The International in Spain

As for the nuclei Fanelli left behind in Spain in 1869, little was heard from them for a time.

Before his departure from Madrid, the Italian had given his admiring group of workers a small miscellaneous legacy of written material: the statutes of the International, the program and regulations of the Bakuninist Alliance of Social Democracy, the rules of a Swiss workingmen’s society, and several radical periodicals which included articles and speeches by Bakunin. These precious texts were carefully studied, discussed, and passed around (presumably in translation), until the fledgling Madrid Anarchists began to feel assured and confident of their views. They called themselves “Internationalists,” and were to do so for years, basking in the mounting prestige of the great workers’ International north of the Pyrenees.

They also began to write letters to the International’s General Council in London, but rarely received a reply. It may have been that the General Council, dominated by Bakunin’s opponent, Karl Marx, was suspicious of the new “official section” in Madrid, or it may have been sheer negligence; in any event, the Madrid Internationalists maintained close ties with Bakunin and his friends in Geneva, and they began to cast around for support in their own city.

But this raised a difficult question: what could a revolutionary group, oriented toward the working class, hope to achieve in the Spanish capital? Madrid, the administrative center of the Spanish crown, had no proletariat in any modern sense of the word. A new city by Iberian standards, Philip II had turned it into a capital in order to provide the country with a sorely needed geographic and political center. It was not until the eighteenth century, under the Bourbon kings, that Madrid reached sizable proportions. At the time of Fanelli’s visit, the capital city of Spain had no industry to speak of. Its proletariat consisted of craftsmen, working by traditional standards in small shops, and its market was composed of petty government officials, courtiers, soldiers, an emerging commerical middle class, and a large number of intellectuals attracted by the University of Madrid and by the city’s burgeoning cultural life. Anarchism in the Spanish capital was largely to reflect these social traits. The Madrid organization eventually attracted many intellectuals and became one of the major theoretical centers of the Anarchist movement in Spain.

The early Internationalists in the capital, however, began in confusion over their aims and methods. A substantial number of the original group, those who were actually Republicans, Masons, and cooperativists, simply dropped away. The remainder, after sorting out their ideas and the material ‘Fanelli had left behind, began to hold public meetings and attract local attention. The first of these meetings was held in a barn-like warehouse on Valencia Street which the janitor, a newly won supporter by the name of Jalvo, had opened to the Internationalists. Typical of the early enthusiasm and recklessness that marked the movement, Jalvo’s gesture could have easily jeopardized his job, possibly exposing him .to arrest, for the warehouse was a municipal building used to store materials for public festivals. Fortunately, the authorities did not take the movement too seriously, and Jalvo suffered no reprisals.

The Madrid section of the International expanded rapidly. The early meetings also attracted a number of canny Republican orators who were looking for a base in the labor movement and tried to take over the newly formed section. But Fanelli had done his work well, and they were firmly resisted. Faced with these well-attended meetings, Lorenzo and his comrades now began the difficult task of giving their movement some organizational coherence. They threw their net far, reaching out to the Masons (whom Lorenzo describes sympathetically as “auxiliaries” of the International), cultural groups, mutual-aid societies, and even economic liberals. By early 1870—a year after Fanelli’s departure—the Madrid section of the International claimed a membership of two thousand and had started publishing a local periodical, La Solidaridad, to propagate its views. This membership figure was probably inflated by the inclusion of many individuals and groups with a very tenuous relationship to the section and with no clear understanding of its revolutionary goals. Yet it is clear that by 1870 the Anarchist movement was firmly rooted in Madrid.

If success is to be gauged by numerical following, the new movement was even more successful in Barcelona. In contrast to Madrid, the great Catalan seaport was a major textile center, the biggest in Spain, with a large industrial working class. Although Barcelona had been renowned for its cloth products for centuries the industrial development of the city in any modern sense of the word did not begin until the late 1840s, when steam-powered cotton factories were widely established. A decade later, engravings show the old port district surrounded by factory chimneys. Most of these concerns were not large; they normally employed between ten and twenty workers and were owned by moderately well-to-do bourgeois families. But there were also spectacular industrial dynasties, such as the Guells, the Muntada brothers, and the Serra brothers, employing thousands of unskilled workers and producing cheap cotton cloth for the villages and towns of Spain.

The average Barcelona factory operative worked long hours and at near-subsistence wages (see pp. 51–52 below), living with his or her family in hovels that often lacked adequate ventilation and sanitary facilities. This degraded way of life, scarred by toil and poverty, was menaced continually by technological unemployment and by lay-offs due to economic slumps. Reduced to an animal level of existence, the Barcelona proletariat seethed with a futile outrage that found partial outlet^n “Luddism”: the destruction of machinery and factory buildings. In 1836, during an upsurge of working-class unrest, a Barcelona crowd burned down the Bonaplata factory, a new steam-powered enterprise that produced not only fabrics but textile machinery. Factory burnings and the destruction of self-acting spindles also opened the labor struggles of 1854, but this time Barcelona was swept by a general strike in which workers marched under the slogan, “Association or Death.” The right to form trade unions, denied by law under nearly all the regimes of that period, had now become a paramount demand of the Catalan working class.

Despite the failure of the strike, the movement toward association was irrepressible. This became evident in the mid-1860s when, under the tolerant administration of a Liberal government, underground workers’ organizations suddenly surfaced, established two successful, widely read newspapers, and in 1865 held an impressive congress. The movement was suppressed a year later with the fall of the Liberals, but it thrived below the surface, publicly appearing in such forms as cultural circles and educational societies. Around the time of Fanelli’s last visit to Barcelona, the most militant workers’ groups were organized around the Federal Center of Workers’ Societies (Centro Federal de las Sociedades Obreras). Politically, the Federal Center made common cause with the Republicans, supporting their demand for a federal republic. Economically, it favored privately financed cooperatives. A workers’ Congress of over sixty societies, held in Barcelona on December 12–13, 1868, declared its support for these moderate forms and circumspectly avoided any demands that might alienate their Republican allies.

