Proletarian Anarchism

The founding of the Spanish Regional Federation opened an entirely new period in the modern history of Spain. Since the respectable Liberal parties had shut themselves off from the masses of Spain the lower classes would try to form organizations of their own. The political polarization of rulers and ruled merely paralleled one that had long since developed on an economic and cultural level, but it was to lead to increasingly bitter confrontations in the years to come.

The earliest of these were mild. The founding congress had evoked press attacks throughout Spain, particularly in Madrid where the Liberals and Republicans viewed the antipolitical stance of the new Federation as a threat to their waning influence on the working class. Fortunately, the most immediate practical result of the Barcelona congress was to furnish the Federation with the nucleus of its own national press; in addition to La Federation in Barcelona and La Solidaridad in Madrid, the Internationalists acquired El Obrera and Revolution in Palma and La Voz del Trabajador in the key industrial dty of Bilboa. The propaganda of the Spanish Federation probably represents the most important achievement of its first six months of existence. Its literature reached thousands, evoking an additional press response that gave it wide and continual publicity. The Federation began to acquire larger dimensions in the public mind than it actually possessed in fact, an image which the Federal Cciuncil in Madrid and the sections shrewdly reinforced with numerous leaflets, statements, arid public meetings.

But other areas of the Federation’s activities were less satisfactory. The enormous enthusiasm generated by the founding congress soon gave way to lassitude. The Federal Council’s attempt to achieve a working unity between the various sections throughout the country met with a disillusioning lack of response. Letters sent into the hinterlands of Spain went unanswered, responses were often delayed, and a chronic shortage of funds created difficulties for the Madrid organization and severe hardships for members of the Council, most of whom gave generously of their time and resources. This in turn exacerbated relations between some of the Aliancistas who constituted the Federation’s center and were to lead to serious personal and political frictions.

Even more serious were the problems that faced the Barcelona movement. Although Catalonia provided the largest single bloc of working-class recruits to the Spanish Federation, the Internationalists constituted a very small proportion of the Barcelona proletariat. Perhaps 9 percent of the working class in the city adhered to the new movement. Small as this figure is, it declined drastically when a yellow Jjever epidemic swept through the Catalan seaport, claiming many lives and stampeding thousands, into the countryside. Of the 10,000 members who belonged to the Barcelona movement in July 1870, only 1,800 remained in January 1871, and scarcely more than 2,500 in August, a full year after the founding congress. The commonly repeated notion that the International in Spain enjoyed a spectacular growth during the first year of its existence is a myth, certainly as far as Barcelona—its center of proletarian support—is concerned.

Nominally, the Barcelona organization was controlled by Anarchists. Actually, the number of Anarchists in the sections was very small. In fact many outstanding figures in the Barcelona labor movement were pragmatic trade unionists whose social idealism was shallow at best. The International in the Catalan seaport was based on an alliance between a handful of Anarchists and a larger group of opportunistic unionists who had been driven into an antipolitical, direct-actionist position by the intransigence of the Barcelona textile manufacturers. Between these two tendencies of the Catalan trade-union movement existed an uneasy, even distrustful relationship which was to snap, reknit, and snap again in later years. The nature of this alliance and the maneuvering it entailed disturbed the gallant, honest Anselmo Lorenzo. Lorenzo had never forgotten Fanelli’s words on libertarian organization. “How much more beneficial it would have been,” he opined, years later, “if instead of finding agreements and solutions by surprise, the Alliance [of Social Democracy] had engaged in a work of education and instruction to show the way of obtaining agreements and solutions as a conscious sum of wills.” Instead, the tensions in the fusion of trade-unionist demands with social revolutionary ideals was to have serious consequences throughout the history of the Spanish workers’ movement.

Had the Catalan Anarchists rested their hopes solely on an alliance with an opportunistic union leadership, they surely would have lost the Barcelona labor movement to syndicalism of a reformist, French variety. Even the most dense, unreconstructed class of employers could not have deflected this development. What eventually gave Catalan Anarchism a mass following were the hordes of rural folk, the landless peasants and laborers, who streamed into Barcelona looking for work. Each year they came by the thousands, the great majority from the Catalan countryside itself, the next largest group from the Levant (Murcia, Valencia, Alicante, Castellon), followed by Aragonese from Saragossa, Huesca, and Teruel. Contrary to popular myth, only a small fraction of this inflowing labor force came from Andalusia. To the urbane Barcelonese, these destitute emigrants from the hungry Levant, with their country ways and course manners, were indiscriminately lumped together under the name Murcianos, in Barcelona a word equivalent to “nigger.”

Pariahs in a strange, hostile urban world, the Murcianos encamped by the tens of thousands in squalid, miserable shacks. Their hovels ringed the great seaport and penetrated its suburbs, providing a huge reservoir of unskilled, menial labor exploited by the Catalan bourgeoisie. Disdained by nearly all the factions of the Liberals, later manipulated by such Radical demagogues as Lerroux, the Murcianos also provided a reservoir for the most volatile recruits to the libertarian movement in Catalonia. Without this transitional proletariat Anarchism would have lost its mass base in a broadly syndicalist labor organization, and it would have been impossible to reorient the reformist tendencies of the skilled and established Barcelona factory workers towards Anarchosyndicalism.

