—as a strategy that would be translated into action if there were sufficient provocation from the manufacturers or the government.

It was against this background of mounting crisis in Barcelona that the Maura ministry, on July 11, announced a call-up of military reserves for active duty in Morocco. The call-up was not entirely surprising. Skirmishes and sporadic encounters between Riff tribesmen and Spanish troops had been going on for weeks. The odor of an impending war was already in the air. It was no secret that the Riff forays were menacing the supply routes to valuable iron mines owned by major Spanish capitalists. To the Spanish workers, the prospect of shedding their blood to protect the colonial holdings of a few wealthy magnates was not particularly alluring. Maura’s call-up had produced heartrending scenes in Barcelona, the main port of embarkation for Morocco. Many reservists were desperately poor Catalan workers whose families were in no position to lose their breadwinners even for a few days, much less allow their lives to be endangered in imperialist adventures. Antiwar feeling ran high throughout the country. On July 18, Pablo Iglesias, a man who for decades had made prudence the keystone of Socialist policy, warned an antiwar rally in Madrid that “if it is necessary, workers will go out on a general strike with all the consequences.”

But when would it be necessary? On the very day of Iglesias’s speech, the Riffs attacked the Spanish supply lines for the first time, turning what had been sporadic engagements into a full-scale war. Demonstrations at the Catalan port spread to train stations in other cities where reservists were being called up. This crisis was raised to acute dimensions in Barcelona when on July 21 El Poble Catala published a petition by the Catalan Socialists to their Madrid headquarters, calling for a general strike throughout Spain. Nearly a week had passed since Iglesias’s warning without any follow-up action being taken by the UGT. In the meantime, the turmoil in Spain continued to mount. As El Poble Catala editorialized: “The valves have been closed and the steam is accumulating. Who knows if it will explode?”

The stalemate was suddenly broken on the night of July 24, when two Barcelona Anarchists, Jose Rodriguez Romero and Miguel Villalobos Morena, decided to constitute themselves as the nucleus of a Central Committee for a strike. Rodriguez Romero was an Anarchosyndicalist official in Solidaridad Obrera, and Villalobos Morena had been a schoolteacher in a mining village who was forced to leave his post for publicizing Anarchist ideas. During the events discussed above, Villalobos was on the staff of Ferrer’s Modern School and later represented the “syndicalists” on the Central Committee for a Strike. Both men, of course, were Anarchists in their dedication to a libertarian society and libertarian methods of struggle.[19]

Collecting whatever support they could find among the militant officials of Solidaridad Obrera, they fanned out through the city to gain commitments from other leaders. Faced with a fait accompli, the Catalan Socialists, who had been waiting for word from Madrid, now had no choice but to join the Committee. To have remained outside would have cost them the opportunity of playing a leading role in the strike action.

Among the Radicals there was to be a division in attitude between the top leaders and rank-and-file militants. Lerroux had gone abroad in February 1909 to escape trial on an old charge of writing a seditious article. He prudently remained away until October 1909, long after the upheaval had subsided. The leadership of the party fell to Emiliano Iglesias Ambrosio, a shrewd lawyer and politician whose sole policy was to prevent a revolution without damaging the Radicals’ reputation for militancy. In trying to curry favor with both the army officers and workers—two essentially antagonistic camps—the Radical politicians succeeded in satisfying neither group. Although a year later the Radicals were to score a large electoral victory, the Catalan workers were to abandon the party and turn away from politics. The army, for its part, was to develop its own organizations, the Juntas de Defensa (Committees of Defense), after which it drifted almost completely toward reaction.

The Central Committee for a Strike had been formed on a Saturday night. By Monday the strike was underway. In the morning hours, strike delegations appeared at the factory gates to call out the workers. To protect their property, the employers closed down the factories, once again swelling the ranks of the strikers as they had in 1902. From the outset the Anarchists associated with Tierra y Libertad tried to turn the strike into an insurrection, but their most able activists were quickly arrested by the authorities for inciting crowds to attack the police stations. They were removed from the scene almost as soon as the strike began. The Socialists on the other hand, fearful of “Anarchist turmoil,” tried to confine the strike to an antiwar protest and regarded any attempt at a revolt as adventuristic.