It was on this diffuse labor movement, committed to a bourgeois political alliance, that the Barcelona nucleus of the International went to work. The moving spirit of the nucleus was unquestionably Rafael Farga Pellicer, who had been deeply impressed by Fanelli’s speech in his uncle’s study. The group of Internationalists formed after the Italian’s departure was soon reinforced by new, extremely able people: the physican Gaspar Sentinon; Jose Garcia Vinas, a medical student from Malaga; Trinidad Soriano, a technical student; and Antonio Gonzalez Meneses, an engineering student from Cadiz. By May 1869, the nucleus felt strong enough to constitute itself officially as the Barcelona section of the International Workingmen’s Association. To the call for a “federal democratic republic,” issued by the Workers’ Congress, the new group replied with a demand for “Socialism,” firmly declaring its dissatisfaction with mere reforms and change in government.

Despite this strong expression of intransigence, the Internationalists proceeded slowly and cautiously. A printer by trade, Farga Pellicer attended the Workers’ Congress in December, two months prior to Fanelli’s second trip to Barcelona; there, he had openly congratulated the delegates on their support for a federal republic and their plan to establish a newspaper! His relations with the Federal Center were excellent and the pages of its newly established organ, La Federation, were open to the expression of Internationalist opinions. In a letter to Bakunin he describes the basic strategy of the Barcelona nucleus as a threefold approach: to defend Socialism in “a prudent manner”in La Federation, to bring the regulations of the Federal Center into accord with the spirit of the International, and to strengthen the organizational influence of the nucleus on the workers’ societies.

Within a few months, this strategy succeeded. Internationalists were elected presidents of several workers’ societies and La Federation essentially became an Internationalist organ, the Barcelona counterpart of Madrid’s La Solidaridad. By 1870, the Federal Center and presumably most of its affiliates declared for the International, bringing thousands of industrial workers into an Anarchist-influenced movement. This influence, it should be stressed, was exercised with care. The great majority of the workers and their leaders were not conscious Anarchists, certainly not in any revolutionary sense of the word. Indeed, as we shall see later, the entry of the Federal Center into the International was an alliance, not an act of organic unity, between a small group of Anarchist militants and a numerically larger trade-union apparatus. But it foreshadowed a time when Anarchist ideas were to saturate the Spanish labor movement and produce a genuinely revolutionary mass organization based on Anarchosyndicalism.

From Madrid and Barcelona, the ideas of the International began to spread into the provinces of Spain. Newspapers and propagandists began to appear in Andalusia, Aragon, the Levant, and in rural areas of Catalonia, the two Castiles, and Galicia. Gradually the movement took hold outside of the two great cities. In February 1870, La Solidaridad issued a call for a national congress of all sections of the International in Spain. After consultations with the Catalans over a suitable place, it was decided to convene at Barcelona in late June.

During those few months before the congress the Anarchists did a great deal of careful planning and preparation. After Fanelli’s final departure from Barcelona in the winter of 1869, Farga and Sentinon had carried on a lively correspondence with Bakunin. About a half year later, in September, the two Spaniards attended the worldwide congress of the International in Basel, where Bakunin scored a shortlived triumph over Marx and his supporters. There, Bakunin not only solidifjgd their adherence to Anarchism but initiated them into a secret group, originally named the “International Brotherhood,” which the Russian had formed years earlier during his long sojourn in the heady, conspiratorial atmosphere of Italy. (Although the original “International Brotherhood” (Fraternit’e Internationale) was formally dissolved early in 1869,[5] have retained this name in quotation marks to designate the small group of confidantes who surrounded Bakunin during the later years of his life.)

The key role played the various Bakuninist organizations—the “International Brotherhood” and its successor, the Alliance of Social Democracy—in the development of the International in Spain requires examination here before proceeding with our account of the planned congress in Barcelona.

Bakunin’s “International Brotherhood” has been dealt with derisively as a hierarchical, elitist organization which stands in blatant contradiction to his libertarian principles. This contradiction in my view is very real. Bakunin had intended the “International Brotherhood” to be a secret organization of Anarchist militants, led in tightly disciplined fashion by a highly centralized group of initiates—indeed, by what amounted to a revolutionary general staff. The Russian never resolved the need to bring his organizational theories and practices into complete accord with his libertarian social ideals. He seemed quite sincerely to regard both his followers and himself as highly moral and dedicated individuals who could survive the sordid aspects of organizational life without becoming authoritarians, perhaps even shielding weaker individuals and less committed organizations from the temptations of power and authority. Bakunin’s followers often rebelled against this obvious contradiction between theory and practice, forcing the Russian to accede to a looser, more libertarian type of organization. The result is that the “Brotherhood” and its organizational heirs remained nebulous, shadowy, and never developed a hierarchy; indeed, it is doubtful if its numbers ever exceeded a few score individuals.

The “Brotherhood” was expected to play a guiding role in still another organization, the Alliance of Social Democracy which Bakunin’s comrades had formed over his objections in 1868, shortly before Fanelli’s journey to Spain. Farga Pellicer and Sentinon, in fact, had helped form the Spanish section of the Alliance months before they knew anything about the “Brotherhood.” In contrast to the “Brotherhood,” this organization was to be an open, public movement and was clearly Anarchist in program despite the apparent innocence of its name. Declaring itself for the abolition of classes, property, and the right of inheritance, the Alliance recognized “no form of state” and demanded that “all the political and authoritarian states at present should be reduced to mere administrative functions of public services.”