The role of the Murcianos in rooting proletarian Anarchism in Spain’s largest industrial city, and the near-insurrectionary atmosphere they created, raises many fascinating problems. To Marx, the more the proletariat advanced from a craft to an industrial estate, and the more this class was “disciplined, united and organized by the process of capitalist production itself”—by the factory—the more of a revolutionary force it became. Marx’s theory viewed the craft worker as a backward and undeveloped proletarian, a member of a transitional class like the peasantry. It is certain he would have regarded the rural Murcianos, not to speak of (os miserables of the Spanish cities generally, with disdain—as a declasse flotsam, a lumpen proletariat.

This contemptuous attitude toward decaying classes at the base of society is evinced most clearly in his remarks on the Franco-Prussian War. “The French need a thrashing,” he wrote to Engels a day after the outbreak of hostilities.

If the Prussians win, then centralization of the state power is useful to the centralization of the German working class. Furthermore, German predominance in Europe would transfer the center of gravity of the West European labor movement from France to Germany, and one need only compare the movement from 1866 to the present in the two lands to see that the German working class is superior to the French in theory and organization. Its predominance over the French on the world stage would at the same time be the predominance of our theory over that of Proudhon....

As it turned out, Marx was wrong—-not only in prospect but also in retrospect. The classes that gave the cutting edge to the revolutions of 1848 were not primarily factory workers, but craftsmen and workers in small shops, precisely those decomposing, preindustrial strata whom*Marx viewed with such contempt. The factory workers of Berlin, centered largely in the newly emerging locomotive industry, played a reactionary role in the insurrectionary movement of the period, even by comparison with petty-bourgeois democrats. Later, a year after Marx’s letter to Engels, the declasses of Montmartre and the craftsmen and workers in small industry (the “luxury goods .workers,” as Marx disdainfully called them) raised red flags and died by the thousands on the barricades in defense of the Paris Commune of 1871. And some sixty years afterwards, it was not the sophisticated, highly centralized, and well-disciplined labor movement of Germany that was to take up arms against fascism, but the working class and peasants of Spain—both of which were unique in having retained the most preindustrial outlook in Western Europe.

Ironically, the “process of capitalist production itself,” which Marx commended in Capital, served not-only to unite, discipline, and centralize the proletariat, but to vitiate its revolutionary attitudes. The more workers were conditioned to accept the factory routine, to bend their heads before the demands of its overseers, the more they tended to accept hierarchy, authority, and obedience as an unchallengable destiny. And the more the working class acquired a hereditary status in society, knowing no other way of life but the industrial routine, the less revolutionary were its descendants. It was precisely the continual flow of Murcianos into Catalan industry, the continual leavening action of decomposing classes from the preindustrial pueblos, that renewed the revolutionary fervor of the Barcelona proletariat. These rural folk, uprooted from a precapitalist culture and life-style, imbued with values, codes, and tastes completely antithetical to the enervating culture of the cities, prevented the more stable and coopted sectors of the Catalan working class from hardening into settled social forms. The Murdanos were an immense social stratum that had absolutely nothing to lose. Accustomed to illegality, ebullient and riotous almost by nature, they added an electricity to the atmosphere of Barcelona that was to make it the most exciting, unruly, and revolutionary city in Europe.

In the early 1870s, however, these large masses of semiproletarians had yet to be won to Anarchism. The most dedicated early supporters of the Spanish Federation were craftsmen, not declasses or unskilled factory workers. As late as 1872, more than half of the delegates to the Cordoba congress of the Federation were printers, typographers, master masons, shoemakers, and bakers—in short, skilled or fairly skilled craftsmen who worked in small shops. Only one out of five delegates was a factory hand, and an even smaller proportion were peasants. The unruly miserables of Madrid, for instance, were by no means uniformly friendly to the Federation. On May 2,1871, a day which Spain celebrates in honor of the first popular uprising against Napoleon’s armies, the Internationalists held a public meeting to counter the chauvinistic, anti-French spirit engendered by the holiday. It was mobbed and broken up by the local poor. A howling crowd laid siege to the Internationalists in a cafe well into the night.

Time was on the side of the Federation, however, and it soon began to make headway among the workers and urban poor. A few successful strikes in Barcelona, coupled with the growing notoriety of the International at home and abroad, brought new, dedicated adherents into the movement. The prospects of rapid growth seemed, highly promising. In Barcelona, membership figures began to rise sharply from the low of January 1871; new periodicals were started or planned; and agitation began to spread in earnest beyond the cities into distant reaches of the countryside.

But time was precisely what the Spanish Federation was to lack. When in March 1871, the Parisian workers rose and established the commune, tremors of fear shook all the palaces and chancellories of Europe. In Madrid these fears were compounded by the increasing instability of the government. In December 1870, Amadeo of Savoy had arrived from Italy to occupy the vacant Spanish throne, but instead of bringing peace to the warring political factions, his presence reopened all the infighting and intrigues that had led to the isolation and flight of Isabella. The new regime, high-strung and unsure of itself, became increasingly sensitive to the agitation initiated by the Internationalists. Soon press attacks began to give way to police repression. Internationalists were harrassed and jailed in growing numbers, and the Federal Council, alarmed by the turn in events, decided to emigrate to the less troubled atmosphere of Portugal. In June 1871, on Corpus Christi Day, Lorenzo, Morago, and Francisco Mora departed for Lisbon with the records of the Spanish Federation, leaving Borrel and Angel Mora behind to keep an eye on events.