The events were to astonish everyone. During the week of July 26 to August 1, Barcelona would present the spectacle of a full-scale insurrection, a largely spontaneous uprising that received little guidance from the union or Radical leaders. As Anselmo Lorenzo wrote to Tarrida del Marmol in London: “What is happening here is amazing. A social revolution has broken out in Barcelona and it has been started by the people. No one instigated it. No one has led it. Neither the Liberals nor Catalan Nationalists, nor Republicans, nor Socialists, nor Anarchists.”

Had he known all the details, Lorenzo might have added that the civil government in the city had collapsed. On the first day of the strike, the governor of Catalonia, Don Angel Ossorio y Gallardo, became locked in a feud with his superior, the minister of interior Don Juan de La Cierva and his military counterpart, Santiago, the captain general of Catalonia. He resigned in a huff from his post and withdrew to sulk in his summer mansion on the Tibidabo. Santiago, mistrustful of the local garrison, confined most of his troops to their barracks, abandoning the streets to the revolutionaries.

Whatever leadership emerged came from the militants in the Radical Party and Solidaridad Obrera. “By default the leadership of the uprising passed to the militants ...” observes Joan Connelly Ullman in her detailed study of the insurrection. “They were anarchist by conviction, although nominally members of the Radical party or Solidaridad Obrera.” Their efforts were never coordinated by the Committee, which stonily refused to issue any directives and wasted much of its time trying to coax the Radical jefe, Iglesias, into joining it. Iglesias, now concerned only with his personal safety, refused. Thus from the outset the insurrection followed its own course. The crowds roaming the main street were careful to distinguish between police and soldiers. The latter were wooed with cheers and antiwar appeals whenever they appeared; the police stations, on the other hand, were attacked with ferocity. This canny approach proved to be highly successful. The police made themselves scarce while at the Paseo del Colon, a group of dragoons refused to obey an order to open fire on the crowd. Railroad lines leading into the dty were blown up, temporarily isolating Barcelona from garrisons outside the city. Barricades were thrown up in the working-class districts and arms distributed. Women played a very important role in the revolt, often joining the men in the actual fighting. The struggle aroused not only the workers and Murcianos but also elements of Barcelona’s déclassés, especially prostitutes.

Nor was it for want of leadership that the insurrection was suppressed, all myths about the limits of popular spontaneity notwithstanding. The crucial problem was the lack of support outside Catalonia. The breakdown in communications between Barcelona and the rest of Spain worked to the full advantage of the government, which misrepresented the uprising as an exclusively autonomist movement. The non-Catalan working class and peasantry, lulled by a false picture of the events, made no effort to aid the revolutionaries. Except for workers in a number of industrial towns nearby, the Barcelona proletariat fought alone. And it fought with great courage and initiative. By Wednesday, July 28, large troop detachments reached the city and were deployed against the insurrectionaries. Intense fighting continued well into the next day. In the Clot and Pueblo Nueva districts, the resistance of the workers was so furious that artillery was needed to clear the barricades. Even after the barricades were demolished, dogged fighting was carried on in buildings and from rooftops.

Elsewhere, the fighting was sporadic. The morale of the workers had been shaken by the news that their revolt was an isolated one. For instance, the UGT, the only national labor federation in Spain at the time, did not issue an appeal for a general strike until Tuesday night, July 27, two days after Barcelona had risen. Moreover, the appeal was not distributed until Wednesday, and it scheduled the strike for the following Monday, August 2—two days after the Barcelona insurrection had been suppressed.

There was little clarity about the aims of the insurrection. The Socialists, as we have noted, saw the uprising as an antiwar protest, the Anarchists as a social revolution, and the Republicans as a blow against the monarchy. By Tuesday the ‘Tragic Week” had developed a sharp anticlerical edge that was to characterize it almost to the very end. Before the week was over, an estimated eighty churches, monasteries, and Catholic welfare institutions were destroyed. It is fairly evident now that this widespread damage to clerical institutions was instigated by the Radical politicians’ who were eager to divert the workers from revolutionary paths into well-grooved anticlerical channels.