To Marx, the presiding spirit of the International’s General Council in London, this amounted to a de facto rejection of electoral and political activity, a position he strongly opposed. When the Alliance applied for membership in the Internationa] late in 1868, its rejection by the Genera] Council was almost preordained. In order to circumvent the Council’s decision, the Alliance officially dissolved itself, calling upon its sections to become sections of the International. In reality these sections continued to exist as secret Bakuninist nuclei. In Spain, the Alliance essentially became a small underground organization within the larger, open arena provided by the Spanish sections of the International. By the early summer of 1870, the sections numbered between twenty and thirty thousand members, with scores of groups in different parts of the country.

In the sixty years following Fanelli’g visit, the fortunes of Spanish Anarchism were destined to fluctuate sharply and dramatically. During periods of repression, the movement was to contract to a few isolated nuclei of dedicated militants, only to surge forward and embrace ever larger masses of oppressed. Gradually, Anarchist groups were to take root in a multitude of Andalusian villages as well as in major cities and industrial centers. They were to establish tendrils in the mountain communities of Murcia, in the towns of the Ebro valley, in the remote fishing villages of the Galician coast. Long after the Anarchist movement had waned in the rest of Europe, it was to find a rich soil below the Pyrenees, nourished by the devotion of thousands of workers and peasants. Only the scythe of fascism could remove this wild luxuriant growth from the Iberian Peninsula—and with it the revolutionary passion of Spain.

The Congress of 1870

On the morning of Sunday, June 18, 1870, about one hundred delegates representing 150 workers’ societies in thirty-six localities of Spain convened in the Teatro del Circo of Barcelona for the first congress of the Spanish section of the International. The congress proposed five months earlier by La Solidaridad, the Madrid organ of the International, had now become a reality.

The Teatro was filled to overflowing. The first rows of seats were reserved for delegates, but workers had come in large groups to express their solidarity, occupying every seat, filling the hallways, and spilling out beyond the entrance. A tribune occupied the center of the stage. In the background there was an array of red flags, and overhead, a large red banner proclaiming in gold letters—“No rights without duties, no duties without rights!“1 Tools were decoratively arranged on both wings to symbolize labor and tables were placed on the extremes of the stage for pro tem secretaries of the congress.

The congress was opened by Rafael Farga Pellicer, who appeared suddenly on the deserted stage, rang a hand bell, and extended the following greetings:

“Comrade delegates: those of you who gather here to affirm the great work of the International Workingmen’s Association, which contains within itself the complete emancipation of the proletariat and the absolute extirpation of all injustices which have ruled and still rule over the face of the earth; those of you who come to fraternize with the millions of workers, white slaves and black slaves, under the red banner which covers us; dear brothers, in the name of the workers of Barcelona, peace and greetings!”[6]

The hortatory style with its use of superlatives, its largeness of perspective, its intense internationalism, and its high-minded tone, all sincere and very deeply felt, was to be characteristic of Anarchist speeches in Spain. Farga made no attempt to conceal or subdue tiis radical views. “The state,” he declared, “is the guardian and defender of the privileges that the Church makes divine.... We wish to end the rule of the capital, of the state and of the Church by constructing on their ruins Anarchy—the free federation of free associations of workers.”

The speaker, we are told, was interrupted continually by “formidable thunderclaps” and the audience was “visibly moved.” An atmosphere of “felicity” and enthusiasm pervaded the Teatro, to which greetings from the Swiss and Belgian sections of the International added a sense of historic purpose and worldwide fraternity. In the afternoon, the delegates rose one by one to report on the conditions in their factories. Their accounts leave us a bitter picture of the misery that pervaded the lives of the Spanish workers during the 1870s. The report of Bove, a Barcelona textile worker, is typical. The workers, he tells us, are exploited from five in the morning to late at night. Women work from ten to fifteen hours for less than a dollar, and in some factories, for as much as eighteen hours for little more than a dollar. Other delegates report that eleven, sixteen, and eighteen hours of daily work are typical in the textile enterprises around Barcelona and Tarragona. Farres, a delegate of the steam workers, speaks for “a sad and lamentable group in which the capitalists have declared men useless for work and replaced them with women and children. Take this into consideration, for only the man is useful for this [heavy] work and not the women. The men do not know what to do because they were not born to steal but to work.”

These harsh realities contrasted starkly with the glowing hopes that opened and animated the congress. Each session moved along smoothly, often in an atmosphere of spontaneous, even tumuluous enthusiasm, and no restraints were placed on controversy or the free expression of opinion. But as we have seen, the proceedings had been carefully planned and prepared by a conscious, well-organized group of Anarchists, members of Bakunin’s Alliance of Social Democracy.

It was these Aliancistas—this hidden Anarchist faction in Spain, known perhaps to only a few hundred initiates—that guided the proceedings at the Teatro del Circo. They prepared the agenda of the congress, staffed its key commissions, and provided the most articulate and informed speakers at its sessions. The Aliancistas had little need of manipulation for they enjoyed enormous prestige among the delegates to the congress. They were the actual founders of the International in Spain. So closely were the origins of the International linked to the Alliance that Fanelli’s disciples had initially adopted the Alliance’s program for the Madrid and Barcelona sections. It was not until the spring of 1870, when the Alliance was formally established in Spain as an independent body, that the two organizations became ideologically distinguishable. At the congress of 1870, the Aliancistas set about to give the Spanish section of the International a broader program, one that would be more in accord with the needs of a loose federation of workers’ and peasants’ trade unions.