This flight was probably premature. The government was still too weak and divided to crush the labor organization, and the pressure began to lift. After three months, the Internationalists returned to Madrid. During this brief exile, they went through another bitter round of material hardships and internal friction, but their stay in Lisbon had not been a complete loss. There they met two young intellectuals, Jose Fontana and Antero do Quanta], who helped them establish the first stable nucleus of the International (and Bakuninist Alliance) in Portugal. A year later, the new Portuguese Federation claimed a membership of 10,000 in Lisbon and thousands more elsewhere in the country.

The Spanish Federation, on the other hand, was badly in need of repair. The Federal Council had suffered the loss of two members: Borrel, who had dropped out of activity, and Francisco Mora, who remained behind in Lisbon, nursing personal and political grievances that were later to bring him into the Marxian-inspired Spanish Socialist Party. Most of the work in the Council fell on the shoulders of Angel Mora and the indefatigable Anselmo Lorenzo. Although the membership had held its own and La Solidaridad in Madrid had been augmented by a new periodical, La Emancipation, the ties between the Federal Council and the various sections in Spain were looser than ever. The very life of the Federation as a national movement seemed in the balance.

To meet this crisis, fifty-four delegates of the Spanish Federation convened in Valencia on September 10, 1871 for a week of intensive organizational work. The conference met in secret owing to the atmosphere of repression that still lingered on from the spring. To firm up the organization, the conference divided the International in Spain into five large regional federations or comarca (north, south, east, west, and center). The trade sections or Secciones de oficio, which existed in a very decentralized form, were federated on an occupational basis and still further centralized into craft unions. Finally, the powers of the higher committees which knitted the craft unions together were greatly amplified, giving them considerable authority over the local sections.

In time, the new structure was to become so elaborate as to be virtually inoperable. By the end of 1872, the Spanish Regional Federation had turned into a bulky, complex organization composed of five hundred Secciones de oficio and oficio varios, 236 Federaciones locales, and ten Uniones de oficio. Each of these bodies had a committee, subdivided into commissions for administration, correspondence, organization, and propaganda. Anselmo Lorenzo estimates that it would have required nearly 7,500 people to staff all of the committees and local councils—a grave potential for bureaucracy, especially if one bears in mind that many Spanish workers were illiterate. Indeed, many committees could not find a single worker to keep the minutes of the meetings and often had to call upon friendly students and intellectuals for aid.

Had the members of the sections taken the structure and its requirements seriously (which they probably did not do), it would have been virutally impossible to have any concerted action and solidarity on any level beyond the locality. If a group of strikers wished to get support from sections outside their community or tried to draw on the strike funds of the organization, they were required to follow an elaborate procedure of “petitioning” the trade federation to which they belonged. It might easily have taken two months or more before the trade federation responded with some kind of decisive action. If the strike were strictly economic, it probably would have been defeated; if it were the opening act in a revolution, it almost certainly would have been crushed.

Following the return of the Federal Council from Lisbon then, heroic measures were certainly necessary to prevent the Federation from dissolving as a national movement. But thf structure adopted at Valencia went far beyond what was needed to preserve the unity of the labor organization. Whence, then, came the impulse for the centralization of the Spanish Regional Federation? Frankly, the Federal Council was not composed entirely of Anarchists. In fact, it included the very men who in later years were to found the Spanish Socialist Party: Francisco Mora, Jose Mesa, and Pablo Iglesias. Within a few months of the Valencia conference, these men—the Autoritarios (Authoritarians), as they were called by the Anarchists—were locked in a furious conflict with the so-called Anti-Autoritarios. Neither side emerged very creditably.

Although the conflict had obviously been simmering for some time, it was sparked into an open war by events and interference from abroad. In the same month that the Valencia conference was held, Anselmo Lorenzo had gone to London to attend a world conference of the International. There he not only saw Marx, but observed at first hand the bitter infighting that was to culminate in the expulsion of Bakunin at the Hague congress a year later. From the stormy discussions in London it was clear that a split was unavoidable. Two months later, in December 1871, Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue appeared in Madrid, a refugee from the repression of the Paris Commune. Lafargue had been raised in Cuba and could speak Spanish fluently. Through Mesa and Iglesias he acquired control over La Emancipation and began to press his attack against the Bakuninists in Madrid.

The conflict, dragging well into the summer of 1872, ended shabbily. The London conference had prohibited the existence of secret organizations within the International. Accordingly, the mam thrust of Lafargue’s attack was to demonstrate that the Alliance of Social Democracy had never been dissolved and still played a hidden role in guiding the affairs of the Spanish Federation. Lafargue, of course, was correct. The Aliantistas, embarrassed by the attacks, dissolved their organization, at least formally. The dispute, however, did not center merely on organizational issues. Lafargue had come to Madrid not only to recover the Spanish Regional Federation for Marx but also to reqjient it toward political action. He favored an alliance with the Republicans and the formation of a workers’ party. In Madrid, the dispute over these issues assumed a particularly bitter form when, in March 1872, the Marxian editors of La Emancipation, representing virtually no one but themselves, proceeded to use the periodical in the name of the Federal Council to make a rapprochement with the Republicans. The editors were expelled, and the Madrid Federation was faced with the prospect of an open split.