Very little was required to launch this effort: the church was thoroughly detested by the workers and middle-class radicals in Barcelona. The monasteries and nunneries were regarded as prisons in which recalcitrant novices were tortured into obedience or (as popular rumor had it) simply killed. The aura of torture and terror which suffused popular attitudes toward the church led to a number of macabre incidents. Having “liberated” the monks and nuns, the well-meaning attackers proceeded to exhume bodies in the monastic vaults and cemeteries, looking for evidence of ill-treatment before death. When some cadavers were found with bound limbs (a practice of the Hieronymite nuns), they were carried to the City Hall as evidence of torture. In one case, a number of bodies were deposited on the doorsteps of several prominent Catholic laymen. While this was going on, a young, simple-minded coalman, Ramon Clement Garcia did an obscene dance with one of the corpses as an “amusement.” He was arrested by the Civil Guard and later shot, ostensibly for “building a barricade.”[20]

The fighting in Barcelona came to an end on Saturday, July 31, when Horta, the last outpost of rebel resistance, was overcome. The rebels there had fought until further combat was impossible. They had insisted they were going to “carry out the revolution” despite the overwhelming odds against them. When the “Tragic Week” was over the police had lost a total of only eight dead and 142 wounded; the fatalities among the civilian population were officially reported as 104, but this figure is almost certainly an understatement and should be weighed against Buenacasa’s claim of 600 dead (Buenacasa was one of the participants in the uprising and his figure, although almost six times the official one, should not be totally discounted). The number of wounded will never be known. Although the reactionary press bellowed about attacks on the clergy, only two monks had been deliberately killed. Clearly, in the assaults launched upon religious instituions, the objective was not to take life but, as Joan Connelly Ullman has noted, “to destroy the property—the wealth—of the clergy.”

No sooner was the revolt over when courts martial were established to punish the revolutionaries. According to official reports, 1,725 individuals were indicted by military courts in the ten-month period following August 1. Two hundred and fourteen had escaped the reach of the army and were never captured. On closer examination, the courts were obliged to dismiss the charges against 469 and acquit another 584. In the end, this left about 450 people to be tried and sentenced, mostly to varying terms of imprisonment. Seventeen were sentenced to death, but only five were executed in Montjuich prison. The remainder had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment.

In four of the five capital cases, the trials were almost completely without juridical foundation: the victims were executed not because they had committed the most serious offenses with which they were charged, but because the authorities wanted to make examples of them. The military had apparently decided to shoot at least one individual for each of the major acts committed in the insurrections. Thus its selection of victims was largely arbitrary. The fifth and last person to be executed was Francisco Ferrer. Ferrer had been abroad between March and June of 1909. He had returned to Barcelona in order to be at the sick bed of his sister-in-law and dying niece. During the uprising he had spent most of the time at his farm, some fifteen miles outside of Barcelona, and his movements had been watched closely by the police.

Ferrer had very little influence on rank-and-file revolutionaries and Radicals in the city. Although he had befriended such outstanding Anarchists as Anselmo Lorenzo and Federico Urales, the ordinary Anarchists and syndicalists had been scandalized by his financial activities and the publicity given to his relations with women. The Radicals were interested mainly in Ferrer’s financial contributions to their cause. The Socialists, for their part, detested him. Nearly everyone regarded his political support as a liability. They were ready to take his money (Solidaridad Obrera’s headquarters, for example had been rented with a loan from Ferrer) but few were willing to listen to his advice.

Yet this man was a sincere revolutionary. In contrast to Radical leaders like Iglesias, he devoutly hoped that the general strike would turn into a revolution. The government and clerics hated him and were intent on destroying him. When he was captured on August 31, after hiding for five weeks in caves on his farm, the prelates of Barcelona sent a letter to Maura openly demanding vigorous action against Ferrer and the Escuela Modema. Maura publicly replied that the government “will act in the spirit of your letter and follow the line of conduct you indicate.”

Accordingly, Francisco Ferrer was tried for his life by a military court that had arrived at its verdict well in advance. The proceedings lasted only one day. The prosecution was allowed liberties that scandalized world opinion: anonymous affidavits and hearsay accounts were admitted into evidence against the defendant; prisoners who were faced with serious punishment for their own offenses were evidently given the opportunity to trade heavy sentences for testimony against Ferrer. Evidence in Ferrer’s favor was suppressed, and cross-examination by the defense circumscribed to a shocking extent, even by Spanish standards of the day. One witness claimed that Ferrer had participated in the burning of convents in a community where none in fact had been burned at all.