This new program, however, was not foisted on the congress. It developed out of controversies in the “commissions” on various social issues and in debates on the floor of the Teatro del Circo. In addition to the Anarchists, at least three tendencies surfaced at the congress: an ineffectual miscellany of “associatarians,” who were mainly interested in fostering producers’ and consumers’ cooperative associations within the existing social order; a “political” group which was occupied with mobilizing labor support for the Republican parties; and finally, the most important and enduring tendency of all, the trade unionists “pure-and-simple,” a group concerned largely with immediate economic struggles over wages, hours, and working conditions—and a group, as we shall see, that was to function in later periods as a restraining force on the more militant and revolutionary Anarchists. Virtually all of these tendencies employed an expansive revolutionary rhetoric, giving lip-service to a distant egalitarian future, but they divided sharply with the Anarchists on the critical issues of the specifics needed to achieve this new society.

The views of the “associatarians” seem to have evoked very little interest from the congress. A report by a “commission on the theme of cooperation,” obviously Anarchist-inspired, dismissed the importance of producers’ cooperatives under capitalism: they would represent simply one more institution within the bourgeois framework. But the report did emphasize the practical role consumers’ cooperatives could play in promoting “cooperative habits” and a spirit of mutual aid among the workers. In dealing with cooperatives as an educational means, rather than as a social end that could achieve a new society within capitalism, the report scaled down the entire issue, boxing the “associatarians” into a faddist social limbo. On this issue, the congress of 1870 represented a turning point, marking the decline of the Proudhonian tradition which had once been so important in the Spanish labor movement. Henceforth, any discussion of cooperatives was to be tied to problems of social revolution, not piecemeal reform.

Perhaps the sharpest conflict within the congress centered around the attitude of the Spanish section toward politics. The Aliancistas advocated political abstention. This position, as Casimiro Marti observes in his study on early Catalan Anarchism, “pointed up in a clear manner the immediate consequences of the new orientation adopted by the workers’ movement. It was not now a question of a simple complaint, of a protest, more or less violent, against particular injustices, but of refusing to participate in political activity by virtue of a, total and unconditional break with the constituted society.” Abstention from politics amounted to unconditional support for “direct action oriented toward the suppression of the State....”

An overstatement, perhaps, but essentially true. Although the non-Anarchist tendencies at the congress were prepared to concede such abstractions as cooperative or communal visions of the future society to their Aliancisla opponents, they rallied against a strict policy of political abstention and direct action. After much dispute, a compromise was worked out in which the congress, while committing itself organizationally to an antistatist and abstentionist stand, left individual members free to act as they chose in the political arena.

This was a serious setback for the Anarchists. They were not trying to make the International’s program identical to that of the Alliance, for that would have confined the International exclusively to revolutionary forms of action. On the contrary, they were eager for the two organizations to be differentiated in many important respects, both programmatically and structurally. But they knew that any compromise on the issue of political abstention threatened to open the International to a reformist perspective, involving it largely in the amelioration of existing economic and political abuses. The compromise, in fact, was to have serious implications for the future, for it provided a formula by which the International and its heirs in Spain were to make theoretical acknowledgments to principle but function opportunistically in practice. Although the compromise was carried by the congress, it was scarcely hailed with enthusiasm: nearly 40 percent of the delegates either voted against it or abstained. Most-of these negative votes and abstentions came from delegates of the Barcelona working class.

The most important single achievement of the congress was in the realm of organization. The “commission on the theme of the social organization of the workers” proposed a structure which was to remain the framework of the Spanish section for several years afterwards and which the Aliancistas hoped to advance as a model for the International as a whole at its next conference in London in 1871. This structure is worth examining in some detail. It anticipates in many respects the syndicalist form of organization adopted by the French labor movement in the 1890s, a form that later spread to other European countries and surfaced again in Spain.

The commission proposed a dual structure for the Spanish section of the International (or as it was henceforth to be called, the Spanish Regional Federation): organization by trade and organization by locality. On the one hand, local trade organizations (Secciones de oficio) grouped together all workers from a common enterprise and vocation into a large occupational federation (Uniones de oficio) whose primary function was to struggle around economic grievances and working conditions. A local organization of miscellaneous trades (Secciones de oficio varios) gathered up all those workers from different vocations whose numbers were too small to constitute effective organizations along vocational lines. On the other hand, in every community and region where the International was represented, the different local Secciones were grouped together, irrespective of vocation, into bodies (Federaciones locales) whose function was avowedly revolutionary—the administration of social and economic life on a decentralized, libertarian basis.

This dual structure forms the bedrock of all syndicalist organization. In Spain, as elsewhere, the structure was knitted together by workers’ committees, which originated in individual shops, factories, and agricultural communities. Gathering together in assemblies, the workers elected from their midst the committees that presided over the affairs of the Secciones de oficio and the Federaciones locales; these were federated into regional, or comarcal, committees for nearly every geographic area of Spain. The workers, moreover, elected the delegates to the annual congresses of the Spanish Regional Federation, which in turn elected a Federal Council.

Although all committees were directly accountable to the assemblies that elected them, bureaucratization was a constant possibility and concern. The danger of bureaucracy, manipulation, and centralized control exists in any system of indirect representation. It is not very difficult for an elaborate network of committees, building up to regional and national bodies, to circumvent the wishes of the workers’ assemblies at the base of the structure. This actually happened in France, when a corps of opportunistic syndicalists, Socialists, and later, Communists acquired cpntrol of the French General Confederation of Labor (CGT).