One month later at Saragossa, the Spanish Regional Federation held its second national congress, where an attempt was made to heal the differences between the two factions. The editors of La Emancipation were taken back into the organization. The congress prudently elected a Bakuninist Federal Council, with Lorenzo as secretary general, and transferred its headquarters from Madrid to Valencia. Despite the compromise, within weeks the battle was resumed in full fury—and this time it was waged on both sides without scruple. By publicly casting doubts on the sources of Bakunin’s income, for example, the editors of La Emancipation tried to revive the rumor that Bakunin.was a police spy. The character assault occurred in September, well after they were expelled from the Madrid Federation, but it affords a glimpse of the murky depths to which the “discussion” had descended. The Anarchists on the Federal Council, on the other hknd, were not immune to dishonorable tactics of their own. Suspicions of Lorenzo’s personal friendship with Lafargue, they surreptitiously opened his mail from Madrid and surrounded him in an atmosphere of intrigue. Such tactics by his own comrades so infuriated Lorenzo that he resigned from the Federal Council and left Valencia. But he never gave up his Anarchist principles and soon returned to the Federation.

The serious political differences between the two groups were increasingly obscured by gossip, slander, organizational maneuvering, and bitter invective. The climax of the sordid conflict was reached on June 3, 1872, when the Autoritarios were expelled from the Madrid Federation. A month later, they established a “New Madrid Federation” of their own and in reprisal for their expulsion they maliciously published the names of the Aliancistas in La Emancipation (Juty 27), exposing their former comrades to police reprisals. In the end, the conflict achieved virtually nothing for Lafargue, Mesa, Francisco Mora, and Iglesias. The overwhelming majority of the Madrid Federation, indeed of the entire Spanish Regional Federation, supported the Aliancistas.

But the skirmishes in Madrid presaged a more historic conflict internationally, one which was to have a profound effect on the revolutionary movement for decades to come. On September 2,1872, in a memorable congress at The Hague, Mikhail Bakunin and his young Swiss associate, James Guillaume, were expelled from the International for creating a secret organizatioii. The evidence for the charge came from Paul Lafargue. To be certain of his victory over Bakunin, Marx had packed the congress with his supporters, dispatched delegates with highly questionable credentials, made unprincipled deals with men who were soon to become his bitter opponents, and personally participated in the proceedings. He had even charged Bakunin with “swindling” for failing to return a modest publisher’s advance for an unfinished Russian translation of Capital. “This attempt to rob a famous rebel of his good name, an act of character assassination now condemned, apologetically, by most Marxist historians,” observes Max Nettlau, “was to poison well-nigh forever the anarchists’ personal feeling toward Marx.” Thereafter, Marx had the General Council transferred from London to New York, a move that virtually assured the death of the International.

Two weeks later, the Anarchist delegates to the Hague congress, representing primarily Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, met at St. Imier in the Swiss Jura and formed an International of their own. The delegates from Spain included Farga Pellicer and Gonzalez Morago. After conferring with Bakunin, they hurried home and made plans to affiliate the Spanish Federation with the new International. With all restraints removed by the isolation of the Madrid Autoritarios and the split in the International, the Aliancistas decided to act boldly. They convened a new congress, four months earlier than the date stipulated by the Saragossa conference of April 1872. On December 25, 1872, fifty-four delegates representing 20,000 workers in 236 local federations and 516 trade sections convened in the Teatro Moratin at Cordoba for the third congress of the Spanish Federation. This was to be the last public national gathering of the original International in Spain for the next nine years. In many respects, it was also the most important one.

The Cordoba congress created what is generally regarded as the “typical” form of Anarchist organization in Spain. Although it is hard to speak of “typicality” with respect to the Spanish Anarchist movement, the congress basically abandoned the unwieldly structure created by the Valencia conference of the previous year. The Federal Council was shorn of its authority over local organizations and reduced to a mere “Federal Commission for Correspondence and Statistics.” The trade sections and local federations were elevated to “sovereignly independent” bodies, free at any time to renounce their affiliation to the national organization. All restraints were removed from acts of solidarity for local strikes and uprisings. By the same token, no trade section and/or local federation could be coerced into initiating or supporting any actions. Henceforth, the Spanish Federation was to be a formally decentralized organization and its success as a movement was to depend largely upon initiatives from below.

Nevertheless, some kind of cohesion was necessary. The responsibility for knitting the organization together was undertaken by the Anarchists, who, despite the formal dissolution of the Alliance, continued to retain close personal and organizational ties with each other. The Alliance, in effect, continued to exist, which now meant that the Spanish Federation had a de facto leadership, albeit a libertarian one. With his typical honesty, Anselmo Lorenzo, refused to sugar-coat this fact. In the late years of his life, he wrote: “When a bourgeois expresses admiration for the working class organizations for not having a president who assumes the responsibility of leadership, the Internationals [Anarchists] smile with superior pride, as though they possess a secret that can not be penetrated by the short reach of the bourgeois interlocutor.” This pretension irritated the old Anarchist and he added: “There was no such secret nor was it true that we had a total lack of authority. What we did have was a convention that deceived the very workers who employed it.”