On the morning of October 13, 1909, Ferrer was executed by a firing squad in Montjuich prison. He is said to have died serenely and with great courage. As the men were aiming their weapons at him, he cried out: “Look well, my children! I am innocent. Long live the Escuela Moderna!

The judicial murder of Ferrer was an act not only of gross injustice but political stupidity. The case led to demonstrations throughout Europe and contributed directly to the downfall of Maura’s ministry. No less important were the long-run effects of the repression that followed the uprising. The government used the revolt as an excuse to suppress the Catalan unions, suspend the publication of opposition newspapers, and close virtually all private lay schools in the restive province. Although Spain had been placed under martial law directly after the outbreak of the insurrection, full civil rale was not restored in Catalonia until November 7, almost six weeks after its restoration in the rest of the country. As we shall see, these measures further radicalized the Catalan proletariat and increased the influence of the Anarchosyndicalists in the labor movement.

The “Tragic Week” rallied the manufacturers around Madrid and marked the first major step toward ending independent bourgeois politics in Catalonia. Indeed, almost everyone in Spain became mis-trustful of electoral methods and drifted toward political subterfuge or the use of direct action. The industrial bourgeoisie returned to its old practice of making behind-the-scene deals. The Conservatives and Liberals, although falling out increasingly between themselves, became uneasy about calling elections. All the members of the privileged classes began to live under a single cloud: the danger of a mass uprising by the urban proletariat. The inner paralyzes of these classses increasingly tended to paralyze the entire constitutional system, restricting political life to maneuvers within the government.

Ironically, the Barcelona uprising might have breathed some life into the dying system of Turnismo—just as the Federalist revolt of 1873 had evoked it—had it not been for the political machinations of the young king Alfonso XIII. His overt intervention in parliamentary affairs was to prove a fatal blow to electoral politics, leading directly to the Primo de Rivera dictatorship of the 1920s.

The first monarch of the Restoration, Alfonso XII, had accommodated himself to the constitutional regime of the 1870s and 1880s. The landowning oligarchy mled, and the monarchy for the most part obeyed. The death of the king in November 1885 would have been greatly lamented had the oligarchs been able to foresee the role that his successor would play. They were to be spared this vision for two decades; the second Restoration monarch Alfonso XIII, was a posthumous child, born six months after his father’s death. His mother, Dona Maria Cristina, did nothing to threaten Canovas’s scheme for stability, and these decades were the most stable in modern Spanish history. Industrial development proceeded at a fairly brisk pace. The army’s role in politics was curbed, the Carlists were slowly assimilated into the established order, and the labor movement was periodically crushed when its growth became worrisome.

But while Canovas was building up this new political establishment, the young king was being taken over by the army. Educated in the fashion of a military prince, he lived amid parades, swords, uniforms, and officers who schooled him in the prerogatives of command. On ascending the throne in 1902, this half boy, half general began to exhibit an annoying interest in his kingly privileges. The Restoration Constitution of 1876 had given the monarch the right to appoint and dismiss the premiers of Spain and as 1909 drew to a close, Alfonso decided to exercise his royal authority in a more direct fashion. When Maura, confronted by Liberal obstruction in the Cortes, tried to bolster his position by asking the throne for a renewal of confidence, Alfonso astonished the Conservative premier by accepting his formal offer of resignation and replacing him with the Liberal, Moret. With this treacherous act, Alfonso virtually terminated the Turnismo, a system that had stabilized the Spanish government for a quarter of a century.

If Maura entertained any hope of using the repression to strengthen his own grip on the government, he was soon to be disenchanted. Although he had a majority in the Cortes, he was dropped because his handling of the “Tragic Week” and the Ferrer case had deepened the split within the country and turned world opinion against Spain. How long Maura could have survived had the king supported him is difficult to say. Obviously the whole structure created by Canovas was already disintegrating and Alfonso’s intervention in the affairs of the oligarchy was doubtless an effect, not merely a contributory cause, of its decline. In any case, with the passing of the Maura ministry, the Canovite system of a disciplined alternation of parties began to give way to irresponsible infighting between unprincipled political factions, leading inevitably to the piecemeal crumbling of the constitutional structure.