A bureaucracy never really solidified in the Spanish Regional Federation or its syndicalist heirs, at least not before the Civil War of 1936. Fortunately or not, the periodic waves of government or employer persecution that broke over the Spanish syndicalist unions made a union leader’s position an unenviable one. Moreover, the Anarchists functioned as a steady and unsettling counterweight to bureaucratization (despite their own occasional tendencies to manipulate the unions under their control). They kept the labor movement in a state of continual ferment and-never ceased to emphasize the need for decentralization, control from below, and direct action. Ultimately, it was their influence on the Spanish labor movement which proved decisive. In the decades to follow, they were to give it a depth of passion and an intensity of revolutionary idealism which has never been equaled by workers’ unions elsewhere in the world.

We must look closely at these men and women, these Spanish Anarchists, and try to gain an understanding of their lives, their fervor, and their dedication to the “Idea.” Although the founding nuclei of Spanish Anarchism included many intellectuals and students (such figures as Gaspar Sentinon, Trinidad Soriano, Antonio Gonzalez Meneses, and Fermin Salvochea), most of the individuals entering the growing libertarian groups of the cities were ordinary workers. Even the journalists, theoreticians, and historians of this movement were largely self-educated people of proletarian origin who often taught themselves to read and write or attended union and libertarian schools, acquiring their learning by sheer doggedness in the nighttime hours after work. The majority of them had been sent into factory jobs early in life. And later came the responsibilities of family life, of rearing children and maintaining a home. These Anarchists took great pride in their vocational skills and were viewed with immense respect by their fellow workers. Most of them were intensely serious and high-minded individuals. They were also open, candid, and like most Spaniards, passionately devoted to their friends and comrades.

They were individuals with very strong personalities. For example, more dedicated men, once having decided to embrace the “Idea,” abjured smoking and drinking, avoided brothels, and purged their talk of “foul” language. They believed these traits to be “vices”—demeaning to free people and fostered deliberately by ruling classes to corrupt and enthralled the workers spiritually. It was the duty of every obrera consciente, of every conscious’ worker and esp^fially of an Anarchist, to live by his or her principles, not merely to avow them. By the example of the probity and dignity of their daily lives, such workers would help uplift the rest of their class. Without this moral regeneration of the proletariat, the revolution would eventually be vitiated by all the corruptive realities of bourgeois society.

What these Spanish Anarchists aimed for, in effect, was a “countersociety” to the old one. It is easy to mistake this for an “alternate society,” one that would coexist with capitalism as an enclave of purity and freedom, but nothing could be further from the truth. The Spanish Anarchists expressly rejected the concept of an “alternate society,” with its hope of peaceful reconstruction and its privileged position in a world of general misery. They regarded the cooperativist movement as a diversion from the main task of overthrowing capitalism and the state. Since social or personal freedom could not be acquired within the established order, they viewed a “countersociety” as a terrain in which to remake themselves into revolutionaries and remove their interests from any stake in bourgeois society. But this terrain was a completely embattled one. Eventually, Anarchist groups formulated their own revolutionary codes, their own concepts of freedom, and created a world of intimate comradeship and solidarity that proved almost impregnable to repression.

The most dedicated Spanish Anarchists not only denied the laws, values, and morality of the existing society, but set out to translate precept into practice. They did not enter into legal marriages. They refused to register the births of their children or to baptize them. The bureaucracy, state, and church were the Anarchists’ mortal enemies; any voluntary dealings with these institutions were to be avoided. Children were sent to libertarian or union schools. If these were not available, they went to nonclerical institutions or were taught at home. Parents would often give their children names like “Libertaria” (a favorite for the daughters of Anarchist militants) or “Emancipacion”; they might even exchange their own first names for those of Anarchist heroes or martyrs. They disdained the accumulation of money, and if in later years there was much bank-robbing by Anarchists, the funds went entirely to the movement or to libertarian schools and publishing projects. They did not hesitate to use weapons in defending their own rights or in acts of retribution against official violence.

I shall take up the question of Anarchist violence in its proper context. At this point it might be more appropriate to give attention to the humaneness that permeated the outlook and ideals of Spanish Anarchism. The organized, official violence that the Spanish worker encountered almost daily, even in the form of entertainment, genuinely horrified these earnest libertarians. Shocked by the cruelty and brutalizing effect of the bullfight, for example, the Spanish Anarchists waged a persisent campaign to discourage attendance at the corrida and to arouse in the workers and peasants an interest in books, culture, and the serious discussion of ideas. Accordingly, wherever the Spanish Regional Federation had a substantial following it established centros obreros, which functioned not merely as union headquarters but as cultural centers. Depending upon its resources, the centro obrero might provide literature, books, classes, and meeting halls for discussions on a wide variety of subjects. This institution exercised a profound influence on the personal life of the worker who belonged to Anarchist-influenced unions. Ricardo Mella, one of the most able Anarchist theorists and essayists of that period, recalls that in Seville “with its enormous centro obrero, capable of holding thousands of people, morality in the customs [of workers] took hold to such a degree that drunkenness was banished. No worker would have dared or have been permitted to appear drunk at the door of the great popular building.”

Anarchist-influenced unions gave higher priority to leisure and free time for self-development than to high wages and economic gains. The expansive humanism of these Anarchists is probably best indicated by the actions they undertook to protest the persecution of revolutionaries abroad, whenever or wherever they might be. Great public rallies and bitter strikes were conducted not only on behalf of their own foreign comrades, such as the Chicago Anarchists of the 1880s and Sacco and Vanzetti decades later, but in support of men who would have strongly opposed their movement and ideas, such as Ernst Thalmann, the German Communist leader imprisoned by the Nazis.