Yet in a sense, both Lorenzo and the complacent Anarchists he takes to task miss an essential point. The great bulk of Internationalists worked their jobs for long hours and low wages. They were burdened by the need to make ends meet for themselves and their hungry families. Ordinarily, these workers had little time or energy to give to their organization. Only the most high-minded workingmen could play a routinely active role in the movement, which they did at enormous personal sacrifice. In these circumstances some kind of guidance was both unavoidable and necessary; to deny this fact would have been self-deception or hypocrisy.

Certainly the Spanish Anarchists deceived themselves often enough, and it would have been miraculous if they were free of hypocrites. What deserves emphasis is that they tried to create an organization in which guidance could be exercised without coercion and a leadership, such as it was, removed easily when it was necessary or harmful. They also tried to encourage initiative from below and foster revolutionary elan in the sections, federations, indeed, in the factories and villages themselves. On this score, they were eminently successful, for until the outbreak of the Civil War, the Spanish libertarian movement never developed a bureaucracy. It had its share of those bureaucratic types and authoritarian personalities who are prone to flock into any effective mass movement. These people posed continuous problems for the original International and for its heirs. But their effect was neutralized by a structural flexibility, organizational looseness, and an atmosphere of freedom that has rarely been equaled by a mass labor movement in the history of our time. They had read their Bakunin well.

Brenan gives us a superb account of how well their movement suited Spanish conditions. “The first need,” he writes,

was to get hold of the half-starving, uneducated field laborers and factory workmen and fill them with a consciousness of their own grievances and their own power. These men could not, as a rule, afford to pay a regular subscription and they were suspicious of any influence from outside which might embroil them with their employers. Any regular trade-union organization with a paid secretariat, acting on orders from Barcelona or Madrid and leading its adherents like a bourgeois Republican party to the polling booths, would have be£n doomed to failure. But the Anarchist leaders were never paid—in 1936, when their trade union, the C.N.T., contained over a million members, it had only one paid secretary. Traveling about from place to place, on foot or mule back or on the hard seats of third-class railway carriages, or even like tramps or ambulant bullfighters under the tarpaulins of goods wagons, whilst they organized new groups or carried on propagandist campaigns’, these “apostles of the idea,” as they were called, lived like mendicant friars on the hospitality of the more prosperous workmen.

Their first object was simply to enroll groups of poor workers, whatever their political or religious opinions might be, for mutual protection against employers: now and then there would be a small strike, which, if it was successful, would at once double the membership of the section and lead to other small strikes in neighboring districts. Then gradually the leaders would unfold their anarchist creed with its hatred of the church, its wild idealism, its generous and humane outlook, and the imagination of the hearers would be kindled. Thus it happened that, at moments of enthusiasm, the number of the workers controlled by the Anarchists would double and treble themselves and, when the inevitable reaction came, would shrink back to a small kernel of convinced militants. This plasticity of the Anarchist movement enabled it to survive persecutions and, soon as they were over, to reappear stronger than ever.

The organizational plasticity created by the Cordoba congress was soon to receive a critical test. The political instability that had led to Isabella’s exile and the enthronement of Amadeo was now reaching serious proportions. In this mounting crisis, the agitation and strikes conducted by Spanish Federation did not pass unnoticed. Throughout the closing months of 1871, the Federation, its activities, and the fact of its’affiliation to the “sinister” International beyond the Pyrenees had become the subject of increasing discussion within the Cortes. In January 1872, the Federation was officially ordered to dissolve by reason of its ties to a “foreign organization.” But the government was too weak to enforce its order and the Federation continued to function as publicly as ever, even calling large rallies to protest the ban. But its days as an open movement were numbered, for if Spain was in upheaval and faced with revolution, she was also faced with a reactionary military pronunciamiento that would decide her future for decades to come.

Rebellion and Repression

On February 11, 1873, Amadeo of-Savoy abdicated the Spanish throne and returned to Italy. After a reign of little more than two years, the “gentleman king,” as the Spaniards called him, had run through six ministerial changes and three general elections without bringing political stability to the country. From the start, Amadeo had never gained the popularity of his subjects. The aristocracy treated him with disdain, Madrid theater audiences openly insulted him, and in the last months of his reign he was virtually isolated in the Cortes. Faced with the choices of completely antagonizing the officer corps, provoking a Republican rebellion, or ruling by decree, this civilized monarch abandoned the throne, opening the way to a bloodless Republican victory.

The declaration of a republic found its adherents as divided as the constitutional monarchists. The Unitarians, a cautious wing led by Spain, especially among the radical middle classes of Madrid. Opposing the centralist Republicans were the Federalists, inspired by Pi y Margall’s theories of a decentralized, Swiss-like republic based on the autonomy of the provinces. Not surprisingly, the Federalists acquired the bulk of their adherents from the petty-bourgeois radicals in the provincial cities and towns.

But the Federalists were far from united. The immediate supporters of Pi were prudent men who, echoing his maxim that “force is legitimate only when right fails,” believed in achieving a republic by legal means. Together with the Unitarians, they had developed their forces around parliamentary and electoral contests, throwing their support to the more liberal constitutional monarchists in common battles against “reactionaries” in the Cortes. This parliamentary “benevolence” toward supporters of a liberal monarchy earned them the contemptuous sobriquet of benevelos. By the end of Amadeo’s reign, their tactics had thoroughly infuriated the more militant elements in the Federalist camp—the so-called Intransigents—who now veered toward an antiparlimentary policy of revolutionary action from below.