Their generosity of sentiment reached into the most intimate details of personal and family life. A male Spanish Anarchist, for example, rarely wavered in his loyalty to his compañera. He genuinely respected her dignity, an attitude he extended to his dealings with his children and comrades. The “Idea” was his passion. If he was a committeeman or occupied a union post, he regularly attended meetings and occupied himself with all the details of the movement, for the movement gave meaning and purpose to his life, removing it from the mediocre world of humdrum routine, vulgar self-interest, and banality.

This devotion, however, did not reduce him to an organizational robot. He controlled the movement like everyone else in it and, despite the complexity of its structure at times, it was usually scaled to human dimensions. If this structure threatened to become too complex, he as an Anarchist threw the full weight of his prestige against the development and together with his comrades would rescale it to meaningful, comprehensible dimensions.

Anarchism, moreover, gave his mind a profoundly experimental turn. Spanish Anarchism is rooted in the belief in a “natural man,” corrupted by propertied society and the state, who will be regenerated by a libertarian revolution. To many individual Anarchists, this corruption was ubiquitous; it debased not only people’s instincts and moral integrity, but also their diet, tastes, and behavior. Hence Anarchists experimented with a wide variety of ideas. They improvised new diets (many turning to vegetarianism), flirted with naturopathy, studied Esperanto, and in some cases practiced nudism. Extolling spontaneity in behavior, they had a fascination for libertarian forms of education and for techniques of child-rearing that promoted the natural proclivities of the young. Their emphasis on freedom became the most serious challenge to the rigid mores and medieval fanaticism of the time.

Many liberal and Marxian writers have described Spanish Anarchism as an atavistic attempt to turn back the historical clock. But in fact, the Anarchists placed a high premium on scientific knowledge and technological advance; they devoured the available scientific literature of their day and expounded continually on such themes as evolution, rationalist cosmolpgies, and the value of technology in liberating humanity. A very compelling case, in fact, can be made for the argument that Spanish Anarchism refracted the spirit of Enlightenment Europe through an Iberian-prism, breaking up its components and then reorganizing them to suit Spain’s distinctive needs.

The Spanish Anarchists certainly were eager to preserve the rich, preindustrial tapestry of their country’s communal traditions—the emphasis on individuality and dignity, the high spirit of mutual aid, localism, the patria chica, and the pueblo. But they also realized that Spain needed the technological resources of the advanced capitalist world to create the material bases for a classless society and genuine freedom.

The problem that confronted the Spanish Anarchists was crucial: how to industrialize Spain without destroying her communal heritage, debasing her working class, and rearing the soul-destroying monstrosity that the Industrial Revolution had inflicted on England. The attempt to deal with this problem accounts in part for their puritanical morality.[7] The Spanish Anarchists could not help but absorb the traditional puritanical atmosphere of Catholic, agrarian Spain; but simply to regard their movement as religious, to view it in Brenan’s terms as a nineteenth-century Reformation, is a crude oversimplification. In the latter half of the nineteenth century Spain began to undergo an industrial revolution of her own, with many of the demoralizing effects of the Industrial Revolution in England. Technological change and the erosion of traditional social relations began to undermine the family structure and the old system of morality. The demoralization of newly urbanized rural folk who were flocking in great numbers into the cities looking for work and relief from chronic hunger was a visible feature of social life. Drunkenness, prostitution, broken families, and beggary had reached appalling proportions. Not only traditional society but the proletariat itself was in a state of decay.

The Spanish Anarchists were determined to eliminate these demoralizing features from working-class life. They were intent on restoring the moral fiber of the proletariat, on giving it inner solidity and firmness. In a society of scarce resources, where a life of idleness and dissipation was a function of exploitation and privilege, it was inconceivable that a revolution could occur without emphasizing the duty to work. The struggle of the Spanish Anarchists against alcoholism, dissoluteness, and irresponsibility became a struggle for the integrity of the working class, a validation of its moral capacity to reorganize society and manage it on a libertarian basis in an era of material scarcity.

It was individuals of this moral caliber and social outlook who competed with cooperativists, trade unionists, political opportunists, and Socialists for influence in the congress of 1870. And they won this competition, at least until the next congress a year later. By the time Francisco Tomas declared the proceedings closed with “feeling and enthusiastic phrases,” the congress had elected a Federal Council of five members: Tomas Gonzalez Morago, Enrique Borrel, Francisco Mora, Anselmo Lorenzo, and Angel Mora. All of these men were Madrid Anarchists who had met Fanelli early in 1869 and were now members of Bakunin’s Alliance of Social Democracy. Aliancistas also occupied key positions in all leading sections of the Federation and played a decisive role in the forming of their policies. The Spanish labor movement had been founded on essentially libertarian lines and was soon to be plunged into a series of stormy upheavals.

The Liberal Failure

A large gathering of a revolutionary labor organization could not have occurred at a more favorable time than the summer of 1870. The founding congress of the Spanish Federation was held toward the end of an interregnum, when the entire country was in a state of confusion over its political future and its ruling classes were uncertain and faltering. For nearly two years the Spanish throne had been vacant while Madrid afforded the spectacle of politicians quarreling among themselves over the choice of a monarch. This humiliating interregnum revealed with startling clarity the extent to which a permanent crisis had settled into Spanish society. The hurried flight of Isabella II from Spain in September 1868 marks the climax of a historic conflict between an absolutist monarchy and the liberal middle classes, to be succeeded by a duel between the church and the army—the latter being guardian, for a time, of all elements that feared a theocratic government. Each of these conflicts rolled one upon the other like waves, loosening the traditional structure of the Spanish state. The monarchy had failed completely to restore the “old Spain” Of the ancien regime; the church, to straitjacket the country in a theocracy; the bourgeoisie, to follow in the steps of its predecessors north of the Pyrenees and create the institutional, economic, and cultural bases of a constitutional, democratic state. And now the plebians were beginning to enter the arena in force: the radical middle class, the peasants, and the growing working-class movement.

The details of this succession of failures are too complex to explore in the space of a few pages, but the Very fact of their complexity is evidence of the nervous twitching, followed by periodic collapse, that marked Spanish political life from the opening decades of the rtineteenth century to Isabella’s removal from the throne.

The occupation of Madrid by Napoleon’s armies in 1808 completely exploded the last remaining myths of the “Golden Age” when Spain aspired to hegemony in Europe and her empire encompassed vast territories in the New World. For the first time since the Reconquest, her people acquired a vibrant sense of national identity. Every part of the country took up arms against the French invader, each region and locality acting independently under its own juntas and commanders. As noted by Charles Oman, the English chronicler of the peninsular war, “The movement was spontaneous, unselfish, and reckless; in its wounded pride, the nation challenged Napoleon to combat, without any thought of the consequences, without counting up its own resources or those of the enemy.” Despite the divisions that pitted juntas, regions, and classes against each other, the long conflict with Napoleon could have created the point of departure for a national renaissance and the reentry of Spain into European society.

It was not to be so. These hopes vanished with the return of Ferdinand VII from captivity in France. Supine before Napoleon, Ferdinand proved to be unrelenting in his efforts to crush the Liberals of Spain. The Constitution of 1812, which the Extraordinary Cortes had promulgated from Cadiz in the midst of the national war, was repudiated. Its provisions for a constitutional monarchy, universal suffrage, a single legislative chamber, and civil liberties were replaced by a harsh absolutism. For nearly six years, Ferdinand’s rule lay upon Spain like a shroud. Although the country began to regain its momentum with the successful pronunciamiento of Riego and Quiroga in January 1820, the ghost of absolutism was not consigned to its historic mausoleum until Ferdinand’s death in 1833. With the demise of absolutist rule, however, Spain now came face to face with the menace of a theocracy. The outbreak of the first Carlist War in October 1833 marked the first blow in the church’s attempt to gain mastery over Spanish political life. When violence failed to bring Ferdinand’s reactionary brother Don Carlos to the throne, the church turned to systematic penetration of the state. By the late 1860s, the court camarilla was riddled with priests and clerical craftiness seemed on the point of achieving what had remained beyond the reach of insurgent peasant militias in years of bloody fighting.

However, neither the church, the army which contested its ambitions, nor the bourgeoisie were to gain lasting control of the Spanish state. The thirty years that followed Ferdinand’s death read like the temperature chart of a man in deathly fever. Ministries changed with bewildering frequency, carried away by political maneuvers, civil wars, and above all, by military pronunciamientos. The army, initially the defender of Liberalism against absolutism and clerical reaction, began to act alternately as a political master in its own right. Even the word “Liberalism” began to lose its meaning. The bloc that lay claim to this name divided into the Moderates, a reactionary grouping based on the landed bourgeoisie, and the Progressives, a prudent cabal of anticlerical “Europeanizers,” who leaned for support on the well-to-do urban middle classes. Welling up from the depths of the disillusioned petty bourgeoisie came the Republicans—a conglomerate of radicals and Federalists, the latter adhering to Pi y Margall’s doctrine of a Swiss-like, cantonal state.

There was one thing that united this flotsam of Monarchists, clerics, “liberals,” landed oligarchs, and army officers as they scrambled for control of the state. It was fear: a fear of the masses. Franz Borkenau notes that “in Britain, in America, and in Germany, every popular movement originated in the upper stratum of society and then permeated the masses.” In Spain, on the other hand,

no movement in the higher classes ever penetrated deeply the masses. Spain is the country where the spontaneity of the “people” as against the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the intelligentsia, and, in the last decades, the clergy, is most conspicuous. Such a deep severance of the people from the ruling groups; such a passing of the initiative to the lowest stratum of society, is always a symptom of deep decay and disintegration of the old civilization.

Sensing their own weakness and decadence, the ruling classes responded to the people with a combination of Olympian contempt and sheer panic. It is reported that after a terrifying experience with a riot, Charles III never overcame his fear of the Madrid “mob”; even street noises frightened him. Although national tradition credits “the people” with driving Napoleon’s armies from Spain, a contemporary of the period recalls the panic that seized the middle classes when the ragged militia of the “Valencian Army” entered Madrid.

The job of dealing with the masses, of cultivating a watchful eye and a restraining hand, was left to the Spanish church. The historic isolation of the church from the people in the nineteenth century, a product partly of the Liberals’ agrarian policy, completed the isolation of the Spanish ruling classes from Spain.

There had been a time, though, when the popular prestige of the church was enormous. The church bells of Spain had been the tocsins of the Reconquest, rallying the villages to war against the Moorish invaders. Clerics not only blessed the Christian armies but often led them into battle. During the “Golden Age,” the clergy provided Spain with its only social conscience, raising its voice on behalf of the exploited peasantry at home and the decimated Indians in the colonies abroad. Inveighing against the ravages of usury, privilege, and greed, it stood foremost among the ruling classes in defense of the communal institutions of Spain and the tribal institutions of the New World.