The Federalists did not have a majority of the country behind them, yet everything favored their success. The anti-Federalist forces had exhausted all the alternatives in their political armory and, after an aborted attempt at a coup in Madrid, sank into complete demoralization. The workers and the great mass of land laborers were highly combustible. A meaningful Federalist program, responsive to their needs, might have easily kindled their support. Reassured by the anticonscription policy of the Federalists, rank-and-file soldiers deserted their regiments in droves, leaving the officer corps with inadequate forces to back up a pronunciamiento. The radical petty bourgeoisie of the provincial cities and towns were collecting into paramilitary groups. Only the Carlists were sufficiently armed and cohesive to uphold the interests of reaction, but except for the threat they posed in Catalonia, they were boxed into the northern mountains.

It seemed for a time that the Federalists would succeed. A Constituent Cortes elected a few weeks after Amadeo’s abdication provided them with a working majority and the legality necessary to establish a decentralized, cantonal republic. E. Figueras, a cautious Federalist benevelo who had functioned as caretaker president since February, was succeeded by Pi y Margall, the father of the Federalist doctrine in Spain. On April 24, 1873, Pi took over the presidency of the new republic. The government and the fate of the Federalist movement he had helped to create lay in his hands. Looking back” years later, he recalled that “after April 23 I wielded immense power....” This “immense power” was to melt from his hands like ice under a blazing sun.

In 1873, Francisco Pi y Margall had reached the age of forty-nine. The young, earnest Catalan who had threatened to “divide and subdivide power” until it was destroyed now found himself ensnared by the very system of power he was pledged to destroy. Nearly twenty years had passed since the publication of La Reaction y La Revolution. The Federalist cause had grown from a heretical sect into a’large movement embracing thousands of enraptured petty bourgeois. The severe repression initiated by Ramon Narvaez after 1856 had convulsed the lower middle classes, alienating them from the Liberal parties. From that point on, the Federalist movement began to grow and in 1869 Pi was elected to the Cortes, where he began to learn the techniques of parlimentary maneuvering.

Having acquired the presidency, Pi began to maneuver with the factions of his own movement. The Intransigents embarrassed him by their “puerile impatience” and were treated cavalierly. This devotee of legality of whom Friedrich Engels offered the curious description, “the only socialist in the Republican camp,” could offer the lower classes little more than social abstractions. Although Pi probably had the broadest vision of all the politicians in the Federalist movement, his “socialism,” as Raymond Carr has observed, “did hot get beyond wage arbitration, a -minimum of state action to improve working conditions, agricultural credit, and a ‘generalization of property’ which would extend the liberal land revolution beyond the ‘new feudalism’ to the agrarian poor.” Thus, if the legal etiquette involved in establishing a federal republic goaded the Intransigents into action, the anemic Federalist program for social reform reduced the working glass and peasantry to passivity.

In no sense could Pi be regarded as a revolutionary. His “socialism,” consisted of a hash of undeveloped notions, more akin to cooperativism than Anarchism or Marxian Socialism. Although the pressure exercised by the Intransigents was largely responsible for bringing him to power (a fact he well understood and used to advantage), Pi tended to rely on right-wing and centrist Federalists. He was quite prepared to use troops against Intransigent insurrectionaries and abhorred labor strikes. His “conciliatory” policies consisted largely of trying to cajole the Intransigents into making concessions to the moderate wings of the Cortes.

The denouement came on July 12, when armed Cantonalists (as the Intransigents and their allies were knoyvn) took over the municipal government of Cartegena and declared themselves autonomous. The Cartegena revolt doomed Pi’s legalist “conciliatory” policy. The “father of Spanish Federalism” was now mistrusted by every faction in the movement. The right regarded him as too “socialistic” and “conciliatory”; the Intransigents, as treacherous and lacking in revolutionary zeal, although their deputies in the Cortes were prepared to support him against other tendencies. The Federalist center on which he rejied for parlimentary support had divided between the right and the Intransigents, leaving him isolated. On July 18, not three months after taking the presidency, Pi resigned his office and was replaced by Salmeron, who lacked Pi’s scruples and was prepared to jettison the federal republic for a more centralized state.[8]

With Pi’s resignation, the Cantonalist revolt that had started in Cartagena now spread throughout the south. In a matter of days, July 19 to 22, armed Cantonalists took over the municipal governments of Seville, Cadiz, Valencia, Almansa, Terrevieja, Castellon, Granada, Malaga, Salamanca, Bailen, Andujar, Tarifa, Algeciras, and other smaller communities. The greatest support for the uprising came from Andalusia and the Levant. Madrid and Barcelona remained in the government’s hands* The Cantonalist revolt in the south was abetted by the outbreaks of a Carlist revolt in the Pyrenean passes and by disturbances in Madrid, which compelled the government to dispatch its best remaining troops to the north, leaving the key cities in Andalusia virtually unguarded.

What role did the Spanish Federation play in these events? In reality, only a minor one. The Federation had anticipated that the political crisis in Spain would approach an acute stage and took steps to prepare for any contingency. In the spring of 1872, the Federal Council in Madrid sent Francisco Mora and Anselmo Lorenzo on tours of the sections—Mora to the eastern region, Lorenzo to Andalusia—with the aim of establishing an underground organization. The two men asked trusted militants in each section to form a special clandestine group called “Defenders of the International” whose function was to spearhead an insurrection or, in the event of repression, to engage in underground activity. These “Defenders” were the precursors of many other defense organizations that the Spanish Anarchists were to establish in the future.

In the event of a successful insurrection, the “Defenders” were also expected to establish local revolutionary juntas that excluded bourgeois elements “if possible” (to use Lorenzo’s words). “Bourgeois elements,” of course, included Federalists as well as Liberals. But Lorenzo’s qualifying phrase is significant; it reveals the ambiguity that had begun to permeate the Federation’s attitude toward the Federalist movement. Clearly, the Federation was nursing hopes for a Federalist victory in Spain, which it believed would provide the labor movement with a politically hospitable atmosphere. But since Anarchist principles required a resolutely antipolitical, class-oriented position, this dilemma was solved by a calculated form of “irresolution.” On the eve of the elections to the Constituent Cortes, the Federation affirmed its antipolitical line by refusing to stand candidates. But it allowed the sections and individual Internationalists, if they so wished, to vote for the Federalists and cooperate with them.

In practice, of course the Federation was too weak to follow an independent policy of its own except for Internationalist uprisings in Alcoy, San Lucar, and a few scattered communities in Andalusia. In Barcelona, the proletariat responded to the Federation’s plea for a general strike but refused to follow it along the path of social revolution. Intransigents and Internationalists worked together in establishing a Committee of Public Safety in Barcelona’s municipal’government. The Seville revolutionary junta was headed by the Internationalist, Mignorance. The Cartegena section may have played a role in winning the sailors over to the Cantonalist uprising, and Internationalists cooperated with Intransigents in Granada and Valencia. For the most part, however, the Cantonalist uprisings were followed by sharp recriminations between Anarchists and Federalists of all factions.

The Cantonalists, although capable of mobilizing a much larger following than the Internationalists, were not strong enough to withstand a serious military assault by Madrid. With some three thousand troops, General Pavia captured Seville after two days of heavy fighting and quickly reduced the rebellion in most Andalusian cities. Valencia held out for nearly two weeks against General Campos’s forces, and Cartegena, its landside protected by powerful ramparts and the naval base in Cantonalist hands, was enveloped by a long siege. But the city’s cause was doomed after the rest of the country had been subdued. After four’months it was taken owing to treachery by the officers of a key fortress.

Generally, the Cantonalists dominated the struggle. But in Alcoy a community of thirty thousand people to the south of Valencia, the Spanish Federation managed to etch its own mark on the events of 1873. This old industrial town, a center of paper-making for centuries, and been penetrated and strongly influenced by Internationalists, and by early 1873 already enjoyed the distinction of furnishing outstanding Anarchist militants to the Spanish Federation. The Cordoba congress had decided to locate the Federal Commission at Alcoy because five of the Commission’s members came from the town. As a result, the relatively small industrial community became the center of the Spanish Federation on the eve of this nationwide rebellion.

The street fighting in Alcoy preceded by several days the Cantonalist uprising at Cartegena and almost stands out as a precursor of the insurrections that were to follow. Yet Alcoy exploded into insurrection not because of political or regional antagonisms, but as the result of an economic dispute between the paper workers and their employers.

For some time there had been a vigorous agitation for an eight-hour day in the factories of Alcoy. The agitation, conducted by the local Internationalists, reached its climax on July 7, when an assembly of workers decided on a general strike to enforce its demands. On the following day, a delegation of factory employes appeared before the mayor at the City Hall, demanding that he summon the employers and present them with the workers’ demands. The mayor, a stolid Federalist by the name of Augustin Albors, decided to play for time. Assuring the workers of his neutrality in the strike, Albors treacherously urged the employers to stand firm and barricade themselves in their homes until military aid could be summoned. After dispatching a request for troops, he reversed his neutral stand and publicly denounced the strikers.

It is doutbful if the Internationalists were really eager to foment an insurrection in Alcoy. They must have realized the vulnerability of an uprising in an isolated and patently indefensible town. Accordingly, they tried to negotiate with the municipal government. The next day a second delegation appeared at the City Hall with the warning that the mayor and his council must either maintain their neutrality or resign if they wished to avoid a conflict. As the delegation was leaving, the police opened fire on an unarmed crowd in the square. It was this stupid provocation rather than any “sinister” Internationalist design that triggered the Alcoy uprising. The senseless shootings infuriated the workers, who quickly gathered arms and besieged the City Hall. The police (numbering little more than thirty) finally surrendered after enduring a siege of twenty hours. They had simply run out of ammunition. Albors, adamant and stupid to the last, was shot and killed after firing his pistol point-blank at the workers who were arresting him.

The Alcoy uprising occurred on July 9, and its chances of enduring were far smaller than those of the later Cantonalist insurrections in the cities. The Internationalists established a Welfare Committee to manage the town, but its most pressing task was to negotiate favorable surrender terms from General Velarde, who was approaching from Alicante. Fortunately the committee received a promise of complete amnesty through the good offices of a Federalist deputy, Cervera, and on July 12, Velarde entered Alcoy without meeting armed opposition.