Despite its imposing hierarchy, the Spanish church probably remained the most democratic institution in a society anchored in political absolutism. To a French nobleman visiting Spain in the early nineteenth century, the structure of the Spanish clergy was virtually republican (“tout a fait republicaine”). Raymond Carr, in a perceptive account of modern Spanish history, reminds us that “one eighteenth-century primate was the son of a charcoal burner, a situation inconceivable in France,” and most of the bishops were recruited from “the obscurity of the minor provincial nobility.” Nor was there a visible display of clerical luxury and opulence. A bishop, Carr adds,

was expected to give all his surplus income to charity once his simple houshold needs were satisfied. The average parish priest was poor and remained so throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; he earned less than a well-paid laborer and was often dependent, in rural parishes, on the sale of eggs and on other minor agricultural pursuits.

Lest this trait be overdrawn, however, the fact remains that with the passage of time, the church began to age and fatten, much like the courtiers whose lean, warrior ancestors had helped expel the Moors. By the close of the eighteenth century, the church had become the ■largest landowner and wealthiest institution in Spain, indissolubly linked with the monarchy and nobility. The gap between what bishops were “expected” to do and what they in fact did widened considerably, but the church’s prestige among the masses had not diminished. To the immense number of beggars—los miserables—who formed the recruits for “mob” riots and near-insurrections in the streets of Spanish cities, the church provided not only religious circuses but material sustenance. In Madrid, for example, the convents alone provided los miserables with 30,000 bowls of soup daily. In Valladolid, according to Carr’s estimate, a twentieth of the population depended on the church, “while soup and bread doles from episcopal palaces and monasteries were an important element in the budget of the urban poor.”

But ties of this kind could exist only if the church retained the agrarian roots of a feudal estate, roots which nourished the medieval spectacle of public humility and charity toward the poor. When the Liberal premier Mendizabal initiated the confiscation of church lands on a major scale, these traditional roots were pulled up. Ostensibly, the confiscation was undertaken for two purposes: to finance the war against the Carlists and to create an agrarian middle-class base for the Liberals. Actually, the sale of the church lands did not achieve anything near the result intended. The confiscated estates became the object of crass bourgeois speculation, nourishing a new class of lay land magnates. The land hunger of the peasantry, satisfied in France by the Great Revolution and by Napoleon, was to remain an endemic feature of Spanish society.

Having lost its lands and its agrarian roots, the church shifted all its resources to speculation and business. The higher clergy began to neglect its pastoral duties for the more lucrative realms of industry, commerce, urban real estate, and according to the gossip of the day, brothels. The new investments transformed the Catholic Church from the largest landowner in Spain into the largest capitalist; its ideology, the most medieval and atavistic in Western Europe, transformed it from the social conscience of the ruling class into the most reactionary force in social life.

The decline of the church’s popular prestige left only one’effective institution that could function politically without a popular base—the army. Initially, the army had been a bulwark of Liberalism and its early pronunciamientos enforced middle-class interests in Spanish politics. But a half century of meddling and manipulation had made it increasingly suspect as a corps of Pretorians, even to the Moderates. Having exhausted its alliance with the Liberals, embroiled in imperialist adventures in Morocco, the Spanish officer caste began its slow, fatal drift to the right. If the Liberals, who still had illusions of acquiring popular support, regarded the army as an embarrassing and dangerous liability, the reactionaries in later years were only too glad to use it as a lever for social power. The history of the army after 1870 is a numbing account of its growing sense of isolation, its preoccupation with pay, promotion, and graft, and its arrogance toward the canaille.

The canaille, of course, were the masses of Spain—peasants, farm laborers, craftsmen, industrial workers, los miserables—the majority of whom lived in desperate poverty. Thousands of beggars filled the city slums or wandered the country roads. To the ruling classes, the Spanish people were a faceless, anonymous lot, volatile but inchoate, threatening but politically inert; and all the quarreling factions on the summits of society were united in the need to exclude their participation in the processes of institutional change.

But if the word “mass” is meant to convey anything more than sheer numbers, it becomes meaningless in Spain. From the Spanish pueblo, with its remarkable sense of community, had emerged a people in which self-assurance, dignity, and a striking individuality seemed like inborn traits. Dignidad has a fierceness of meaning in Spanish that has no parallel in any other European language, indeed, a fierceness that the Anarchists were to cultivate in every nuance of behavior and action. They were not unique in this respect. Brenan reminds us that, north of the Sierra Morena at least, the preoccupation with dignity is deeply rooted in Spanish history—the peasant plowing with a sword dangling from his waist, the cobbler and mason treating the grandee as their equal, the beggars expecting to be addressed as “Your Worship” are images that will be found centuries ago.

It was this people whom the ruling classes finally divested of any meaningful relations with the institutions and values of official Spain. By the late 1860s, a cultural, religious, political, and economic vacuum had been created for the Spanish masses. The church had betrayed its responsibilities and the politicians their promises. There was no way even to faintly reconcile the interests of rural laborers, land-hungry peasants, and bitterly exploited workers with those of the propertied classes. Caciques ran the villages with a firm hand. The Civil Guard patrolled the roads, railway stations, and streets. The workers, denied all recognition of their rights to organize, faced an almost solid phalanx of rapacious manufacturers. The guardians of the state, occupied with their narrow political interests, cast a blank stare on the frustrated masses below. For the great bulk of the Spanish people, civil life was as empty as the vacated throne in Madrid. Henceforth, after 1870, all that could fill this vacuum were the Republican politics of the petty bourgeoisie, the Socialist doctrines of the radical intelligentsia, .and Anarchist ideals of a proletarian’or peasant variety.