Many writers have dealt with the Alcoy uprising as a trivial episode that was submerged by the Cantonalist insurrections. In terms of its scope, they are correct. The entire event lasted little more than five days. By comparison with an historic event like the Paris Commune, Alcoy seems like a skirmish. That it occurred at all was due more to the dilatoriness of the military in Alicante than to the revolutionary fervor of the workers in Alcoy. Yet this brief episode created a sensation in Spain. Almost all shades of opinion, including Federalist, joined in condemning it. Doubtless, the well-to-do classes of Spain were haunted by images of the Paris Commune and the possibility of its recurrence in Spain. But there were also internal reasons for the fears Alcoy had aroused. For the first time in Spanish history, an armed uprising had occurred that was orchestrated not by predictable elements such as the military, the church, or the Liberals, but by an avowedly revolutioriary working-class organization. For the first time, the industrial proletariat in Spain had acted as an independent insurrectionary force.

The uprising, coupled with the fall of Pi, guaranteed that the Spanish Federation would be physically suppressed. The organization, however, continued to maintain a public, if harrassed, existence for another half year while the bourgeois politicians in Madrid consummated the burial rites of the First Republic. Salmeron, who had taken over the presidency from Pi in July 1873, was replaced in less than two months by Castelar, a Federalist whom the conservative classes and generals regarded as more pliable than his predecessors. Having strengthened the army’s position in Spanish politics, neither Salmeron nor Castelar could put it to rest. When it seemed that Castelar would not be able to stem a parlimentary drift back to the Federalists, the generals decided to act openly: In January 1874, General Pavia, the “savior of Spain” from a Cantonalist republic, pronounced against Castelar and installed General Serrano, a conservative military politician. Within a year it was clear that Serrano’s government could be little more than a transition to a restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. When a bloodless pronunciamiento by Martinez Campos brought Alfonso XII, Isabella’s son, to the throne a year later, it surprised no one in Spain or abroad. Even a substantial number of Carlists defected to the new monarch.

The Federalist movement, split irreparably by the Cantonalist uprisings, was to disappear under the Bourbon Restoration. Yet its importance for Spanish Anarchism can hardly be overestimated. Despite the sharp differences that were to emerge between the two movements during the revolt, they overlapped in many key areas. Both sought to weaken the central government (the Anarchists, of course, to abolish it) and to foster a vital regional and community life. The Intransigents, like the Anarchists, were prepared to use the most desperate insurrectionary methods to achieve their decentralized goals. Anarchists and Cantonalists fought together behind the same barricades in July 1873, and sat on the same revolutionary juntas in the provincial cities and towns. Later, many Federalists were to turn to Anarchism as the logical development of their decentralist aims. The Anarchists, in turn, were to elevate Pi y Margall to the status of a precursor of the libertarian movement in Spain.[9]

No sooner had Serrano become president of the faltering republic in the early months of 1874, when he ruthlessly undertook the suppression not only of the more extreme Federalist groups, but also of the International. The meeting halls and workers’ centers of the Spanish Federation were closed down, its militants jailed by the hundreds, and its newspapers outlawed. At its high point in September 1873, the Federation probably numbered no more than 60,000 members, an insignificant fraction of the popular following the Federalists could muster. Even more telling than the arrests of Internationalists were the blows Serrano and the Restoration politicians struck at the movement’s base, the working class. Strikes were crushed at gunpoint and the right of workers to form labor unions was prohibited by law. In effect the workers’ movement was thrown back nearly twenty years, when the cry “Association or Death” had rung in the streets of Barcelona. Nor did the persecution relent with the passing years. At La Carraca, as late as March 1877, the police placed sixty-six Internationalists in weighted sacks and threw them into the sea. A doud, thick with fear and repression, had descended on Spain. It would last for nearly eight years.

Somehow the Federation survived these persecutions. National congresses were abandoned for secret regional, or comarcal, conferences. Local underground presses replaced the editorial offices of widely distributed public newspapers. Economic strikes were abandoned for revolutionary strikes—which essentially meant no strikes at all. Having drunk heavily from the fount of revolution, the Spanish Federation reorganized itself once again, this time into a small insurrectionary organization.

A new structure geared almost entirely to armed revolt replaced the loose, informal public structure established by the Cordoba congress. In the tities, where it could once count on thousands of adherents and numerous sections, the International was reduced to a few dedicated Anarchists. The “Defenders of the International” were renamed the “Avenging Executive Nucleus,” a more aggressive title that accorded with the embattled and violent mood of Anarchism at the time.

The fact is, of course, that the Internationalists in the tities were living on a myth. No revolution was in the offing; indeed, the first signs of mass urban revolutionary unrest were not to reappear in Spain until the turn of the century. Lacking the power to conduct strikes for higher wages and better working conditions, the International had been deserted by the Spanish proletariat; hence it could feed only on ideology, hope, and conspiracy. Many native Catalan workers had never accepted the violent Anarchist theories of the Federation with enthusiasm. They might have entered typical reformistic labor unions in droves were it not for the continual influx of Murcianos and the intransigence of the Catalan factory owners. In any case, with the increasing repression, the balance within the International began to shift from the north to the south. By February 1873, when the Spanish Federation’s membership had reached a peak of 60,000,two thirds were in Andalusia. It was in the agrarian south, in the mountain pueblos, the sun-drenched towns and cities, and on the ancient latifundia of Andalusia and the Levant, that Spanish Anarchism was to survive and grow during the early years of the Bourbon Restoration.